Lost Games: Devil's Flight by Gaetano Abbondanza

Devil’s Flight is my second-only entry into the reviewing genre of gamebook playthroughs, and the world (or at least the internet) has changed since those heady days of playing through Bodies on the Docks. Back then, I was aware of only one site doing playthroughs of those old Fighting Fantasy books, and that was the excellently-named Fighting Dantasy. Yeah, I wish I’d thought of that title (though my name isn’t Dan). Back then,as far as I knew there wasn’t much interest in gamebooks on the net, or anywhere else either. I pictured Dan as a tortured, lone genius, working tirelessly to keep the gamebook flame alight with no help from an uncaring world.

Zulu Hart (2009) by Saul David

So apparently history writer Saul David once met with George MacDonald Fraser, creator of the immortal Flashman, and asked him if he was ever going to get around to writing about Flashy’s hinted-at adventures in the Zulu wars of the 1870s. Fraser said he wouldn’t, which is not quite true, as there’s a short story in Flashman and the Tiger which places some of its narrative during this period. But this story is a far cry from Fraser’s usual novel-length examinations of 19^th-century conflicts, and upon the old curdudgeon's death, David decided that it was time someone else took up the baton.

And who better than himself? Already a respected historian, David had even written factual history books about the Zulu wars. He was a big fan of Fraser too; it should have been a match made in heaven.

I’ve already reviewed the second book in the series, which I quite enjoyed, so when I found a copy of Zulu Hart in my favourite second-hand bookshop during a trip to my old Yorkshire haunts, I couldn’t resist picking it up. I knew that it was considered to be a bit rubbish, but I was still keen to get a non-Michael-Caine fictional insight into the Zulu Wars. And with a scholar of that very subject as my guide, how could it go wrong?

The first part of Zulu Hart is concerned with the background and early military career of its hero, George Hart. Hart is of mixed race, with an Irish-Zulu mother (yeah, I know. It’s a bit of a stretch and the narrative doesn’t really make it any more believable) and a mysterious unknown father who we’re told is a ‘pillar of the establishment.’ His father has left Hart with a legacy: if he rises quickly through the ranks of the army, finds himself a respectable wife and earns the Victoria Cross before he’s 28, he’ll get a shedload of money. All of these things seem quite distant to Hart as the book begins.

We follow him through Harrow School and into the military. His dusky looks means that he tends to pass as a man of Mediterranean background, which is lucky for a guy trying to make his way through race-obsessed Victorian society. Eventually, he’s shanghaied in classic Flashman fashion into leaving the country by a vindictive military superior and his willing, beautiful accomplice. He travels to South Africa, hoping to strike lucky in the gold fields at Kimberley. Instead, he finds himself sucked into the building war between the British and the Zulus.

In terms of writing style, Zulu Hart is pretty pedestrian; breezy and inoffensive but without much description of places or buildings, which sometimes robs it of the niceties of historical fiction. The feeling of exploring a different world – surely one of the reasons that we enjoy historical fiction – is somewhat absent.

This is also true of the dialogue and character relationships. Neither Victorian London, nor colonial South Africa nor Zululand really come alive as distinctive, different societies in the book. Compared to the Flashman books, or even to the work of James Clavell, the reader doesn’t get the feeling that they’re stepping into a world different from their own.

This is a problem inherent with historical fiction: while the writer desires to reconstruct the past, with its different modes of thought, norms and acceptabilities, they’re still writing for a contemporary audience, and this audience must be given a world that they can somehow relate to, and protagonists that they can sympathise with. Therefore, the writer almost always ends up washing down or whitewashing certain aspects of the past. I find it hard to believe that many readers would empathise with a truly historically-accurately written medieval or even Victorian hero. Their priorities and morals are so wildly different from ours that we would doubtlessly find the former ignorant, superstitious and overly-religious, and the latter racist and jingoistic. Of course, that is not to say that all medieval people were incapable of rational thought (though ideas about what we know as the scientific method simply did not exist yet) or that all Victorians were unenlightened about race. But what historical novelists often have to do, if they don’t simply wish to write about modern people in period dressing, is to make their protagonists be untypical of their era in order not make them not repugnant to us. Think of William of Baskerville from Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: his use of an Occam’s razor-like proto scientific method, as well as his almost hereticaly liberal views on God’s place in the universe, would have put him in the extreme intellectual minority during the period in which the novel takes place. Though I understand why it’s necessary, I’ve always found it strange how we are drawn to past times, but can only explore them through protagonists who are not representative of these times.

Even before he learns about his true ancestry, George Hart’s views on the subject peoples of the British Empire would have marked him as an oddball in Victorian society. David is not an Imperial apologist writing in the pre-PC 1970s as Fraser was, and so the Victorian world he presents feels slightly whitewashed. Even the antagonist characters are not particularly racist: the war is treated as an excuse for a land-grab, and the more complex Victorian attitudes about race go unexamined. A pity, especially given George’s own background. His character could have been interesting way to explore these issues. But any potential for this is stymied as George spends most of the novel pretending to be of Maltese extraction, and whenever he does reveal his ancestry, usually to his superiors, they generally react with a somewhat unrealistic level of sympathy.

