A Great Follow-up to 'The Last Kingdom' - Rated 
The second book of the series continuing the story of Uhtred and like the 1st book it is an exellent read. Now Wessex is safe Uhtred gets bored and after killing a fellow Saxon he gathers a bunch of Saxons and steals Alfreds ship and turns it into a viking ship and goes raiding in Wales. Here he meets lots of new charcters both new friends and new enemies and he gets himself into a lot of trouble with Alfred. But then fate happens and Wessex is slaughtered by the Danes leaving Alfred living in a swamp desperatley trying to build an army to face the Vikings and save England, and remember this book is based on what really happened. As always Bernard has given us an exellent book with a great story that will keep you coming back for more.
I couldn't stop reading it! - Rated 
I couldn't stop reading it! I won't give away any of the story to people reading the review because that would spoil it but Cornwell again makes you feel you know the people he is writing about and, damn it, you begin to care about them. Uhtred is, without a doubt, a bit of a rogue but he insistently worms his way into your affections.
The atmosphere was superb - there is a thick mist hanging around saxon times but Mr. Cornwell seems to offer us a set of foglights. Yes, some bits are not strictly bound to the historical record but it is downright believeable. His chracters are not bound to some higher cause, they are just normal people who make normal mistakes and have normal emotions.
This book feels like a time machine for your imagination, taking you back onto the bloody battlefields of the time - buy it and enjoy the experience! Also, if you missed reading Tino Georgiou's masterpiece--The Fates, go and read it.
Vikings Meet Saxons in Old England - Rated
For those with a liking for adventure, freebooting and viking raids, The Pale Horseman, Cornwell's second installment in his tale of the formation of England under King Alfred (known to posterity as "the Great") has it all. It's an energetic and fast paced narrative of the Saxon nobleman, Uhtred Uhtredsson, out of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, who, after losing his freedom to Danish vikings and his ancestral holdings to a perfidious uncle, re-establishes himself, albeit with no little resentment, in the camp of King Alfred of Wessex, the last Saxon king still fighting the Danish invaders. England's history is rich with invasion and war, particularly at this early time, and Cornwell successfully mines it for good material.
Uhtred is not a highly sympathetic character, having been raised a viking by his Danish captors and being more interested in getting his own back than in the well being of those around him. Still, he is convincingly realistic and we have little reason to think he would have been any less self-interested or brutal than the people and culture around him warranted. This tale, of course, is set in the early part of the viking age, at its height in fact, when Danish and Norse freebooters were swarming across the British Isles, grabbing what they could and killing whatever they couldn't take away with them. For those familiar with the later Icelandic saga literature which actually reflects a very different era, the level of violence and cruelty may come as a bit of a shock. But there's little reason to doubt that that's how it was and Cornwell presents it with panache. One may not like seeing Uhtred turn on his "allies" in a pinch but its believable and, as a character, he does maintain a kind of internal consistency and a certain sense of personal honor.
Essentially the hero of the tale is at odds with everyone at the outset though he will eventually find himself thrown into uncomfortable alliance with, and allegiance to, the dyspeptic Saxon king who is intent not only on hanging onto his own kingdom (for which he must defeat the predatory Danes) but in expanding his rule to unify the shattered remnants of the other broken Saxon kingdoms. This is as much a book about English history as about vikings and if you like fast paced adventure with well-drawn characters, Cornwell has provided it. It's a little weak in the seriousness department, being mostly a tale of action and scheming and fighting, but it is as tightly woven a narrative as one is likely to see, with nary a moment to take a breath. I liked this one better than its predecessor, The Last Kingdom, and, based on this alone, I'll probably read the third installment when I get the chance. On the other hand, I didn't much care for Uhtred because of his brutality and bloodlust, but he sort of grows on you -- and he is, after all, a creature of his times. More, it pays to remember that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in their day weren't much better to the native Britons than the Danes were in this era to them. So, as they say, what goes around comes around.
