Is Lynn Bryant a Marvel fan? I ask because she seems to be basing her considerable literary output on the 19th century equivalent of the Marvel Universe: a Napoleonic Universe, so to speak.
The core stories are her Peninsular War Saga, which follows one regiment through that bloody conflict. There were some spin-off romances, in which various of the characters return to England and balance the bloodiness of their activities in Spain with some more tender moments. There are regular short story offerings that she gives away free. (The latest, for Valentine’s Day, is available here: An Unsuitable Arrangement.)
As a proud resident of the Isle of Man, Lynn was anxious to involve some Manx characters. Given that the place is an actual island, this inevitably meant a concentration on the Navy rather than the Army. Hence a new series, the Manxman, centring on the adventures of Hugh Kelly, captain of the Iris. Kelly has joined the main characters of the Napoleonic Universe, but as is the way with Marvel productions (surely just a matter of time before we see the film), Kelly’s adventures mean that he keeps meeting characters from elsewhere in Lynn’s substantial oeuvre. In Lynn’s latest book, This Bloody Shore, Hugh is assisting Spanish troops besieged in the coastal town of Tarragona. This gives her the opportunity to view the battle from the viewpoint of the troops on the ground as well as the sailors. We meet existing characters from the Peninsular War Saga as well as introducing some new people who will doubtless find their way into the land-based books in time.
There are an awful lot of characters with an awful lot of subplots, but keeping track is easy. I love the Manxman series, but I can’t get on with the Peninsula War saga. (It’s not you, Lynn, it’s me.) That meant that in this book I occasionally came across characters who most of the readers would already know but who were strangers to me. It completely wasn’t an issue. You’ll probably enjoy this book even more if you have read Lynn’s other output (particularly the first two Manxman stories) but it definitely works as a stand-alone.
One of the reasons that I don’t like the Peninsula War saga is that I have taken against the main female character. But in the Manxman series, Kelly’s wife, Roseen, is a joy. There’s a lot of time spent discussing their marriage and his growing family and I can see that this might annoy some readers, but I loved it. We also get to see Kelly’s lieutenant, Durrell, moving forward in his own romantic life. Let’s just say I’m very happy for him.
In yet another subplot, we find Kelly taking up the cause of abolitionism. It’s always a problem in books like this when you start to discuss attitudes to something like slavery, that we now regard as reprehensible but which seemed perfectly normal to many people at the time. It’s easy to become preachy and see everything through the distorting prism of 21st century attitudes. Lynn swerves this problem skilfully. The horrors of the slave trade and the efforts of the abolitionist movement are clearly presented, but we also meet people whose family money comes from slavery and who do not see themselves as monsters. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in future books.
So many characters and so many subplots does mean that the story becomes a little episodic, but Lynn’s writing – always a pleasure to read – keeps you going and eventually all the threads of the story are neatly drawn together to produce a very satisfying book.
It goes without saying that Lynn’s grasp of the historical details of the military campaign is always assured. The book does suffer from the lack of any maps. The geography of Tarragona is important and Lynn does do her best to paint a word picture of the place, but some of the detail slightly gets in the way of the writing and in the end I was reduced to looking the place up on Google. A map really would help. Even without it, though, this book is clearly a five star read.
I’ve long been fascinated by the way in which the British claimed Waterloo as a British, rather than an Allied, victory – particularly as only a minority of the troops under Wellington’s command were actually British. The insistence that the British essentially pulled off victory on their own accounts for the way that the Prussian contribution is regularly dismissed. Nowadays we often read that the Prussians arrived late at the battle and that they had no effect until the very end. Some accounts even suggest that the final advance by the British would have taken place successfully whether or not the Prussians had been there.
This rewriting of history started on the evening of the battle when Wellington rejected Blucher’s suggestion that it be called the battle of La Belle Alliance (after the inn where Blucher and Wellington met at the end of the day), insisting instead that it be called Waterloo, after the town (not on the battlefield) where Wellington had set up his headquarters the night before the fighting started.
The most blatant rewriting of the Prussian involvement centred on a model of the battlefield created by William Siborne, a young army officer who was commissioned by the government to produce a large scale model as a permanent commemoration of Wellington’s victory. Siborne took his commission seriously, corresponding with hundreds of the officers who were at Waterloo, including Prussian officers and, although many were reluctant to discuss it, the French. As a result he was able to produce a picture of the battlefield representing the situation at 7.00pm, just after the fall of La Haye Sainte. Siborne considered that this was the crisis of the battle.
