Sharpe’s Prey (Reviews)

STATE OF SIEGE by Ken Ringle
31 Mar, 2002
The Washington Post

Like many of us, Bernard Cornwell fell in love with C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower novels as a youth. But it didn’t stop there. After exhausting those famous naval tales of the Napoleonic Wars, he searched in vain for a land-based equivalent. When he didn’t find it, he decided to write one himself. Thus was born, in 1981, rifleman Richard Sharpe, the wily and resourceful soldier whose adventures as a gutter-bred ranker in the army of King George III trail the future Duke of Wellington from India to Waterloo and beyond. If the historical novel presently appears to be undergoing a renaissance, Cornwell, no less than Patrick O’Brian, is one of the reasons. The man is astonishingly prolific, cranking out more than a book a year, not just on Sharpe but on his American Civil War counterpart Nathaniel Starbuck, plus sailing mysteries and other period yarns of a high if not exceptional literary quality. These are fine historical page-turners, as instructional as they are fun. For example, who remembers, if they ever knew, that the British bombarded hapless Copenhagen in 1807, effectively torching much of the city and killing thousands of Danish civilians, including women and children, in the process? Technically, the Copenhagen Expedition chronicled in Sharpe’s Prey was aimed at Napoleon: The British wanted to keep the little emperor from seizing the large and powerful Danish fleet to replace the French ships lost at Trafalgar. But the needless destruction and slaughter of civilians made the incident a disturbingly eerie mini-review of the apocalyptic British firebombing of Dresden in World War II, for which no meaningful military justification has ever been advanced. Sharpe’s Prey is the 18th of Cornwell’s Sharpe novels — one of several fill-in episodes in the career of a protagonist Cornwell has already projected to Waterloo (in 1990’s Sharpe’s Waterloo). Here, Sharpe gets appointed to monitor a secret shipment of gold dispatched to bribe the Danish king into handing over the Danish fleet, without bloodshed, to the British for the duration of the war. The plan goes awry at the hands of a charming but treacherous aristocratic rotter secretly in the pay of the hated Frogs. The villain not only makes off with the royal gold, but tortures a British agent in Copenhagen; the intrepid Sharpe winds up falling for the agent’s flaxen-haired daughter even as he mourns his own lost love. Bombs fall, cathedrals burn, and even orphans are broken and burnt in the cataclysm that leaves Shrpe as seared and shaken as the city his own army and navy have left in ruins. Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe is an intriguing protagonist, Dickensian in his semi-criminal wiles, a military realist and lower-class fatalist periodically led painfully astray by hope. A rifleman in the waning age of musketry, a long-range sniper in the era of the bayonet charge, he embodies the cutting edge of technological death in a 19th-century military still preoccupied with pageantry and maneuver. But Cornwell is clearly no Patrick O’Brian — he’s more like the Forester he loved in his boyhood. If the essence of the historical novel is the fictional evocation of a period, then he’s capable enough. He teases us with enough period details — a shoulder weapon with seven barrels fired by a single trigger; child street sweepers gathering dog droppings (“pure”) to be used in tanning — to persuade us that we’re in another time. His narrative is straightforward and unadorned — a boon for those impatient with O’Brian’s blizzards of scientific and nautical terminology and his uncompromising 18th-century voice. But few of the characters in Sharpe’s Prey come fully to life in the reader’s mind. They propel the plot rather than inhabiting it, and those bewitched by O’Brian will look in vain for the lyrical descriptions of nature, the grand sweeping themes and metaphysical musings, and the richness of character that makes the least of the inhabitants of that author’s novels unforgettable. Still, like Forester, Cornwell is no narrative slouch. Sharpe’s Prey gives us a vivid account of a little-remembered episode in history. And the author makes us care enough about Richard Sharpe and his adventures to want to enlist for another campaign.