I read this novel in high school and really really liked it. This time, 30-something years later, having forgotten all but the first few chapters (the part about the eclipse), I found Hank to be extremely obnoxious in his know-it-all smartassery, but I hoped for a redemptive arc for him.
In his defense, he does enjoy a few glimmering moments of emotional growth. For example, his opinion and treatment of the maiden Sandy: initially he finds her trivial, delusional (which, in fairness, she is), and an insufferable chatterbox. He thinks she is stupid. His opinion of her improves after she uses her emotional intelligence and her knowledge of the customs and attitudes of 6th century England (both things that Hank lacks almost entirely) to defuse and resolve crisis after crisis that his blundering sense of self-superiority created. Eventually he marries her out of respect for her safety and grows to love her. Under similar tutelage from Clarence he learns respect for that man. But his respect for medieval people never extends to strangers. He considers Clarence and Sandy to be exceptions.
In fact there's a parallel between Sandy trying to subtly teach Hank the value of empathy and Hank trying to teach the early medieval peasantry the ideology and technologies of the American 19th century. For starters, in both cases, their success appears thorough but in the end is revealed as very limited. Hank learns to appreciate Sandy and Clarence, but never manages to understand the point of view of any noble, with the exception of King Arthur, and even then only when Arthur demonstrates revolutionary attitudes such as condemning the institution of slavery - that is, even with King Arthur, Hank feels empathy, if it can be called that and not condescending affection, only when the king acts like Hank. He may even believe he feels respect and empathy for the wider populace during the period when his role as The Boss has revolutionized English technology, but what he respects, really, is the extent to which they are able to act like Hank. He doesn't get close enough to see that they are just acting, even after that failure to see gets him and King Arthur sold as slaves.
Similarly, many English people grow accustomed to electricity and technology and some even learn to create and manipulate these forces. However, when the crisis comes, they almost all side with the nobility. Only the very young, those effectively raised with industrial revolution ideas and technologies, stand by Hank and his republic when the shit hits the fan.
Hank's declared commitment to founding a republic turns out to be very awkward, too. Upon the death of Arthur, Hank declares England to be a republic and demands that the people gather and choose leaders and turn the government over to those leaders. Then when "All of England marches" Hank fails to recognize that "All of England" effectively voted to give the government to the knights, while on his side he has only around 50 votes, all boys between 7 and 17 years old. Instead of recognizing that the people had chosen, he undertook the massacre of thousands of knights, using mines and electric fences and similar technological methods that those knights did not properly understand. Hurray for the superiority of 19th century ethics.
Similarly he spends the entire novel railing against superstition, but consistently presents technology as magic and is shocked in the end when superstition prevails.
I'll come back to this novel in a separate post assessing it as a candidate for my dream visions project. For now, sufficient to say that I think Hank is an asshole.
