The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

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After enjoying the River Kings I was hoping for a bit more from this – in part the issue if that the Bone Chests don’t actually provide the key to unlock the narrative and in fact leave the book a bit all over the place.

We seem to jump around a bit, as the stories of the different Kings, Queens, and Bishops overlap – so having told one person’s story you often have to lurch back in time to pick up another’s.

There are various asides, for example we get a couple of pages in the treatment of the dead after the Battle of Waterloo, including the processing of their bones as fertiliser, from which can infer explanations why finding the locations of other historical battles which should be accompanied by mass graves in fact proves so hard, but it is then followed by five and a half pages on the discovery of Richard II explaining how it is possible to have a high level of confidence in the individual identification of some historic remains – both of these are interesting in themselves but at times as we wander freely you almost forget you are reading a book about the rulers of Anglo-Saxon England.

In a similar way the imagined vinaigrettes that begin each chapter somehow don’t quite work – they are not long enough for you to get into the head of the speaker, but long enough to break the flow of the Cat’s own voice.

We are given two sections of photos, but these are not given figure numbers or cross referenced within the text, while at the start of the book we get a map of England c.880 – but given the book is describing a dynamic period why we get this one date and no evolution over time – and a plan of the Norman Winchester Cathedral with the shadow of the Old Minister but not the New Minister despite the dynamic of the period under discussion being the uneasy relationship between Old and New which as the book closes is swept away by the construction of their Norman replacement.

Cat Jarman is an engaging writer, but somehow on this occasion the sum feels slightly than the parts...