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.

The Terror (2007) by Dan Simmons

The Terror lay heavily on my mind for a very long time before I had the courage to pick up a copy for myself. At the best of times, I feel a sort of grim obligation to read and review any and all British Empire-themed books and films I come across, which of course means that I end up reading a lot of dross, and also that my shelves are fairly creaking with as-of-yet unread volumes. But The Terror… that was a step beyond. It takes a special kind of commitment to begin a thousand-page epic about frostbite, scurvy and the general grimness of 19^th-century Arctic exploration, and know that you’re going to see it through to the bitter end. And, to be sure, the end wasgoing to be very bitter. Like I say, The Terror lay heavily on my mind… perhaps as heavily as the upcoming 1845 Arctic expedition to force the Northwest Passage must have lain on the mind of its commander, Sir John Franklin.

But I sure am glad that I did pick it up.

Once in a great while you come across a book that thrusts you into a world and a subject that obsesses you: The Terror is such a book.

The Terror tells the story, in a fictionalized form, of the doomed Franklin Expedition. Once a Victorian cause celebre, it is now a largely forgotten event. I had certainly never heard of it before reading the book, but I was intrigued to find that my mother had memories of singing a song known as Lady Franklin’s Lament, a balled composed about this event just a few years after it happened.

So, what was all the fuss about? Well, as you may be aware, frost-bitten seamen had already been killing themselves north of Greenland for centuries searching for a safe way to sail over the top of the world: the fabled Northwest Passage. If found, such a route would allow ships to trade with the Far East without going around the infamous Capes. The thought of all that lovely trading and money had long convinced sailors that the Arctic ice must surely have been a relatively narrow band, with an easily-navigable (and completely mythical) ‘open Polar sea’ available to anyone who was brave enough to get to it.

Well, we’ve made some pretty sizeable dents into the Arctic with global warming since those days, but there still isn’t and never has been an open Polar sea. The net result is that pretty much all voyages with this goal became grim records of utterly futile horror and death. And into this litany of woe stepped Sir John Franklin in 1845, as he planned an ultra-modern expedition of over one hundred men and the latest in ice-worthy ships, the Erebus and the Terror, to force the Northwest Passage.

Sir John Franklin

Simmons’ weighty tome takes on this story from about a year into the expedition, when the two ships had already been trapped in ice for some time, and the proud Sir John was only just beginning to admit that he probably wasn’t going to realise his goal. Soon into the proceedings, it becomes pretty clear that even getting home alive would be quite an achievement for the team.

The day-to-day horrors of life at the frozen north are brought home with terrible clarity. Scurvy, starvation, rationing, and having metal objects such as pistols and telescopes tear off chunks of flesh whenever they touch bare skin are all common occurences for the crew of the Franklin Expedition. And yet, despite the unrelenting grimness, there is a kind of strange positivity to the whole thing. Somehow, Simmons makes you like and admire the characters. I won’t say there’s hope in the story, as pretty much every character seems to know that he’s doomed from the beginning, but there’s a certain dignity and respect for man’s determination to survive to the proceedings.The extraordinary level of detail of their ordeal, helped by the sheer length of time the reader spends with them, makes them  knowable and somehow admirable.

Simmons focuses largely on an officer called Crozier, an Irishman who has been passed up for promotion countless times because of his origin, despite being an extremely capable veteran of many polar expeditions. Crozier is a great hero, and a character who seems to have been extremely interesting in real life; Simmons depicts his redemption from hopeless achoholic to driven leader (upon the death of Franklin) with a panache that wrings real emotion from the reader. I seldom warm to a character as much as I grew to like Crozier: he’s a believable hero. He’s not perfect but he does the right thing, even under extraordinary circumstances.

