Bernard Cornwell - Stonehenge - book review via absurdist religiose godmatic expressionism

no, not Cornwell’s book… Stonehenge isn’t (necessarily) about absurdist religiose godmatic expressionism…

Cornwell’s book is about Shaman i.e. the exhaltation of the crippled.

Seriously, let’s move on from this already. Cornwell (whom I’ve never read before) does a really good job of constructing a plausible narrative for the building, over various phases, of the Stonehenge monument. Not that it’s either historically, or archaeologically, or religiously, accurate. It’s a fiction book having a stab at proposing an idea, and what’s that idea?

TRIBES, obviously, and the Parenting by War of Common Land i.e. this Free Planet. It’s a story of Inheritance. A story laid out as a Domestic Drama where brothers fight and women are just targets for lust.

Wow, I don’t even know how I’m going to segue from Stonehenge-the-novel into Stonehenge-the-religious-cathedral, so I won’t. Religion has NOTHING TO DO with Stonehenge. Stonehenge wasn’t even EVER its name. Druidism comes from the 18th century. There are no mention of Celts in the Stonehenge novel. It’s all just island tribes: sea-farers, and we don’t even know where they come from, apart from the Amesbury Archer who was Swiss.

There are ‘gods’ in the book, but they’re local-named shamanistic i.e. drug-fuelled, varieties of the same celestial, mountain, streams entities… like the Earth was always ‘haunted’ i.e. filled with inexplicable i.e. physics, effects. A centaur-darkened winter-landscape weighed down with fungus, mushrooms and ketamine. A ‘holy world’ of fear-trumps-sense. Seriously, man is a tool for Conspiracy. It’s what he’s ALWAYS done, the victim he’s always been.