Rex quondam rexque futurus

    

 

          I'll just say straightaway that J.P. Buxton's I am the Blade is a cracking read! Amazon reviewers - and they include novelist and Times children's books critic Amanda Craig - are unanimous in giving it five stars, and I'd do the same. A re-telling of the Arthurian legend, this is historical fiction for older children and adults of any age. There's action and adventure enough to propel the plot along at a fair speed but there's also so much Dark Age detail there, so much fact and myth alike, and it's never forced and stilted but of a piece with the story. I was gripped right through and am now missing the book and the world it so deftly conjures.

    Its events taking place through one lunar phase and culminating in a dramatic scene on Easter day, it follows young Tog, a woodcutter's ward, who is given a strange deathbed message by his rough guardian and has to flee from a murdering stranger. As he travels through Cornwall in the direction of an island in a lake, so he teams up with a Breton boy and a Pictish girl, and they encounter other-worldly creatures as well as Saxon circus performers and the last Romans in Britain. But all the while Tog's destiny is governed by his possession of a strange sword, one that seems to be leading him into ever greater danger.

    Tog - real name Artognu, pronounced Arthnu - is, of course, Arthur, although he has no clue about his parentage and what lies before him, but while the legend of the sword in the stone is well known to most of us, this version is so fresh, so full of humour and keen intelligence that it's new and original and a joy to read. There's nothing arch or contrived here and there's a realism about the characters which will make them recognisable to readers of any age, and important to them - you will care what happens (and there are too many novels of which that can't be said). I mentioned that I was sorry to have reached the end of the book, but happily the next instalment of Tog's adventures, A Heartless Dark, came out earlier this month, so there's that to look forward to.