The Soul Thief, by Cecelia Holland - Corban Loosestrife Series

The Soul Thief

Cecelia Holland

Corban Loosestrife Series

This novel starts out right for my tastes. It’s the mid-tenth century and Corban’s family live in Ireland. ‘Nuff said. Better yet, they are not royal or noble , they interact with Danes, they go to Jorvik/York, and the female characters are not Barbie dolls. Sigh. A perfect novel.

I can’t say that I was disappointed by the rest of the book either. The characters are appealing, the stories archetypal but not simplistic, the magic which I normally do not care for in historical fiction is handled in a natural, earthy way, and the settings are detailed and, with one glaring exception, sound pretty authentic. The glaring exception is the trade in casks of whiskey… um, no. That potable was not developed for about 300 years. It caused me to say “Whiskey?! What?! Aloud and wake up my husband sleeping in our bed next to me.

Corban, a directionless and uncommitted young fellow, is ordered out of their farmstead in Ireland by his father. His sister, Maeve, convinces him to let her talk to old Da and to come back in the morning to see if he relented. When he comes back he finds his family dead and the farmstead in flames. The responsible Vikings had also kidnapped Maeve. The story follows both Corban as he searches for her and her herself as she struggles to survive and to resist the title “soul thief”, a sort of Maiden-Mother-Crone sorceress who, for unrevealed reasons, is helping a man named Bluetooth disrupt the lineage of the various Scandinavian kingdoms, including Jorvik.

While Maeve, who has otherworldly sight, lies mad and fighting unseen forces in Denmark, Corban gets distracted first in Jorvik where he meets a family of three girls living destitute in an already depressed economy thanks to the ill-conceived ideas of their king, Erik Bloodaxe (a historical character whose biography I posted on Random Biographies today.) On his renewed expedition to find her, his ship is blown across the ocean to North America, which promises to be the setting of a later volume. When he does find her the sorceress bargains with him: “Get Erik to fight for the crown of Norway and you can have your sister back.” He goes back to Jorvik and blows his assignment when he sees that the world might be better off without Bloodaxe in it at all.

It’s a ripping yarn but subtle as well. Corban seems to need a psychic lodestone to keep on track, but if it’s there, he can’t quite see it. He is a hero outside the usual mold, not an antihero by any means, but something of a well meaning trickster hero.. entirely without malevolent intentions but nevertheless full of tricks. I actually did not like the character that much, as a person, but I think he is a brilliant character that challenges one’s notions of what the questing hero should be.

I am looking forward to the rest of the series.

The National Library Service for the Blind had sent me the next novel in the series, The Witches’ Kitchen, so I asked to get its prequel first. I wound up downloading it from their BARD site and listened to it on my beloved digital talking book machine.

Sharpe's Enemy, by Bernard Cornwell - Richard Sharpe Adv enture Series

Sharpe's Enemy

Bernard Cornwell

Richard Sharpe Adv enture Series

Nothing like the cover image being from the last page of the book. Sharpe’s Enemy is one Sharpe novel that is not actually based on a real battle. It is far more personal for Our Hero, as it involves good old Obadiah Hakeswell and also a terrible loss for Sharpe. Cornwell used the novel to introduce two real groups, bands of deserters from all the armies at war in the Iberian Peninsula of Christmas 1813 and the first deployment of a rocket corps, though there were in fact no instances where the two coincided.

Shape is sent to try to rescue a British lieutenant colonel's wife who is being held prisoner along with a French officer's wife by a band of deserters at a convent hidden up in the mountains. of Spain. The historical Marshall Pot au Feu, a sergeant and former chef who deserted and elevated himself as leader of such a band, is the commander there, and his second in command is Sharpe's enemy -- get it? -- the odious and un-killable Obadiah Hakeswell who has dogged his steps since India, it seems. The ransom negotiations fall as flat as one of Pot ay Feu's failed soufflés, so Sharpe has to go back and sneak the women out. It turns out Lt. Col. Farthingale’s wife is no lady, not his wife either. She is Sharpe's own old main squeeze from Sharpe's Eagle, Josefina. It also turns out that once they have rescued the women, the French are planning a massive offensive to retake all of Spain and Portugal once and for all. So Sharpe is stuck there, responsible for turning the French back with a tiny army of rifles, Spanish soldiers, and rocketeers.

