Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell

‘You like Flashman, right?’

‘Yeah. Love Flashman.’

‘Oh, man, you’ve gotta try Sharpe so.’

Fine so. I finally have tried Sharpe. And, while entertaining, I find myself agreeing with the Flashman fan who noted that Sharpe is ‘too straight an arrow by half.’

Bernard Cornwell and his fictional Napoleon-era soldier Richard Sharpe have a lot of fans out there- Sharpie’s probably one of the biggest names in British Empire military-themed historical fiction, only partly as a result of the popular tv adaptation starring Sean Bean. It’s really a bit of a surprise he hasn’t crossed my path before- probably as a result of my lack of interest in the Napoleonic Wars.

But despite the slight age difference, the parallels to Flashy are unavoidable- Sharpe is a British soldier who works his way up to a high rank, and has a long career around the globe, appearing in many of the famous military escapades of his time (including Waterloo).

I picked up Sharpe’s Tiger because I found it for two pounds in a shop in Yorkshire, but also because it featured Sharpe’s early adventures in India, which seemed more interesting to me than his later Europe-based adventures. It’s actually chronologically the first book in the series, though not the first one written.

Sharpe begins the book as a private, having signed up for the army following a scuffle at home. He’s a rough Lancashire lad with a troubled background; he spent some time stealing luggage from stagecoaches, eventually killing a man over a fight with a woman.

In the army, he becomes part of the slow British take-over of India. Come 1799, the redcoats are struggling against the mighty Tippu Sultan in what we now know as the fourth Anglo-Mysore war. The Tippu, a Muslim of Persian background, has come into control of the largely Hindu city-state of Mysore in the south of India. The French, always eager to see the British thwarted, have sent an adviser to aid the Tippu. And there is an Irish connection here: the last British leader to have taken a swipe at the Tippu prior to this was Lord Cornwallis, the same guy who surrendered to the Yanks at Yorktown and put down the 1798 rebellion on the Emerald Isle (I'm not a big fan of him, so).

During preparations for the siege of Seringapatam, Sharpe earns the ire of one Sergeant Obediah Hawkeswill, a tyrannical officer who goads Sharpie into assaulting him. A flogging follows, cut short only by the news that a senior British officer carrying sensitive information has fallen into enemy hands. Someone is needed to pose as a deserter and join the Tippu’s forces to rescue the man- is Sharpe up for the job? Already thinking of deserting for real, Sharpie volunteers, but is dismayed to find that he’s going to paired for this perilous mission with Lieutenant Lawless, an upper-class officer who has to also pose as an unruly deserter.

So begins the book. Later, there’s adventures, rescues and spills aplenty in the Tippu’s city as Sharp faces off against tiger-striped Mysore soldiers, a team of professional torturers, and even an actual tiger. It’s all pretty entertaining stuff.

Aspects of the novel are great- the play between Lawless, a decent but slightly effete man who needs to convince as a ruffian, and Sharpe, who’s the real deal, are among my favourite parts. It gives a glimpse into the injustices of the British class system of the time. Other small touches I liked include the French adviser’s shock at how the British army recruits and treats their troops- in France at that time, soldiering even at a private level was considered an honourable and respectable position, and officers often mingled with their troops. Hawkeswill too is a flat if hateful villain, sure to have the reader hissing from his first appearance.

So it’s an enjoyable adventure with some nice period touches. But compared to Flashman?

For starters, the history quite often simply isn’t there. Sharpe, as an uneducated private plucked from the gutter, doesn’t particularly care why the British army are in India fighting against the Tippu, and the reader doesn’t find out much about this issue either. In a Flashman book, the hero would have ended up learning much about the Tippu's point of view and coming to understand (if not appreciate) his culture, but here this fascinating historical figure is reduced to a generic villain. Late in the book, there is a very brief discussion about how trade is the main reason that the Brits, the Frogs and the Tippu have come to blows, but this interesting tidbit is kept tantalizingly brief. Throughout, other interesting topics are brought up and then discarded (such as the place of religion in the various characters’ lives) as though the narrative is afraid to look any further beneath the surface of what is essentially an action-adventure novel. Which is fine, but it could have been much more. In total, what we have here is a British Empire-themed novel that is not really interested in addressing any of the issues raised by the day-to-day realities of the British Empire. Compared to Flashy’s satirically scathing commentary on just about every aspect of Victorian life, it just won’t wash.

