The Land Beyond the Sea by Sharon Kay Penman

The Land Beyond the Sea
By Sharon Kay Penman
Putnam, 2020

Bestselling historical novelist Sharon Kay Penman interrupts the steady tread of her “Plantagenets” series to bring readers her latest, The Land Beyond the Sea, a great big novel about the Kingdom of Jerusalem in 1172, with its new young king Baldwin IV and the lurking threat of its greatest enemy, the Muslim warlord Saladin. Her previous two novels, A King’s Ransom and Lionheart, were set nearly two decades later and, as the series title indicates, had Penman’s signature fictional subjects, the Plantagenets, front and center the whole time. In The Land Beyond the Sea (the title is taken from A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea by Archbishop William of Tyre, a contemporary account of events that Penman rightly praises for its relative reliability), the Plantagenet is King Henry II, but he’s far away from Jerusalem.

Instead, there’s an even larger cast of characters than usual for a Penman novel, and the author here is in very strong form. As the novel opens, Sybilla, the daughter of Amalric, the previous King of Jerusalem (and sister to the new king, Baldwin, is experiencing reactions to her pregnancy that are timeless in their nature:

“My legs look like tree trunks. I get these odd cravings for food I never liked, often in the middle of the night. My back throbs like an aching tooth. I cannot stray far from a chamber pot. My breasts are sore even to the touch. And I’m as clumsy as a lame donkey. Yet someone dared to tell me yesterday that these are the happiest days of my life!”

And young Baldwin, by far the novel’s most compellingly-drawn character, is a believably complex and melancholy as he grapples with both the pressures surrounding his kingdom and his growing realization that he’s gravely ill. This will be no surprise to history buffs, who already know Baldwin as The Leper King, but Penman does a very good job of portraying the slow horror of the situation as it seeps into Baldwin’s immediate circle. In a quick, quiet scene between Baldwin and his mother, we read: “He was actually smiling, the saddest smile she’d ever seen. ‘I know what is wrong with me, Mother,’ he said softly. ‘I am a leper.’”

The book is thoroughly absorbing reading, even though apart from the sign-post battle of Hattin in 1187 it doesn’t have many big organizing plot points. Penman’s writing style is so companionable that most readers won’t mind the slight wandering of the narrative, although this author’s penchant for loading every scene with every historical detail within reach takes some getting accustomed to for newcomers:

William kept the bulk of his library at the archbishopric palace in Tyre, and when his clerks could not find a Latin chronicle, he realized he’d forgotten to pack it. He’d intended to get some work done today on his history of the kingdom, but he needed to check a passage in Fulcher of Chartres’s A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem. He looked now at the writing implements, a knife to sharpen his quill, a boar’s tooth for polishing the parchment to keep the ink from running, an inkhorn, a ruler to measure the margins. All he lacked was the missing book and motivation.

Readers familiar with Penman’s long shelf of historical novels will eagerly welcome this everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, and The Land Beyond the Sea shows off that approach to marvelous effect. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.