While his wife Teresa takes a message back to headquarters of Sharpe's army's peril, Our Hero sets about several tricky maneuvers to block the French. All this time the odious Hakeswell is twitching and scheming naked with the other deserters in the dungeon. It seems touch and go at times, but Sharpe and Harper pull off the various sneaky tricks Sharpe, now a major, cooked up. What happens to him, to Harper, to Hakeswell, to Lord and Lady Farthingale, the rocketeers and to Teresa are what leads to a rare moment in Sharpe's and Wellington’s relationship.. a genuine moment of understanding and appreciation.

One welcome aspect of this novel is a new character, "Sweet William" Frederickson, a thoroughly quirky fellow with an eye parch and false teeth who removes both in battle and who has an artistic and intellectual inclination that is quite a surprise when it pops up. Sharpe quite likes him, likes how he thinks, fights, and behaves, and from the movies, if they can be believed, I know he stays in the stories for several more novels.

There is also a French colonel, Alexandre Dubreton, the husband of the other woman being held for ransom, who respects and likes Sharpe, for whom the sentiment is mutual, and though having to fight him takes every honorable opportunity to show Sharpe some support.

The battles, being entirely made up, are more inventive than in the other books, and quite pleasantly entertaining, with the usual dead ensign, fear for a regular character's fate, and Sharpe's angst over the possibility of losing.

I am grateful to have seen the last of Hakeswell. He was about as unpleasant a character as he could be.

My husband read this novel to me. On to Sharpe's Honor.

Memoirs of Colonel Gérard Vreilhac , by Anel Viz

Memoirs of Colonel Gérard Vreilhac

Anel Viz

A friend of mine once told me when I told her I was planning to write historical fiction that if she wants to know about an event, she just reads a history book about it. I was so startled by the inconsideration of the comment that I had nothing to say. This novel is an example of why historical fiction, when it is well done and the writer is insightful and a careful researcher, can be so much better than a dry, impersonal, history. No matter how much the historian tries to address the immediate experience of an event, s/he simply doesn't have the liberty to speculate on the inner motivations and reactions of the people who lived through it. That is why I value historical fiction so much, and one reason why I loved this book.

Imagine what it must have been like to live through the period in France from just before the Revolution of 1789 through Napoleon, two more revolutions and the continuous change in political systems and government and their impact on average people. I mean, have you ever wondered how you would have known from your middle class or lower neighborhood in Paris in 1789 that people were rioting in the streets and that the Bastille had been taken? I can tell you that this happened at this place as a result of this action, but wouldn't you rather know what you may have seen out your kitchen window as early one morning you dragged yourself out of bed and went out to the courtyard well to draw water to make coffee, noticing odd sounds outside and seeing one of your neighbors running out of his front door with a musket?

Gérard Vreilhac experienced it all, either right in his face or as a victim of the consequences. He is the gardener's son at a country estate of a nobleman. He is about as far from the focus of the revolutionary action as he can be, but not for long. He and the younger son of the household, already boyhood friends, become lovers, Gérard finding the first love of his life. Julian, the son, must leave to join the military, and

Gérard is left to puzzle out his sexuality. He is in Paris when the proverbial Revolutionary trumpets sound and manages to get a job that introduces him to the leaders of the rebellion. As a result of impressing Robespierre, he becomes the clerk for the infamous trials of the Reign of Terror, finally finding himself convicted of crimes against the revolution and facing a guillotine that has already taken the lives of the many, both strangers and friends. He rots in prison, and miraculously is still there when Robespierre himself is taken down.

It is in prison that he meets Laurent, a sensitive and mild person who nonetheless joins the army of Napoleon the same time Gérard does and turns out to love fighting. They have an initially rocky

relationship that settles into something no different from a marriage as they grow older and more mature. While in the army in Cairo with Napoleon's Egyptian campaign, Gérard takes in a servant, Akhmoud, who proves to be a willing and inventive bed partner. The scene when Gérard leaves Cairo, having given Akhmoud his house and furnishings, and Akhmoud's face is streaming with tears watching him go was heart breaking. Still Gérard knows he could not have stayed, could not have fit into the society, and their relative class would have prevented anything truly deep from happening between them. Gérard knows, for it was Julian and himself in reverse. Back in France Gérard and Laurent return to their intense if peripatetic romance, until Laurent goes missing at Waterloo.
The rest of the novel sees Gérard trying to find a place in his new world without Laurent. An older wealthy friend acts as an excellent advisor and helps him find his way into salon society. He must marry to maintain that lifestyle and makes an old friend, also a former servant in Julian's family estate, his wife. Other married men have mistresses, it is just that Gérard's is a man, Anatole, a male prostitute, whom he sets up in an apartment. When Gérard is reaching the end of his life, prompted to write this memoir, Anatole is still there, his longtime companion and friend.

