The Lone Warrior

The Lone Warrior
© 2016 Paul Fraser Collard
384 pages

The time for grand strategy was over. The moment had come to put faith in an Enfield rifle, a steel bayonet and the exhausted and bloodied soldier who stood behind it.

Jack Lark is a free man,  and restored to his old name.   Although he’s proven himself a warrior,  his skillful bloodlust in battle unnerves him, and that combined with his general disgust with the  army in India,   see him looking for a boat home. That was the plan, anyway.  Enter a new sweetheart, though, and a mutiny that imperils her, her mother, and every Englisher or Indian associate thereof sweeps the subcontinent, and Jack is back in uniform. The Lone Warrior follows Lark throughout the great mutiny of 1857,   in which  pent-up outrage  spurred on by allegations of religious abuse  turns into a country-wide war that threatens to destroy Jack and all those he loves and admires.     The story is much grimmer than usual, with evidence of child murder and mentions of rape as the mutiny turns into a general civil war. Still, as with The Devil’s Assassin, the novel ends with Lark in a very interesting spot, making me want to read on. 

The mutiny catches most everyone by surprise; Lark’s first hints of danger are fired villages on the horizon, and the arrival of raucous, disheveled troops in the city who appear leaderless.   At first the mutiny seems like a local affair that will be put to rights soon enough, but as it spreads,  Jack and other British soldiers find themselves in the middle of fighting retreats,  routs, or sieges.  Jack is in constant danger , losing  much along the way, and his residual faith in the Cause and in his fellow man is constantly eroded by the horrific abuses of human life he sees perpetuated by both the Brits and the Indians, who by the late novel are also fighting between themselves in the sudden power vacuum created by the empire’s retreat.    Another area of interest in The Lone Warrior is the presence of two officers who were historic personalities, their characters based on the conflicting literature about them.  They’re far more complex than usual as a result, worthy of both admiration and contempt at times.   Jack ends the novel wholly sick of it all, but considering how many novels are left,  obviously something drives him back to stand under the flag. I’ll  just have to see what!

The Devil's Assassin

The Devil's Assassin
© 2015 Paul Fraser Collard
336 pages

 

Jack was filled with the madness. He could feel it searing through his veins. It resonated deep in his soul, every fibre of his being tingling with the insanity of galloping against an enemy horde. The regiment raced forward, their voices roaring out as the men unleashed the cheer saved for this moment. The last yards flashed past and the 3rd Bombay Light Cavalry charged into action.

Following the events of The Maharajah’s General,,  in which Jack Lark’s false identity was exposed but the parties involved silenced by  war, Lark is now a freewheeling rogue, keeping his distance from those who’d recognize him and pretending to be an officer on leave, free to enjoy the pleasures of cities like Bombay.   Though away from the fighting, Jack can’t escape his deceit,  and when he’s cornered and kidnapped by a man working for a secretive British intelligence officer known as the Devil,    his career takes an interesting turn. 

It’s the eve of battle in Central Asia. The once free city of Herat has been suddenly occupied by the Shah of Persia,  in violation  of a treaty and destabilizing the balance of power  between the Empire,   Persia, and Russia in the region.   The army is being organized to go forth and show the flag,  hoping the Shah will withdraw, but what few know is that there’s a leak: someone is keeping the Persians informed  of English troop movements, and the level of fine detail means they’re in the camp itself.    Rooting out rival spies is just the work for the Devil, who drafts Jack and threatens to expose him as a fraud if he doesn’t cooperate.   Despite his acquired talent for deceit, Jack is more at home on the battlefield than he is fishing for information in cloak and dagger affairs.  

The Devil’s Assassin is both a spy novel and a war novel, and largely successful on both ends.  The running battle between the British Expeditionary Force and the Persians takes up most of the middle, as the forces engage and break off. It’s purely a cavalry affair, too, spurred on by the British need to rout the Persians before they build up their strength in the area.  Although the Devil  recruited Lark on his talent for disguise and pretense,   a gift for subterfuge doesn’t necessarily make a good counterintelligence agent – as the Devil learns when Lark runs off on the first rumor he hears and nearly beats a man to death, so disrupting the investigation to no good effect that he and the Devil are both told to leave finding the spy or the spy ring up to naval intelligence.     I’d pinned the spy fairly early on, or thought I did: there’s a little twist where the great reveal proves to still be leaving part of the story in the shadow, so while I was far closer to the target than Lark,   I wasn’t quite there.     

