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.
Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser A+
After last month's two books set in India/Burma in the 1840’s, and with none of my free books I had on hand appealing to me, I selected this Flashman book off my shelf to reread. Truly, this book is an order of magnitude better than those two previous historical fiction books set in India and Burma, Sands of Truth and Windrush. Fraser really knows how to write, and because he writes in the first person, he can showcase his vastly entertaining skill with words by having them “written” by the central character of the story, Flashman, which makes the character himself all the more entertaining.
What I mean by this is that when a writer had a distinctive voice – think of Chandler or Wodehouse – their writing risks overshadowing the story when written in third person, as their distinctive style can insert the writer between the story they are telling and the reader, perhaps outshining the story being told. In some cases, this might be the author’s intent. But if not, by using a first person narrator, their wit and styles becomes that of the character and comes from within the story – fleshing him or her out as they tell their story, in their style, keeping the story itself in the fore.
This Flashman story set in 1845-46 India. Flashman is sent as a secret agent to Punjab city Lahore in the guise of an attorney to settle the question of who is entitled to a treasure held by a British bank. The Punab is ruled by a child, with his drunken and luscious mother, as regent. The Punjab has a large, European trained army that is itching to drive the British from India, waiting only for an excuse. Fraser seamlessly inserts his (anti)hero, Flashman in to an extensively researched historical event, the first Punjab War – which includes footnotes highlighting the various historical events and people. The two book covers suggest something of how Flashman fits in to history. This combining fiction with real history facts and facets that are often too unbelievable to be fiction, makes for both entertaining and educational history. This is the way I like my history. Highly recommended.
The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield C+
This is a sea story written by a fairly well known British author, first published in 1933. At the age of 15 in 1893, Masefield went to sea as an apprentice in a Cape Horn windjammer. He became ill in Chile and abandoned the sea, working at odd jobs in the U.S. before returning to London in 1897 to become literary editor of the Speaker. He went on to publish many books of novels, prose, and poetry until his death in 1967.
The novel is set on a tea clipper in the late 1860's, a time when tea clippers raced from China to London with the new crop of tea. A time when hard nosed Scottish ship owners would spend a fortune building fast, yacht like sailing ships, manned by large crews, hard-driving captains, especially designed to bring the first crop of tea each year from China to London in the least amount of time. In the Great Tea Race of 1866, five ships arrived in London within three days, the leading three ships within hours of each other after a voyage of 99 days from the far side of the world. I came across Basil Lubbock's The Tea Clippers while exploring the stacks of the University of Wisconsin Library while in college, and fell in love with the romance of tea clippers and the sea stories he told of their exploits over the decade or so of their brief heyday until steamships and the Suez Canal replaced them.
This novel is a fictional account of a tea clipper that is struck on a foul night by a steam ship, It sinks, leaving 16 survivors in an ill provisioned boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Having been trained as a sailor, Masefield writes about their plight and the measures taken to deal with their situation in extensive detail, probably more than most casual reader would need, or care to know. Even I found it so, plus shipwreck survivors in a small boat is not one of my favorite tropes. It does, however have some twists and turns, that I won't spoil and ends with an exciting race; a fictional account similar to the ending that Great Tea Race of 1866 that I mentioned, which lifts it up from a simple C to a C+.
H. M. S. Surprise by Patrick O’Brian A+
I written about how much I admire the writing style of Raymond Chandler, P. G. Wodehouse, and George MacDonald Fraser, and I do, but the writing style of Patrick O’Brian is, in my opinion, every bit their equal, though subtler. His writing style is very different than these others, and though his style may take a little getting used to, it is every bit as clever and delightful, while being perhaps more insightful and literary. Though it is written in a modern, if unique style, it is written in such a way as to suggest the period of which the novel is set. Found families are a trope these days, and a ship's crew in the days of sail is very much a found family. The books feature many shipmates who follow their captain from ship to ship, so that the stories are filled with both old friends as well as new characters, unique for each story. His books are a perfect blend of great literature and exciting genre fiction, fiction that in the 21 book series takes the reader around the early 19th century world, several times over, with many unexpected events and interesting ports of call.
This is the third book in the series. I’ve read all but the last two or three books at least twice and probably three times, so I could just pick this title off the shelf to read, knowing where I was in the saga. Not only is this one perhaps my favorite, but it takes us to India, something of a theme these last two months.
The story opens with Captain Jack Aubrey in temporary command of the frigate Lively while the ship’s captain, a member of parliament is sitting with parliament. They are on tedious blockade duty in the Med, keeping an eye a French fleet in harbor. He is ordered home to return the ship to its captain, and to stop along the way to pick up his best friend, Stephen Maturin, who, though he usually sails with Aubrey as the ship’s surgeon, is also a volunteer secret agent for the British. Maturin had gone to the Spanish/French controlled island of Minorca to meet with Spanish resistance groups. However, it had been leaked to the French that Maturin might be a spy, and so they had taken him into custody. Aubrey must rescue him in a daring night raid. After this episode, in order to “rehabilitate” Maturin, i.e. to make the French think they made a mistake about him being a spy, he is to be sent as an aide to a diplomat bound for Kampong in Indochina. Being very well regarded by the boss of British naval intelligence, and knowing that Captain Aubrey is aware of this second, secret occupation, Aubrey is appointed captain of the frigate, Surprise, that will carry the diplomat to Kampong. The story then relates various incidents at sea during the long voyage, first to Bombay. In India the ship is refitted after a harrowing passage south of the Cape of Good Hope, giving us a taste of India. And when they sail on to Kampong, they eventually come upon a French squadron consisting of a ship of the line and several frigates that have been sent to the India Ocean to disrupt British trade. This leads to a sea battle in between the French squadron and the East India Company's yearly convoy of large merchant ships bringing a vast quantity of tea and good from China to London, aided by the Surprise.
The series is best read in order, and though every book has its own story, there came a point where the series simply became one 21 volume novel. I have read other books of this period and in this sub-genre from a number of other writers including C. S. Forester, Alexander Kent, and Dudley Pope, and I can say that O'Brian's books stand head and shoulder above them, not only in writing, but in bringing in the world and society of the time period into his stories.
If you have any taste for historical fiction of this period and/or the sea, be sure to give Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin books a try. I can not recommend them enough.
Coming up next week: Three cozy mystery/medical/monster urban fantasy books. Stay tuned.
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