Francis Crozier

 And it’s the extraordinary circumstances that I expect will make or break this doorstop of a novel for most people. For, in a genre-bending move, Simmons makes the most immediate threat to the crew not any of the above troubles, but instead a seemingly-supernatural creature, barely seen, that stalks them from the ice. It’s a weird twist indeed, changing the book from being a strictly historical thriller to a speculative pseudo-horror story. It’s a trick that works best towards the beginning, when we’re still unsure whether or not the creature is real or if it’s a product of madness and superstition. Inevitably, Simmons overplays his hand and is forced to ‘show’ us more and more of the monster. It still works as a decent thriller, but the mystery and horror elements do get somewhat watered down the more frequent the monster appearances are. I’m not going to indulge in a ‘don’t show the monster = better horror’ debate, but there are works that make me think that there's something to be said for the theory.

There are always pacing problems with a novel this size. I do personally value brevity and efficiency in fiction, and I feel that it takes a real master to justify the ludicrous page length of, say, the average Stephen King novel. And Simmons, while exellent, and a better writer than most, doesn’t quitesustain my interest at its initially high level. Which is a light criticism, but describes a problem which the author could easily have remedied, if he’d exercised a little more restraint. For the first 300-odd pages, I was completely hooked, entirely obsessed with the minutia of polar exploration. And what a feeling that was… I exhaustively researched the Franklin Expedition and its predecessors, sourced folksongs and stories dealing with Franklin and his crew, and generally bored everyone around me stupid with Arctic exploration stories for about two weeks (which is how long it took me to plough through this monster). The Rogers Stan song Northwest Passage in particular gave me chills the first time I heard it, and when he mentions Franklin in the chorus I felt as though he was singing about someone I had known and shared hardships with.

Compared to this, I found the monster stuff less interesting, though it was well done. Perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting older, that I prefer the historical stuff to the supernatural. Who knows.

There are very few books that obsess you, and for that reason I shall place The Terror proudly beside the few others on my shelf that have done the same. But the initial high did wear off about halfway through, and though I was never bored, there were times when I wondered how I would have felt about the book if it had finished while still rocking my world.

Stay frosty.

Vu Quang

The rain fell in grey sheets that hid the forested slopes and hammered on their helmets. Mullins and Richardson tramped up the steep incline, their feet sticky and heavy with mud. Marching in this humidity was like being swathed in warm, wet blankets. They were glad when they came to a small temple, a squat Buddha cross-legged on its roof, defiant against the deluge. They ducked into the entrance. The door had been boarded up – probably by their own squad-mates, knowing that the enemy made lethal use of any hiding place they could get in the jungle – and contented themselves with sitting in the deep doorway, sheltered from the rain.

The Future Eve (1886) by August Villiers de L'Isle Adam

A word of warning: The Future Eve is not a novelette that you’re going to find easily. Not in English anyway; from what I can tell, the only available English translation, apart from some rather academic and expensive-looking journals, is in a strange collection called The Frankenstein Omnibus which is almost definitely out of print. So, chances are, you’re probably not going to be reading it, which is a shame. For this reason, I may be a little more lenient with the spoilers this time.

I’ll admit upfront that The Future Eve is not really anything to do with Imperialism or colonialism, but it is choc-full of other points of interest to the nineteenth-century enthusiast. For starters, the author was a fin-de-siecleFrench bohemian who hung out in cafes writing, drinking (absinthe, presumably), being poor and attempting to get rich society ladies to marry him (a bit like my life, really. Except I'm not French, obviously). The novelette is a sort of take on the Frankenstein theme, and what makes it interesting is its distinctly romantic/decadent spin on the subject.

At the beginning of the story we’re introduced to one Professor X, who sadly is nothing to do with the X-Men, but is in fact a sort of literary stand-in for none other than Thomas Edison. That’s what the intro says, anyway; if it’s true then the general public (in France at least) must have had some pretty weird ideas about the man and his abilities back in the 1880s. We first meet Not-Edison rambling about in his mansion outside a city (presumably New York), being attended to by the disembodied voices of artificial personalities he has somehow created using ‘electricity.’

Not in this book.

One of the great joys of reading literature from this period is the almost mystical reverence that was given to electricity. I guess even this late in the century it was still seen by many people as being wondrous and a little bit mysterious… the kind of ill-understood force that could be capable of almost anything. Think of Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues telling his captives that ‘my electricity is not the same as everyone else’s’ in an attempt to handwave the workings of the Nautilus. Way to fluff your research there, Verne.

