(Of interest to nobody but myself, but I ordered this book from the library and went in to collect it on Monday. Just as it was being put on my card, I glanced at the New Arrivals table and saw the latest James Lee Burke and grabbed it. It was only yesterday that I noticed the congruity between the title of this, The Wonder Of The World and the Burke, The Light Of The World. Furthermore, I sat down last night to watch the latest episode of the superb tv show Fargo, titled A Fox, A Rabbit And A Cabbage, and one of the characters posed the timeless riddle of the man with the three objects, no two of which can be left alone together, the river and the small boat. Only a few hours earlier I had found myself reading about three characters discussing the same riddle (with a wolf and a goat - the cabbage is a constant) in the pages of The Wonder Of The World. I'm pretty sure this means something. I'm pretty sure it means I should get out more.)

Another Cecelia Holland novel, another medieval hero winding his way to a crucial turning point in his career or in history itself, or both. Frederic, Emperor of the Holy Roman Emperor sets out to finally sort out the pesky Middle East Problem once and for all. He's pretty sure he can negotiate a treaty granting him the Holy City of Jerusalem without the messy, if more traditional, business of Christians and Infidels slaughtering each other. Quite a lot of Christians think this is unsporting, including the Pope, who appears to have excommunicated Frederick for not going on a crusade and promptly invades Frederick's beloved Sicily while he's off on Crusade, despite the fact that the Pope himself has laid an interdiction against anyone attacking crusader's lands while they're off on Crusade.

Frederick is brilliant, charismatic, mercurial, passionate, lecherous, easily bored and a bit of a thrill-seeker. This is the most Dunnetish of the books so far, though Frederick isn't as enigmatic as Lymond or Niccolo. This isn't a novel of clever, witty, textual games. There are complex themes and deals and political situations all over the place, but Frederick, and Holland, deals with them smoothly in that wonderful, clear, polished prose. There's no battle, either, though there's a nasty street fight. Battles are largely avoided, much to everyone's annoyance, even Frederick's, at the end, as he pursues the Papal forces through Sicily. Climactic conflict eludes him, and us, and then you get to the end, and you realise it was probably just as well.