Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms
Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry
Yet such inconsistencies become inconsequential once the reader immerses himself in the world that Dumas conjured. It may be that schoolboys today negotiate adolescence unassisted by Dumas; if so, they are to be pitied. Anyone who has not galloped, heart in mouth, with the musketeers on the road to the convent of Béthune, in a desperate bid to save Constance Bonancieux from the vengeance of Milady, has omitted a crucial rite of passage. He who has never thrilled to the urgent command ‘To horse!’ is a potential health and safety officer.
Dumas owed his original inspiration to Sir Walter Scott. Even in his own lifetime he had a minor rival in Paul Féval, whose best-known novel Le Bossu (The Hunchback) has been filmed several times, most recently in 1997, with the very Dumas theme of a secret botte, or sword thrust, that is invincible. In the generation after Dumas, the sword-and-cape novel returned to the land of its birth and became primarily a British product.
Leading the charge was Stanley J. Weyman who, between 1890 and 1904, published 15 novels set in 16th- and 17th-century France, including such bestsellers as A Gentleman of France and Under the Red Robe. Other writers in this genre included A.E.W. Mason, in books such as Clementina and Königsmark, and the more Regency-based author Jeffrey Farnol.
The giant of the 1890s, however, was Anthony Hope Hawkins, although his swashbuckling output was only a small part of his oeuvre. Nonetheless, The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau became classics. The singularity of the Ruritanian romances was that the characters still rode horses and fought with swords in a world that also encompassed the railway and the telegraph. Their being rooted in modernity was part of their appeal to readers. There has been much misleading interpretation of these novels. They are not set in a ‘Balkan’ kingdom, but in a Mitteleuropean one: Dresden is the nearest real-life location to Ruritania. As for speculation about the origin of the kingdom’s name, it clearly derives from the Latin rus, ruris, meaning ‘country’.
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Jane Bodington
June 17th, 2008 11:16pmWell, you've never played 'Monkey Island' have you? Or 'Broken Sword'. Quite a few computer games are full of swash and buckle, and the designers are well-read in the genre and historical context.
But I agree with your main point, about the dearth of historical novels that are true to their period but have a sense of adventure. (Not Sharpe? No sense of humour?).
Anyway Perez Reverte wrote his books as a response to 'Sharpe', offended his sense of national pride, and also because he loves the British Nautical yarns, Hornblower etc., and wanted to do something similar for the Spanish.
In my opinion you forgot 'The Children of the New Forest'by Marryat, 'Kim' by Kipling, Erskine Childers 'The Riddle of the Sands' and Buchan, 'Greenmantle'?
Brian E. Birdnow
July 26th, 2008 4:37amI am an American writer of your magazine and was wondering why you did not place G. A. Henty in your pantheon of swashbuckling novelists. Henty may not have been a master literary stylist but he told a great tale and did so with verve and elan. His subjects were Scottish partisans, soldiers-of-fortune in seventeenth century Germany, and "cavaliers" fighting in the American Civil War. He was undoubtedly politically incorrect, but isn't the whole chivalric ideal politically incorrect today?