Electricity in Victorian novels is always a plot device for creating monsters, bringing people back from the dead or other Things Man Was Not Meant to Know, mostly based on its demonstrated ability to make dead frogs twitch. Makes perfect sense, really. In the 1950’s, its place as a magical monster creator was taken by atomic power, and later by genetic engineering, which are similarly both misunderstood by the public and misused by narrative media. Read this for a bizarre real-life example.

This is exactly what Victorian science was like.

Not-Edison’s devices are described and explained in very strange ways in the novelette. The science isn’t ignored or handwaved away like in Wells, nor is it excruciatingly and accurately thought-through like in Verne. Instead, the author does go into quite a lot of detail; it’s just that none of it makes any bloody sense. There’s lots of talk about telephone wires and reflections, vibrations and currents. Of course, none of these descriptions really address how Not-Edison has achieved artificial intelligence, no matter how long they go on for. But they do bring a wonderfully romantic feeling of science-as-magic to the story.

How did I do it? I'll never tell!

 The scientist receives a visitor: the young and handsome Lord Ewald. But despite being the very picture of virile English manhood, the lord has a problem: he’s desperately lovesick. Despite having a position and profile that would win him the heart of almost any woman he meets, he’s gone and got himself hung up on a girl who’s doing him wrong. Things are so bad that he’s considering suicide.

The girl, one Alicia Cleary, is so beautiful that she’s regularly compared to the Venus of the classical world. She is, in a way, attached to Ewald, but he is constantly disappointed by her because the silly chit’s personality is not equal to her beauty.

Ah, yes. It would be neglectful of me not to mention that The Future Eve contains more than a strain of misogyny. In fact, it’s rather famous for it: the misogyny is the main thrust of most of the literary criticism that has been written about it.

Professor X and Ewald talk over the particulars of the situation. Apparently Miss Cleary is so physically perfect that Ewald is willing to die for her, he is so in love. They also agree that her personality is deficient: she doesn’t like opera or sculpture, she’s small-minded and selfish. The two men discuss which aspects of her being are acceptable and which are lamentable, and they both agree how wonderful it could be if they could somehow keep the former while jettisoning the latter.

And then Professor X realizes that, actually, he knows just how such a thing could be achieved.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, it’s pretty despicable. There’s no getting around that. Ewald, like all romantic/decadent heroes, is so hung up on this girl that nothing else in life really seems to matter. Fair enough, we’ve probably all been there. But the explicit fact that he’s only in love with her beautiful exterior, and cannot stand her personality, makes him utterly shallow. And that the two characters coldly and rationally decide what characteristics are desirable and not desirable in a woman makes them both pretty unlikable. Also, their limits for what’s desirable, personality-wise, are offensively narrow, which I suppose was probably typical for the time.

Eventually, Professor X reveals his plan: he will create an electronic facsimile of the girl, an exact copy: an android (the first use of the term in literature, fanboys!). Ewald is at first horrified, noting that even if the physical likeness was perfect, her store of conversation and actions would necessarily be woefully limited. Professor X mentions that they’ve both observed in the past that a proper society lady is nothing more than a limited number of learned conversations and actions. Shudder.

The two then retreat to Professor X’s gigantic underground cave of electronic wonders, where he explains in fascinating (and horrifically offensive) detail exactly how one would go about making a perfect woman. He ‘proves’ to Ewald that real women aren’t that ‘real’ anyway, because they use make-up and can alter their appearance. It’s this that a man really falls in love with, he says while pointing to a drawer full of cosmetics. An illusion. So really, falling in love with an automaton isn’t that different. Again, the superficiality is staggering.

This section is fascinating, if ghoulish and ethically questionable. Again, the author goes into masses of detail about how the android will be constructed, how she will function and how perfect the likeness will be. And even though he’s despicable, I liked how Ewald’s emotions swing constantly as he see-saws between revulsion and lust at the idea of having his desires granted in this unorthodox way. By the end, I wanted to find out what was coming next as much as the lovesick Lord.

