25 SEPTEMBER 1964, Page 18

The Crusaders

THE late Alfred Duggan had many gifts as a historical novelist. Deep scholarship displayed without pedantry, a communicable delight in storytelling, unobtrusive accuracy of detail. In objective description ... heraldic honourmonger- ing, mechanics of siege-engines, the handling of battles . . . he always convinces. Himself a Catholic, he could survey the medieval Papal supremacy with romanticism salted by irony. Most historical novels lack humour; Duggan's do not. His final novel describes the ardours and absurdities of the First Crusade and returns to his earlier hero, Bohemund of Antioch. It does not show the author quite at his best.

Bohemund, a Norman adventurer, simple and likeable, has perpetually to grapple with com- plexities: Byzantine wiliness, knightly jealousies, the tortuous hazards of an appalling campaign. A great deal of war, he remarks, is waiting for something to turn up. This remark has, perhaps, conditioned too much of the novel, which be- comes not much more than a success story in unfamiliar terrain, as narrative alone adding nothing to the first volume of Runciman's mar- vellous History of the Crusades. It does provoke a query. Duggan has been widely praised for his language. But he apparently regarded medi- aeval knights as more or less ourselves in different clothes (our own era rather the more super- stitious).

Thus his dialogue and observations are in a contemporary idiom. 'A whacking great bridge,' 'Count Raymond, who had cut breakfast . . 'Drat the child,' Pompous ass.' It could be argued, however, that their conception of sex, death, jokes, numbers, darkness, fate, made the medicevals almost wholly different from most modern adults, though not from children. Himm- ler, an outsider, one hopes, was a mediaeval character, and regarded himself as Henry the Lion reincarnate. To evoke such astrological beings poetry is as essential as scholarship. This is not mere carping at Duggan, who illustrates with wit and finesse the other views. It might be, of course, that when we are utterly alone or shrieking in a crowd we all relapse into mediaeval obsession, so that his method is in fact justified, illustrating, so ter speak, the time-