Winston Graham's THE ANGRY TIDE

As I joked recently on Twitter, I can always tell when a new batch of episodes of Poldark hits American or British TV because all of a sudden the page views for all of my prior Poldark book reviews shoot back up into the stratosphere (well, for this blog). I still haven't seen any of the latest series that is just now airing on PBS in the States, so I can't speak to how it compares to the books yet, but I figured the least I could do was take a break from all the Doctor Who and Gene Wolfe and give the Poldarkies something new to look at here at Kate of Mind.

The Angry Tide, the seventh "Novel of Cornwall" in the Poldark saga, starts earning its title right away. As is always the case in these books, the state of the sea reflects the emotional state of the characters living near it, and there's plenty of tempestuous wave action and passionate melodrama in and around Nampara, where our hero and heroine, whose marriage took another near-fatal blow last novel, reside.

And   they're getting used to other changes as well, are Ross and Demelza; last novel saw Ross getting elected to replace adversary George Warleggan as a Member of Parliament, and so has to spend at least some of his time in London now. A bit awkward, that, because of course last novel also saw wife Demelza tempted strongly to have an adulterous affair, and everybody knows that the best way to patch things up after a conflict like that is to put a few hundred miles between husband and wife.

But this is Demelza, though a very subdued and somewhat uncertain Demelza, who has learned some lessons since back in the day when she meddled freely in other people's love lives. She got mostly good results, granted, but at the cost of more than a little pain and awkwardness, so she's not so eager to plunge into that again, except....

Except her poor brothers! Both of them are in love with girls who seem pretty much perfect for them, but Sam's girl is intimidated by the prospect of marrying such a very ardent Methodist when she herself has a bit of a jolly past, and Drake, Drake's beloved was way above his social station and was pretty much forced into a marriage within her class but to a truly odious garbage person.

The course of this marriage, between Morwenna Chynoweth (a cousin of Ross' first love, Elizabeth, who is herself now married to that troublesome George Warleggan but went into said marriage with open eyes and strength) and local vicar Ossie Whitworth, is a big topic in the first half of The Angry Tide, though for most of the first half it's the one plot that doesn't have a lot of ebb and flow to it. Morwenna is a "plain girl with a beautiful body" as her husband thinks of her, while Ossie is your standard puffy, self-righteous C of E man who is also more than a bit of a lecher, and starts trying to manipulate the local medical community into agreeing with him that if Morwenna doesn't want to sleep with him (and she really, really, really doesn't, especially after reluctantly having a son by him), it MUST mean she's insane and should be put away somewhere so that Ossie can get on with his proper churchman's life with the help of, say, a reasonably attractive "housekeeper" to attend to his "needs."

Pardon me while I go and shower now.

Seriously, if you don't hate Ossie already (assuming you've read these books or seen the 1970s era Poldark TV adaptation or something), I'm not sure we can be friends, you guys.

Fortunately, there's the second half of the book, largely concerned with Demelza's first visit to London, its causes and consequences. As I mentioned before, Demelza has changed over the course of these books; there is very little of the poor miner's scraggly, boyish daughter left in her. So her time in London is not merely spent gawping and wide-eyed as once she was intimidated by a house party among the local gentry in Cornwall. She's still not entirely sure exactly how to behave, but she's learned to trust her instincts, and actually makes fewer mistakes than Ross.

She also gets a chance to shine at home, when a banking crisis forces quick thinking and quicker action while Ross is away. We've always known that Demelza is quite intelligent, but here we see that she has become shrewd. It's truly wonderful to see, especially when she is contrasted with the Chynoweth women, who are born to higher stations but who never really develop beyond that. You're not going to see, at any rate, a Novel of Cornwall named after any of them; Demelza's name was on the very second book!

As for the rest of The Angry Tide, well, it's a Poldark novel. Lots more political/military issues come to the fore as we are now contemporaneous with Napoleon's capture of Alexandria and Cairo and with Admiral Horatio Nelson's famous defeat of Napoleon at the famous Battle of the Nile (where, of course, our beloved Captain Jack Aubrey of Patrick O'Brian fame got his medal). There's lots more stuff to make fans of Blackadder the Third smile as George Warleggan strives to acquire a "robber botton" of his very own, and the prose continues to a delight. Seriously, you guys, if all you're doing is watching the new TV adaptation (or the original one, in which the guy who occasionally cameos as Dr. Halsey in the new show played Poldark) (but mostly kept his shirt on, admittedly), you're missing out. These novels are absolutely delightful, and they only get more so as the story moves on beyond what's been covered in (to date) either TV adaptation. Most of them are now available as ebooks; I'm sure eventually all will be as the new TV show creates new fans.

Here's hoping!

For now, I'm almost into dead tree reading, which I have difficulty doing due to chronic hand/arm/shoulder problems, but I'M GOING TO SUCK IT UP when the time comes, because these books are worth it!

Patrick O'Brian's THE SURGEON'S MATE

The Surgeon's Mate is one of the cleverer titles for an Aubrey/Maturin novel, suggesting that it does that Dr. Maturin is at last going to get some help in keeping Captain Aubrey's crew healthy; larger commands like those Aubrey is entitled to these days not only get to bring along a surgeon but also a surgeon's mate, but that's not even sort of what is going on here.

The title refers to Maturin's lady-love, Diana Villiers, who has at last agreed to marry him as a means to recover her British citizenship after having run away with a rich American several novels ago -- a move she came to regret by the time The Fortune of War brought Aubrey and Maturin to America. Partly with her help, our duo escaped from the clutches of her lover (who turned out to be a major American spy-master) after having killed some important French spies, and made off with some of the lover's very important personal papers to boot.

It's a strange courtship these two have had, and by the time Maturin has found Villiers again, in America, he's mostly out of love with her; she has taken up tobacco smoking and bourbon drinking and a bit of a colonial accent, but she's still a looker and a pretty cool chick, so he's not completely off her, and good thing, because in The Surgeon's Mate it's her turn to save his bacon. Well, sort of. She believes she has done so, and is going to be allowed to believe it, because if the real story of how Stephen escapes France (where he and Aubrey are taken prisoner after their sloop wrecks after assisting in a chase after a mission in the Baltic involving Catalan freedom fighters and a Swedish island battery and other complicated stuff) ever became common knowledge, he would no longer be able to deny being the George Smiley of the Napoleonic wars.

This is not my favorite Aubrey/Maturin by a long shot, choppy and sort of all over the place, but it's still good fun.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S COMPANY

In a lot of ways, Sharpe's Company can feel like Sharpe's Fortress revisited, though in a slightly diminished capacity. Fortress had Sharpe leading the charge and finding the vulnerability in India's awesome mountaintop fortress of Gawilghur where Company has him "merely" having to do so to take the Spanish fortress-town of Badajoz, a much less impressive target, but there are challenges and complications to keep things fresh, oh yes.

Though the fortress angle is not the only parallel with Fortress. Oh no. For Sharpe's Company brings back one of Sharpe's most entertaining enemies, the malevolently cunning Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill -- last seen in Sharpe's Fortress, once again failing to kill our hero, but not for lack of trying.

Here Hakeswill surfaces as a new member of the South Essex, the battalion to whose fortunes Sharpe and his Rifles have been married for several Peninsular novels now, and he arrives just in time to see Sharpe laid somewhat low: his latest field promotion to Captain has finally and formally been rejected by the British army's top brass (over Wellington's objections, to be sure) and Sharpe is just a lieutenant again, though still sort of running his Light Company, at least until its new captain arrives -- a captain who is a proper high-born gentleman of means, and who purchased his commission like you're supposed to.

That system of the hereditary upper-class buying their way into officer-dom has always blown me away, as an American who used to take it for granted that the military is and should be a meritocracy. A lifetime of reading stories proving me wrong, at least in the case of the European military, hasn't robbed me of this basic reaction; I suppose by now it's obvious that I'll never really lose it, no matter how often the injustices of the purchased commission system are exploited for drama.

And speaking of obvious, if it's not by now, continuity, as far as the Sharpe novels are concerned, is a matter for other series, as is driven home anew early on in Sharpe's Company as we learn that his lover Teresa, badass Spanish partisan and beautiful babe, has given birth to a daughter, his daughter, and we see him acting like it's his first an only child even though those of us who are reading his adventures in chronological, rather than publication, order know that he's already got a daughter by one Lady Grace, whom he met on his homeward journey from India. The late Lady Grace having been a lady, her upper-class family would rather not acknowledge Richard's part in the creation of their granddaughter and so have taken the girl away from him, so perhaps he's just done a really, really good job of blotting this real first child from his thoughts?

Anyway, fiction. Which this is. And the Sharpe novels are a special case, there. To the point where I think that from now on, if anyone asks me in what order to read them, I might just say publication order. The discontinuity might jar less that way, even as the adventures leap about in time. Sharpe already spends lots of time in Doctor Who jeopardy; he might as well just be experienced as full on timey-wimey, amirite?

At any rate, Sharpe's Company. As I've mentioned, Sharpe's most enthusiastic (if not always most effective because batdung insane) enemy is back and up to his old tricks, and Sharpe has been put somewhat out to pasture for a while, suddenly in charge of the battalion's "wives and mules and baggage" instead of his Light Company and his beloved Rifles (who themselves are being, cough, strongly encouraged to ditch their threadbare green Rifles jackets for good old British army bright red-and-pipeclay, and to exchange their Baker rifles for plain old muskets, further insulting Sharpe's pride). Which he bitches about to his sub-protector, Major Hogan (who looks after Sharpe for Wellington), and gets shot down with a speech that could come straight from the mouth of his Author trying to keep this swashbuckling bastard under control: ""Just because you've been allowed to swan about like a bloody pirate for years doesn't mean you shouldn't take your turn at the real work." This made me laugh, even though it's precisely Sharpe's swanning around like a bloody pirate that makes him such fun to read, even when his adventures start getting formulaic.

Swan on, Sharpe. Swan on.

Patrick O'Brian's THE FORTUNE OF WAR

Very nearly everything bad, or at least unpleasant, that can happen to an 18th century sailing man happens to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin in The Fortune of War, the sixth in Patrick O'Brian's amazing chronicles of life in England's Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, making this novel perhaps the most aptly titled of the series. Though maybe it should be The Misfortune of War instead?

And they don't just happen for the sake of happening, these misfortunes. Pretty much everything that befalls our splendid duo is in some way a consequence of a prior adventure of theirs, or of suppositions relating to those adventures, to wit the "horrible old Leopard" which they barely survived commanding in Desolation Island and limp into New Holland after having been given up for dead at the beginning of The Fortune of War. The Leopard was an actual and infamous ship due to an incident in 1807 when its crew attacked the USS Chesapeake as part of an effort to capture some deserters from the Royal Navy, causing a diplomatic row and earning the Leopard a bad reputation among Americans*, with which reputation Jack Aubrey is tarnished when a series of calamities land him as a sort of convalescent/prisoner in Boston.

All that, though, is merely prologue to the land-based adventures of Maturin in Boston! For at its heart, The Fortune of War is a spy novel, and Maturin has been a very effective secret agent, even to planting a heap of poisonous misinformation on American spy Aphra Behn Louisa Wogan last novel, a feat that has resulted in serious disruption of the French intelligence effort, who weren't suspecting a pretty American dilettante would be so manipulated until it was too late and several of France's own agents were dead, dismembered, exiled, etc. This and other feats of espionage and counter-espionage render Maturin a marked man once he and Jack Aubrey find themselves prisoners of war in America, and in Boston specifically, which is crawling with French agents now that America, too, is at war with Britain. Yowza.

And of course, this is also the novel in which Maturin sort of half-assedly gets his heart's desire -- meaning the dashing, courageous, graceful and good-looking Diana Villiers, who has broken said heart several times but is now as trapped in America as are Maturin and Aubrey and Needs Stephen's Help. Just as Stephen has sort of decided maybe he's not in love with her anymore. Ah, me.

On to the next Napoleonic War adventure!

*And is also considered by some to be one of the causes of the War of 1812.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S BATTLE

In many ways the highest-stakes Sharpe novel so far, Sharpe's Battle is one of the most intense and compulsively readable of Richard Sharpe's adventures in King George III's armies. This is largely again due to the quality of our man's foes; in this book he has two principle adversaries, with a third sort of lurking in the shadows.

Guy Loup, aka El Lobo, aka the Wolf, is a French brigadier whose mission is to engage the partisan guerillas of Spain head on and match them brutality for brutality -- and then some. As the novel opens, he has just committed war crimes on a scale we moderns don't usually associate with the early 19th century, and who but our man Sharpe comes across the carnage? What Sharpe finds provokes him into committing a war crime of his own, but of course the wrongness of Sharpe's action is dwarfed by what Loup has done. Still, there are to be consequences, consequences that loom ominously over the rest of the novel as Sharpe and Loup hunt each other around the Spanish/Portuguese border.

Assisting the Wolf and causing trouble in her own right is the bizarre and fascinating Dona Juanita de Elia, a virago if ever there was one, dressing in the uniforms she collects each time she sleeps with someone from a new regiment, riding astride like a man, a passionate hunter, and a French agent who has lately infiltrated (by which I mean "hooked up with the commander even unto promising to marry him") the Real Compania de Irlandesa, the (fictional) Irish component of the exiled and imprisoned King of Spain's Household Guard. Whom the Spanish government has foisted onto the British Army in order to "help" but who are pretty much useless in the way of so much of the Spanish military seems to come off as useless in these novels, even though none of these men are Spanish. Which uselessness prompts many, including the Iron Duke himself, to conclude betrays the Compania's true nature as some kind of secret French weapon, or at least a deception of some kind. At any rate, they're not to be trusted.

Of course it falls to Sharpe to try lick them into shape, and of course he has trouble doing it, and not only because he's A. Made a formidable new enemy in Loup and B. Got in Dona Juanita a French agent making trouble in the ranks. Because the actual rank and file of the Compania are pretty decent men who just want to do their duty and beat Napoleon, just like anyone else, so of course Sharpe, whose real mission is to make them go away and stop trying to "help", winds up losing his heart to them just in time for everything to go to hell outside the besieged Almeida (which, we may recall, Sharpe blew up a significant portion of at the end of Sharpe's Gold).

Really, what makes this book so refreshing is that it's to the Compania and not another tart-of-the-month that Sharpe loses his heart this time around (he and Dona Juanita experience hate at first sight, also a refreshing change). And that the grim irony of so many of Britain's military hopes are pinned on soldiers from a nation that resents the British and periodically tries to throw off their yoke, is finally addressed (and Sharpe's best friend, Sergeant Harper, and best protector, Major Hogan, are themselves Irish, so it's high time). Its these elements that keep this book from being just another iteration of the same old formula, even as of course events build to the predictable climax of yet another famous grand scale battle on which the fate of Europe depends.

And another, more personal, battle as well, which is the best worst, or possibly the worst best, swordfight ever. You'll understand what I mean when I get to it. Yowza!

Patrick O'Brian's DESOLATION ISLAND

So I have final and ultimate proof that Patrick O'Brian is good for what ails you, especially when you're reading the Aubrey/Maturin novels in sequence and just happen to come up on one of your favorites just when you need it the most.

I'd been in another sneaky hate spiral, rage-quitting everything I picked up at the slightest provocation, even books to which I'd been looking forward. I was pretty sure this had nothing to do with their quality, or at least not very much, and everything to do with me. After all, I had just had to put my faithful companion of over 11 years, the Collie of Follie, to sleep and there is still a giant border collie-shaped hole in my home and my life and when I'm home and reading I've always had one hand on her fur.

But so cue Desolation Island, which is, as I've said already, one of my favorites in the Aubrey Maturin mega-series. This novel brings us one of Jack's most memorable ships (the horrible old Leopard), one of the crew's most interesting chases (fleeing the Dutch ship Waakzaamheid), one of the more interesting missions (to Australia, to help deal with the infamous Rum Rebellion against Governor William "Bounty" Bligh and introducing thereby the theme of mutiny, which delicately looms through the novel's various crises without ever really becoming overt), and one of Stephen's most interesting opponent/victims, Louisa Wogan, she of the slight resemblance to Stephen's faithless love interest, Diana, and of the "absurd gurgling laugh" and of the career as a sort of low-rent Aphra Behn.

It is around Wogan that most of the plot revolves; an American spy who got caught, she is sentenced to be transported to Australia, but the powers that be suspect she still has more valuable information to yield up, so instead of chucking her into an ordinary transportation hulk, she is to go on a Royal Navy ship -- the Leopard, under Jack Aubrey's command -- with enough additional prisoners to give her cover. En route, our man Dr. Stephen Maturin, naval surgeon and intelligence agent, is to be set to trick or otherwise extract this information from her. Sounds simple enough, and should be a piece of cake for our man Maturin, except for one giant fly in the ointment: gaol fever, aka typhus, brought on board by some of Wogan's camouflage-prisoners, quickly fatal to all of the people charged with the prisoners' care, including their doctor, and taking its toll on the Leopard's crew as well!

Nor is this their biggest problem as they make their ill-starred way to Australia. Undermanned and underprepared, they run afoul of the aforementioned Waakzaamheid, which I mention again just because it's fun to type "Waakzaamheid" and other hazards, leading them to the titular island and more peril! But it's all just a vehicle for Jack and Stephen to prove their ingenuity, their fitness to survive and command in their separate spheres, their ability to make do with whatever meager resources are at hand, their sheer awesomeness as characters and Men of the Early Nineteenth Century. Hooray!

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S FURY

There isn't a great deal of fury going on in this eleventh (chronologically) Richard Sharpe novel, but at this point it must have started getting difficult to come up with titles? Maybe?

At any rate, Sharpe's Fury is, well, another Sharpe novel, in which much the sort of thing that happens in other Sharpe novels, happens again. He survives the nearly fatal incompetence of yet another highly placed British officer and manages to distinguish himself in doing so. He gets suckered into a decidedly non-military assignment on which, potentially, the fate of the Peninsular War depends. He meets a pretty woman of loose morals at just the right between-lovers moment to enjoy her usually expensive favors for free. He earns grudging admiration and gratitude and makes new enemies. He ruffles allied feathers. He is Richard Sharpe in a Richard Sharpe novel.

The fun here is largely in the side plots, which in this novel take place largely in and around boats, as befits its overall setting of the Spanish city of Cadiz, one of Europe's oldest cities, almost completely surrounded by the sea, its inhabitants desperately afraid that their British allies are going to make it into another Gibraltar. Well, most of them are afraid; some of them are more concerned about fanning that fear for their own political ends, whether they be to make of Spain a throwback autocratic monarchy/theocracy or to liberate it as a republic (with or without the help of Napoleon) or to continue to enjoy its current state of near lawlessness and profit potential.

Which brings us back to the main plot, which has Henry Wellesley, brother of the Iron Duke and British envoy to Spain in his own right. Unhappily married, it is he who first and primarily enjoys the favors of this novel's token female, only to convince himself he's in love, pen her some very indiscreet letters in which he tries to show off and impress her and thereby gives the Brit-haters of Cadiz exactly the kind of ammunition they need to make Brit-haters of the whole of Cadiz.

Guess who gets to try to buy, steal or destroy those letters? Hint: one of them carries around a non-regulation sword and rose up from the ranks; another carries a seven-barreled volley gun and actually gets to use it a bit. And, you know, the rest of their friends.

But that's all just the middle third of the book, which is bookended with, what else, battles. The last third, in a bit of a departure for the Sharpe novels, is rather light on scenes that actually feature Sharpe, as even Bernard "I put my infantry bastard at Trafalgar" Cornwell had trouble working his hero into the Battle of Barrosa. Suffice it to say that while Sharpe was playing spy/thief, the rest of the British are channeling Buttercup's beloved: "We are men of action; lies do not become us."

Again, history knowledge acts as a spoiler for this stuff, so I'm proud of myself for avoiding that Wikipedia article until just now. And again, well, the Spanish do not come off so well, perhaps even worse than the last time they let their British allies down. Still, I have a new hero about whom I wish to learn more in Sir Thomas Graham. Wow, that guy.

Patrick O'Brian's THE MAURITIUS COMMAND

I'm realizing anew, this read-through of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, how much this series really depends on its fascinating array of guest stars, of which there are two in The Mauritius Command, both of great and sad importance: Captain Corbett, a vicious "flogging captain" whose idea of discipline is severe even by the standards of Nelson's navy, and Lord Clonfert, with whom Jack once served as a youngster but who hasn't done quite as well as Jack since. So, um, uh oh. We see trouble before we even meet the gentlemen in question.

We meet them on Jack and Stephen's latest mission, to take charge of a frigate, hang a commodore's broad pendant on it (thus signifying that Jack is, at long last, to command a squadron!) and head out to the African islands of Mauritius and La Reunion, there to take these potentially highly strategic islands away from the French, who are doing rather a half-assed job of using them as a base for action in the Indian Ocean. Consult a quality atlas if this confuses.

The action in The Mauritius Command highlights better than any we've seen so far just how much military vessels of this time period and since served as vast mobile artillery batteries. How else can ships take on an island? Float around and around in that effortless-looking way and unleash hell with the big guns on anything that looks like it might contain Frenchmen. Boom! And if the French are so bold and impetuous as to send out ships of their own to put a stop to this harassment, well, Commodore Lucky Jack Aubrey knows how to take care of those. This all goes off tolerably well, but for a couple problems, problems intimately tied in with the personalities of the two guest star captains I mentioned above. The trouble with Corbett is pretty straightforward; his crew are tired of getting fifty lashes every time a bit of tar plops down to mar the perfection of Corbett's decks and thus grow mutinous. The trouble with Clonfert....

Ah, Clonfert. Lord Clonfert is one of the most fascinatingly tragic characters O'Brian has written. A son of the Irish aristocracy -- who are not considered Irish by the Irish and are not considered real aristocrats by the rest of their class in the U.K. -- he's already got a chip on his shoulder before Jack shows up on the scene. Once Jack does, Clonfert pretty much loses it (and he's bi-polar to boot, I should mention; his crew are used to his mood swings and tolerate them because sailors "dearly love a Lord", but Stephen and Clonfert's own surgeon spend a lot of the novel shaking their heads over Clonfert's case) and mounts an all-out campaign to prove that he's just as good as his old shipmate, with disastrous results.

Fortunately, even as Jack is dealing with the consequences of having Corbett and Clonfert under his command, he is also working closely with an army colonel that is an infantry version of Jack himself, the capable and vaguely Sharpe-like Colonel Keating. Together they manage to overcome most of the obstacles created by the fractious captains. Most of them.

For of course, no officer, however capable, has any control over what his superiors say or do, or where they show up, just in time to steal his thunder. Feeling outraged on Jack's behalf is, however, all part of the fun of reading these novels.

And fun they most certainly are!

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S ESCAPE

I am now officially obsessed with the Lines of Torres Vedras. Which is hilarious, since I'd never even heard of the Lines of Torres Vedras until a few weeks ago, when I read a highly fictionalized/romanticized version of one possible way those amazing fortification/lines of defense/great big military things were built and paid for in Sharpe's Gold. Now in Sharpe's Escape, I get a closer look at what they were for and how they were intended to -- and actually did -- work.

The principle, basically, is this: build two all but nation-spanning lines of forts and earthworks and walls that keep your enemies from reaching a desirable target, say, the city of Lisbon, and then, quickly before said enemy arrives, practice the most severe scorched earth campaign you possibly can. There must be no food or potable water of any kind anywhere. Armies march on their stomachs, and Napoleon didn't like big bellies so made his armies raid for their suppers. No big vulnerable supply trains from France for Boney! His soldiers must root, hog, or die. Which makes them vulnerable to a plan like the Lines of Torres Vedras, which is basically meant to starve them out if they can't be killed any more quickly. Phew!

And this is not just historical color here, for the plot of Sharpe's Escape is intimately concerned with this plan. Sharpe starts off the novel with an encounter with a Portuguese officer and the officer's brother and their stash of contraband flour they've been planning to sell to the French; he makes a grudging admirer of the former and a bitter enemy of the latter when he foils this plan and destroys the flour. Because what Sharpe needed most of all was another enemy, and this one a great big ruthless brute of a man, a true bastard who could almost be a combination of Sharpe himself and his giant Irish Sergeant, Pat Harper. Except, you know, not funny. Subsequent acts repeat and enlarge on this theme as it turns out the Portuguese duo, even though their country is being invaded by the French and the British are their allies in trying to fight the French off, have an even bigger plan to provide the French with even more food!

It is in the midst of foiling that second, bigger version of this novel's treason plot that Sharpe finds himself in need of an escape, which takes him through a Roman sewer that is still in very foul and recent use in the company of his old friend Jorge Vincente (a Portuguese good guy), Sgt. Harper, a feisty Portuguese woman they've saved from rape, and a pretty Englishwoman who used to be a tutor to the children of the bad Portuguese officer and who Sharpe has also spared from rape. She doesn't like Sharpe too much at first, but ah, doesn't he know how to show a girl a good time?:

"Something strange had happened to her in the last few minutes, as if by undressing and lowering herself into a sewer she had let go of her previous life, of her precarious but determined grip on respectability, and let herself drop into a world of adventure and irresponsibility. She was, suddenly and unexpectedly, happy."

 And now we know the secret of the old Sharpe charm. I wonder how many unacknowledged little Sharpes there wound up being in addition to the daughter he had with Lady Whossername from Sharpe's Trafalgar? I'm sorry, it's lazy and shallow of me, but Sharpe's Chicks are legion and I'm not in the mood to sift through the roster just now.

Anyway, there was nothing in this novel to contradict Dave Slusher's Sharpe Trek theory, and that's fine with me. These are fine adventure stories, and I continue to love and fear their hero devotedly. But no, I would not be one of Sharpe's Chicks. Not in the days before penicillin and whatnot.

Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. SURPRISE #ReReads2013

It's interesting, isn't it, that these novels appear to have been marketed originally as "Jack Aubrey novels" (see first edition cover art to the left). But where, oh where, would Jack Aubrey be without Don Esteban Maturin y Domanova, better known as good old Dr. Stephen Maturin, Spock to Aubrey's Kirk if ever there was one.

As it happens, we get a pretty good idea as this novel opens, finding Jack alone in acting command of the crack frigate Lively, which he admires and enjoys only in principle -- likening it internally to a brother's officer's wife, elegant and chaste and living her life according to sound scientific principles. Not very sexy, but not a slovenly waste of wood and canvas, either. He is alone in command because Stephen, revealed last novel as a valued secret agent, is on assignment and, as it tuns out, in peril, because the new First Lord of the Admiralty blundered into mentioning him by name in a public meeting (Plamegate, anyone?), a remarkable thing that did not go unremarked by enemy agents!

So while in Post Captain both Jack and Stephen engaged in a ridiculous dual escape, in H.M.S. Surprise the former starts off the story enacting a rescue of the latter, who was captured on one of his spy missions, in deadly earnest. That it is from the very island where they met --Minorca, Port Mahon, since fallen into the hands of the Spanish who are, in 1804, allied with France (the French turned on them in 1808), makes it all the more poignant and interesting. It's a very broken and battered Stephen who joins the Surprise's crew, and his ordeal is far from over: no sooner is he aboard than he's itching to get off the ship again to go explore a rock in the middle of the sea, a rock teeming with bird and insect life the likes of which might well be nondescript, in the old fashioned phrase*, which, this is Patrick O'Brian, so everything gets an old fashioned phrase at some point.

And that's just the first act!

Really, I generally think that if one is, for some unfathomable reason, going to read just one Aubrey/Maturin novel it should probably be this one, because it packs pretty much everything we love about O'Brian's creations into one dense little book -- staggering geographical scope (England to Minorca to India to Africa to...!), slapstick escapes/rescues, hot naval battle action (this time with a fleet of merchant ships having to fight like military vessels, with Jack having to engage in hard core diplomacy as well as seat-of-his-pants strategizing to pull it off), charming/brutal scenes of shipboard life, and perils ashore in love and war. Especially in love. Poor Stephen. Poor Jack. But mostly, in this novel, poor Stephen, for Diana Villiers leads him quite a merry chase all over India and beyond; he even winds up fighting a duel over her.** And then there's Dil. Ah, Dil.

And hey, everybody, it's okay. I still have a heart. I know this because once again the story of Dil, the wise-beyond-her-years little girl in Bombay who adopts Stephen and more or less keeps him out of trouble during his wanderings there -- she considers him a sort of idiot saint who can probably fly if he chooses, but would definitely fly the wrong way if not smack into something and knock himself out -- still makes me tear up. I picture her as being played by Sarala Kariyawasam. Brilliantly. Except Sarala might have been too cute. Ah, me.

*Meaning "not yet described" rather than "not worth describing because it's so boring" as we tend to use the term nowadays.

**And getting wounded. And surgically removing a pistol ball from his own gut in a scene wonderfully depicted in the film adaptation of Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World but in the film his wound is gotten quite, quite differently. And much less tragically.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S GOLD

I've never been more eager to see a TV/movie adaptation of a novel as I am that of Sharpe's Gold. This is not because of its quality, which is fair to middling as Sharpe novels go.* Rather, it's because I'm dying of curiosity as to how the continuity problem is going to be handled.

The continuity problem named Teresa Moreno, whom I've already seen played to dashing perfection by the great Assumpta Serna in the TV movies of Sharpe's Rifles and Sharpe's Eagle. Even though her character didn't belong in them. Ahem.

Of course, I didn't realize until I got to this book what a problem she was going to pose, as this, Sharpe's Gold, is the novel wherein Sharpe and Teresa meet, and it's not at all cute. Sharpe has been directed to go collect rather a lot of Spanish gold that was moved to a sort-of-safe place until it could be paid out to the Spanish army -- their wages -- but then the Spanish army got its collective posterior well and truly kicked by the French and there basically isn't one anymore. There are just guerrillas (and I just this second noticed that this word basically translates into something like "mini-war"), known as the Partisans, herding sheep and growing barley by day, making life hell on earth for the French by night, sleeping, uh... sometime?

A family of them is more or less guarding the gold, in the family crypt, until what's left of the Spanish government figures out what to do with it and how to transport it to where it's needed.** Except said government has pretty much farmed that task out to the British, who have, via the newly made Lord Wellesley, in turn farmed it out to one Richard Sharpe, killer of men, destroyer of armies, hopeless dimwit when confronted with a pretty face (or, in this case, a girl with the guts and the looks to lead the French army away from her men by running naked through the night).

But see, the Partisans don't trust the British. And Teresa's fiance is chief of the Partisans thereabouts. And may also have some ideas of his own about what to do with that gold.

So next thing we know, Teresa is a hostage. Who doesn't seem to think much of Sharpe. Whom she has just met. But in the TV movies, in the movies, they've already made whoopie and promises. Quite a lot.

So as I said, for this one, I'm mostly interested in seeing how the whole Teresa plot gets handled for the little screen. My guess is the fiance will just turn out to be an ex-lover and there will be no side-switching and whatnot. Which will be duller than this novel was.

But maybe I'm wrong. Because there is plenty to enjoy aside from the Teresa plot, of course. I can't wait to see that great German brute, Helmut, in action, for instance. Because anyone Pat Harper regards as a big ol' monster is going to be something to see, a veritable Hodor, except trained with the sabre. Zowie!

And also, one of my favorite minor characters dying. Le sigh.

And also, Alameida. Which, OMG Alameida.

*Meaning it's still a damned fine book, but there have been better ones. I still like all the India books better than any of the Peninsular ones, so far, and this one didn't change my mind. And Sharpe's Havoc is still the best of the Peninsular War novels I've read.

**This, of course, reminds me of the bit with the heaps of Nazi war gold in the middle of the Philippine jungle in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and of Goto Dengo's observation that "gold is the corpse of value." But unlike that gold, Sharpe's gold is needed for a mind-blowingly epic purpose, in one of Cornwell's neatest weaving of history and fiction and speculation I've yet seen. Well done!

Patrick O'Brian's POST CAPTAIN #ReReads2013

The perils of life ashore are many and varied if you are Jack Aubrey, Master & Commander in His Majesty's Navy ca. 1802. Post Captain, the second Aubrey/Maturin novel (and one of the funniest) seems to exist to detail them all.Or at least a whole lot of them.

Chief among these perils is that you might be trapped in a bit of Jane Austen-flavored courtship porn* for a good third of your novel. You might take a house to share with your shipmates and start thinking of starting a hunting pack when all of a sudden you run right into a pretty face. A pretty face with a wickedly grasping, calculating mother who is the chief reason that pretty face is still unmarried. But because you're only a dashing, commanding, formidable figure on the deck of a ship, you might be helpless and kind of thick when confronted with this pair. And if the pretty face has a pretty widowed cousin who is well on her way to being something of a courtesan for you to pursue as well, even though your best friend kind of likes her, too, well!

All that's going to be enough to drive your typical naval action, Napoleonic War-fixated O'Brian fan just a little batty, although it is nice to see that O'Brian conjured up some female characters that could more than hold their own against our sea captain and his physician friend. And I do mean more than hold their own! The boys are dished, simply dished, in their company, kind of hilariously helpless, mostly because they've not been prepared to deal with the likes of Sophie Williams and her awful mother, of Diana Villiers. These are future wives, and their presence changes these stories forever, and it's good to see how these relationships came to pass, but ugh, courtship porn.

Fortunately, the Seamen & Senselessness side of the story is more or less over relatively quickly, due to Jack's having run right into an even greater peril: debt. Houses and horses and country balls at which girls can look pretty and dance cost money, money Jack didn't quite have secured. He did many wonderful and potentially lucrative things in Master & Commander, but note that "potentially." His fortune was still vulnerable to legal and political maneuverings. What if, well let's not call them bad guys, let's call them other interests, won out against Jack?

Before we know it, he and Stephen are fleeing to Spain-by-way-of-France, but an end to the Peace of Amiens means they must make a hasty and rather ludicrous** overland escape from France to Spain. And then find their way back home because now that the peace is over, Jack can go back to work as a dashing naval captain and make some money to pay off his creditors. They don't call him Lucky Jack Aubrey for nothing, right?

Well, about that.

Because while Jack has been learning the perils of lubberdom, the Royal Navy has been experimenting with lunacy in the form of building a ship that can launch a giant rocket capable of destroying an enemy ship a mile away. And then scrapping the rocket idea after the lunatic inventor gets himself blown up the first time it's tested. But then building the ship anyway, because of reasons. Said ship being hailed as the "Carpenter's Mistake" and featuring all sorts of fangled notions like sliding keels and other nautical nonsense that makes it instantly recognizable from a distance and, as her captain will learn shortly, a horror to try to maneuver.

Guess who the captain of "that wicked Polychrest" is going to be?

But Lucky Jack isn't just lucky; he knows what he's doing, and while what he's doing looks quite comical to his fellows -- at one point a good friend on meeting the Polychrest at sea signals by way of alphabetical flags a reference to a line in psalms about delighting not in the strength of one's horse -- he actually finds a way to sail the thing, and even manages to fight an action with it that does everyone proud -- everyone except for his admiral, that same Harte with whose wife Jack meddled last novel.

Meanwhile, we get a satisfying look at Dr. Maturin's life when he is not playing music with Jack, or patching up Jack's crew, or gawking at seabirds from the deck of Jack's ship; Stephen is a secret agent! Whose achievements in that area wind up having direct bearing on what Jack gets to do after he's finished with the Polychrest! Huzzah!

My only regret with regards to this novel is its lack of news of my favorite subsidiary characters, for while Bonden and Preserved Killick and Tom Pullings and Babbington get to join in a touch of the fun, mostly because, well, someone has to be there, where is dear Mowett? Padeen, the Hodor of the Aubrey/Maturin books, we have not met yet but already I long for him. But that's part of the fun of re-reading these books, meeting everyone anew and then just anticipating their moments of glory.

There's plenty of that to go around, in over 20 novels.

*Please note that in saying this I do not mean to cast aspersions on Ms. Austen or her stories, though they are not to my taste. I simply don't think that "the masculine side of a bit of Jane Austen courtship porn"† is something anyone goes looking for. Prove me wrong?

†Courtship porn = any story in which the courtship, usually leading to marriage, is the only point of it to the exclusion of pretty much anything else, whether the participants in said courtship are willing or not. It's a genre (or would it be a subgenre?) that I find tiresome. Courtship stories are fine and good, but they need to be part of something larger to tempt me.

**Okay, actually very ludicrous.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S EAGLE

I don't often encounter historical/military novels that themselves have a strong sense of prior history the way that Sharpe's Eagle has, for the Roman Empire strongly permeates the book, especially in its opening chapters.

We open with Sharpe and his rifle company* being drafted into yet another weird little scheme. An ancient Roman bridge crossing the river Tagus, a bridge that has stood strong for hundreds of years, has to go for strategic reasons, and Sharpe's friend and sort-of-commander, Captain Hogan, is the engineer who's going to do it. All fine and dandy. But the mission comes with certain... accompaniments.

A right upper class twit of a politically connected jerk has raised a brand new regiment back home and dedicated them to the cause in Spain and Portugal, and they're coming along in all their finery and splendor. The upper class twit thinking that it's more important that his soldiers look well than fight well and all, it's a pretty useless regiment but one that, maybe with some seasoning, might do all right if their Colonel, one Sir Henry Simmerson, doesn't get them killed first. Anyway, they're coming along for the bridge blowing party.

But because this is Spain and everything here is a matter of hidalgo honor, so is a fancy Spanish regiment, even shinier and fancier and more useless than the British noobs. "Hell's teeth," one of Sharpe's men observes on the approach of these military fops. "The fairies are on our side."

So, the early mission turns out not to be so straightforward after all. And that's before the French show up. Which shouldn't be a problem, as it's obvious to Sharpe it's a classic calvary vs infantry standoff, wherein no one has sufficient advantage to make it worthwhile to attack. Alas, this is not so obvious to the Colonel or his Spanish counterpart, who, in a scene of prolonged hilarity, pretty much provoke the French into massacre. And lose the regimental colors (the physical embodiment of a regiment's honor and pride the way a Roman legion's eagle was back in the day, and what the French still use for this purpose ca the early 1800s, and now the title of this novel makes all the sense in the world, don't it?) into the bargain.

That's all prologue. It establishes a new enemy for Sharpe in Colonel Simmerson, who needs a scapegoat for his enormous blunder and finds Sir Arthur Wellesley's favorite gotten-up, up-from-the-ranks officer a perfect candidate as much because Sharpe is a protege of Wellesley's as because Sharpe disobeyed an order in the middle of the debacle that was essentially for him and his men to commit suicide and make the French win all the faster (instead, Sharpe rescued one of Simmerson's colors and captured a French cannon, because Sharpe is awesome). When Wellesley promotes Sharpe to Captain and gives him command of a Battalion of Detachments, consisting of odds-and-ends groups like Sharpe's own fragment of a rifle company, and puts the survivors of Simmerson's regiment in that new Battalion, he's just painted the biggest political bullseye ever on Sharpe's back, and Sharpe is, of course, the last guy who'd ever want to be entangled in any politics at all. Especially the kind that can result in his being yanked out of the Peninsular War and deployed to the West Indies, to likely die of a tropical disease within a year of his arrival!

But so there's only one thing Sharpe can do to redeem himself from the results of his badassery: something even more badass, something no one has managed to do in this war: capture a French Eagle.

And of course he'll have to do this in one of the Peninsular War's biggest battles.

With Simmerson and his underlings (including an odious nephew, who is, of course, fighting with Sharpe over, of course, a beautiful woman) in tow.

And even more useless Spaniards mucking things up. Seriously, the Spanish army does not come off well in this novel! When they're not cocking up minor actions being show-offs, they're delaying major actions by oversleeping and letting the French gather up even more forces. And then there's bits like this, describing the aftermath of an ill-planned bout of shooting at some out-of-range Frenchmen:

For a second Sharpe thought the Spanish were cheering their own victory over the innocent grass but suddenly he realised the shouts were not of triumph, but of alarm. They had been scared witless by their own volley, by the thunder of ten thousand muskets, and now they ran for safety. Thousands streamed into the olive trees, throwing away muskets, trampling the fires in their panic, screaming for help, heads up, arms pumping, running from their own noise.

 I bet Spanish readers hate this book.**

But I, I loved it. I'm in serious danger, folks, between this and my re-read of the Aubrey/Maturin books, of making this as much a Summer of Napoleonic War Stories as a Summer of Jest!

Though I do sometimes wish Sharpe would stop taking justice into his own hands. Dude has almost as much cold blood on them as hot. Not cool, Richard. Not cool. As it were. Um. Please don't hurt me.

*Now a seriously rag-tag bunch of military orphans, whose regiment is back in England and who therefore cannot get new uniforms or boots or gear of any kind, even from the plentiful other fighting recipients of the King's Shilling who are still on the Iberian Peninsula, because no one wants to take on the bureaucratic headaches that would ensue if Sharpe's boys were given kit out of some other regiment's or division's stores.

**But, as Cornwell informs us in his traditional historical afterword, that incident really happened.

Patrick O'Brian's MASTER AND COMMANDER #ReReads2013

Caveat lector: this is another re-read, of one of my favorite series ever, so 'ware gushing ahead.

Much as I love the Sharpe novels -- and it should be pretty obvious that I do by now -- there is as yet no danger that they shall supplant Patrick O'Brian's magnificent Aubrey/Maturin series in my heart, even though by all rights, as a landlubber, I should probably have more sympathy for the proper bastard infantryman than for this naval captain his best friend and ship's surgeon and their little wooden world. But there is more to Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin than their offical roles in Admiral Nelson's navy. Oh so much more.

The pair's meeting at a concert in Port Mahon has to be one of the greatest literary meetings of all time. For much of the first scene they seem likely to come to blows, but both were brought up better than that; both have been taught that manners and courtesy are most especially due where there is dislike, and it is manners and courtesy, ultimately, that triumph and let them see one another's better qualities very quickly. Well, manners and courtesy and a stroke of well-deserved good fortune on Jack's part, for I doubt much beyond a nice dinner could have come of this meeting had not Jack "gotten his step" -- promotion to Master & Commander, and command of a vessel, and the impulse to invite his new acquaintance along on his first cruise.

What follows does not so much have a grand overall plot as a series of smaller plots enacted in succession: after the Meeting there is the Shakedown Cruise on Jack's first command, the Sophie; then there are their Early Successes; then the Taking of the Shore Battery; the famous action with the wonderfully named Spanish frigate Cacafuego*; the Encounter Where Too Much Is Bitten Off to Chew:, etc. This makes this first in the series a bit of an unfortunate leader, and I see that many readers have been sufficiently put off by its odd structure so as not to want to continue with the other books and to be baffled by the enthusiasm of people like me. But come on, think of it as a cheese course: Lots of little samples that give a taste of what's to come!

But so far there is little in my description to indicate why these novels stand out from the pack of novels set during the Napoleonic wars, set in Nelson's navy, set on the high seas (though really, the relationship between Jack and Stephen is key; they are Kirk and Spock in saltwater-stained canvas, these two). For me a lot of the fun is the language, though I must confess to being at times bewildered by it, having constantly to refer to the diagram towards the front to keep all the different sails and yards straight in my head, to say nothing of the differences between a sloop and a snow and a poleacre and a... but that's not really what I mean about the language, which shines most in the dialogue; even in life-or-death situations where terseness and clarity are of the utmost importance, their speech is still highly mannered, even formal. I'm not sure anyone in Nelson's navy ever really spoke that way, but I'm not sure they didn't, either. I am separated from that world by so very, very much that I cannot be sure, but it does not matter. I simply enjoy.

Part of the fun of re-reading this series from the beginning is getting my first glimpses of various characters in their, as it were, larval stages. I know what's in store for them and marvel at the journey they'll take. It's like getting a chance to see your best friends as little children. Little children firing four-pounders and scrubbing the deck with holystones and climbing precariously high into the air and slashing at enemies with cutlasses and sabers and getting their skulls trephined, but little children all the same. And through it all, there are Jack and Stephen, here still feeling each other out, in awe of each other, not sure how much trust they may extend to one another (but needing to extend much; Stephen is a complete lubber constantly in danger of committing horrible breaches of naval etiquette when he's not in danger of getting a clout on the head or falling down a hatch or getting blown overboard; Jack newly in command and discovering for the first time that it's even lonelier than he'd always suspected), playing the violin and cello in the captain's quarters of an evening and eating ridiculously named food together: soused hog's face, lobscouse and spotted dog (the latter two dishes featuring in the title of a cookbook by which you, too, could eat like an O'Brian sailor, though I suspect these recipes are light on mold and weevils).

Then again, the other thing that really makes these novels work is the other characters, those outside or apart from Jack and Stephen's core crew. Here the two most important ones are doozies: Molly Harte and James Dillon. Molly is the wife of Port Mahon's commandant, a lovely woman, a harp player, and already Jack's paramour as the novel opens. Their liaison causes most of the troubles that follow in this first outing; the cuckholded husband holds just enough power to make life very difficult for Jack and his crew. Meanwhile, James Dillon, Jack's new lieutenant on his first command, is a figure from the Irish/Spanish Stephen's past among the rebels of Ireland. James and Stephen spend the first part of the novel avoiding each other, afraid each of being denounced; later it's Jack who has problems with James, whose guilty conscience and high dudgeon keep them from becoming friends until it's almost too late.

And now permit me a happy sigh, for I get to read all the rest of the books again now, as easy as kiss-my-hand, joy. Bring on Post Captain! Again! Again!

*I dare you not to mentally translate that as referring to burning excrement.

Bernard Cornwell's SHARPE'S HAVOC

Starting with a desperate evacuation of a town as an invading French army completes its conquest of northern Portugal and a pontoon bridge fails and sends hundreds of civilians to their crushed, watery deaths and ending with a freakily similar battle at another bridge in which the French receive more than a little poetic justice, Sharpe's Havoc is a hell of a fine read, like all of these books are.

It's a funny old thing, though, reading a series like Bernard Cornwell's Richard Sharpe books. But then again, the Sharpe books are rather a funny old series. For originally, there were just a few of these, and they were all set during and in the midst of the Peninsular War. Then they got very popular, so popular that they were adapted for television. The TV show, featuring the awesome likes of Sean Bean and Pete Postlethwaite and David Troughton, was very popular as well, so popular that there grew to be demand for more Sharpe books and TV adaptations of those books and somewhere in the middle of all of this came the notion that perhaps some prequel novels detailing Sharpe's pre-Napoleonic adventures might go over well and...

The result is a great heap of prose books that may be likened unto a long and convoluted run of a Big Two superhero comic book, rich with minutia and ret-conning and related geek-bait (the geeks in question this time being military history buffs, and damned if Cornwell isn't turning me into one of those. I found myself doting over the details of how Baker rifles work and the finer points of using case shot [and learning where the term "shrapnel" came from]), daunting in the extreme for the newcomer, who has two basic choices in how to approach this mass of material:* in publication order, or in chronological order. Choose publication order and you're going to be all over the place, historically speaking, starting out on the Peninsula in the middle of the Talavera Campaign in 1809, proceeding more or less chronologically for a while, but pretty soon you're lurching back and forth in time as though you had a TARDIS, not coming to, say, our man's adventures in India in  1799 until you've read a whole lot of novels. The thought of that makes my brain hurt a little, so I opted to read the novels in chronological order. As I've mentioned elsewhere, the fact that said order begins in India made that choice even more appealing.

But reading chronologically is not without its perils, too. While I'm sure the publication order readers just see an ever ascending level of quality in the writing, the characterizations, the battle scenes, etc. as they move on in the series, we chronological readers must weather lots of unexpected peaks and valleys, not to mention what seem like glaring omissions (for instance, last novel, Sharpe's Rifles, contained no references to Lady Grace, whom Sharpe wooed and won in the middle of the battle of Trafalgar, because when SR was written she had not yet been written into existence and readers are presented with a Sharpe that seems to have little experience with women except as casual whores, which is jarring for those of us who have read our man's Indian adventures and seen him happily, if still somewhat temporarily, paired with many lovely ladies). But we weather them happily, because Sharpe is awesome.

But so, Sharpe's Havoc is very much a case in point. It takes place not long after the events chronicled in SR, but while SR is a very early book (though still not the very first; the very first Sharpe novel is... the next one after SH in the chronological list), presenting Sharpe as greener and less confident than we've gotten used to seeing him, SH was written some 20 odd years later, after Cornwell had written many more novels, including the Indian prequels, and developed his firm and masterful command of the art of writing a Sharpe story.

Which is to say that from my perspective, SH looks to be one of the best, if not the best, of the Sharpe novels, and certainly my favorite since Sharpe's Fortress, the best of the three India books. Sharpe is 100% Sharpe, smart, capable, cunning, sometimes cruel, stubborn and devastatingly creative, qualities he desperately needs as he struggles not only against the French, against the deprivations and duties of wartime abroad, but also against the machinations of yet another turncoat superior officer. His main foe this time around, Colonel Christopher, can't hold a candle to Major Dodd in the scary-danger department being more of a political schemer and a misguided idealist, but that makes him all the more actually dangerous to Sharpe**, who can handle any jerk on the battlefield or in skirmishes of all sorts, but who is still pretty rough and clueless when it comes to society and the way it works -- or is supposed to work.

And of course, Christopher is far from Sharpe's only problem. His men are still cut off from the rest of their regiment and sort of juking their way through the war at Arthur Wellesley's whim. The Iberian peninsula is crawling with French soldiers. The ordinary people are unreliable; many passionately committed to maintaining their independence from Napoleon's empire but ill-trained and ill-equipped and looking to people like Sharpe to make up for their deficiencies. Generals and other superiors have high expectations for him, too, but are a bit out of touch with what he's dealing with, sometimes by nature, sometimes due to circumstances, and sometimes because of Christopher's machinations. And then there's the novel's Girl, this time the pretty young heiress to a British wine dynasty who has grown up in Portugal and refuses to leave it despite the danger. Thank goodness Sharpe is too busy to do the predictable by her, this time around, at least.

Does SH feel at times a bit formulaic? Yes, yes it does at times. Cornwell is going back to the same wells - turncoat officers, pretty women in need of rescue but not entirely helpless (thus even more attractive to Sharpe), natives/partisans of both kinds: noble/proud and gutless/scheming, big sweeping battle scenes and expertly presented representations of the ordinary soldier's life - but they're good wells to go back to, yielding high quality stuff every time. It's still mostly fresh, here, but as I read, part of me sort of longed to go back to the unevenness and occasional roughness of the earlier books as being more likely to have actual surprises in store for me. Here, everybody seems just a little embalmed. Consummately embalmed, but embalmed all the same.

Despite that, SH is a fantastic read, amusing, emotional, bloody and thrilling. If I haven't convinced you to give Sharpe a try by now, seven books into the series, I despair of you. I really do. It's everything most of my people read books for and then some.

*Well, perhaps three, if you want to count just reading them in any random order. Or many more than three if you want to treat every possible reading order as a separate choice. But come on.

**Though dude, do not make off with Sharpe's telescope, a gift from Sir Arthur Wellesley he has cherished since receiving it (and his battlefield commission) on saving the future Iron Duke's life back in India.