Later, there’s an amazing scene in which Ewald has a surprise meeting with his automated lovedoll that prompts us to think about what it is that we really fall in love with. Ewald is obsessed with an ideal of Alicia; an impossible vision of her that is no more or less real than the automaton is. It’s an interesting idea, and one the author delves into in some detail, only to slightly spoil it with his underlying shades of misogyny, as well as the fact that he cheats by having the android inhabited by the essence of one of Professor X’s artificial personalities through supernatural means, thereby giving it a bona fide soul, as it were.

Large portions of the novella take place in real-time, with the Professor and Ewald having long conversations (while smoking cigars and drinking brandy, of course) that allow the writer to indulge in reflections on morality, science, and emotion. Even if some of the ideas are now repugnant to us, it’s still a good deal more interesting than the flat characters that usually turn up in Victorian speculative fiction. Ewald in particular fascinated me as a man who knowingly and deliberately buys into his delusion in the most literal way over the course of the story.

The Future Eve is not easy to come by in English, but it’s well worth looking out for.

Mmm... gentlemanly.

Hart of Empire by Saul David

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Everybody ready for another trip to 19^th-Century Afghanistan? Thought not. Well, we’re going anyway.

How good is Hart of Empire? Well, I’ll tell you this much: I read the last hundred pages of it while marching up a mountain. Granted, I was living on top of the mountain, and the walk up it from town had become more of a regular tramp to me than a breath-taking experience. But, yeah, I was gripped enough that finishing the book became more interesting than taking in the Yorkshire Dales scenery. So that must say something.

But that was a year ago, and things have changed. Surrey is not Yorkshire; in Surrey, there’s always a rich prick (or a housemate) around to snigger at my habit of reading while walking. For whatever reason, I never got around to reviewing the book then, so I’ll review it now, following a recent re-read.

If you’ve ever haunted the historical fiction aisle in bookshops (really? Are you a ghost or something?), you’ll know that there’s something of a cottage industry of book series that ape the whole Flashman/Sharpe thing: books that follow the adventures of a dashing young soldier who takes part (willingly or otherwise) in the various famous battles of his era, which is usually either the Napoleonic or Victorian era. Just off the top of my head, I can name Hornblower, Flashman, Sharpe, Fenwick Travers, Jack Absolute, and now Hart as well as examples of this. Some of these characters are older and more influential, some are clearly very derivative. Those that take after Flashman tend to be tongue-in-cheek, those that take after Sharpe tend to take themselves very seriously.

The lure of an author who loves history to write a series like this is obvious. It’s great fun, and tremendously useful, to have a character who exists at a place in time where they can plausibly (ahem) pop up during events that are themselves fascinating and well-known. Much of the history of Victorian colonialism in particular reads like a (highly racist and bigoted) ripping yarn anyway, so it makes tremendous sense to make fiction out of it. Someday, someone will write a series like this that takes place during some radically different period, and then the floodgates will open. Anyone for the adventures of a dashing young rapscallion who blunders his way through the Pelleponesian wars, pissing off prissy Athenians and getting riotously drunk with crazy Spartans? I’d buy that for a dollar.

For me, these books serve a higher purpose too: they add life to the history. I find that even the best-written history book comes to life just a little bit more when I can relate the events to a fictitious piece of work. History gets so often reduced to lists of names, dates and numbers. It’s great to know exactly who fought who during the Zulu wars, and how many troops they had, but I sure as hell wake up when I suddenly realise that Bromhead was the guy who was played with such uppity magnificence by Michael Caine, or that Cetshwayo was the leader who double-crossed Flashman. Fiction is able to bring character and meaning to the subject in a very different way than real history books. Of course, it also has a certain responsibility to the source material; witness the descendants of Private Hook who were appalled at his portrayal as a coward in the movie Zulu, and loudly made their grievance known to the film company.

