The Saturday Morning Post (No. 65)

 

I'm still on a non-fiction history kick this week. But this week it's the American Revolution or if you're English, the American Revolt. The book I am reading is from the English point of view. 

Reading it has been a new experience. It's a library ebook, and usually our library service offers ebooks via Amazon for the Kindle readers, or in my case, my Fire tablet. However, some ebooks are offered via Overdrive and the Libby app. Usually, for these ebooks I can download them via my Kobo ebook reader, as Overdrive is owned by the owner of Kobo. But for some reason, this book though it was offered by the library via Overdrive would not show up on my ebook reader. I could download it to my computer, but I hate reading books on my computer, and for some reason, I rarely, if ever, get the downloaded book to transfer from my computer to my ebook reader, even though I've jumped through all the hoops to do so via the Adobe system to do so. I was, however, able to download the Libby app on my phone, and borrow the ebook via that app. So I started reading this book on my smartphone, a first for me. It was an okay experience, but I when I discovered that I could also download the Libby App to my Amazon Fire tablet, and sync the Libby App between my phone and tablet, I was able to read the last half of the book on my tablet which is a better reading experience.  Anyway, on to the book.

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. 

Fusiliers by Mark Urban  C+

This is the history of the British 23rd Welsh Regiment serving in America during the time of the revolt of those colonies. It is drawn from the memoirs, letters, and history of that regiment, as well as other contemporary accounts from other English regiments in that war. I find accounts from the English point of view interesting, as they offer a counterpoint to the American version and its founding myths. For example, he noted the fact that the continental armies executed a lot more of their men for desertion in order to discourage their soldiers from deserting than did the English. And that at least some of the American revolutionary armies killed their own countrymen who they suspected were still loyal to the King. The war, it seems, from my reading of this book, to have been pretty much guerrilla war, with a lot of ugliness on both sides.

I know that I have read one novel set in the period where the main character was an an American loyal to the Crown. Fifteen minutes of a Google Search brings up the most likely suspect, Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts published in 1940, which sounds right, as I remembered that the book had the main character's name as the title. In any event, I did know that there were plenty of people in the colonies who were not revolutionaries, and that they didn't fare well in the end.

This book takes much the same route as A World On Fire, in that it follows characters connected with the 23rd Welsh Regiment throughout its ten years of serving in North America, using their experiences to drive the story. The problem with this approach, I feel, is that all the characters are drawn from preserved letters or official records, and are not really fleshed out characters. Each at best  has a page of bio spread throughout the book, and as such, are more of a distraction then a feature of the narrative. They're too thinly drawn to care about, and their stories are not all that interesting. These little episodes make for a somewhat cluttered and confusing read. I gather that the author used this approach for a Napoleonic era British rifle regiment as well, but he had a lot more written material to work from. I think that this story could have been told with less words and greater clarity in broader strokes, rather than as the narrow focus of the story of this regiment.

I think that to appreciate this book to its full extent, you need to be somewhat familiar with the American Revolutionary War in order to put the events described in the book into the larger context. While there is some background necessary to the story of the 23rd, there is a much larger picture surrounding the events that the 23rd participated in that is not fleshed out, so that you only get a small, and far from complete understanding of the events of that era. 

All in all, this is an interesting, ground level view of that conflict from the point of view of the English army. While I learned a lot about the American Revolution (or Rebellion), I feel that I would need to read a lot more about it to put what I learned in this book to fully appreciate it for what it is.