Dawn Wind, by Rosemary Sutcliff

[rachelmanija]

Owain, a young Roman-Briton boy, is the only human survivor of a battle between his people and the invading Saxons. He and the hound he finds on the battlefield, whom he names Dog, head out in search of some place where they might belong. This turns out to be even more complicated than one might imagine, as Owain discovers when he comes to the abandoned city of Viriconium and takes up with a beggar girl, Regina.

Like The Shield Ring, this is a start-and-stop book, alternating sequences of intense emotion and suspense with lengthy time-skips and slow interludes of daily life. I liked many individual scenes very much and was very satisfied by the story, but it was not exactly a quick read – even less so than The Shield Ring.

I liked how Owain’s virtues are the ones generally considered passive and feminine: his courage and battlefield prowess are present but largely elided, while his endurance, patience, kindness, and self-sacrifice are the focus of the story.

Now that I’ve read three of the books in the “Dolphin Ring” sequence, which I think encompasses about a thousand years of history, it’s fascinating to see how conquerors become the conquered, and each culture in turn mourns its fall to “barbarians.” It’s one of the best examples I’ve ever read of a God’s-eye-view of history, in which the reader gets both the inexorable sequence of events and the length of time, and a sense of how every sparrow that falls is important, if only to itself.

Though the book is not particularly full of startling plot twists, the overall shape of the narrative was surprisingly difficult to predict. In case that’s a common reaction, I’ll put the rest of the plot behind a cut.



I did not expect Regina to drop out of the story for as long as she did, and kept waiting for her to come back. I am usually dubious about people picking up relationships after that long of a separation, but it does happen and Sutcliff made it convincing.



Warning: This is by no means a “dead dog” book, in which animals are slain by the hand of the author for cheap tears and life lessons (“Kids! Being a man means shooting your own rabid dog!”) However, there are major animal characters in this book, and it takes place over a long period of time, which means that they don’t all make it to the end of the book.

Other Warning: There is a villainous character who limps, and one line in which the limp and villainy are equated. This is the opinion of the character and not representative of Sutcliff in general, who often writes very sensitively and realistically about disability.

Dawn Wind

Comments

[cofax7]

Oddly enough, I just finished a reread of this yesterday; I had read it once, about thirty something years ago, and not since, so it was interesting to revisit. One of the things I found interesting but also sad was the way that the successes of the protagonists of the past books in the series are lost and forgotten entirely in subsequent books. It adds an air of melancholy, and yes, a real sense of the depth of history that Sutcliff is working with.

And of course now I have to go off to Wikipedia and see if any of this actually took place. *g*

[rachelmanija]

There's this very bittersweet sense that what the protagonists did mattered to them and the people around them, but time moves on and buries everything. And that a lot of the culture that they were worried about losing did get lost, but what replaced it wasn't horrible and barbaric, but valuable and beautiful in its own way.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

That's a huge part of what I love so much about Sutcliff right there -- that sense of time and its flow, and the way traces of the past are everywhere and sometimes touch the lives of people in later eras, even if their specific stories are largely forgotten. It's melancholy, and yet hopeful at the same time, IMO, because life is going on and something of the past always remains. There's a perfect line at the end of Sword at Sunset that sums it all up for me -- the mortally wounded Artos, who has come to a sense of peace with his tumultuous life and impending death, is trying to comfort his grieving friend Bedwyr: "There will be more songs -- more songs tomorrow, though it is not we who shall sing them."

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I am trying to figure out how on earth I managed to entirely miss Rosemary Sutcliff. This all sounds not just right up my alley, but all the way to my stoop and knocking on my door. I will need to go find some.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I missed her until this year, too! I think she'd be right up your alley. I have reviews of three of her books tagged here, all in the same "Dolphin Ring" sequence.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Along with Rachel's reviews, if you hit her Sutcliff tag here you'll find a post on Andre Norton that spawned a massive Rosemary Sutcliff Appreciation-and-Rec-Fest thread -- that might be a helpful resource in choosing which titles you'd like to start with. (Sadly, only a handful of her books are available as ebooks, and much of her extensive bibliography is out of print, although I am hoping that with the movie adaptation of The Eagle of the Ninth coming out next month, there will be some more reprinted titles...)

