Name: Wolf of the Plains
Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9780007201754

Conn Iggulden

The first book in a fiction series about the life of Genghis Khan.

Wolf of the Plains

A remarkable story of heroism and adventure, of a boy who had to become a man too soon, of a family and a tribe who had to learn to win to survive.A man without a tribe was at great risk, so the young boy abandoned with his siblings on the harsh Mongolian plains had to struggle to avoid death. He survived both starvation and hostile attacks by learning remarkable leadership skills and gathering a group of outsiders like himself.Hunted and alone, he dreamed of uniting the tribes into one house, one nation. He became a great warrior. He would become father to his people. He would be Genghis Khan.

Edwin Lang

Let me count the number of ways that I found the book somewhat disappointing. First it’s blatant superficiality. Next the slowness with which the story developed. Next was the sparseness of the story line. Finally the absence of intelligence in the tribes that soon would rule much of the land and peoples from Northern China, south Russia, much of the Stans countries including Afghanistan and northern Persia. On superficiality I felt that I was reading something written for a teen audience, full of adventure and intrigue but absent any redeeming quality for an adult reader. I did like though the treatment of the family of five brothers of which the future Genghis Khan was part. This started when he was 12 and Conn Iggulden’s treatment of the personality of each and the chemistry through chapters one, two and three which included a hunt for a hawk. Iggulden though successfully introduced his reader to a rawness of these great unwashed tribes living in the plains of what the Chin dynasty called the Northern Sung. I had trouble getting into the story and the language initially seemed a barrier. I didn’t in the case The Kite Runner and felt Iggulden perhaps could have done better, at least initially, to bridge the divide of current language and names with that of the Mongols. While this passed I found getting through the first 100 pages something of an ordeal. The book though included some impressive action and battle scenes and although the scenes were relatively short they felt believable and authentic. Particularly good I though was Iggulden’s treatment of the ordeal of Yesugei’s family abandoned to die amid the minus 20 degree winter of the Plains. The reader felt their trial, the hunger, the cold and in the depth of Bekter something of the Lord of the Flies in the panic that sets in when faced with a need to survive. It emphasized again with some embarrassment that the tribes, aside from their battle readiness and the relative ruthless simplicity of their lives, were in every sense barbarians of the lowest order, and former empires such as Persia and China were no match in the face of this single-minded onslaught. This book covered these precious formative years well. I found the storyline particularly sparse and felt frustrated by that. To some degree I was comparing it in mind to The Virginian where Wister wrote with economy and force to create a memorable Jeff, and although I felt the growing power of the Temujin who would soon cal himself Khan of the sea of the grasses of the plains, Genghis Khan, the force was not there for me. Nonetheless Iggulden describes the trajectory of Temujin’s rise to power well: I found that as a reader it was relatively believable. In <a target="_blank" href="http://www.biography.com" rel="nofollow noopener">www.biography.com</a> it’s stated that ‘Genghis Khan's armies struck the Jin Dynasty in northern China, lured not by the great cities' artistic and scientific wonders, but rather the seemingly endless rice fields and easy pickings of wealth” and this underlies my sense that this was no Greek army invading (albeit ruthlessly) Troy, or an Alexander or Caesar. I think the story suggests the coming ruthlessness and brutality of the emerging leader but doesn’t reflect the innate brilliance of the man and just hints at his youthful vision of a unified people. The essence of my complaint then is that the story, while a good and well-told chronological story in very respect, leaves the reader somewhat less than fuller satisfied, as if we’ve eaten a high calorie meal that was deficient in nutrition. It’s a long story – 460 pages – a little shorter than Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and I think Iggulden could have included speculation and hints at the seeds of greatness within Temujin that made him the great world leader that he became. I can accept that this was historical fiction and was left bereft at the absence of powerful insights into the man and his times that I think would have made the story more valuable and engaging and more powerful. Edwin

Wolf of the Plains

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