The writing is solid and occasionally striking, but it often retains an unremarkable airport-novel style that’s pretty bland and lacking the character of Fraser’s work.

As for Sharpe himself, he is somewhat more interesting than most thriller heroes. His rough background and pragmatism sometimes cause him to do shocking things- in order to prove his ‘loyalty’ to the Tippu, he is fully prepared to assassinate British officers if necessary. And the glibness with which he accepts that he’s been dumped by his up-to-then sweetheart is a bit shocking too. He’s angry at how the world has treated him because of his lowly birth. But by and large, he’s a far more conventional hero than Flashy. Which is to be expected, really.

Perhaps comparing the two isn’t fair. But the Sharpe novels were begun a few years after the original Flashman books, and were surely influenced in some way by them, so in that regard it’s a little disappointing to find them a similar idea carried out far, far more conventionally. The end result: Flashy would totally take Sharpe (probably by throwing sand in his eye and rogering his woman, too, the coward).

Lost Games: Bodies On The Docks

It’s popularly accepted by fans of old-school gamebooks that the coming of age of video games finally knelled the death for the paper-and-dice brigade. Gamers no longer had to shirk their computers for truly immersive experiences. But is this the way it had to have been? Surely the new technology ought to have provided new way to play text-heavy gamebooks, allowing them to be played in a way that didn’t have other, irrelevant paragraphs visible all the time and where cheating was not possible?

Lost Games: Adventure Creator

Remember when games came free with floppy disks on the front of computer magazines? Of course you do. They were demos, mostly- games like Lemmings, Wolfenstein 3D and Escape Velocity- designed to sucker you in and make you buy the full versions. There was shareware, too- full games, made by amateurs (usually a single person) that pleaded with you to send ten dollars- just ten dollars!- to some guy in California if you liked the game. Usually there’d be a stack of these games on a single disk. Somehow I often found these ‘homebrew’ efforts more interesting than the proper studio games- they were always small, and usually somewhat graphically impaired, but they had a charm and randomness about them that big company products couldn’t match.

The Silver Key by H.P. Lovecraft

Okay, so we all know a little about Lovecraft, the guy who invented ‘cosmic horror’: he feared that mankind was adrift in an endless and uncaring universe, he created a Parthenon of god-creatures that are unspeakably terrifying (if occasionally plush and cuddly), and he liked using the word ‘eldritch’. A lot. And let us not forget his contribution to later generations of teenage mealheads (curse Metallica’s spelling of ‘Ktulu’- I always thought it was some kind of bird).

But today’s topic is a sometimes less-noted facet of his works- the ‘dream-works.’ See, when he wasn’t scaring the bejesus out of readers with his madness-inducing monsters and his turgid prose, he wrote stuff that was, well, a bit different. A bit airy-fairy. The ‘dream-works’ refer to a bunch of his stories that are more overtly-than-usual influenced by one Lord Dunsany, an Anglo-Irish writer (woop woop!) who wrote fantasy fiction around the turn of the century. Dunsany’s stuff is extremely whimsical, a little like slightly twisted children’s fairy tales. There’s been a lot of speculation about exactly how to classify some of these writers who were churning out fantasy and science fiction-type stories before those terms had really solidified (Lovecraft is usually thought to feature elements of both), but be sure that the dream-works fiction would register as extremely soft on the hard/soft sci-fi scale.

These tales generally take place in regions of a dream-world that’s as well mapped as Lovecraft’s fictional New England. It’s a place full of ‘strange and ancient cities’ and ‘elephant caravans tramping through the perfumed jungles of Kled.’ A place of wonders rivalled only by the Arabian Nights themselves, and limited only by the imagination of a dreaming artist. The stories feature real people who discover ways to enter the dream-realm, and once there they have fantastic adventures. They’re mostly enjoyable for their sheer whimsy and lack of logic, though they’re probably not my favourite of his works. When they start to include roving bands of intelligent cats (HPL bloody loved cats) as main characters, that’s when I check out.

But there is one Dream-cycle story that has a special meaning to me.

The story starts with a tale called The Statement of Randolph Carter. Carter is a young man who acquires a strange Southern friend with an interest in the occult. As usual, they go messing with Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, and Carter’s associate comes to a messy (if vague) end in an eldritch tomb in a graveyard. It’s a short, throwaway tale, standard for Lovecraft, and Carter is just another of HPL’s author-stand-in protagonists. There’s no evidence that Lovecraft had any particular plans for the character.

Carter next shows up in a tale called The Silver Key, and suddenly he’s become a much more interesting character. The first line is unforgettable-

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams.

The story is about how Carter, who once was imaginative and unsullied by convention, made nightly trips to fabulous dream-worlds. As he grew older, however, experience and friends caused him to adopt a more prosaic, world-weary attitude, and he becomes unable to enter the dream world. Achingly conscious of what he has lost and yet unable to abandon the logical, scientific approach to life, Carter desperately searches for the key to the dream-world by adopting and then abandoning various world-views. It’s a fantastic tale that challenges the reader. Lovecraft weighs up the merits of religion, atheism, rationalism and finds them each lacking in wonder. Essentially it’s a poignant ode to the innocence of childhood. It’s especially interesting knowing Lovecraft’s own real-life views; he believed that science was an inarguable truth that freed man from superstition as much as it killed wonder. He often noted that his own need to write weird fiction stemmed from his belief that the world was decidedly not mysterious or mystical- he was in effect, a hardline rationalist who mourned for the death of romanticism.

Eventually, Carter returns to his childhood home, the place where he first learnt to dream. Exactly how the story ends depends on the reader’s interpretation, as well as the reader’s attitude towards the real life vs fantasy theme. Relatives find his car and some of his clothes near the house, but Carter himself has vanished. Has he finally escaped for good into the dream world, or was he just a silly dreamer who earned nothing but sordid oblivion? It’s a great open ending.

EXCEPT that there’s a sequel, Through The Gates of The Silver Key. Supposedly Lovecraft was reluctant to write this, and was persuaded to do it by another writer, E. Hoffman Price. It’s a slightly ridiculous tale sci-fi that destroys the mystery and ignores the timeless fantasy and commentary of the original. During a will reading to divide up the missing Carter’s stuff, a well-wrapped-up stranger appears (wonder who that is?!). Turns out that Carter travelled through the cosmos, ending up trapped in the body of a stupid-looking alien on some faraway planet. Eventually, he figured out how to build a spaceship, locate Earth, and return just in time for the will reading. Ridiculous.

When I first read The Silver Key it had an enormous impact on me. I had spent several years at college training to be a scientist (which I had enjoyed), and without really noticing it, going through an extended creative dry period. The story shocked me- I recalled my former love for writing, for books and stories and movies, and I identified with Carter. I too, had lost the key! Fortunately, I had not left it as late as Carter did to realise this! I still enjoy science, but it’s only a part of what I do. Immediately after reading this story I began a slow change in career trajectory. I began writing reviews, articles and fiction once again. For a story to have such an effect 90 years after it was published sure means that the old guy was surely doing something right.

The Diamond Lens by Fitz-James O'Brien

It is my privilege to rescue from obscurity an unfairly-forgotten writer from the annuls of history, and a man from my own county at that- the great Fitz-James O'Brien. Born Michael O'Brien in County Cork, very little seems to be known today about him (I reckon there's a decent English thesis in there somewhere, as the chap definitely deserves a revival).

