Fan though I am of Koontz’s novel, Innocence, to which this is a short story prequel, I have to admit that it’s a slight tale of Addison Goodheart’s childhood that does not add anything to what was said in the source novel. One for Koontz completists only (of which there must be some but, given the man’s extraordinary work ethic, I suspect few people successfully keep up with him).
Going straight in at the top of the they’d-never-publish-this-today list is A High Wind in Jamaica. It manages to break almost every modern publishing tabu, from racism through sexism to having pirates that aren’t women but what really makes it verboten to modern tastes is that nobody, absolutely nobody, gets their just desserts. Children’s writing has slowly set in place an inflexible rule: that the characters’ outcomes must reflect their adherence to what publishers now consider the good. You can be a villain but as long as you’re a ‘good’ villain, then you will come out of the story all right (in fact, held up as an example). The hero or heroine will prevail not so much by their actions but by the purity of their modern morals.
It’s the exact opposite in A High Wind in Jamaica. The protagonists, a family of children, are completely amoral, abandon their dead, including a sibling, with barely a backward glance and certainly no tears shed, and set up their saviours, a bunch of good-hearted pirates, to swing from gallows so that they don’t get the blame for all the stuff that had happened. This is the opposite of childhood trauma forming the adult: this is childhood as a state of natural psychopathy, gradually ameliorated by the constraints of civilised adulthood.
So, if you want to read something completely and utterly different from the stock motifs of today’s children’s books, this is the story for you.
In the 1950s and 1960s, at the dawn of the Rocket Age, we didn’t really know what we would find when we went to another planet. The Moon was clearly airless, but the telescope images of Mars were still indistinct enough to leave open the hope that the canals were real, and Venus was a cloud-covered mystery. Writing boldly into this mystery went Hugh Walters, writing a series of space adventure books where a quartet of young men started off by going into space and then, by virtue of the fact of being the most experienced spacemen, continued on and outwards to the other planets.
I fondly remembered Walters’ books from my childhood, where they were stocked by the local library, but it’s been many years since they featured on any library shelves and, looking idly on Abebooks, I found that second-hand editions were selling for hundreds of pounds, rapidly quashing my idle interest in rereading these books.
Which is where electronic editions of books come in. It’s now possible to republish books at very little cost by making them available on Kindle and similar platforms. As such, it’s worthwhile publishers doing so, as the investment is low and the returns, particularly with books like this that people are searching for, will be steady and long lasting.
I look forward to rereading the adventures of Chris Godfrey (in this universe, an Englishman is, quite properly, the first man in space) and his comrades, and reliving my childhood, when the stars were closer and I might dream of being an astronaut myself.
A few years back I was talking to an eminent theologian when he remarked that, while the Church had good theologies of salvation, redemption and suffering, its theology of creation was thin.
He should have read The Silmarillion. Tolkien is the theologian of creation par-excellence because he was himself a creator (or a sub-creator as he put it): through his entire adult life he struggled with the contradictory demands of fashioning a coherent world that also satisfied his understanding of human and divine nature. The creation myth that begins The Silmarillion is perhaps, The Ainulindalë, the most coherent expression of a true theology of creation yet written and it raises for those of us who also profess to create the responsibility and privilege that Tolkien presents to us: that when the Music of Eru is played aright at the end, then He will take our own creations and give to them the Secret Fire, and they will live.
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.
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.
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.
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 Romans were not an imaginative people save in one important area: pain. A culture that had turned sadism into both public spectacle and, for some of the imperial families, private sport, really let themselves go when it came to devising new and interesting ways of putting people to death. Crucifixion was, of course, the old standby, easily carried out by any Tom, Dick or Horace, but for a properly painful end the Romans really let their fancies fly.
So the gruesome tortures meted on 13-year-old St Eulàlia of Barcelona are, to some degree, support for the historicity of her end. What is somewhat more unusual was that there were, according to legend, two martyred Eulalias: Eulalia of Barcelona and Eulalia of Mérida. Both were young girls, both were martyred in Spain, and both suffered extreme tortures during their martyrdom.
Of course, there are some historians who insist that St Eulàlia of Barcelona and St Eulàlia of Méribel are the same person on the spurious grounds that there can’t really have been two 13-year-old virgins with the same name martyred for the Faith.