Anyway. So, Hart of Empire is a sequel. The first book is Zulu Hart, which I’ve not read. It isn’t supposed to be very good. But the opening chapters of the sequel make a few things clear: George Hart is part Zulu (and part Irish, for those of us still paying attention to such things!), but he passes himself off in English society as being of Mediterranean extraction. He fought in the Zulu War in 1878 and was, rather predictably, involved in the Isandlwana debacle as well as the defence of Rourke’s drift. There are at least a couple of women who are fond of him, and whom it seems will continue to play a part in the series. We also learn that he has a mysterious rich father who has left him a legacy: the young Hart will inherit rather large sums of money if he can rise to a certain rank in the British Army (for God’s sake don’t ask me what rank), earn a Victoria Cross and ‘marry respectably’, all before he turns 28.

Not very good, apparently.

The story begins with Hart being called for interview with several highly-placed Government bigwigs, including Prime Minister D’israeli himself, though he’s referred to as Lord Beaconsfield (as an aside, I recently spotted an Irish bar called the Earl of Beaconsfield in Cambridge recently. I doubt if many people noticed that the half-heartedly painted leprechaun hanging from the door had once been a portrait of D’israeli. In a weird coincidence, Gladstone once called D'israeli a 'soulless leprachaun'). Obviously Hart’s a bit suspicious as to exactly what these stuffed shirts want with a half-dago like himself, but wouldn’t you know it, he’s being blackmailed by the brother of a man he accidentally killed, so he’s willing to listen to what they have to say in case it’ll help him get out of the country. As it happens, it might just: apparently, a mission to Afghanistan is what they have in mind for young Hart, as trouble is brewing there: the kind of trouble that can best be dealt with by an officer who has just the right qualities. An officer who can go undercover because he has just the right look.

As in, HE’S A DARKY.

Half-castes never amount to anything.

D’israeli takes him aside and gives him a pep talk, telling him that they’re both ‘cuckoos in the nest,’ and that as an ethnic Jew, he knows what it’s like to be singled out. They don’t exactly bond over this issue, however, but the prime minister goes ahead anyway and gives him the details of the mission. And why exactly is our man being sent to rumble in the ‘stan?

Apparently not learning their lesson the first time, the British have gone and got themselves embroiled in a second Anglo-Afghan War (they haven’t learned their lesson since either: Britain went to war against Afghanistan, pretty much with disastrous consequences every time except the third, in 1839, 1878, 1919 and 2001). It’s part of what was called the Great Game: the cold war of subterfuge that had been going on between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia as their two empires swallowed up vast tracts of real estate in that region during the 19^th century, bringing their borders ever closer together. Afghanistan, being a border state to British India (well, it was once they’d annexed Sind and the Punjab, anyway), occupied a precarious position between these two great enemies. The British had always been keen to keep it as a buffer zone, separating India from the Russian hordes, but the damn Orientals were just so unpredictable: Afghan leaders toppled on and off the throne with alarming regularity, and the country was never as unified as the British would have liked. So naturally they had to step in every so often and tell the Afghans whose rule they should be subject to, though usually not without getting a bloody nose in the process.

 Ever fearful that Ivan is keen to get his grubby mitts on British India, the British become jittery because the Afghan king hsd been consulting with Russian envoys. Ultimatums are given and ignored; redcoats (and khaki coats, for the first time!) march yet again on Kabul as the British military steamroller trundles into the country.

Here we go again...

So far, all this is described pretty much as it really happened. Hart’s particular mission hinges on a small fictional device of the author’s: that a fanatical religious leader, Mulah Mushk-I-Alam, has taken possession of an item rumoured to be the cloak of Mohammed (a real artifact that was in Kabul at the time) and intends to use it to stir up holy war. If he does, the Indian government will doubtlessly use this as an excuse to annex all of Afghanistan as part of their aggressive ‘forward policy’ against the Russians in Central Asia.

But London and Calcutta don’t see eye-to-eye on this. London has no wish to find themselves master of yet more untold miles of savage terrain and even more savage, pissed-off tribesmen, so they aim to deprive Calcutta and the Indian Government of this excuse. Hart’s job is to reclaim the cloak before holy war breaks out.