Lieutenant Bromhead: What's that you say, old boy?
You're a darky? Why, how spiffing!

 Hart himself does have a mid-novel flip-flop between sympathising with the Zulus and accepting the British line that they’re barbaric. At first he romanticises them in the ‘noble savage’ mould, but after spending some time at their capital he witnesses their cruelty and warmongering, and briefly comes to believe that the British are right to destroy their way of life. It’s an interesting storyline, but not one that really goes anywhere after being introduced. We don’t really get any insight into thir society, despite our main character being related to them and being able to speak the language.

David also seems to have squandered some of his knowledge of Victorian military protocol: Hart talks back to his superiors in a way that probably would have ended the career of someone so junior, and he hobnobs and advises high-ranking officers who would not have listened to him in real life. While Flashman’s meeting of every famous historical figure was played tongue-in-cheek, there’s nothing here that stops the reader from noticing the improbability of Hart’s adventures. I am also left with a slightly sickly feeling that David is twisting real characters to make villains for his novel... several of the commanders behave in a rather stereotypically evil moustach-twirling way as they plan the war against Zululand. I'm no expert on the subject, but I doubt things were quite as simple as this.

The climax of the novel involves the two most famous military engagements of the war, the battle of Isandlewana (dramatized in the not-so-famous movie Zulu Dawn) and the battle of Rourke’s Drift (dramatised in the more-famous movie Zulu). Unfortunately, both battles are confusing and somewhat dull. I find it difficult to explain what makes battle sequences work in novels; I suspect it’s really more to do with the build-up and the sense of anticipation; the sense of knowing what the participants are fighting for and what the stakes are. For whatever reason, it doesn’t work here.

Zulu: Four years of blogging, and still no review!

 Ultimately, Zulu Hartis a mechanically sound, if plodding and unremarkable, trundle through what will always be an interesting subject. It isn’t the best introduction to 19^th-century history, or historical fiction, but if you like either then you’ll probably find something to enjoy. Some of the background about the colonisation of South Africa and the various states that existed there in the 1870s is interesting. But really, you’re better off with the sequel, Hart of Empire, in which David shows that he’s learned a few things about his craft since the first book.

Yes, I wear this at work sometimes.

Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

I don’t normally care much when famous people die: not many of the famous people I admire are still alive anyway. But I sure was sad when Michael Crichton went to the big second-hand pulp novel shop in the sky. Who was now going to write ripped-from-the-headlines, so-current-it’ll-be-dated-within-months alarmist techno-thrillers for a public crying out from Dan Brown ripoff over-satiation? Nobody, that’s who.

If Crichton had never done anything else with his life, his rank among the immortals would still be sealed for all eternity because of Jurassic Park, the proverbial good piece of dinosaur fiction. I mean, don’t get me wrong – dinosaurs are amazing. But go on, try to name another well-known book or movie besides Jurassic Park (and, okay, Conan Doyle’s original Lost World) that doesn’t blow T-rex dick.Journey to the Centre of the Earth doesn’t count though because plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs are not dinosaurs, as any six-year-old will tell you. It’s almost as if dinosaurs had only a limited amount of potential for use in fiction, and with his blockbuster novel, Crichton latched onto some sort of supervein of this potential and greedily sucked it all up and filled his book with it, leaving any other aspiring dino-authors with nothing left except tiny, smegma-like splotches of Roger Corman’s Carnosaur. 

Not. Dinosaurs.

I still love Congotoo; Crichton’s 1970’s tech-heavy reinvention of the old-fashioned lost-city-in-the-jungle tale is still great, nonwithstanding the bizarre movie version that had the idiocy to cast Bruce Campbell as opening-scene killer-ape fodder, Ernie Hudson as the campest black man I’ve ever seen, and Tim Curry as the worst-accented Eastern European ever to have come out of the American Midwest.

Get me my agent...

Before his death, Crichton had still been cranking out novels that dealt with technological issues of the day, and while he never quite hit his 1980’s peak again, you were always assured a decent thriller with hearty infodumps to keep you feeling as though you were learning real science without having to, y’know, learn real science. There are less dinosaurs and killer apes in real science anyway, so Crichton wins.

In any case, his publishers must have been thrilled to find not one but two completed novels on his multiple hard drives after his death. That’s what they claim happened, anyway. And seeing as he owed them another two novels on his contract anyway, it was decided to publish them. The first was Pirate Latitudes, and the second was Micro, which was finished by another author. Given the quality of Pirate Latitudes, and the fact that Crichton is known to have been planning a pirate novel since the 70s, I reckon it must be pretty likely that it’s a rather old novel that he had decided not to publish, rather than the next great work he was planning. But before I muse further on this, let’s get onto the story!

Pirate Latitudesbegins in 1665 in Port Royal, the short-lived but notorious British-controlled capital of Jamaica. We meet the governor of Jamaica, Sir James Almont, who slaughters pirates ruthlessly in an attempt to keep law in the rowdy town, and lets them hang on the main street for all to see. But all is not what it seems, as a pirate is only classified as such if he is not acting on the behest of the crown. A crown-approved pirate, out pillaging Spanish ships and settlements with the blessing of the British Empire, is not really a pirate but a privateer, and Sir James has no problems with privateers at all. In fact, the booty they bring into Port Royal keeps the town’s economy afloat. Almont is sent a couple of snivelling politicians by London to keep an eye on his dealings, and they are prissy, self-righteous, and are shocked at his dealings with ‘pirates.’

