Leona Francombe

At first, I thought The Sage of Waterloo was one of those books that ought to have been a short story: too little pith awash in too much narrative, stretched out to novella length to please an editor or a publisher or a self-indulgent author. After finishing the book, I can safely say this is not so: The Sage of Waterloo should've been an essay on Waterloo, hold the rabbit and/or the sage.

There is no story in this book. Or rather, the story in this book is only about Waterloo, the battle and the slaughter and the loss and the impact on the surrounding countryside. The rabbit (who might also be the sage, though I suspect that role is meant for his grandmother) doesn't really add anything beyond the tale of Waterloo, itself.

Instead, he proses on and on about his younger days (learning about Waterloo) and his old home (at the ruins of the chateau near Waterloo) and leaving home (where he misses Waterloo) and the horrors of humanity (and what they did at Waterloo) and his family and other animals (and how they were impacted by Waterloo). Whenever his narrative brushes too close to anything approaching an actual story of his own, it skitters right back inside the story of Waterloo---just as a rabbit frightened of the unknown flees back to its hutch.

This entire book is an exercise in anticipation and disappointment as, over and over again, the story promises to appear only to dissipate once more into the never-ending drone about Waterloo.

There are moments of what might be considered wisdom, but the wisdom is so tired and specifically sized for rabbit consumption---"If something bad happens, William, chew through the problem methodically, as if it's a long, hard carrot"---that only the most untried or inexperienced or determined of readers would find it novel or helpful.

The book also contains something that could possibly be seen as a ghost story, but the rabbit spends so much of the book harping on his grandmother seeing things and animals learning to "read the air" and all the pointless, violent death at the battle that the final ghostly reveal feels expected and anticlimactic. There's nothing spooky about it, just something obvious that the rabbit could've shared to greater effect 200 pages earlier.

Francombe clearly has strong feelings about this battle and the lives lost and how we've written the history after the fact, but I would've appreciated reading her thoughts far more in a medium designed for just such a purpose. Encountering them through the underused and irrelevant mouthpiece of a rabbit renders the entire piece toothless and pedantic. I shrug at the tragedy of the battle instead of weeping at it.… (altro)

This book felt vaguely reminiscent of Watership Down to me, likely due to the rabbit narrator. William is a rabbit at Hougoumont, an old farm near the site of the Battle of Waterloo. The battle and the myths surrounding it loom large in this book, as the rabbits thoroughly discuss and dissect the battle which so transformed their home. Overall, this was an odd read, but not bad. I just couldn't help but feeling something was missing from the story to pull the concepts together and drive the action.… (altro)

This wasn't at all a bad book, but it had too many improbabilities and overly anthropomorphized the rabbits, giving them deeper insight than we'd expect. It just doesn't match the hoopla it seems to have gotten in some published reviews.

At first glance, a "rabbit story" might remind readers of Watership Down, but in fact The Sage of Waterloo reminds me more of another Richard Adams novel, href="https://www.librarything.com/work/153595" rel="nofollow" target="_top">Traveller, the Civil War as seen by Robert E. Lee's horse, and The Sage of Waterloo has the same limitations as that lesser known of Adams's novels. It's lacking in action, too meditative, and leaves the reader with a rather trivial but also unrealistic conclusion, relying as it does on a probably human ghost.

The Sage of Waterloo, published in 2015, dealt with the Battle of Waterloo in its bicentennial year, but there's nothing particularly distinctive about the choice of Waterloo; and, if the novel had been published just two years earlier, it might just as well have been The Sage of Gettysburg.… (altro)