The most consistently present character in this book besides Gérard is France. Viz captures the idealism of youth that can become so violent so quickly, then the rollercoaster of idealism, realism, cynicism. One year they seek a republic, the next they want the King back, then they want workhouses, then they want war. Against this backdrop Gérard's relationships reflect his changing role in his own frenetic society. He is Julian's servant, Laurent's working class lover, Akhmoud's master, Anatole's client and then Anatole's companion and beloved. The novel is rich in erotic scenes, detailed and at the same time romantic. I would like to tell every heterosexual woman I know to read gay male erotica if you want to learn things you never knew a man likes in bed. I happen to believe that sex in a novel is an important way to develop the subtler aspects of a characterization, strive for that in my writing, and have a masterful example to follow in Viz's novel. There is nothing cold or impersonal in Gérard's accounts of bed sport, but rather are part of a vital and intelligent man's self reflection and self determination.

In sum, I found this novel intelligent, insightful, quite well written, both sexy and romantic, and quite moving. Viz handles first person narrative appropriately in what is, after all, a memoir. For me, this novel was most of all about the importance of people in your life and how much friends of all types mean in the successful life of any person. There are so many fine characters in this novel, and each is distinct, important, and not just to the story but as well to each other.

I bought the book as a download at Dream spinner Press LLC's web site and read it on my Kindle 2 - which, incidentally, was miserable with the French names!

Dreamspinner Press LLC

Genghis: Birth of an Empire, by Conn Iggulden

Genghis: Birth of an Empire

Conn Iggulden

I learned something surprising about Genghis Khan from the author's note in this novel that seems so like many of the legendary biographies I so enjoy.  The man wrote an autobiography!  Yeah, Genghis Khan!  So it is to Iggulden's credit that he managed to create something with all the rich feel of myth and legend, like a Helen of Troy or Cúcchullain, about real events.

It is obvious from the start that Iggulden planned at least a trilogy, so expect in this novel to be introduced to the main characters and to get the origin story, the "how come the G-man got that way?" 

He was born the second son of a great and well respected khan, or chieftain, of the Wolces, one of  dozen Mongol tribes.  He is murdered by Tartars, a common enemy to all the tribes,  but who had help from one of them in order to keep the Wolves from getting too strong.  The boy Genghis , whose name was Temugen, and his brothers and sister are all young, so their father's best friend takes over the Wolves and abandons the children and their mother to almost certain death from exposure.  Of course, these are tough folks.  They survive, with the exception of the elder brother whom Temugen kills for hogging all the food while his brothers, sister and mother starve to death.  And thanks to the experience Temugen and his brothers become both resentful and mighty, a dynamic combination.  The usurper of the Wolves manages to catch him at one point and throws him in a deep icky hole, but Temugen is rescued by an older warrior, Arslan, who is also one of the finest swordmakers in the world.  It was Arslan's intention to swear fealty to his Dad, so he does so to Temugen, something that results in a fair about of conflict between them.  Not to myself: get to know what someone might ask you to do before you swear unquestioning louyalty yo him, or her.  Temugen marries, realizes Mongol disunity was a plot by the Chinese to keep them occupied with fighting each other and the Tartars, and chooses to pull together all the Mongols to become the Great Nation they are meant to be.  No wonder the novel reminded me of Brian Boru - but historically the Mongol Empire was far more lasting than a unified Ireland.

There is enough in the author's appendices to have a good idea what's coming in the sequels.  As much as I enjoyed this novel and learned a lot from it, it's probably suggestive of what I thought of the book that I am in no hurry to go on to next volumes.  I will, just not right now.  I did appreciate the characterizations, the strong female characters, the action scenes, and watching Temugen grow up... he's about 22 at the end of the book.  I felt Iggulden dropped story lines too much, such as the abduction of Temugen's wife.  I would have done more with the aftermath, with her trauma, their estrangement sexually but affection nonetheless, and how they got through it all, perhaps with Mom's help.  There was just too much of a feeling that "OK, that plot line is done, let's go on to another" too often in the book.

