Sharpe’s Trafalgar, by Bernard Cornwell.
New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
$25 - 167 pages.

To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fueled by a determination to win. Just that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.

Richard Sharpe is the hero of Bernard Cornwell’s fabulous series of novels about the British imperialism in India and the Napoleonic Wars. Richard Sharpe is innately bright, a magnificent fighter, attractive to the ladies, a near-illiterate, risen through the ranks, a dead-shot soldier. Cornwell has written seven Sharpe novels, and each is a pleasure to read both as military fiction and as military history.

Cornwell’s latest account of Sharpe’s adventures and fights is Sharpe’s Trafalgar. On his way from India to England to join the Green Jackets, a new regiment, Sharpe sails aboard the Calliope, a merchant ship. Here he becomes involved with Lady Grace Hale, gives over his purse of gems to the ship’s captain for safekeeping, and is then taken captive along with the rest of the ship’s crew by a French warship. When the captain and several passengers board the French warship, Sharpe quickly realizes that the captain has stolen his gems and that the passengers are French spies whom the captain was assisting. When the Calliope is recaptured by the British, a feat accomplished with Sharpe’s help, both Sharpe and the British pursue the French warship. Their long hunt ends when they join Admiral Nelson and the British fleet at Trafalgar.

Readers who don’t care for this genre of book, or who don’t care for series books at all, will probably not warm to Richard Sharpe. My own liking for a series book depends entirely on whether I connect with the central character - John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux, and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder, all detective novels, are three of my favorites. Several years ago, I added Richard Sharpe to the list. His character doesn’t change much from book to book - he is consistently brave, contemptuous of falsity and facade, and yet brutal enough to seem a realistic soldier of his time and place. He loses friends to battle, but always comes out alive himself; he romances beautiful women (actually, they often romance him); he has a good heart.

Such continuity of character may annoy some readers, but the rest of us who enjoy series books come to them not for change, but for comfort and continuity. We want excitement and entertainment, yes, but we also want the feeling that all will turn out well in the end. It’s much like watching a detective series on television; we want car chases, gun play, and quick romance, but we want the good guys to win and the world to be set right before the evening is over. We want, in short, to be entertained.

What will attract the reader seeking entertainment to the Sharpe books, other than the character himself, is Cornwell’s knowledge of the British society, particularly military society, at this time. In Sharpe’s Trafalgar, for example, Cornwell shows us that the British navy at this point in time was a little less hidebound in tradition than the army. This looser approach to advancement makes sense, for a captain of a ship, faced with problems of weather and navigation, cannot get away with his ignorance or incompetence for nearly so long as a captain of army troops. In his descriptions of naval fighting, Cornwell reveals to us how such battles must have looked through the eyes of a sailor or a marine; he is particularly adept in his account of the fighting by the marines.

My one quarrel with Sharpe’s Trafalgar is Sharpe’s love affair with Lady Grace Hale. To conduct such an affair on a ship without being directly apprehended seems to me a near-impossible feat; the crowded quarters and constant movement of people certainly make it unlikely. Moreover, it might be nice for Sharpe just once to conduct an affair with someone from his own class. In the books that I’ve read, his lovers are all upper class ladies who find him, as Lady Grace says, “intriguing.”

One excellent way to begin your acquaintance with Richard Sharpe and the times that Cornwall depicts through him is to watch the Sharpe videos from your public library. Made originally for British television, with Sean Bean starring as Sharpe, this excellent series will whet your appetite for the books.
Book or movie - take your pick. Either way, I think you’ll have some fun and learn something in the bargain.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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