The Pretender is the most enjoyable historical novel I’ve read in years

Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the youthful figurehead of a Plantagenet uprising against Henry VII in 1487. The historical Simnel is an elusive figure, and most of what little we know comes through Tudor propagandists. Jo Harkin fills the gap in the record with enormous brio, channelling this bloody epilogue to the Wars of the Roses through a hapless adolescent who usually has his mind on other things.

Simnel is a pretender in more ways than one. Even he doesn’t know who he really is. The son of an Oxfordshire farmer? A Yorkist bastard, retained by the sinister Lord Lovell as a form of dynastic insurance? The 17th Earl of Warwick and the rightful Edward VI? In the final section of the book, however, when he has been captured by Henry VII, he becomes a different sort of pretender, pursuing a dark strategy of revenge.

When we first encounter him, he’s ten years old and on the losing side of a long-drawn out war with a goat. Soon he’s whisked off to Oxford where, in a house off Gropecunt Lane, a priest force-feeds him literature suitable for a boy of noble birth. Then it’s off to the magnificent court of Burgundy, where his putative aunt, the formidable dowager duchess, primes him for his royal destiny. Next stop Ireland, where he falls for the ruthless but sexy daughter of the Earl of Kildare and is crowned king in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

The invasion of England ends in tears at the battle of Stoke Field. Henry VII puts the pretender to work first as a turnspit in the palace kitchens and then as a falconer. But Simnel, now adult and capable of creating his own destiny, has other plans.

There is an extraordinary energy about this novel, due partly to its language – a supercharged blend of Chaucerian and modern demotic English – and partly to Harkin’s almost supernatural ability to channel the chaotic mind of a teenage boy. Simnel is a glorious creation, whether wanking in a garderobe and fearing God might see him or worrying that his new crown will fall off his head in public. (The grown-up Simnel isn’t quite so much fun. To be fair, though, that’s true of everyone.)

All in all, this is the most enjoyable historical novel I’ve read in years. Harkin’s previous book was science fiction. I don’t know what her next one will be but I do know that I shall want to read it.