The Sage of Waterloo: A Tale
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The most beguiling and distinctive debut novel of the season: the Battle of Waterloo…as told by a rabbit.
On June 17, 1815, the Duke of Wellington amassed his troops at Hougoumont, an ancient farmstead not far from Waterloo. The next day, the French attacked—the first shots of the Battle of Waterloo—sparking a brutal, day-long skirmish that left six thousand men either dead or wounded.
William is a white rabbit living at Hougoumont today. Under the tutelage of his mysterious and wise grandmother Old Lavender, William attunes himself to the echoes and ghosts of the battle, and through a series of adventures he comes to recognize how deeply what happened at Waterloo two hundred years before continues to reverberate. “Nature,” as Old Lavender says, “never truly recovers from human cataclysms.”
The Sage of Waterloo is a playful retelling of a key turning point in human history, full of vivid insights about Napoleon, Wellington, and the battle itself—and a slyly profound reflection on our place in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A clever premise is squandered in the debut from pianist turned author Francombe. In opening scenes full of potential, the novel introduces a family of rabbits who live on the farm at Hougoumont (in modern-day Belgium), where part of the Battle of Waterloo was fought. Across the generations, these rabbits have curated an oral history of the battle, filling quiet time in the hutch debating details and analyzing tactics. William, the narrator, is the only white rabbit in the colony; his grandmother, Old Lavender, is the family's resident Waterloo expert. Eventually Old Lavender disappears, and William is taken from the farm to become a pet, but these moments are buffered by so much battlefield minutiae that they reduce excitement. The charm of the premise erodes as scene after scene piles up of the rabbits presenting history lessons with almost nothing happening in the present Francombe underscores this weakness late in the novel by having William summarize what little plot there has been in half a page. There is one dynamite line "Nature never truly recovers from human cataclysms" and it's repeated twice, as if to impose a thesis. But so little has happened with so little at stake that the novel fails to make an emotional or intellectual impact.