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

 When a ship comes in reporting that a Spanish treasure galleon has moored at a remote island, Almont knows that the story refers to the crescent-moon shaped island of Mantanceros, which means ‘slaughter’ in Spanish (subtle, Crichton). The Spanish fort on Mantanceros is controlled by a cruel Spaniard called Cavalla, who it seems has pissed off half the British population of Jamaica at some point.

Almont summons his favourite privateer, Captain Charles Hunter, whom we first meet leaving the bed of a lady so that he can pee out the window into the street. Hunter goes to Almont’s place, and the London politicians look down their noses at his careless, freewheeling ways. To their consternation, Almont and Hunter plan an unprovoked attack on the Spanish at Mantanceros despite a fragile treaty between the two nations, making Hunter an unofficial privateer (and thus technically a pirate), just so that Almont can get rich and Hunter can revenge Cavalla for some ill-defined misdemeanour. Ladies and gentlemen, these are our heroes.

Spielberg has already snapped up the rights to the book, and no part of the story smells more of formulaic movies than what comes next: a classic ‘getting the band back together’ sequence. Hunter has to put together a crack team of killers and psychos to pull off this job, so naturally we get to follow him around Port Royal as he finds each of them in some situation that shows us something about their character, like that scene in Armageddon. He’s worked with them all before, and shared past adventures with many of them. There’s a guy who’s secretly a girl who has such good eyes that she can see sandbanks from the top mast in the dark, there’s a Frenchman who’s the best killer in town but with uncertain loyalties, there’s the Jew who’s really good with slightly anachronistic explosives, and of course a black character who’s a heavy, good at fighting, and conveniently doesn’t have a tongue so he doesn’t have to have any dialogue. How far we’ve come…

Don't forget your 20-sided dice.

 Hunter and his ragtag band, all of whom seem to have fallen foul of Cavalla in the past, set off to teach the foul Spaniard a thing of two about unofficial British justice. They infiltrate the Spanish fort, and have many swashbuckling adventures along the way.

Reading this after finishing the behemoth that was The Terror, I’m struck by how fast everything happens. Perhaps my perspective has been skewed by Dan Simmons’ plodding monster, but it feels as though events and elements in Pirate Latitudes have scarcely been introduced before they’re over and done with. This does make it easy to get into, and several hundred pages will fly past without the reader noticing. Which, really, is good thriller writing, and that’s what Crichton was always known for. There’s no question that Pirate Latitudes, for the first half at least, is a breezy and more-ish read. Wanting to write the best damn swashbuckling adventure, with all the trimmings (and all the clichés) is a pretty worthy goal, in my opinion.

Except that Crichton is better than this. He has been, he can be. The book doesn’t quite have the feel of his other books: it lacks the in-depth research and scene-setting that drags you into the worlds he creates. It lacks believability and immersion. It’s more like a cheesy Hollywood version of the golden age of piracy: enjoyable for sure, but Crichton’s gift was to create factually-accurate  (well…within reason) worlds and still deliver rousing adventures that educated as well as enterted, and seeing him do this with a pirates-of-the-Caribbean setting would have been amazing. Every now and then he reminds you of what he’s usually like: there are dollops of info-tainment that briefly flesh out the pirates’ world, such as when we learn how cannons were operated or how Jamaican courts were run. But these are exceptions.

Another problem is that Crichton really seems to run out of steam about halfway. There is quite a lot of buildup to the Mantanceros raid, but once the characters get there, things begin to move so fast that it just seems silly. Encounters with a giant squid and some cannibals are dealt with so fast, and without fleshing-out, that they might as well not have happened. We never feel like the characters are in any danger. The cannibals themselves are portrayed as stereotypically as possible, and Crichton’s sole research into their habits and culture seems to have come from Saturday-morning cartoons. I’m frankly surprised that he didn’t write that one of them had a bone though his nose or something.

As for the characters, they are even more flat than usual for Crichton. Hunter is an outrageous parody of a manly-man male lead. His constant roguish cheek and acts of derring-do had me picturing him as Errol Flynn. Women throughout the book are either whores or helpless, except the amazing eye girl, who dresses like a man and is merely there to full out the ‘ragtag band’. All women in the book are of course in love with Hunter, and need frequent rescuing by him from being raped by other men. The book finishes with a scheme by Hunter that makes absolutely deplorable use of a woman’s charms (and body).

Don't act like you don't want him.

All of which adds to the suspicion that this is an old book of Crichton’s, and not perhaps one that he would have chosen to be published now. It reads like the work of an able but unoriginal thriller writer from the 70s. So, worth checking out? Eh… maybe. I will say that it made me hungry for more (and better-written) pirate material. Evidently, just enough of the old Crichton magic seeped through to get me interested in the genre, which was a hallmark of his greater works.