At this point, Prussian troops were already attacking the French in Plancenoit while others had linked up with Wellington’s left, enabling him to strengthen his centre. Hundreds of detailed models of Prussian soldiers were placed to reflect that. Yet if you look at the model today (it’s on display in the National Army Museum) these soldiers aren’t there. At the crisis of the battle, just before the decisive charge by Wellington’s troops, the French are faced only by the British. The Prussians, as so many people still believe, weren’t there. They arrived too late to have any decisive impact on the battle.
There is Plancenoit in the distance, with a suspicious absence of attacking Prussians
I love that model and I’ve visited it several times. I knew it misrepresented the Prussian position and I understood the politics behind it. But this Christmas I was given a copy of Peter Hofschroer’s wonderful book, Wellington’s Smallest Victory and now I know how the model came to be so inaccurate.
It’s a story of a naïve young man who set out to produce something that was to be both the historical record of a famous victory and a significant work of art in its own right. The project ran out of control, taking over his life, and he became quite obsessive about its accuracy. What he did not realise was that he was taking on the Duke of Wellington himself, who had no intention of allowing Siborne’s model ever to see the light of day with the Prussians in place.
It’s a story of a powerful man using money and position to crush somebody who threatened the image he had created for himself. Wellington, it is fair to say, does not come out of the story well.
Hofschroer’s book is incredibly detailed. Very occasionally it even verges on the boring with its accounts of exactly who corresponded with whom as the government tried to deprive Siborne of money owing to him. The detail is important, though, as Hofschroer is presenting a version of the battle of Waterloo which many people, after 200 years of propaganda, will find difficult to accept. He is also attacking the reputation of Wellington, somebody who was practically a demigod while Siborne was working on this model and who is still seen as one of the Great Britons of the 19th century.
The meticulous descriptions of exactly which troops were where helps the reader visualise exactly what was going on and will probably provide new insights even for those already very familiar with Waterloo. Hofschroer also extends the scope of his book to cover Wellington’s response to Prussian setbacks at Charlesroi and Ligny. Again, his account is detailed and convincing and does not show Wellington in a good light. Given how much time I spend reading accounts of Napoleonic battles, it’s worrying how much I struggle with many of these books, but Wellingtons Smallest Victory reads like a crime thriller. It’s gripping.
A Word from our Sponsor
There is a lot of detail about elements of the Battle of Waterloo Burke at Waterloo. (“A good general account of the battles described.” – Amazon review.) Burke at Waterloo is available on Kindle at a ludicrously cheap £3.99. If you enjoy my blog, you might consider buying it. mybook.to/BurkeWaterloo
In last week’s blog post I mentioned that my most popular posts were often book reviews. I actually tried to write fewer book reviews last year because I didn’t expect them to be particularly well read. Here are the books I reviewed with links to the original blog posts for people who might be interested.
A short review of the latest Sharpe novel with comparisons with my own Burke and the Pimpernel Affair and Burke at Waterloo, which have some overlaps in plot. If you were imprisoned in a French fortress, who would you rather have saving you: Sharpe or Burke?
The fourth of Horst’s Norwegian thrillers that I’ve reviewed. Not as good as the first three about his policeman hero, Wisting, but good enough if you’ve enjoyed the other three.
I remember lots of excitement about this book when it came out. Does anyone remember it now? Not the Great American Novel that some reviewers seemed to have thought it was. It may well be the Great American Novel That Defines 2022 though.
What do you do when your famous detective character (Falco) has been going so long that he’s no longer a credible action hero? Why, you have his daughter take over the family business. The Ides of April is the first in Lindsay Davis’s new series featuring Flavia Albia. It came out in 2013 but I only just got around to it. Sorry about that.
If you’ve read any of my blogs featuring Marble Hill House, you may understand why I found this book so fascinating. If you don’t know anything about Marble Hill House, reading this book might make you want to learn more.
I’m a fan of Val Poore’s blog, Rivergirl, so her story about how she came to be living on a classic Dutch barge fascinated me. Give it a go and you might end up a fan of the blog too.
The fifth book in Vanner’s ‘Dawlish Chronicles’ series features an early submarine, the ‘Fenian Ram’, a submarine designed by the pioneer of submarine warfare, John Holland. The adventures are largely fictitious but the technology is very real.
I’ve not included Tales of Empire in my eleven book reviews because it’s hardly an unbiased review. I published this book which is a very short collection of stories, one by me and three by other authors. Have a look about at what I say about the other three and then buy it. It’s only 99p.
