Book review

Book review: Flashman in the Great Game by George MacDonald Fraser

5 July 2023
Edoardo
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Flashman in the Great Game by George MacDonald Fraser

It might be an exaggeration to say that the Great Game brings out Flashman’s kinder, gentler side but he does actually fall in love with the Rani of Jhansi, a heroine of Indian independence, a villain of the Victorian view of the Indian Mutiny. What’s more, Flashman is reasonably even-handed in his treatment of the Mutiny itself, noting and sympathising with some of the reasons for the Mutiny as well as highlighting the savagery that it unleashed as well as the brutality of the British response. As such, it’s one of the best, and certainly the most entertaining, accounts of the Mutiny (or the First War for Indian Indendence) out there.

Book review: Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser

5 July 2023
Edoardo
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Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser

Just when you start to think that Sir Harry Paget Flashman might be veering towards the ‘lovable’ part of lovable rogue, along comes a book where he does something so despicable that he returns, firmly, to the category of cad and bounder where he patently belongs. So, it’s perversely something of a relief when Flashie, having flirted with heroism earlier in the story, does precisely that, literally selling into slavery one of his squeezes so that he can escape one of the tight spots into which fate and his tireless pursuit of women and wealth has squeezed him. Few characters cast such a clear light on the past – nor on our age, with its own platitudinous morality.

Book review: Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser

5 July 2023
Edoardo
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Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonal Fraser

One of the best Flashman novels, where our hero, to his horror, finds himself riding in the Charge of the Light Brigade (while simultaneously coping with explosive wind), dumps a naked nubile woman from a sled to slow down pursuers and foils fiendish Russian plots to take British India. Given the events in Ukraine, Fraser’s depiction of the Imperial Russian mindset appears all too accurate.

Book review: Tarchon by Nick Brown

5 July 2023
Edoardo
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Tarchon by Nick Brown

Nick Brown’s Agent of Rome series is one of my favourite historical fiction series, but it has never really received the recognition, or sales, that it deserves. I had thought that the series was finished, so it was a real delight to see a new novel from Nick. However, while it inhabits the same world as the previous novels in the series – the world of the grain men, the secret agents of Imperial Rome – the protagonist this time is different: Tarchon, a street youth from the western capital of Empire, Byzantium.

The book exhibits all Brown’s strengths as an author: the characters are well drawn, the setting inked in with just the right amount of detail, the plot motors along at a great pace. But it also shows perhaps why the books have not been more widely popular – and this is to the credit of the author. The truth is that most historical fiction that features anyone wielding a sword is basically the male equivalent of chick lit, allowing the 21st century reader to imagine himself playing the role of a dashing hero while getting the girl and a few fetching but not disfiguring scars along the way. There’s no real engagement with the alieness of the past, which truly is a different country: this is history used as set dressing.

Brown’s work, on the other hand, features heroes that are not just flawed, they are in many ways positively ordinary. Cassius Corbulo, in the previous novels, and Tarchon in this one, are young men who lose as many fights as they win, who rely on wits more than weapons but even so still have plans come awry, and who are plausibly figures of their time rather than ours. As such, it makes for novels that are, objectively, much better than the run-of-the-mill historical fiction, but because they don’t tick the boxes for many readers they haven’t received the readership they deserve.

Hopefully, his small but devoted band of readers will be sufficient to persuade Nick to continue writing Agent of Rome novels. And if you know anyone who wants a more intelligent and authentic take on historical fiction, direct him or her to this series.

The Greatest Book Review Ever

9 June 2023
Edoardo
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My own review for The Book of Magic, I now realise, was mere enthusiasm when compared to another review of the book I saw on Amazon.

I await the day when someone reviews one of my books by saying it smells slightly of salt and vinegar crisps.

Book review: The Book of Magic edited by Brian Copenhaver

8 June 2023
Edoardo
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The Book of Magic edited by Brian Copenhaver

The Book of Magic is a masterpiece of scholarship. The editor, Brian Copenhaver, selects texts, from antiquity to the Enlightenment, demonstrating how the idea of magic changed through the centuries. Each section begins with a short introduction on the author but the scholarship is best demonstrated in the copious footnotes, that provide a running, explicatory and illuminating commentry to each original text. A demonstration of how scholarship can shine light on the past.

Book review: Four Princes by John Julius Norwich

21 April 2023
Edoardo
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Four Princes by John Julius Norwich

An enjoyable, fast-paced four pronged biographical telling of the first half of the 16th century. The titular princes included two emperors, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, and Suleiman, the Ottoman Sultan, as well as two kings, Francis I, King of France, and Henry VIII of England. The four men were all born within ten years of each other and their rivalries defined the new world that was breaking through the old certainties during the half century in which they held sway.

