My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The Gentleman: A Romance of the Sea by Alfred Ollivant DNF 6%
Many novels today, at least genre novels, like starting with a bang; putting the reader in the middle of some sort of action in the hope of "hooking" them into the story. Apparently this is not a recently invented technique, seeing that's what Mr Ollivant does here. With a bang. Well, that is to say, after the forward, which featured an unnamed person longingly looking across the English Channel from France at night. I suspect this person was, in fact, Napoleon.
But after that, the action begins in breakneck earnestness, starting with with a man riding his favorite horse to death, commandeering a rowboat to take him to a ship at at anchorage, which then he orders to set sail...Why? I believe a bold French spy has escaped capture and is in possession of valuable information for Napoleon and his invasion fleet across English Channel. He must be intercepted before he can make his way across the channel to France or else... I think. It was told in such a breathless style, in a series of rapid, fragmented dialogs with characters who are largely unidentified. Thus, what's actually going on, who, and exactly why, are hard to discern. At least by me. Some of the people we meet on the ship seem to know the rider, since they begin to recall other times and sea battles they share, some of this shared history seems to involved the father of the young midshipman was in the row boat when it was commandeered by the rider who rode his horse to death... I was completely befuddled by this relentless, breathless, and confusing narration right out of the gate that I threw up my hands and simply gave up trying to figure out what was going on. I'm an old man and things were just moving too fast for me, especially if the whole story was written in this style. Spoiler: I'm pretty sure Napoleon doesn't end up invading England.
The Yeoman Adventurer by George W Gough B
This story is set in the fall of 1745 as Bonnie Prince Charlie leads his highlanders down into England to reclaim the English crown for the Stuarts. The yeoman of the title, Oliver, Wheatman, a minor member of the gentry is the not-so-reluctant adventurer. His father is dead and he feels duty-bound to look after his widowed mother, his sister, and the family's land. Thus, he can't go to war and adventure, as much as he wants to. All around him, the King's troops are gathering to meet the threat from the invading Highlanders from the north, while all he can do is go fishing. He does, and hooks a 30 lb pike, but can't reach his gaff to land the monster. A young woman, Margaret, steps down from the bridge to the river bank, and gaffs the fish for him. He learns that her father, a well traveled mercenary captain, has been arrested as a Jacobite spy, and our yeoman, proceeds to save her from capture as well from dragoons searching for her, by carrying her under the bridge. And with that, off they go adventuring across the countryside heading towards the invading Scots in order to save her father who had been sent north. What follows is an adventure story very much in the vein of a Robert Lewis Stevenson adventure, with one thrilling episode after the next.
Oliver has made an enemy of a lecherous nobleman leading a unit of the King's dragoons, who lusts after the mercenary's daughter, Margaret, and he has set ruthless people after them. Oliver gets almost captured, captured, escapes, captured again and again only to be either saved or escape himself, to eventually, join the rebellion. He gets to know Prince Charles, and becomes one of his aides. And well, it's still one adventure after the other, one flip of the coin after another, captured and saved, as he gets deeper and deeper into the conflict, and faces the hard choices, and sudden deaths it involves.
I've read some of RLS's adventures, like Kidnapped, and I have to say that Mr Gough's writing, characters, and story are up to that level of both adventure and writing. That said, it took me the better part of a week to finish this book, despite the many things it had going for it. That may well be because this isn't quite the type of story that I'm into these days. The fact if the matter is, I don't think Kidnapped gripped me anymore than this one. Still, I think I can safely say that if you like RLS's stories, you will likely enjoy this one as well.
I tried tracking down Mr Gough, and despite this story being fairly widely available, I could find no more several purported photographs of him, that you can buy framed, and a description of him as an early 20th century British novelist. It seems he wrote at least two more novels, Terror by Night, (1922), and A Daughter of Kings, 1930, as well a several books on politics.
As a wild young novelist?
Or an elder political commentator?
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