(While the intrigue between the two governments makes for an interesting plot, this point becomes more and more stretched as the book goes on. As the war against the British becomes more and more intense and widespread, the reasons for Hart to track down the cloak and complete his mission become more and more obtuse. I mean, when all hell is already breaking out all over the country, does the Indian Government really need the excuse of jihad to annex Afghanistan?)

Hart agrees, and gets shipped off to British India, and from there he makes his way to Afghanistan. Along the way, he picks up a (yawn) proud, brave, earthy Klingon Pathan warrior, Ilderim Khan, to assist him and become his bodyguard and sidekick (Ilderim’s a likeable character, but he’s such a stock ‘proud warrior race’ character that I had trouble not visualising him as a Jaxn’trep from Run Like Hell. How’s that for an oblique reference?). They have a few adventures on the way before arriving at Kabul and meeting Yakub Khan, the cowardly Emir of Afghanistan. The Khan proves indecisive during a riot by his own troops, and Hart’s attention soon turns to Yakub’s hot (and sadly fictional) sister, who, he reckons, would totally make a better ruler, if only the Afghans would get over their inherent sexism. And if he gets to bone her along the way, that would be just dandy. And so the stage is set for scrapes and thrills aplenty.

Don't google-image search 'Jaxn'trep, unless you're a fan of Rule 34.

This is not my first encounter with author Saul David: before writing fiction he wrote history books, and I once struggled through his Victoria’s Wars, despite my obsession with the subject. I found it a snooze-worthy collection of boring troop manouvers and colourless, indistinguishable battles. Nobody should go near the book who isn’t well-extensivelyversed in military terminology. His mammoth book on the Indian Mutiny too glowers at me from my bookshelf, daring me to give it a go, though at the moment I’d rather be held under siege by marauding Pathans. Happily, I found his fiction a far more pleasing way to digest his undoubted expert historical knowledge. Predictably, David has been quoted as saying that his interest in Imperial history was sparked by a reading of Flashman as a young man.

Compared to that earlier book, this is definitely a case of an author writing historical characters that have worldviews waytoo modern for their supposed period. Hart is such a lefty that he’d have had no place in the Victorian military system. He’s all in favour of independence for small nations, and is far more respectful to the Afghans than even the Orientalist travellers and explorers like Burnes and Burton were in real life. He’s also well into his women’s lib. It must be impossible in this day and age to write realistic characters from an age that had mores which are now considered offensive.

Now Hart is clearly the latest of many characters to have been inspired by Flashman, but with the Afghanistan setting, David is clearly setting himself up for a rather explicit comparison. The Afgan war of this book was, in real life, the sequel to the First Afghan war that was the setting for the first Flashman book. Many of the settings, buildings and military engagements are identical, and the exercise often feels like a bit of a re-tread (as it may have to some of the soldiers involved) though with a slightly different tone. I think it’s a compliment to say that David’s book doesn’t come off as being truly awful compared to Flashman, though it’s nowhere bear as good. It’s well written enough that I enjoyed it as a tour through an unfamiliar bit of military history. But while it jettisons the humour and right-wing attitude of Fraser’s book, it doesn’t really replace it with anything unique that is strong enough to stand out from the crowd. Little is made of the character’s mixed-race, apart from his useful ability to pass as a native. The more left-wing tendencies of the book seem a somewhat wishy-washy comeback against Flash Harry’s pro-empire worldview, and also seem frequently out of place in this time period. Flashmandefinitely gained something by being published back when more offensive attitudes could be included in popular fiction.

All the same, I enjoyed the book and will pick up the next one in the series, if David ever cranks one out. He’s covering a later period in Imperial history than the majority of the Flashman books, so I’d be definitely interested in seeing his take on the African wars of the 1880s and 1890s. By all accounts Hart of Empire is a vast improvement over Zulu Hart, so perhaps David will be able to nab that elusive something that will make Hart less bland.

Come and take me, Brits - if you think you're hard enough. Wait.. actually, no. I've had enough.