It makes for a good way to pull disparate historical threads together and their personalities are each big enough to fill books on their own (even poor Charles with his Hapsburg chin was more interesting than his detractors claim). However, in the areas in which I am knowledgeable, I did spot a couple of errors (Ibrahim did not become Suleiman’s caliph until after the siege of Rhodes in 1522 and the Italian military engineer who masterminded the Knights Hospitaller’s defences during the siege was Gabriele Tadino not Tadini), so it suggests that other details might be inaccurate too. Nevertheless, the book is a good introduction to possibly the most crucial fifty years in the last millennium.

Book review: The Wraithbone Phoenix by Alec Worley

21 April 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review, Warhammer 40k
The Wraithbone Phoenix by Alec Worley

Reading novels set in the 40k universe, you usually know what you are going to get: bolters, lasguns, big guys in armour shooting and getting shot by aliens, all limned in characteristic grimdark. It’s a winning formula. But sometimes it’s good to read something a little outside the usual tramlines, and Alec Worley’s The Wraithbone Phoenix delivers a story outside those tramlines that might just be the most purely enjoyable Warhammer 40k novel I have ever read.

That’s not to say it’s lacking in bolters, action, intrigue and a suitably grimdark setting (the hive city, Varangantua – thought: was the city inspired by Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel? 40k is full of veiled, and not so veiled, references to this world settings). Indeed, in its outline, The Wraithbone Phoenix is a classic 40k quest story, with different kill teams converging on the same prize and, well, killing each other. But what sets it so marvellously apart are its protagonists, the ratling (essentially, the 40k version of Hobbits) Baggit, and the ogryn (yep, a 40k ogre) Clodde. The odd couple is a trope of storytelling precisely because it works so well and Worley employs it like a master, setting and contrasting the personalities and physiques of Baggit and Clodde in juxtaposition to the horrible world that they are attempting to navigate their way through. I loved both characters but must proclaim a particular weakness for Clodde. Ogryns are usually big and stupid, like their folkloric predecessors, but Clodde, having been hit on the head, has become an ogryn philosopher – although no one, including himself, has noticed! It’s a marvellous touch, and helps set Clodde and Baggit in contrast to the violence and nihilism all around them in Varagantua and the wider 40k universe.

So, despite the body count, the double crosses, the general grimness of the dystopian setting, The Wraithbone Phoenix achieves the almost miraculous feat of being a genuinely joyous 40k novel. For fans of the universe, take this as a warning or an invitation, depending on your inclinations, and dive in or withdraw and find something more nihilistic instead.

Book review: Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

12 February 2023
Edoardo
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Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein

This is an enlightening, enriching and superbly written account of the shifting waters and treacherous sands that join the River Thames to the North Sea. Lichtenstein works broadly downstream, starting from London and moving eastwards, telling the extraordinarily varied stories of the lives that intersected and intersect with the river. The river was what made London, bringing the world to the city, but what is fascinating is how much life went on in and around the river, from dredgers and fishermen, to a self-declared autonomous republic on an old sea fort in the estuary.

The sea fort, calling itself the Principality of Sealand, has been fought over, invaded and defended in its time. The river itself flows with tales, from drowned boats laden with unexploded munitions to the hard lives of the fishermen, and Lichtenstein does a superb job of telling them.

She also has a great deal of time for the various artists who seek to incorporate the river into their work – sometimes with near fatal results. Taking a photographer with her to record the sailing of an old yacht, the photographer faffs around for so long trying to set up his camera that the boat crashes. In the crash, Lichtenstein is quite badly injured. Her commitment to river side artists shows a notable lessening thereafter!

For anyone interested in the river and how the people living alongside it have used, abused, loved and hated it, this is a wonderful book.

Book review: Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

23 January 2023
Edoardo
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Categories: Book review
The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh

“Bunty, you see in the paper, that chap Waugh has a new book out?”

“What’s it called, darling?”

“The Complete Short Stories.”

“What a dull title. Must be a dreary writer.”

“Nonsense, Bunty. He’s the chap you met in a bar in Abyssinia.”

“You mean the fellow who stole all my stories?”

“That’s the one. You’re in this new one too.”

“I hope he gets me right this time, darling. He made me out to be a frightful cad in the last one.”

“But you are a frightful cad, Bunty.”

“Would you want me any other way, darling?”

“Of course not, Bunty. Just that…”

“Just what?”

“It would be nice if you could remember my name.”

“Of course I remember your name, darling.”

“What is it, Bunty?”

“Why, it’s darling. Would you have me call you anything else?”

“No, of course not, Bunty.”

“That’s better, darling. Now, pass me the paper. I must check the racing results.”