OOPS!
Somehow (probably because it was so recent that I didn’t really think of it as being last year) I completely forgot to include Sisters at the Edge of the World, Ailish Sinclair’s stunning novel of Bronze Age Scotland. Almost impossible to categorise, I can only say that it is brilliant. Read it.
The Night Man is the fourth of Horst’s Norwegian thrillers I’ve read. All feature William Wisting. He’s introduced with a first name now, which is barely mentioned in the previous books. We’ve recognised him in the past as a policeman, popular with colleagues and a good father to his adult daughter, but now, perhaps, we will get to know him better as a man.
The murder at the centre of this story is a particularly gruesome one and the opening, with a woman finding a dead girl’s head looming through an early morning mist, is classic Scandi noir. There is little in the way of clues, and the police procedural elements of the story are well constructed. We see Wisting leading his team as they identify the body and trace the events that have led to her death. Wisting has always been presented as a competent policeman but I felt that in this story we saw more about his leadership qualities and how he pulled the team together. Bits of it, I thought, could almost be used in training courses for managers.
The story is long and quite complicated but, in essence, straightforward. Refugee children are being kidnapped by a drugs gang which uses them to run narcotics across the border from Sweden. The murder victim is a girl who, for no fault of her own, has failed to deliver the drugs.
The story could hardly sustain a full-length novel on its own, but we meet Wisting’s journalist daughter, Line, again. Although she is now working in Oslo, coincidence brings her to visit her father just as the murder story breaks. As in the previous books, she finds herself investigating the murder as well. Desperate to get the story ahead of competing news organisations, she uses her own contacts in the criminal class and her experience with uncovering links on the internet to move toward solving the murder. Her father’s approach and hers lead them to the same conclusions at almost the same time. Line’s interference, though, does mean that, yet again, her life is threatened by the crooks she is hunting. This is becoming a recurring theme in these novels and, given that Line is clearly an intelligent and able young woman, I can’t see why she never seems to learn from these mistakes. The ‘damsel in distress’ trope is common in these sorts of books (it’s not as if I never use it myself) but here it is beginning to come over as a tad formulaic. Even so, the prose is fluid and the requisite level of tension is maintained and Horst definitely spins a good yarn.
The story is strengthened by the development of Wisting and Line as characters. Wisting is allowed to start a tentative relationship with a civilian while we see Line struggling to succeed in a hugely competitive job whilst trying to build her own personal life.
The book is, I feel, weakened by occasional moralistic inserts. One character lectures Wisting at length about the problems faced by young refugees and there is a lot of criticism of Norway’s immigration policy. Wisting follows one witness to Afghanistan. This seemed slightly implausible but it was used as a way to comment on the awfulness of life in Afghanistan and the efforts being made by Norwegian police and troops to improve things there. There are also what seemed like mini-essays on the evils of the drugs trade.
I’m all in favour of authors using their stories to carry a political message but this is always more effective if the political message is well integrated into the. In this case the messages read like rather clumsy product placement. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of the Norwegian involvement in Afghanistan where, in the light of subsequent events, I think that every country which was there is taking a long, hard, critical look at what was achieved and at what cost.
Is the book worth reading? If you’ve never read any of Horst’s books before, this would be an odd one to start with. If you have been following Wisting’s progress and enjoying the books so far, you will probably enjoy this one, although maybe not quite as much as some of the earlier volumes. I felt this book marked difficult points in a series when the author wants to introduce new ideas and new characters and this means a sort of gear change, which is not necessarily that smooth. Even so, Horst has set things up well for another sequel and I look forward to seeing that.
It’s easy to be rude about genre fiction. People say that they don’t want books to be neatly classified. But genre fiction is easy to read. We know where we are. It’s easy to review. We can (mostly) recognise the core elements of a “good” book of historical fiction or a “good” romance. (Cute meet; obstacle to their love; obstacle overcome; HEA.) Above all (as far as writers are concerned), it’s easy (or at least easier) to sell. Perhaps that’s why Ailish Sinclair has, despite a track record of successful historical fiction, decided that Sisters at the Edge of the World should be self-published. And if ever there was an argument for the failure of the traditional publishing system, its apparent inability to accommodate books like Sisters at the Edge of the World is it.
