The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon, by Alexandre Dumas

The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon

Alexandre Dumas

The story about the discovery of this novel is almost more interesting than the novel.  It seems it has puzzled Dumas experts for years that with all the novels he wrote about French history he had left out a novel about one of the most exciting periods.  It turned out he did not, but the novel, which appeared in installments in one of the journals of the day, was first never finished and second, lost in the journal's archives.  Once rediscovered The Last Cavalier: Being the Adventures of Count Sainte-Hermine in the Age of Napoleon has been reassembled, all 110 plus chapters of it, and though pretty much nothing in the novel ever gets resolved , it was published in 2008.  The copy I "read" was a download from the National Library Services for the Blind and was a cool 34 hours long.

I won't even begin to pretend to review  a novel this old by a novelist so enshrined in history.  There's no point, really, but I will give you a sense of what you are in for if you pick it up and start to read it.  To start with, you don't even meet the title character until well into the novel.  The entire first section is all about Napoleon Bonaparte, his wife's debts, his enemies, his personality, his plans.  When we finally meet Count Sainte-Hermine we find him falling in love and getting married.. almost.  It seems he is the last of a line of royalists and I mean last... the rest were all at best exiled and at worst guillotined.  Loyal to their memory, the young Count leaves his wedding and his bride in tears to go and rejoin the resistance.  He is caught and imprisoned and then forgotten by the author for a while.  To make a long, long, long story shorter, he has a friend in a high place, no not Napoleon, who gets him released and makes him choose either to be a common sailor or a common soldier.  You soon learn he is anything but common as he faces dangers beyond imagining and reckoning in his Elerde-like desire to get himself killed.  His elaborate suicide attempt takes him into the crew of a famous corsair, then to Burma to fight tigers, and after that to Trafalgar where he is the marksman who kills Nelson.  Returning to Paris much lauded, he comes out as a royalist to Bonaparte himself and instead of reaping richly deserved rewards he gets sent down to help the Emperor's brother Joseph rid Italy of brigands as colorfully as possible.  That's apparently when he died.. no not the Count, but the author. 

One of the fascinating things about this novel is that it breaks every rule in the How To Write a novel Book.  As I am tempted to believe all those hard and fast rules are largely some one's persnickety idea rather than actual I got a big kick out of this.  "Show, Don't Tell"?   Not only does the author tell you what is going on all the time, he doesn't even confine the telling to the story at hand.  Dumas isn't shy about telling.  Some of the most interesting chapters, and there are tons of them, have no direct bearing on the protagonist's story at all.  There is one about what was doing on the Appian Way fifty years before the birth of Christ, another on a Breton island famous for its corsairs, several in a row about Chateaubriand travels in America.  "Point of View"?  Dumas doesn't hesitate to jump from character to character, leaving the Count in the dust numerous times.  I am sure if I had paid close attention I would have heard speech tags other than said and asked all over the place.

You realize fairly quickly that this "novel" is really a serial.  Clearly Dumas was being paid by the installment, as he was far from finished after well over 100 chapters.  As a result the resolution remains elusive, no return to his betrothed, no kiss and make up with Napoleon,  and I can't say if these resolutions would ever have come through, though Dumas does appear to presage them.

One must remember that this man wrote The Three Musketeers and The Man In the Iron Mask, to mention just a couple of ins swashbuckling novels, when watching the Count shoot better,k fence better and more nobly, give his millions away right and left, tear up romantically when anyone reminds him of his sorrows, dress impeccably, know the right wine to have with the fish course,  run faster than a speeding locomotive and leap high buildings in a single bound -- well you get the point.  I couldn't help but feel sorry for the man who apparently is a virgin still at the end of the romance (sic).  Women fall for him of course, but his true love back in Paris is his one and only.. and having never had the honeymoon ...  oh merd.

Major commitment, readers.. I confess I skipped two chapters, both asides from the main story.

