Edward Rutherfurd: The Forest

(Century $49.95)

Review: Jack Leigh*

To give credit where credit's due, it is the people who take care of history, not the forest. Trees just stand about, looking dumb.

True, the ancient New Forest of southern England has its mystique and this book is a storehouse of woodland lore. But a historical romance 800 years and 600 pages long needs more than the noble oak to make it live and breathe. It takes human events as memorable as a royal deer hunt, the storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada, and the beheading of a cavalier colonel at Exeter in 1655, as witnessed by his 10-year-old son, Thomas.

Colonel John Penruddock, aged 36, of the "brown beard and laughing eyes," showed style and courage on the scaffold. He spoke to the crowd, denying high treason, absolving accomplices in his abortive rebellion, and trusting England would one day be restored to the rule of its rightful king.

Thomas saw his father kneel and kiss the block, "then still kneeling, he turned to the executioner. He said something. The executioner presented the head of the axe to him and he kissed it. The crowd was utterly silent.

"Thomas wanted to shout, 'Father!' He opened his mouth. Nothing. The axe fell."

Penruddock was a Wiltshire squire, and a real person. The name, with a final "e," even adorns a street in Pakuranga. The fact that author Edward Rutherfurd pads his 15-page treatment of the Penruddock case with spurious domestic detail reinforces an impression that while the history is soundly based, the packaging is often banal.

Dialogue seems to follow one simple rule for all epochs, classes and circumstances: you can't go wrong with small talk.

Yet in its planning and scope this is an immense novel which uses the New Forest as a metaphor for age and transition, for the decay of the old and its incorporation into the new. There is no sense of loss but only of continuation.

Self-contained stories set in successive periods of history are connected by family and other links of which the participants are not necessarily aware. The reader sees all, however, and wonders about such a web in his or her own ancestry.

The author's style, which has served him well in other epic works (London, Russka), blends fascinating factual detail with unabashed romantic fiction. In this book, the New Forest's splendours - its ecology, wildlife and centuries-old economy based on its deer, timber, grazing, charcoal, peat and the like - are exhaustively covered.

The forest is wonderful, but wooden at heart. The book's title is misleading. The subject is not trees, but people.

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist.