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.

Metropolis

Metropolis
© 2019 Phillp Kerr
384 pages

At the height of Weimar decadence, young Bernie Gunther is invited to join the Murder Commission. It’s a step up from Vice, and the department needs every watchful eye and quick wit it can get:  the city’s prostitutes and disabled veterans are both being methodically hunted and shot.   With the usual avenues of  investigation producing nothing,  Bernie takes to the streets as a legless victim of the Somme, hoping  he’ll hear words from a little closer to the ground – and from sources who wouldn’t go near the police.    Although this is the last Bernie Gunther novel (his creator having passed just over a year ago),  it’s also a prequel of a kind:  this Bernie still carries  a lot of  bruised, youthful naitive with him: he’s not the cool, jaded detective of the forties and fifties,  and it’s this case that will make him a little more weary of the world.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Kerr’s Gunther novels, I stopped reading them four years ago on the grounds that they were far too depressing.    Gunther’s report from his case in The Lady of Zagreb, for instance, was so gruesome that even Goebbels was unnerved by it.  Metropolis, despite its scalpings and cold-blooded murders, is not quite as morbid as the rest – although it’s definitely shaking for young Bernie, whose sub rosa inquiries take him into a bar popular with some of the most depraved souls in Berlin – and that’s saying something, given that Weimar Berlin  has become popular for the kind of sex tourism that now favors Thailand.    And yet there’s light in the darkness, as  Gunther finds a reason for climbing out of the bottle (he drinks like a Raymond Chandler lead at the beginning).

Like most of Kerr’s novels, Metropolis is not a piece to comfort the soul with warm fuzzies. It’s often disturbing, but the dark humor is here, too, and Kerr’s skillful pen makes even the grim go down sweet.

Scarlet

 Scarlet
© 2007 Stephen Lawhead
443 pages

Young William Scatlock has been reduced to a landless vagrant, courtesy of  malevolent Norman lords and their toadies.  It seems as good an occasion as any to trek west and join forces with a phantom of the forest who has been giving the Normans hell – King Raven, a dark and hooded figure who puts the fear of God into the hearts of nobles and churchmen alike.  Although the Raven’s Welsh resistance fighters don’t trust a Saxon any more than the Normans, Will  quickly proves his mettle and joins their not-so-merrie band,  calling himself Will Scarlet.   One raid finds the band in a plot far more complicated than the usual corruption. At stake is nothing less than the thrones of England and of Christendom.   

When I read Hood a few years back, its historical grounding immediately won me over.  Instead of the traditional Crusades-era timeline,  Lawhead instead placed his forest rebel some time after the Norman conquest, at which time the Bastard’s heirs were spreading their rule into Wales as well.   Robin Hood became a landless Welsh princling (Rhi Bran, or King Bran), thrust into adulthood and leadership when everyone else was killed.     Scarlet continues the historical intrigue, this time by having Bran and his follows inadvertently stumble into a a plot that involves both the cold war contest for the English throne between the Bastard’s spawn, as well as the more active conflict between two men claiming to be Pope, Urban and Clement.   Will Scarlet is a most agreeable narrator, with colorful self-expression and understandable passion.  Of particular interest is the way characters are portrayed differently here; when Hood told his own story, we saw him as the weak princling, scared and uncertain, beset by his fear, anger, and self-loathing. In Scarlet's eyes, however, Raven  is ever the strong and capable leader, with only one bout of uncontrollable anger revealing a little of the 'other' man who readers of Hood know is there, under the mask.

War of the Wolf

War of the Wolf
pub. 2018 Bernard Cornwell
333 pages

Uhtred of Bebbanburg is called a priest-killer, a chief of devils. And yet when a distressed and scarred monk came to his gates and begged that he send help to Mercia, beset by civil war, the old warlord answered the call.  He once swore to protect a young man, then the son of his beloved friend Aetheflaed, Queen of Mercia. That young man is now an accomplished young prince, one of such potential that he might help realize King Alfred's dream: one England,  with one law, and one God.  That is a future Uhtred  does not want, for his own home is in the last pagan kingdom,  Northumbria -- the last to resist Edward, Anglorum Saxonum Rex.    And yet Uhtred is a man of oaths, and so true to his word he rides forth to rescue a man who one day by be his undoing.  When he arrives, however, he finds that the man,  though besieged by rebels,  is in no dire straights, and the monk who begged for his help is not what he seemed. Someone has lured Uhtred of Bebbanberg from his forbidding castle, but for what reason?  Although his pursuit of developments gives him greater reason to fear for the future than ever -- Edward is plainly dying, and his sons are all ambitious men who want to prove  and engorge themselves by attacking  Northumbria --  that kingdom has a more pressing enemy,   one who has already manipulated Uhtred and whose sorcerer draws men to his banner even as it frightensthose he stands against.  Though Uhtred can resist him with wiles and might, as he has taken countless enemies before, the aging war-prince also knows that fate is inexorable.   He can foil men, but not the gods.

The Saxon Stories are probably my favorite series of historical fiction to read, although after the first half-dozen the plots have gotten a little tiresome:  medieval Saxon politics punctuated with epic battles. It's great, but...people being as they are, even a diet of constant steak would grow tiresome.   In War of the Wolf, we appear to be approaching the endgame, as the poet who appeared early in the series putting Uhtred's life into verse appears here again,  complete with some borrowed Saxon poetry. Although Uhtred has an immediate enemy -- a young savage with a ferocious warband and a lust for power --  the political developments of this book also hint that the 'final battle' will be the defense of Northumbria against the south.   What made Uhtred so interesting from the start was that he was a Saxon princeling raised by the Danes, who much preferred the company of the latter but was compelled to fight against them to realize his dream of reclaiming his family land.  Uhtred in his youth was constantly torn between  his Christian countrymen of blood, and his Danish and Norse countrymen of heart. Old Uhtred has been a partially tamed wolf: one who is wild, but mostly cooperates with the king. If push comes to shove, however,  and Christian England invades Northumbria, it's almost certain that  the wolf will run wild again. 

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.

Alice Roosevelt, Linux, and Death

Approaching the end of the month, as we are, time to post a few also-reads:

Alice and the Assassin, R.J. Koreto. Entertaining historical fiction following the infamous pistol-packing Alice Roosevelt and her cowboy Secret Service bodyguard.  Following the assassination of President McKinely, Alice's father is made president and Alice herself turns detective. Declaring that it doesn't make sense for a feeble-minded Polish anarchist to randomly go after the president, Alice and Agent St. Clair begin following leads on their own -- to the faint horror of Alice's official guardians, Teddy excepting.   The chase takes them into private society clubs and public brothels, alike, consorting with the likes of Emma Goldman, Sicilian crimelords, and members  of the New York yacht club.   Most interesting is the relationship between St. Clair and Alice;  St. Clair is a former cavalrymen, former frontier sheriff turned federal agent, while Alice -- for all her wildness --  is a teenage girl who has been far more sheltered than she realizes. The two have an interesting fondness for one another by the end.

From Here to Eternity, by Caitlin Doughty, visits several cultures around the world to examine particularly interesting death customs, in a bid to convince western readers that pickling the dead and shoving them into an airtight vault at ludicrous costs to ourselves,   is neither normal nor attractive. Although  it doesn't have nearly the strength of her first book (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, her account if becoming a mortician and developing a funerary style more in keeping with older customs. She promotes, for instance, the practice of families washing and dressing their deceased loved ones themselves, and taking part in the burial or pushing the button on the crematory. Traditions like those are those she explores here,  though she's naturally drawn to more...unusual death traditions, like people collecting and decorating human skulls to use as magical tokens, or  occasionally exhuming their dead kinfolk to  dress them and give them tea.  As with her previous book, this one is laden with humor, both in the writing and in happenstance; at one point Doughty was left alone in a cave of skulls and was stumbled upon by tourists, who immediately asked if they could take her picture in terms taken from Emily Post, circa 1915.    Although the book's contents were not as deep as the last one, I was cheered by the promotion of natural-burial movements within the US,  which is also covered here.

Open Life: The Philosophy of Open Source. Penned in 2004. Open Life offers a history of the open source software movement, an appraisal of its financial prospects, and a look at how the open source philosophy might be applied to matters other than software.  Admittedly, this is esoteric, and...dated. Most people use open source tech, even if they don't realize it: Android devices, for instance,  and even chromeOS, use Linux at their base,  as do many internet servers, and IOT devices will only bring more of it into people's homes.  A lot of the projects that Ingo mentions here (in examining different ways open-source software companies can be profitable while maintaining their roots)  have since been discontinued, though others (Red Hat) are still around.  One of the bigger success stories is Mozilla,  the first great challenger to Internet Explorer which has matured into Firefox. 


Finally, I also read my two classic club entries for this month, both by Walker Percy.  It turns out I'm not much for existentialist novels, even  if they are by a southern author.

The Reckoning

The Reckoning
© 2018 John Grisham
432 pages

On an otherwise unremarkable autumn morning in rural Mississippi,  an idolized war hero traveled from his farm into town, visited the preacher, and shot him. The sheriffs found the shooter patiently waiting for them on his front porch, where he offered neither resistance nor explanation.  The entire town is dumbfounded to see two of its favorite sons turn on one another so inexplicably, and in a way that will destroy the families as the criminal trial and then a wrongful death trial wear on.  The trials here are quick and brutal; instead, the meat of The Reckoning lies in an account of the Bataan Death March and the plight of two children whose lives and homes are destroyed by their parents' decisions.

Say what you will about The Reckoning, but it's decidedly different from anything else Grisham has written, set completely in the 1940s and featuring an aspect of the Pacific War (American resistance in the Philippines to Japanese occupation) few will be familiar with.  The first third of the novel addresses the immediate consequences of the preacher-killing, before shifting several years prior, to tell the story of a country farmer turned jungle commando, who barely survived the Bataan death march and escaped to take up with American and Filipino soldiers in the mountains who were engaged in guerilla warfare against the Japanese occupational forces.  The novel then shifts back to the aftermath of the killing and the trials, which....is about as uplifting as reading about the Japanese torturing and starving thousands of men after Bataan. That bit in the middle about the resistance was nice, though.

I can't deny that I enjoyed reading The Reckoning -- I only received it Christmas morning and now write this  less than 24 hours later,  like a few other Grisham reads over the years.  The first two thirds are unexpected, and with all the Faulkner references (characters are constantly reading him, and the writer himself appears as a minor character) I thought Grisham might produce a completely unexpected conclusion. Why did the hero shoot the preacher?  Was this the hero's way of immolating himself for not living up to his own legend, and taking another secret ne'er do well with him?  Was the preacher a Japanese sympathizer?  In the end it comes down to a very old story, which is unsatisfying given how depressing the novel was as it reached the conclusion. 

While I was appropriately intrigued and riveted by The Reckoning, it's mostly melancholy.

The Memory of Old Jack

The Memory of Old Jack
© 1974 Wendell Berry
223 pages

"Now Old Jack, who was the last of that generation that Wheeler looked to with such fililial devotion, is dead. And Wheeler is fifty-two years old, as old as the century, and younger men are looking to him. Now he must cease to be a son to the old men and become a father to the young." p. 163

For years, Old Jack Beechum has been a fixture on the porch of Port William's downtown hotel, where he sits staring into the distance until the arrival of a friend or the call to supper  disturbs him from his reverie.  Old Jack is a widower whose daughter long abandoned him for the bright lights of the city, but he's far from a man alone, instead being a source of admiration for most of the men in town. Jack is the last of a generation which can remember the Civil War, the last of the men who were the true husbands of their fields and not merely the drivers of machines. He is notoriously stubborn, careful, and devoted -- and The Memory of Old Jack takes readers on a journey both through his life and his final day as he is lost in memories while approaching that final rest.

As Jayber Crow noted in his own account of the town of Port William and the membership thereof, "telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told".  That is ever the case with any Port William story,  for they are richly interconnected with one another and with the town's story through time. The passage of time is a theme in every Berry story that I've read -- considering as he does the maturation or degradation of characters and the community itself --  and that, combined with the fact that we encounter the same characters and some of the same stories from different angles in different books, means this is a fulsome fictional experience. Berry affects me like no other author in taking me through the full gamut of human emotions -- youthful romance,   debt-induced desperation, deep satisfaction in work well done,  sadness and estrangement over an ill-considered marriage,  rage and regret, and the deep sorrow of a parent whose child has become a stranger to them.  I've encountered Jack in other stories, and was entranced by him here.  As with any Port William story, this is not one of saccharine and happy endings; tragic things happen, and life goes on, characters making the best lives they can for themselves, and -- fittingly -- the story does not end with Jack's death.  He lived within a community, within a family, and their response to his death is just as important as its happening.  One of the more touching moments of this particular novel is when a few of Jack's younger friends, silver-haired men who he had mentored, gather after the funeral and swap their favorite Jackisms.

Berry's fiction is exquisite, and The Memory of Old Jack easily ranks among my favorites along with Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter.