Book Review: Why Does the Heathen Rage?

I recently completed Why Does the Heathen Rage by J. Stephen Roberts.  On the whole, my impression is that it is a decent attempt by a skilled amateur.  The book has two things in its favor.

1. It provides insight into a period of history about which most people have at best cartoonish ideas.
2. It provides a sympathetic perspective to the Crusaders, something in very short supply these days.

Both of these are important, and I am strongly inclined to favor this book ... but it still comes across as the work of an amateur due mostly to the stiff characters.  There is no arc of meaningful character development in the book.  There is no temptation, fall, and redemption.  There is not even a heroic resistance to temptation; there are temptations of various kinds, but the characters always seem to have, or to accept, pat, pious answers.  Think how The Empire Strikes Back would have unfolded if Luke had sadly but meekly accepted Yoda's insistence that Luke was not ready to face Vader but should abandon his friends to their fates while he completed his training.  That would have made a poor movie, but it is more or less how the book plays out.  A knight flirts with a princess, but it really never gets beyond flirtation, and they both conclude the romance is politically impossible and just get on with their lives.  Of course, history strongly constrains the plot, but the author had the freedom to choose his main protagonist.  If the protagonist had been a sinful aristocrat who went on the Crusade as a penance, rather than a goody-two-shoes knight born in the Holy Land, there would have been much more opportunity for character development that would have breathed life into the historical events.

The dialogue is also a bit off.  This is a bit hard to judge, since of course Medieval knights were neither Victorian prudes nor as crude as today's potty mouths, and some of their cussing might seem odd to us today.  I know that "God's Body", "God's Blood", and "His Wounds" were actually used, but then the Body and Blood are of course presented in the Mass, and devotions to the Wounds of Christ were widespread, so these would naturally be prominent in the Medieval mind; and to use such a phrase for cussing would have been considered blasphemous even in my non-Catholic Christian elementary school.  The characters in the book, though, use strange combinations, like "God's Feet" and "God's Bones", which somehow combine silliness and blasphemy in a character meant to be serious and pious.  Beyond this, the characters are supposed to be aristocrats, but they lack the eloquence that should mark their rank.  Twitter has not been kind to language -- or to the thoughts language conveys -- and something of the shallowness of our current era seeps through.

Would I recommend the book?  Yes, to the right people.  I doubt it will change a reader's mind about the propriety of the Crusades, and I think there are other books that give better insight into the Medieval Catholic mindset, so it should not be the first, let alone the only, book one reads or gives to a friend on the subject.