Given her previous work, it more or less goes without saying that Sinclair’s prose is a pleasure to read. Even so, I did not find this an easy book to love: not at first, anyway. It’s not exactly a fantasy, though it’s set in a world where magic is a real and everyday part of life. It gives the impression of being historically accurate but, given that it covers a place and a period where the historical record is, at best, sketchy, it’s not quite what I would think of as a conventional historical novel. Is it a romance? Well, there’s a boy and a girl but, if they’d had Facebook in the Bronze Age, their relationship status would best be described as ‘complicated’.
As I kept reading I stopped worrying about what sort of story I was being presented with. I was just carried along with the life of Morragh, the girl who talks to the Mother-god and who is a spiritual leader of her people. The people came alive for me too: their daily lives, their sometimes complicated and uncomfortable relationships, and the ill-defined but all-pervasive spiritual beliefs that linked them and the world they lived in.
The coming of the Romans and the attack on their tribe by Agricola and his legions brings violence and death to their community – violence and death that might, just might, have been avoided if, at heart, the peace-loving worshippers of the Mother-god didn’t secretly like the idea of a good fight. And when that fight comes, Ailish Sinclair pulls no punches. It’s truly horrible, somehow even worse because Morragh (who has flashes of visions of the future) has already told us how it would be. Except it’s worse.
Life goes on after the battle, but I’m not saying anything about it because Spoilers. But the end, like the rest of the book, combines the supernatural and the mundane to open up wholly unpredictable situations. Does it end well? You’ll have to read it to find out.
If you, like me, are not at all certain that this is a book for you, keep going. Very soon you will join (judging from the reviews I’ve seen) the crowds of readers for whom this book is, in every sense, magical.
It’s still October and I want to keep blogging about books with a spooky supernatural theme, but I’ve only written three. This week, then, I’d like to turn to another brilliant writer of Urban Fantasy – Ben Aaronovitch.
A friend asked me if I had read Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London. When I told him that I hadn’t, he said that Something Wicked reminded him of Aaronovitch’s book so I had a look at it on Amazon. What I saw made me very pleased I could honestly say I’d never read it, because there was definitely more than a passing similarity in the opening pages and I didn’t want people to say that I had copied his approach. It’s a humorous urban fantasy which combines a police procedural with things that you would never expect to see in Dixon of Dock Green. (Younger readers: ask your parents. Or Google it.)
When I read the whole book I thought it was wonderful. There are definite similarities to Something Wicked. Perhaps Aaronovitch’s familiarity with the supernatural (the story does suggest quite a lot of research) means that he read Something Wicked and then moved back through time to write Rivers of London. (Not an entirely original thought: I recommend Morley Roberts’ story The Anticipator.)
Like Something Wicked the story starts with the discovery of a body that has been the victim of an unusual murder. In this case it has been decapitated. There follows a lot of detail of police procedure but the appearance, fairly early on, of a ghost as a witness to the crime suggests that things are going to get very weird very quickly. While my detective finds himself working alongside Chief Inspector Pole, a vampire from the mysterious Section S, our hero here, Chief Inspector Nightingale, is a wizard working for Economic and Specialist Crime. Pole and Nightingale share a preference for working alone from their homes and both seem to take an unhealthy interest in mortuaries, but while Pole’s brief sticks to the vampiric, Nightingale covers all the ghosties and ghoulies London has to offer – and Aaronovitch’s research has turned up more strange things than Nightingale can shake his mysteriously powerful silver-topped cane at. To be honest I got a bit lost in the ghosts, the genii locorum, demons, revenants and assorted other phantasmagoria. It’s a complex plot (and the first of a long series) but it makes sense as you read along, though I must admit to waking up at 4.00 am worrying at some of the details. It doesn’t matter, really. Our narrator is a probationary constable whose natural curiosity and somewhat eclectic skill set was unappreciated by the Metropolitan Police generally but fits right in with Chief Inspector Nightingale. He’s a beautifully rounded character, whose constant amazement at the world he finds himself in massively helps us suspend our disbelief. “Of course he’s being possessed by a revenant,” I found myself saying. “Good heavens, man, isn’t it obvious?” And obvious it somehow became, however barking mad the characters, the plotline and the twisted logic. It’s helped by a wonderful sense of place, with lots of details of London geography that pin it firmly to reality (though how he managed to put Teddington Lock downstream of Richmond I have no idea – a careless copy editor, I suspect).
Above all the book is funny – often laugh-out-loud funny. It’s a wonderful mix of horror and humour and glorious British eccentricity at its best. I do recommend it.