I have no doubt you will enjoy the novel in spite of my small misgivings.  Temugen/Genghis is an appealing hero, larger than life, committed and focused to a good cause, and loyal to his loved ones and allies.  The depiction of life as a Mongol of the Middle Ages was fascinating.  Anyone for a steaming glass of mare's blood in mare's milk?

I received the book from the Library for the Blind as a digital file.

A Giant Step Backwards for the Kindle 2

Last year I made the choice to buy an Amazon.com Kindle 2 rather than one of the book reader devices specifically designed for use by people who are blind or otherwise print-impaired. I reasoned that there would be many more books available for the Kindle 2, and that has proved correct. I figured if I could not learn how to navigate by memory, I could return the device and get something else. When I got my Kindle 2, I was able to find a way to turn the text to speech function on without needing to see the screen clearly. I was quite happy with my decision.

Then within the past several weeks Amazon.com appears to have done an upgrade to my Kindle 2 firmware. How one navigates to use text to speech changed. That would be fine if every time I want to listen to a book I simply learned the new steps in the navigation. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Now when I turn on my Kindle, select or return to the book I want to read, I may get either of two screens when I push the button to activate the font and speech options. See the following figures.

Figure 1 shows the popup menu where you can choose font size, words per line, turn on text to speech and change the orientation of text on the screen.

Figure 2 shows the screen where all you can choose is to turn off text to speech or play the audio.

There is a third screen, Figure 3, where you can change other settings, like reading speed.  I will add a phot of that screen to soon.  I could not find the screen to take a picture of it!  Suffice it to say that it adds one more indistinct set of choices, making it impossioble for me to know hwich screen I have up.   If you cannot differentiate between the screens, you don't know which one popped up and to the best of my knowledge, there is no way to predict this.  I could go out and buy a CCTV magnifier.. anyone got a couple grand I could have?

The result is that when I turned on my Kindle 2 to read an ebook I bought and plan to review I could not find how to get text to speech to start. For all I know I was disabling this function. I know at one point I had slowed the reading down and could not figure out how to speed it up.

This difficulty means that unless someone sighted is available I cannot be sure I can read a book I already started. This renders the Kindle 2 virtually inoperable for me.

Now I know that Amazon.com has no legal obligation to make what they are calling a experimental feature accessible. I don't even know why they added text to speech to this model. It certainly was not designed for people with print impairments. My guess is that it is a gimmick to get you to replace your first Kindle. However, if they seriously thought anyone who does not have to listen to read would come to use the feature, then they were deeply misinformed. It is just not that good speech output. No one sighted and not otherwise print impaired would listen to a whole book on the thing.

Amazon.com continues to promise to add text to speech to the menus. I hope they do. Otherwise I am finding a year after buying mine it has devolved into a device I can't use dependably.

I just wrote to them to ask them to consider the issue in their next upgrade and if they still plan to make navigation accessible. I would not be surprised if they ignore this issue.. after all, even if they did all I ask for very few blind people will buy a Kindle for a variety of reasons, some3 understandable, some the typical whining of the oppressed. I guess I made a mistake.. I don't know. The Kindle 2 still has many hundreds more books than any of the services for the blind.  But I will share whatever they do say in the comments sectioon below this post.

I am just disappoointed.  This is a tool that allowed me to read so much more than the National LIbrary Servies provides.  I get books from authors and publishers in order to review them and the Kindle has been an extremely satisfactory means to do so.  This has been a giant step backwards for me both personally and professionally.

---

Found the screen.

As you see this screen gives more options, reading rate, etc.  The point I am making is that as there are three possible menus popping up, I can't memorize  what I am not sure is showing on the screen.  Alas.

The Walking Drum, by Louis L'Amour

The Walking Drum

Louis L'Amour

Like Ken Follett in his World Without End, this medieval novelist-come-lately pulls off a better than adequate transition to the genre with some slips and one quite refreshing and remarkable strength. L'Amour, writer of Westerns, like Follett, a writer of thrillers, lacks the smooth awareness of more practiced and better researched authors of the period, and it shows when the stereotypes come out. In The Walking Drum L'Amour nearly alienated me at the beginning when his character, the Breton Kerbouchard, lamented that "no one in Europe had a bath for one thousand years" and put me off as well making the 12th century protagonist and his entire family Druids. Luckily the novel is very enjoyable, a fun swashbuckler, and contributes something rare in the genre, awareness of the accomplishments of the non-Western societies.

