Though it is a genre of wide-ranging tastes and styles, historical fiction has two fundamental purposes: to open windows upon the past and to invite us to imagine how we might have fit into these times so different from our own. These are powerful enticements, seductions that speak to us of eras come and gone: their glory, their nobility, and their difficulty. They are stories capable of inspiring us, igniting passions for worlds lost to us by the shrouds of centuries. It is unfortunate, then, that this laborious effort from Ms. Fox mostly fails to deliver on either promise.
In the century following the fall of Anglo-Saxon England, a civilization largely buried by William the Conquerer and his Norman knights at the Battle of Hastings, life is hard for those who call themselves English. Not only are their customs overturned, their laws changed, their lords slain, they also find themselves bowing to a line of foreign kings who ended their way of life and imposed upon them continental conventions of tangled feuds and dubious morality. This is the thorny and troubled Plantagenet England through which Eleanor, our heroine, must navigate.
The product of a youthful and indiscreet dalliance between a French lord and an ambitious Englishwoman, Ellen is doubly cursed. Not only is she the object of her mother's spite -- the woman blames her pregnancy, and by extension Ellen, for ruining her chances at a comfortable, upperclass life --, she is a commoner with a boy's ambitions trapped in a woman's body. She does not want to succumb to a life of marriage and childbearing -- the destiny of all women of her era. She wants to throw off her meager, limited life, become a smith and make armor and swords for the great lords that rule her land.
Until she catches her mother cheating on her adoptive father with a local knight, hers is nothing more than a childish dream. But when her discovery forces her to flee her village, pursued by the knight's lethal threats, she inadvertently stumbles into a lie that will transform all her fanciful notions into reality. If she masquerades as a boy, she can not only earn an apprenticeship with a smith, she can have the life she dreamed of, traveling the known lands, her talented hands laboring for the highest kings. This is Ellen's adventure, its highs and its lows, its triumphs and its betrayals, its loves and its discord.
Though its heroine is, for the most part, a subversive pleasure, The Copper Sign is, in virtually every other respect, a disaster. Its bloated plot consumes 640-odd pages, showing no signs of having ever graced an editor's desk. For not only is the tale twice as long as necessary, Ms. Fox's characters are a confused, inconsistent muddle, their attitudes and ethics changing as the story's plot and her whimsey require. Not only is Ellen's desire to be a boy abandoned less than a quarter of the way through this dense morass, nonsensical feuds, irrational master smiths and conveniently timed illnesses are all summoned by the author and hurled at her heroine in the vain hope that something sticks. Some of this would be forgivable if the novel wasn't held together by Ms. Fox's stupefying lordly antagonist, an accretion of villainous cliches that serve no other purpose than to make Ellen's life miserable and to shove the tale towards its quiet conclusion.
It brings me no pleasure to condemn this work. Clearly, Ms. Fox went to great pains to learn and pass on to her readers the lessons of the forge and the realities of 12th century England, but she appears to have spent much more time researching than she did crafting a plot in which to embed this knowledge. Startling work in desperate need of another draft. (1/5 Stars)
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