The Swords of Faith, by Richard Warren Field

The Swords of Faith

Richard Warren Field

For a little while now there has been an effort to examine the Crusades from both a Christian and Muslim viewpoint. From my own research I have found that the former record can be quite spotty, for instance when the three accounts we have of the Crusade of 1101 are not only not by witnesses to the events but one was not even written until some years later. It must be gratifying for those authors who turn to the Muslim record, for it appears that it is fulsome. The Christian records are full of propaganda, but whether or not this is true of the Muslim I cannot say.

Richard Warren Field's The Swords of Faith is one of those works dedicated to a balanced look at, in this case, the Third Crusade. It follows three central characters each of whom represents one part of the dialectic. The great Muslim leader, Saladin, known for his honorable and courteous manner, is one. The second is the legendary King Richard of England, known as Lionheart, who while arrogant and blinded by his quest for glory, cares enough for chivalry to recognize Saladin's qualities. The third represents the synthesis of the two sides, the fictional character Pierre. Early in the novel he is captured at the Battle of Hattan and winds up being sold to a Muslim trader named Raschid for two pairs of ugly shoes. Because both Pierre and Raschid are good men, Pierre working hard and honestly for Raschid and Raschid treating Pierre justly, they become friends and allies. They share a desire to see a pluralistic society take root in the Holy Land, where Christians, Muslims, Jews and all can live in harmony.

The story follows Saladin's attempt to make the Holy Land Muslim and Richard's drive to retake Jerusalem and reestablish the Christian kingdom. One of the first things I noticed about this novel comes through their separate and opposed quests, and that is the book's skillful rendering of relentless movement towards confrontation accomplished through Field's shift back and forth between the onward progress of the two leaders. I found my heart beating in time with this sense of an inevitable clash. At the same time the antiphon is Pierre's and Raschid's developing relationship, as the trader frees the slave as a wedding gift for him and the favored servant woman who may well be Raschid's own daughter. The two men struggle to help each other survive in an increasingly hostile and dangerous world, one that views their alliance with trepidation and spite. Whether peace and cooperation can be achieved and persist appears, in the end, to be up to the next generation.

The author clearly painstakingly researched the events of this novel as well as the personalities of the two leaders and those around them. There is authenticity in its rendering, along with a clear sense of Field's fascination with everyone and everything involved. There are tender love scenes, stirring battle, gripping adventure, and crushing loss. The characters are distinct and the reader comes to know them in a personal way.

If I remember correctly I received this novel from the publisher and author as a document which I was able to read on my Kindle 3.

Lessons in Love, by Charllie Cochrane (Cambridge Fellows Mysteries)

Lessons in Love


Charlie Cochrane

Cambridge Fellows Mysteries, Book 1

This is one sweet, touching triple murder mystery.  Well, the murders are not sweet or touching, but the amateur detectives most certainly are, and the story of their meeting and falling in love especially is.

Dr. Jonathan "Jaunty" Stewart is a Shakespeare scholar just hired to teach at Cambridge University's St. Bride's College.  His first day he breaks a serious rule, that is, not to sit in another fellow's chair in the Senior Common Room.  That's how he meets Dr. Orlando Coppersmith, a brilliant mathematician who has never known a moment of human warmth in his entire life.  Jaunty's ubiquitous cheer slowly draws Orlando out of his hard shell, and, of course, they fall in love.  There growing affection is threatened by a series of brutal murders of college students known to be homosexual, each of whose bodies has a note claiming the vengeance of God.  Orlando is afraid his growing romance with Jaunty will put them both in danger, even while the two of them are asked to help with the investigation by the local constabulary.

This is a good, if not brilliant, mystery story,. but its thinness allows the real story, of Jaunty and Orlando, to fill most of the pages.  Jaunty has had both brutal and loving same sex experience, but Orlando is a highly repressed product of a stone cold family life.  Cochrane does such a sensitive job with these charaacters, who are quite unlike the main characters of most of the gay novels I have read.  Jaunty is quite sincerely religious, believing no just and loving God would condemn something he himself finds so beautiful.  That was refreshing.  Orlando takes some time to adjust to the new feelings he has, but Jaunty recognizes this as pure innocence and goes about warming things up from just kissing to making love with as much tenderness and patience as he has in considerable store.