Kerbouchard is a young boy when the story begins. His mother has been murdered by a robber baron, who also torched his home. Seeking sanctuary, he winds up being made a galley slave and only manages to escape by tricking the Keystone Pirates in Spain. There he meets a beautiful princess, Love Interest #1. Kerbouchard has a notable talent for getting into trouble, and in no time he is chased out of the highly intellectual Cordoba. He hooks up with one of the merchant trains of the Hansa, starting one of the best and most fascinating sections of the book. The Hansa were formed to provide safe travel for merchants from fair to fair all over Europe. His companion is Lobe Interest #2. After avenging his mother's death back in Brittany, Kerbouchard sets off again to find his corsair father who is reportedly a slave in the infamous Assassin's mountain lair in Persia. I swear, as often as this setting comes up in books I read, I'm surprised the various characters don't bump into each other.

Meanwhile Kerbouchard has hooked up with a runaway Countess, Love Interest #3. The Hansa decides to go to Kiev, then to Constantinople, and this turns out to be a big mistake. Kerbouchard is stranded along the way south to the Black Sea, making it at last safely to Constantinople. Kerbouchard manages yet again to tick off the wrong guy and must flee, but he was on his way to look for his dad at that point anyway. Enter Love Interest #4, and he knows the minute he sees her she's his future wife. Sadly the promised sequels never came about as L'Amour died before writing them.

Kerbouchard is a very appealing character, a sort of High Plains drifter with chain mail and a sword. His quarrels, his enmities, and his amazing escapes are highly satisfying. Other than the Druids and bathing issues, the book feels more or less in line with other novels of the genre. What really shines here, like Folllett's remarkable treatment of the Plague, is L'Amour's extensive knowledge of the science and literature of the medieval Islamic, Hind and Chinese world. He says in his marvelous author's note, all by itse3lf worth reading the novel, that US education tends only to teach the history and scholarship of Europe and North America, and that sailors always knew the Earth was round and sailed as far as North America long before Columbus, that the Arab world had made scientific and medical advances long before the west.

I can forgive L’Amour for thinking he can just jump into a well beloved, well covered genre and expect to do as well as, say, a Sharon Kay Penman, where it is not so easy with Follett. Follett just didn’t do it so well. Perhaps the swashbuckling nature of L’Amour’s book just makes it more tolerable. Hopefully, as some have suggested to me, Follett and L’Amour managed to turn some of their usual readers into medieval novel readers.

It is sad that the two sequels never came to be. I wonder if one of L'Amour's associates or heirs will ever give it a try.

I read the book for the Let's Read Historical Novels group which will discuss it on June 1. I was able to download the book from the Library for the Blind's BARD service, which is simply wonderful.

Baudolino, by Umberto Eco

Baudolino

Umberto Eco

Imagine a sort of Gulliver's Travels for grownups. Oh wait, Gulliver's Travels was for grownups. OK, imagine a sort of Gulliver's Travels for grownups written within the past score of years, one with involved discussions of the nature of the Trinity, with the word "fuck" and a finer line between the fantasy and the reality. . You have Baudolino .

Baudolino is a peasant boy who runs across Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the fog common near his home in northern Italy. His wild imagination fascinates the imperial fellow, and he takes the boy with him back to his court. Baudolino proves to be quite intelligent, so he is sent to Paris to study for several years. The fantastic creations of his imagination that began in his childhood are soon matched by his two roommates, and Irishman named Abdul and a fellow known primarily as The Poe, who can't really write much poetry of worth. They conceive the notion of going to find the famous and entirely elusive priest, Prester john. They collect a group of fellow enthusiasts, each of whom wants to find Prester John's kingdom for his own reason. For Baudolino it is a desire to repay his foster father, the Emperor, for his generosity and love. For Abdul it is to find a woman he saw in a drug-induced hallucination. For the Poet.. well that's not so easy to identify at first. For Rabbi Solomon it is to find the Lost Tribe of Israel. For two others it is to locate the Grail to find out whether one or the other is right about what it is. The group creates a whole story of what Prester John's kingdom is like, what sorts of creatures live there, what the kingdom means. They become utterly convinced it exists and is precisely like their ideas of it.

The difference between truth and Fiction is a central theme of this novel. I would paraphrase this as, "It's all lies, but so what?" For instance, someone tells Baudolino that it does not matter if a holy relic is genuine, because if it inspires faith in a pilgrim, the effect is the same wither way. Further if one believes in something with every nerve, it must be true. If a belief is in common acceptance, it must be true. While Baudolino tells his story to a historian he rescues in Constantinople you don't really know which parts of the man's tale are true and which flights of fancy. As the story progresses to the quest for Prester John's kingdom, the flagrant inventions take over, but since you have come to accept Baudolino tall tales, you accept them as at least his truth. The Eco versions of Brobdignag and Lillput are peopled with one legged people who run faster than any two legged, with half women half goat whose wisdom surpasses all, and people who live in total darkness but are enchanted by song. Even on the very doorsteps of Prester John's kingdom its existence is accepted, though no one has ever seen it.

Some of the humor in the novel is outstanding. One characteristic of the one legged people is that they don't see distinctions in physical appearance, but only in the nature of a races belief in the Trinity. So one of these fellows shakes his head over the European's insistence that he must see the distinction between him and someone with two legs. "No," he avers, "for when that creature lifts on leg he also only has one." "But you can't put the lifted leg down and have two!" His answer is, "Why would I want to have two? My one is good enough." At this The Poet says to Baudolino, "Hold me or I will kill him." But these races do very much see distinctions, but they consist of "wrong" interpretations of theology. One group insists that Jesus was God's adopted son, another that he is truly his son, another that Jesus is just some guy who helped out, and so forth.

Throw in rides from the Assassin’s Lair to Constantinople in baskets held under rocs’ wings, a river made entirely of rocks, pebbles, and boulders but which flows like water, the forest that allows no light, cities built into hillsides, Crusaders gone berserk in Byzantium, a town built just to piss off the Emperor, and a man who claims to have created a machine that takes all the air out of a room, and you have plenty to digest. This is not a riveting read from the perspective of action, but if you are fascinated by what is real and what is our interpretation of reality particularly in theology, you will not put the book down for a second. I remember in college thinking that the one convention of fiction is that readers accept the storyteller/author is not actually lying outright about the fictional world and events. In Baudolino the storyteller/author is definitively lying. That's the point. It ends with a wonderful line about how someday an even bigger liar will write the story down. Bravo Eco!

This is a smart, clever book.

The copy I listened to I downloaded from BARD, the National Library Services new digital library for people who are blind or otherwise print impaired.

Post #170 on this blog!

Audio Conversation with Author Margaret George

Margaret George, author of such beloved historical novels as:

• The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
• The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel
• Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles: A Novel
• Mary, Called Magdalene

was a guest on AccessibleWoerld.org's  monthly historical fiction discussion to talk about her novel Helen of Troy and to answer our questions about this book, our May reading assignment.

Below is an audio recordingf that quite marvelous discussion.

Let's Read Historical Novels meets at 9 PM Eastern/6 PM Pacific on the first Tuesday of each month. You can find a list of our books and both a link to the chatroom -- you'll need a microphone -- and a sampling of the other time zones. In most the chat is actually on the first Wednesday of the month. The site is designed to be accessible for people with vision imapirment, but as with all such things, not just for people with disabilities. Anyone and everyone who can access the audio is more than welcome to join us.

Click to listen.

June's book is Louis L'Amour's The Walking Drum.

AccessibleWorld.org has audio chats on a wide variety of subjects.  Its book groups include A World View of History, the Romance Novels group, the Mystery Novels group, a science fiction group, and others.  Join for some the brightest and most engaged discussions on the Internet. 

Let's Read Historical Novels

Sharpe's Sword, by Bernard Cornwell - Richard Sharpe Adventure Series

Sharpe’s Sword

By Bernard Cornwell

Richard Sharpe Adventure Series

Our Hero, Captain Richard Sharpe, has been a married man for a few months when this story opens and he meets the fabulous Marquesa Helena. She’s beautiful, aristocratic , blonde and not quite what she seems, so you guessed it, Sharpe is a goner. And I suspect she has read several of the Bernard Cornwell books because she knows how to get him to do whatever she wants: while you are in bed with him, tell him someone is threatening to do awful things to you. Hey presto – he’s yours.

The situation in Sharpe’s Sword is this: Our Hero and his cohorts are responsible for a prisoner, a French dragoon officer, whom we already know is a master spy and nasty guy named Leroux in disguise. He is under the direct command of Napoleon himself, entrusted with finding a list of all the agents helping the British in Europe and beyond, and thereafter killing each and every one his favorite way: flaying. Sharpe is hot, more or less, on his trail after he kills first Ensign Expendable and then their current and well-liked Colonel Windham. The prisoner has taken refuge somewhere in Salamanca, which is mostly in British hands now. There he meets Jack Spears, one of Major Hogan’s “exploring officers”, a jocular, inveterate gambler . Spears befriends him, introduces him to la Marquesa, who invites him up to her chambers and her bed. No one much sees our dear Richard for a few days after that.

When our Married Man emerges from la Marquesa’s bower, he has one more reason to kill Leroux. Besides the list of names, the fact that he killed the ensign and colonel and that he has the waycoolest sword ever and Sharpe wants it, Helena has told him the evil man plans to kill her. Bingo. Unfortunately when Sharpe tracks him down, the man manages to break Sharpe’s own sword and stab him in the gut. He almost dies. In fact, Harper digs up the graves of all the dead soldiers from the battle, French, British, all of them, and does not find his body. That leads him and Hogan to look in the Death Room, where a quite historical alcoholic Irish sergeant is tending him. Though Sharpe is almost dead, they manage to revive him. All left to Our Hero is to rest and recover at the Marquesa’s, where he learns the truth about her but finds it rather ameliorated by the fact that she has fallen in love with him. Oh, and there were some battles.

If you saw the BBC television movie, it bears little or no resemblance to the novel. The novel is, as with all of them, better than the movie. You get Sharpe at his most susceptible to blondes who welcome him to their beds, hey wait.. I used to be a blonde! Hmmm. You get the reverses, the revelation of an ally or two, the faithful Harper, the precise battle scenes, and more insight into the Peninsular Wars.

My husband Jim read the novel to me. We are already on to the next one, Sharpe’s Enemy, complete with the odious Obadiah Hakeswell.

Checkmate, by Dorothy Dunnett - Lymond Chronicles

Checkmate

By Dorothy Dunnett

Lymond Chronicles

Sigh, the inevitable end of the series, volume six of a six volume masterpiece. I now know why there are so many absolutely devoted readers. Like Dorothy Dunnett’s House of Nicolo, the Lymond Chronicles are quirky, sometimes outrageous, brilliantly written and absolutely riveting cover to cover to cover, and so forth.

In this volume, Checkmate, Lymond has been balked at returning to Russia where he would meet almost certain and savage death. The court of the King of France devises a way to keep Lymond in the country, threatening to block the annulment of his name-only marriage to Philippa Somerville,. Now that he has fallen in love with her, this is more important than ever. Why? Ask Lymond, and if he tells you, tell me, OK? You don’t have to understand a character to love him. While fighting for France Lymond, and the delegation from Scotland in town for the wedding of teenaged Mary, Queen of Scots to the Dauphin, uncover a plan to subjugate Scotland under France permanently. The skullduggery around this is only matched by Philippa’s relentless sleuthing after Lymond’s origin. All this conspires to make the scheduled annulment deadline come and go. Then the most painful part of the novel starts: the honeymoon from Hell.

Do we find out who Francis’s father was? Yes. How about Marthe? Yes. Is there a tremendous sacrifice made for this knowledge. And then some. But that is as much about that that you will get from me. I will just warn you with a story Bill Russell  told me. When you get to the shooting scene, don’t, as one man did, throw out the book. As the other train passenger told him as he returned it, “I think you should finish it.” I spent a whole weekend in deep and utterly unnecessary mourning.

The other thing I can promise you is that if you ever were baffled by Lymond and wondered at his monumentally self destructive urges, you will understand better and see him in a whole new light by the last page.

Checkmate is the capper for the series, a more than worthy one, with plenty of the best of the series, the intrigue, the battles, the wit, the relationships, the insurmountable obstacles surmounted, and all the little sub-themes of betrayal, incest, enmity, revenge, and redemption.. this last this one has in greatest measure.

I read this book on cassettes from the national L Library Services for the Blind and am happy to report that not one single cassette in this book was damaged. I got to listen to every exquisite word.