Anyway, I'm not always a fan of Cornwell (I didn't like Winter King, the first installment in his three part Warlord Chronicles, based on the Arthurian era) but this time he's sold me and I'll be the one doing the buying after this, at least as far as the sequel to this one is concerned.
(If you've an interest, at all, in the saga-as-novel, here are a few quite good ones -- Saga: A Novel Of Medieval Iceland by Jeff Janoda; The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley; Two Ravens by Cecelia Holland; Eric Brighteyes by H. Rider Haggard; Styrbiorn the Strong by E. R. Eddison; Gunnar's Daughter by Sigrid Undset; and, probably the all-time best, The Golden Warrior by Hope Muntz. And one more, if you still want more, this one by me, The King of Vinland's Saga which, I like to hope, is not too much worse than these others.)
SWM
Difficult to sympathise with Uthred - Rated 
I was a little disappointed with this after, I had thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the Trilogy (The Last Kingdom). I think my difficulty is following the anti hero Uthred, who is not a very likeable character. He is brave, sure, but arrogant and very anti- Alfred's piety. I would like to read more about Alfred who seems far more interesting, than the highly predictable character of Uthred. Maybe its just Uthred's young age (20), though the even younger Uthred was far more interesting a narator in The Last Kingdom. I m hoping a more mature and reflective Uthred will narrate the last in the trilogy. The description of the Somerset mudbanks where Alfred and his small band laid low and he burnt the cakes, allegedly, was for me the highlight of a slightly disappointing tale.
Succeeds despite the author's best efforts - Rated
I'm hardly Bernard Cornwell's biggest fan - when he retells historical actions he's up there with the best, but - presumably in order to enliven his plots - he has a bad habit of attempting to jazz up his novels with idiotic attempts to include outlandish plot devices such as Sharpe battling Mayan death cults in Spain (I'd like to see the historical evidence for that!), and his attempts to enliven the Hundred Years War (as if disease ridden English and Welsh army's decimating French army's 3-10 times their size for almost 130 years actually needed any enlivening whatsoever, for God's sakes!) with a quest for the holy grail, which was basically the medieval equivalent of the modern day UFO cult (who needs proof when you've got blind faith). For once, in his Alfred novels he reins in his wildest fantasies and in general sticks to the basic facts - Alfred existed, most of these battles were actually fought (although not necessarily in the order they are written here). Uhtred exists in these novels as a real personality - half English, half Norse, he's caught between the two cousin societies and their conflicting religions, his loyalties veering from one to the other... aside from an attack in book 3 on a non existent castle, which is saved from defeat by an improbable counter attack by, of all things, a pack of hounds, there is only one major flaw in this series: the treatment of Alfred the Great himself.
For a series of novels based on the life of Alfred the Great, Alfred himself comes across as an intellectual, ineffectual, personality free wimp of the highest order. When he faces a battle he has absolutely no idea what to do and displays a complete lack of leadership that wouldn't have inspired his own mother; when he faces a crisis, possibly the most intelligent man in the British isles ever to become a king can't think of anything to do other than pray piously. Considering that in his afterwards Cornwall admits to having read books on Alfred such as John Preddie's 'Alfred, Warrior King', he's ignored the facts and created a King Alfred who wouldn't inspire confidence in a village idiot. In reality Alfred was a medieval king - moreover a 'dark age' medieval king - who overcame terrifying odds to defeat an invader that still inspires awe today. Despite their pious hagiography's, by their very nature dark age and medieval kings were not the ineffectual limp-wristed wimps of these novels; despite noble ambitions Alfred is well documented as being more than capable of displaying utter ruthlessness when it came to dealing with threats. Put simply, the Alfred of these novels wouldn't have lasted five minutes in charge of your local Women's Institute; the real Alfred rebounded from the brink of annihilation, repeatedly defeated some of the most awe-inspiring foes of history and set the foundations for a country that at one point rightly or wrongly ended up with the largest empire the world has ever seen. Doesn't quite fit with Mr. Cornwell's version of events, does it?
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