Something about this particular novel cememted for me why I so love what is called N/N fiction.  I find the coming together of two preassumed equals with so much life experience in common quite liberating.  In the vast majority of love stories the factual equality of the men and women is not well portrayed, in my humble opinion, and that goes for my first novel too.  When the two men find each other, there's no need for translation or cultural adjustment just on the basis of gender.  I also find the difficulty with which the individual character has coming to grips with his particular identity, finding love safely, and finally protecting that love in a hostile society, since I read historical fiction, poignant and a magnet for my sympathy.  The mind to mind romance just works for me in a way the typical heterosexual romance story does not.

But I digress.  Lessons in Love delivers a very satisfying portrayal of two diametrically opposed personalities  where indeed opposites attract.  The look into the life in an Edwardian British college is fascinating, with its routines, values, and select society.  It is not immune, in spite of this, to the injustices and threats of an intolerant time and era.

More than anything I know I will want to come back for more of Jaunty's and Orlando's charming and entertaining company.

I purchased this novel to read on my Kindle 3.  As always, I thank the author, Charlie Cochrane, and Samhain Publishing, for allowing text to speech to be enabled so I could read it.

Read a Cambridge Fellows short mystery in the latest Wilde Oats: Once We Won Matches.

The House in Birdgate Alley, by Anel Viz

The House in Birdgate Alley

Anel Viz

Some might think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes and Watson dealt with some of the seamier sides of London crime, but there is a decided lack in terms of such scandalous matters as male prostitution. That is where we latter day novelists can correct this lack, and that is what Anel Viz has accomplished with The House in Birdgate Alley.

A baronet is deathly ill with pneumonia and his wife asks family friend Dr. John Williams, the Watson character, to find out why he was out in the miserable weather until three in the morning. He calls on his Holmes-like cousin, Cyril Fosterby, a chemist with remarkable powers of deduction to help him solve the mystery. The murder of a young male prostitute comes to light, and the two soon establish that the baronet had a longstanding love affair with the young man. They choose to enlist the help of the prostitute's friend, and colleague, Johnny Rice, in finding and catching the murderer, whom they are sure is not the baronet.

Johnny is bright, attractive and fearless, and though the novel is ostensibly a detective story, the central theme is really the growing awareness of "inverts" by the good Dr. Williams. At the outset he is clear that homosexual acts are "unnatural" and is repulsed, but as he gets to know the various cast members of the book who are so drawn he is, by nature, forced to reconsider his attitude. When Johnny starts to fall in love with him and his own affection grows, he is forced to recognize "normal sexuality" cannot be pigeonholed as one type or another. Johnny's spirit and liveliness he comes to realize is largely bravado to mask the torment of his underworld life.

This is also an origin story of sorts, with Fosterby, an experimental chemist, realizing just how much he enjoys detection that he decides to make it his profession. Holmes aficionadi will recognize the Master Sleuth here with his superior powers of observation and his use of disguises. Now I will confess that while I enjoy the Conan Doyle stories, I have always felt they were rather simplistic and contrived, not quite as amazing as their reputation. People seem to get caught up in the brilliant creation of a character like Holmes, the real artistry of the novels, and assume what they are seeing is Holmes' brilliance in action. I am tempted to think Viz sees it this way too, because The House in Birdgate Alley is fairly thin in terms of the detective story, much like typical Holmes and Watson tales. The quirky and intriguing Homes/Fosterby character is not half as interesting as Watson/Williams, with his observer's objective view and judgments.

This is not a long book. It's primary attraction is entertainment, but more its sensitive interpretation of the characters and relationships. Just sit back and enjoy.

I bought the novel to read on my Kindle. My thanks to the author for authorizing text-to-speech to be enabled.