No more Dunnett’s to read. I guess I will have to start over with a Nicolo or King Hereafter! It appears from the posts on the Facebook page and the Yahoogroups that everyone who falls under Dunnett’s spell reads them over and over. I look forward to my own return journeys.  How else shall I go on?

Next Steps:

Dorothy Dunnett Reader Association

Yahoogroups:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Marzipan
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Claes

Facebook page

Helen of Troy, by Margaret George

Helen of Troy

Margaret George

Margaret George is well known for her fictional autobiographies of mostly historical women. Like some of her others, this novel of Helen of Troy is in first person, but she has also written third person biographies of such icons as Mary, Queen of Scots.

Helen of Troy tells her own story here, pretty much from her own conception throughout her fateful adventures as “the most beautiful woman in the world”, the fabled “face that launched a thousand ships”. The product, or so she has been led to believe , of the union of her mother, Leda, and Zeus in swan form, her young life is sheltered. The Greece of this novel is chockfull of omens and prophecies, and those associated with Helen and her family, the royals of Sparta and later, Mycenae and Troy, are legion. She marries the younger brother of Agamemnon, Menelaus, a solid but not at all exciting fellow, and as expected longs for something more. Turns out Aphrodite is only too willing to give it to her in the form of the dazzlingly good looking Paris of Troy. As we all know from Homer’s Iliad, Helen runs off with Paris, and they find a chilly welcome back at his dad’s and mom’s house.

In this novel which is otherwise full of nymphs and gods and magic, it is clear that a lot more is going on than just honor besmirched. Before Helen even meets Paris, Agamemnon is angling for a war with Troy. It’s the same old thing.. we want what they got, so let’s find an excuse to go get it.. whether booty or oil, what’s the diff? Unfortunately for Paris and Helen, no one else seems to realize this and so they alternately get snubbed and accepted. The great Trojan War begins, and a heartsick Helen watches one after another of her new in laws get killed: first Troilus, then Hector, then.. Paris. The Greeks, with their infamous Trojan Horse trick, infiltrate Troy, utterly destroy it, and Menelaus brings Helen home to a sad but mostly harmonious life.

Helen of Troy is a good demonstration of what fiction can offer that history cannot. The first thing I noticed and appreciated was seeing what life in Troy under siege for years and years may have been like, how being cooped up with only disaster ahead would do to people. Homer may have eloquently shown Achilles, not at all a positive character in this novel, sulking in his tent because no one is paying enough attention to him, but where do you read about how a magnificent and wealthy city handles food shortages, loss, and despair?

The second thing I appreciated about this novel are the characterizations of such legends as Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, Priam and Hecuba, Menelaus and Agamemnon and especially Paris. Oddly I did not find Helen herself that interesting. She seemed to go about most of the time rather numb, often lacking sincerity. Perhaps the burden of having to tell such a long and faithful story robbed her of her unique perspective.

There were a few disconnects in the plot that bothered me. For example, as Helen and Paris flee to Troy from Sparta, Helen runs into Achilles who is living on Styros as a girl. The reason given is that when his mother heard about the impending war with Troy, she hid him there so he would not go. But.. war either had not yet or only just been declared.. the illicit lovers had not even gotten out of Greece yet.

I also want to know, when Helen is worrying herself sick about Paris during a battle, why she does not simply do what she did in two earlier battles and project herself onto the plain? It felt like she lost interest. It made no sense to me.

Another inconsistency involves a strong original character named Gellinor -- I hope I am spelling that right. When Helen has an urgent need for someone who knows snake venom antidotes, she appears to entirely forget that this loyal servant of hers is just that. He and her other special companion, the visually impaired Evadne, just are out to lunch or something, no explanation given. I suspect George was just sticking to the official story, but it rang terribly false with me.

Speaking of Evadne, I have to say here we have a very well drawn character with a disability. I happen to have a form of what she had, macular degeneration, so I know how true she is written. And Evadne is not in the least pathetic or bitter.

In sum, this novel makes a strong showing in using fiction to show what history cannot impart about an event, but perhaps in trying to cover every detail of the story, George lost a consistent tone, making Helen seem insincere at times and dragging the reader through more pages than was strictly necessary.

I read this novel as a download from the National Library Services BARD system, a heaven sent innovation in books for people with print impairments.

Other novels by Margaret George:

The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
Mary, Called Magdalene
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles
The Memoirs of Cleopatra: A Novel