What we do know about him is that he moved to America in the 1850's, changed his name and whittled away a sizable inheritance living the lavish lifestyle of a dandy. By all accounts (not that there are many), he was a raucous, rollicking man to have at a party, and he supposedly entertained and palled with many of the famous writers of the day. Like many an Irishman, he fought with the Yankees in the US Civil War, and died after being wounded

Fortunately for my own purposes, he also dabbled with ink himself. One of my favourite of his compositions is The Demon of the Gibbet, a rattlingly good Poe-esque tale of a late-night horseride past the Gallows Tree, where a demon is said to haunt. In every alternate verse, the demon speaks to the protagonist, telling him that he's going to steal his cloak, his wine, and eventually his woman as well! The existence of various locations around Cork city named for being former sites of gallows and hangings (Gallows Green, for example) makes me wonder if he had the Cork landscape in mind when he wrote this. The nature of this poem seemed to be crying out for a melody, so I did once put it to a tune, and played it many times with my group, The Thirsty Scholars, in our haunting ground, An Spaipin Fanach. Perhaps it will end up on Youtube someday!

Anyway, O'Brien also frequently wrote proto-sci fi stories for the American Victorian magazines almost thirty years before Wells was on the scene, which is pretty remarkable, especially seeing as how well he fares against the Grand Old Man of Victorian fiction. His tale What Was It?, though not one of my favourites, is thought to be possibly the earliest use of invisibility in fiction, predating The Damned Thing by Ambrose Bierce, The Horla by Maupassant and Predator. True to my own heart, he was massively influenced by the Arabian Nights (moreso even than Lovecraft, perhaps), and liked to inject his speculative fiction with a jolt of Orientalism, setting tales in Arab or far Eastern countries.

But for today's selection, I've chosen a tale that could have slipped easily into the Wells canon, except for one twist. The Diamond Lens at first appears as if it's going to be a classic Victorian sci-fi yarn- a a story of new science gone wrong. Here's the plot: Linley is a boy who grows up obsessed with microscopy. He loves it so much that as a child, he tears the eyes out of fish and animals in order to use the lenses within. Eventually his family buys him a real microscope, but this only fuels his obsession.

In order to live his life without interference from his family (who expect him to become a doctor), Linley enrolls in a medical course in a New York university and gets himself an apartment. He never turns up for lectures and spends his parents' money on more microscope equipment. But it's never enough! He wants to see more, he wants to see deeper. He curses the limitations of physics.

On the advice of his shady Jewish roomate (Wells would have approved), Linley does what any mid-Victorian gentleman would do when he had a problem- he goes to see a spiritualist. In a rather loopy twist, she puts him in touch with the father of microscopy, the eighteenth-century Dutchman Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek. The spirit of Leeuwenhoek tells Linley that to gain the clarity he craves, he must use a certain type of diamond to make the lens.

And what do you know? Upon returning home, the Jewish roomate (he's also French, just to add insult to injury) reveals to Linley that, through shady means, he's come into possession of just such a diamond! So what's a guy to do? Linley immediately decides to kill him and steal the diamond. After all, he reasons with himself, the Jew must have killed someone himself to get it (it's implied that the Jew had some background in South-American slave-trading). And thus, a perfectly good evening of wine and tipsy indiscretion ends in murder.

Linley carves the diamond into a lens, and finally gets the view he has always dreamed of. In a single drop of water, he discovers worlds that seem like fantastic gardens of colour and splendour. But then he spies something else in this world- a creature that looks like an exquisite, miniature girl. Linley is smitten. For days he cannot leave his microscope- even seeing the drop of water she inhabits depresses him, as it reminds him of the uncrossable gulf between them. I won't spoil the ending, but if you're thinking that this unnatural love will eventually destroy Linley, then have yourself a drink.

Man, I do love this story. It's simple, creepy and effective. It's also wonderfully old-fashioned and harsh in its themes of obsession and karma. From youth, Linley's obsession is depicted as driving him to unnatural acts, viz. the mutilation of animals. And the fact the he receives the information on how to make his breakthrough by supernatural means wonderfully foreshadows its later effects on him. Via consulting with spirits, theft and murder, Linley has achieved his goal. He has broken the natural order, and what he discovers will ruin him in the most personal way possible- through love (a touch that Wells would never use).

The writing is solid and far less annoying than even much later Victorian prose (Stoker, I'm looking at you!). The descriptions of the new world that the hero discovers are stirring, and the sense of wonder-turning-to-horror is masterfully handled. Who else but a Corkman could do as well?

Read the story here, if you would.