[larryhammer]

I think it's rather less than a thousand years. Aren't installments set about 100 years apart? If the Saxons are invading, that'd be two centuries or so after Eagle of the Ninth.

---L.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The Shield Ring has the Normans invading, but I'm not sure when the sequence begins. Are there pre-Roman novels?

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Sutcliff did plenty of pre-Roman novels, but as far as I know none of them tie directly into the dolphin ring sequence. (One of the Bronze Age books, Warrior Scarlet, does link directly to the Norman-era Knight's Fee, however.)

Here's the timeline I've seen floating around online for the Aquila sequence:

The Eagle of the Ninth (AD 133)
The Silver Branch (c AD 280)
Frontier Wolf (AD 343)
The Lantern Bearers (AD 450)
Sword at Sunset (AD 450)
Dawn Wind (AD 577)
Sword Song (c AD 900)
The Shield Ring (c AD 1070)

[larryhammer]

Ah -- that's useful.

---L.

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

I have a vague (very vague, I haven't read these books in years) recollection that there was on before the Eagle of the Ninth, because I seem to recall the emerald starts out un-cracked. But I could have dreamed it, and don't have the first idea of the title...

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I don't recall the emerald being cracked, though -- and I've just read/reread everything except Sword Song over the last few months. Sutcliff does frequently describe it as "flawed", but I always assumed she just meant it had visible inclusions, like most emeralds...

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Yes, sorry, that was what I meant. But as I said, I dreamed entire novels when I was little, so perhaps the pre-roman celtic one that I was sure had the original ring in it was my imagination...

[17catherines.livejournal.com]

Oh, I loved this book when I was little! I think I read everything Sutcliff wrote, but this particular one was my favourite (I can't quite remember why, which means it's time for another re-read).

[sarahtales.livejournal.com]

Having just discovered the Awful Revelation that is the Eagle of the Ninth movie, I really have to get on reading more Sutcliff. I loved that book. So I should get this one!

Also, I'll see the movie, because Jamie Bell for Esca, but I'll possibly be screaming 'Where are my ladies and wolf cubs at?' thoroughout.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

If you're planning on reading more Sutcliffs/more of the signet ring cycle, it will be particularly interesting to look at this one in comparison with the earlier The Lantern Bearers -- once again we've got the Romano-British lead enduring years as a thrall and worrying about a young girl left behind, but this time it all plays out very very differently: it's the early years of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Aquila and his younger sister Flavia are taken as captives by a Jute raiding party, and his long years of slavery are consumed with bitter dreams of escape and vengeance. It's one of the darker, grimmer Sutcliffs -- I actually find it rather harder to take in many ways than the more overt tragedies, because Aquila is such a difficult, prickly protagonist. Sword At Sunset, which picks up literally hours after The Lantern Bearers ends, seems like it should be darker since it's a long slow losing battle against the tide of history, narrated in flashback by a dying man, with personal tragedies a-plenty and endless casualties; but I actually find that one much easier to take, since Artos is a more engaging protagonist. (Also, I am embarassed to note that I didn't mention this in the massive-recfest-of-DOOOOM because I somehow missed it completely on my earlier readings -- there's a canonical gay couple amongst Artos' Noble Warrior Guys Companions!)

The big animal death scene in this one didn't hit me too hard -- as you said, the passage of time alone meant that was a coming inevitability, even if the manner of it was harsh; but the burial scene afterwards, oh, that leaves me gutted and sobbing every time. I've been in that place myself too many times, and Sutcliff herself knew that particular form of grief deeply and writes it with great power.

...'scuse me, gotta go hug my dog.