Nonsense, say the Catalans, hanging on to Laia, as she is known, for all they are worth. Besides, our little saint suffered much more than yours. Eulàlia of Mérida was merely tortured with hooks and burnt alive; Eulàlia of Barcelona really suffered. In 303 the brave girl went to Barcelona’s governor, Dacian, to tell him off for his cruelty to the city’s Christians. Since Dacian’s orders came straight from the Emperor Diocletian he rapidly sized up the relative advantages of clemency for the Christians or doing what the emperor said, and sentenced Eulàlia to as many tortures as she had years.
These included being whipped; torn with hooks; rolled down what is today the Baixada de Santa Eulàlia in a barrel filled with nails and glass; having hot oil poured on her wounds; being put in a flea-filled box; having her breasts cut off; and, the appropriate final punishment, crucifixion. Legend has it that Eulàlia suffered all these torments in silence.
What is not disputable is that Dacian may have miscalculated the percentages. Today, Eulàlia is the co-patron saint of Barcelona, with her feast day on 12 February, and she is particularly revered as an intercessor for children, while Dacian is a forgotten functionary of a failed imperial persecution.
What do William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes and St George have in common? They all died on 23 April, with the master dramaturge and literary don arranging well-nigh simultaneous exits in 1616. Of course, we’re slightly less certain about the exact date of St George’s death – the more sceptical among historians doubting the fact of his birth let alone the time of his passing – but that has not stopped Catalans from amalgamating the feast of their patron saint with the celebrations of the two literary lions.
La Diada de Sant Jordi (St George’s day) had been associated since medieval times with lovers, the paramours giving gifts of roses, but in the 1920s the writer Vicent Clavel Andrés proposed marking the birth of Cervantes as a book day. A little tweaking saw the date changed to the more universal 23 April in 1930 and since then the Dia del Libre has gone from strength to strength, with Unesco declaring, in 1995, that 23 April should be World Book and Copyright Day.
Thus this most adaptable and travelled of saints makes his way into the 21st century world of supra-national organisations and officially endorsed culture. George has come a long way from the little town in Cappadocia where he was, possibly, born. Of course, there is no historical source for where he came from, nor for the idea that he was a Roman soldier, and not even that he was martyred. But then, there aren’t that many historical sources at all for obscure 3rd century soldiers. What we do have, however, are traces of a man whose mark in history has been all but obscured by the accumulation of later legends. His cult spread rapidly through the eastern Roman empire and by 494 he was cautiously canonised by Pope Gelasius I as one of those ‘whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose acts are known only to God’.
Nature abhors a vacuum and the religious mind dislikes a blank canvas, so the story of St George soon began to be filled in. The oldest traditions state that he was a soldier who refused to abjure his religion despite the orders of the Emperor Diocletian, who launched the last great persecution of Christians in 303, and was beheaded on 23 April. George’s sufferings soon underwent inflation, taking in poison drinks, being cut into pieces, molten lead and being sawn into two. If some of these sufferings sound a trifle terminal, don’t worry since George was restored to life three times before finally expiring. Pope Gelasius, while accepting George’s sanctity, was somewhat more skeptical about his invulnerability and forbade the promulgation of these lurid legends.
The cult of St George really took off with the Crusades. The knights that survived brought the Cappadocian home with them, and in the 13th century the best seller of the age, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, featured a new twist to the tale: dragon killing.
George became the emblem of the courtly, chivalric culture of medieval Europe, the ideal to be attempted by the rowdy, licentious but essentially pious nobility and a hero to the peasantry who took every advantage of clerically sanctioned days off. Since St George offered protection to those travelling by sea (as well as soldiers, farmers, horsemen, lepers and shepherds among others – he was a busy saint) port cities like Barcelona, Venice and Genoa adopted him as patron.
The saint, who didn’t get where he got without results, reciprocated. According to Jaume I George helped the Catalans conquer the city of Mallorca, and the soldier saint played his part in a number of the battles of the long Reconquista, including the 1237 victory at Puig that opened the way for the recapture of the province of Valencia.
Despite a dip in popularity during the Enlightenment and the determined assaults of some recent scholars, St George’s recent move into the literary realm suggests that the old warhorse still has some legs in him. This is one old soldier who positively relishes new tricks.