Looking ahead I see Lark has found himself in the midst of the Great Mutiny, the American Civil War, and...the....Wild....West?   Obviously I’ll continue to follow!  

The Maharajah's General

The Maharajah's General
© 2013 Paul Fraser Collard
339 pages

In The Scarlet Thief, an ambitious but impoverished redcoat saw a way for himself out of the gutter when the officer he served as an orderly became deathly ill on a sea voyage to Crimea.  Assuming the officer’s name and position, Lark launched himself from the ranks – and found that becoming a leader of men was far more different than mocking officers from the ranks, even aside from the challenges of polite society.  But when Lark arrives in Crimea, he finds that news of his ‘demise’ has preceded him. A pat explanation may put  away suspicion for the moment, but the charade is bound to unravel, and when it does the soldier wrestling with his conscience will find himself wrestling with his loyalties, too.   Can he find a way back into the good graces of the army he loves, but which despises him – or will he find glory by serving an  a foreign king, one who resists the increasing British control of India?  

The original novel based on Lark’s fraud saw him thrown into the Battle of the Alma, where he floundered before finally finding his way. Here, the kingdom involved, and the sustained siege and battle at the end, are fictitious, albeit loosely based on the India mutiny of 1857 and meant perhaps as a prelude to them.  Combat peppers the novels, as even before the British and the defiant maharajah meet in battle,  Lark encounters brigands in the wilderness. The finale certainly commands attention, but more unexpectedly interesting was Lark continually wrestling with himself:  he doesn’t like living a lie, even though it’s a fairly harmless one. He is a good officer in a fight,  proving himself to men on both sides of the line:  even those who want him dead admired his skill with a sword. (His skills on a horse...not so much.)  But that acclaim is part of the problem, as Lark wonders if he’s good for anything other than killing.  He can win glory in battle, but a life? 

The Maharjah’s General proved far more interesting than I’d expected, and it ends with Lark in an unexpected position. I’ll have to try The Devil’s Assassin to see where this path takes him.  Although there are certain elements of the plot that are...implausible (like a man with no horseback experience being appointed as commander of the lancers on the strength of his performance during an ambush), but Lark is an unusual character, and he combined with the setting and Collard's writing override occasional quirks. 

Related:
The Scarlet Thief, Paul Fraser Collard
The Sharpe in India books, Bernard Cornwell. The link is to a list of British Historical Fiction; all the India books are under the Age of Discovery and Early Empire category.

The Scarlet Thief

The Scarlet Thief 
© 2013 Paul Fraser Collard
352 pages

Captain Arthur Sloames stepped off the boat with a terrible secret.  He wore on his shoulders the coat of a dead man.  When his transport left England, he was but Jack Lark -- a crushed and anxious common soldier whose ambition had led him to become an officer's aide. That officer perished of fever en route to a new command, however, and seizing on the opportunity Lark has assumed the man's identity.  It's not as if he can do worse than the stuffed shirts leading the army now, after all -- but faced against Russian cossacks and massed artillery, Lark soon realizes being the man who gives the orders is never so simple.   As mobs of uniformed men are thrown into battle against one another, Lark is doubly challenged: first,   to survive the brutal opening of the Crimean war, doing right  by his men; and to maintain his charade surrounded by officers who are not nearly as dimwitted as they appear from a distance.

Imagine the frantic action of a Bernard Cornwell novel, but with the humor drastically downplayed; that's the general feeling here, as Fraser is just as good at thrusting readers into the heart of battle and keeping the pages flying by.  The working-class character suddenly turned officer is very reminiscent of Sharpe's backstory, though Lark's promotion is one of stolen valor -- or rather, borrowed, because Lark may pose as an officer but he's a courageous soldier  who doesn't shy from leading his men from the front.  What he leads them into is not always advisable, but it wouldn't be a novel without disasters to test characters and learn from.   There are enemies both foreign and domestic; there are the Russians, of course, but Lark is also dogged by an old enemy who has inexplicably turned up in Crimea as well.

What will make Jack Lark stand out, I think, is not so much his similarities to Sharpe, but how very different his story will become.  The novels to come take Lark to India, Persia, and beyond, with roles beyond the battlefield.  I'm  especially intriuged by the idea of an English soldier fighting for the Shah.