From the Shelves of the Paco Library

Patrick O’Brian, George MacDonald Fraser and Bernard Cornwell are far too well known for me to praise their novels here; they are masters of historical fiction and I doubt that I could say anything about them that wouldn’t be completely obvious to my readers. It would just be a case of gilding the lily.

So I wanted to highlight a few other writers in the genre, all of them well-known, although the particular novels I’m going to mention may not be.

1) Barnaby Rudge, by Charles Dickens, is one of two historical novels that the author wrote (the other being A Tale of Two Cities). The book is a brilliant fictional reconstruction of the anti-Catholic riots that broke out in London in 1780, largely as the result of the mad Protestant fanatic and rabble-rouser, Lord George Gordon, who whipped the mob into a frenzy over the Pappists Act of 1778 (the Act had been an effort by Parliament to remove some of the more onerous restrictions that had burdened English Catholics for many years). During the riots two prisons were attacked and essentially destroyed, Catholic homes and the chapels of several foreign embassies were burned, as was the home of Lord Chief Justice William Murray. The riots continued for five nightmarish days, until the army was finally called out and given orders to shoot. Hundreds of people died in the riots and millions of dollars of property damage was done.

The novel is filled with plots and subplots, the obligatory love story, and an extremely unusual character in Grip the raven (the inspiration for Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous poem). Dickens does his usual masterful job at drawing interesting, believable characters, and he lavishes attention on the minor ones as well as the major. At 636 pages (Oxford Illustrated Classics edition), the novel is not the kind of thing you race through just to see what happened; but for those who have the patience to approach the book as an entry into another world and way of life, and to absorb the rich period detail, the excellent characterizations and the accurately-described history, it is well worth the trip.

2) Quentin Durward is, in my opinion, one of Sir Walter Scott’s most interesting novels. Scott was a gifted writer of historical fiction, possessing a genius at bringing to life many of the great actors who swaggered across the world stage. The hero of the title is a young man who leaves Scotland to enter service with a company of Scottish archers in the employ of King Louis XI of France, and the novel follows his adventures against the backdrop of the great rivalry between King Louis – known to history as the “Spider King” – and the appropriately-named Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Charles was the nominal vassal of King Louis, but he was an extremely ambitious man whose duchy was, for a time, mightier than the kingdom of his overlord. Louis was a monarch of incredible cunning, mixed with an almost laughable degree of superstition. The character sketches of the two rivals are brilliantly imagined by Scott, and are among his greatest creations, and there are, as with most 19th century novels, numerous interesting subplots (for example, Scott gives us a fascinating picture of the gypsies of the period, and their sad lot under the reign of the brutal Louis). Note: Sir Walter was much given to writing very long introductions to his novels; while I usually plow through these things myself, they can be skipped with no loss of understanding and appreciation of the stories.

3) C.S. Forrester is best known as the author of the outstanding Hornblower series, although he also wrote other distinguished fiction (including The African Queen, and a first-rate crime novel called Payment Deferred, which was made into a movie in 1932 starring Charles Laughton – I highly recommend both the book and the movie, in that order).

In Rifleman Dodd (published as Death to the French, in England), Forrester gives a picture of the land-based war against Napoleon, but in miniature. The hero, Matthew Dodd, is a soldier fighting in the Peninsular War who gets trapped behind enemy lines, and the book is the exciting story of his fight for survival and his hair-raising attempts to get back to his company. Along the way, he acts as a sort of one-man army, wreaking havoc among French forces. He succeeds, and the conclusion is a touching picture of the regular soldier, thrilled above all to be back among his mates, and firmly convinced that his heroics were simply part of the job.