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
Hope imbued his romances with excitement, humour, a fervent sense of chivalry and occasionally almost unbearable emotion. When Max Hastings, in a newspaper literary series, selected The Prisoner of Zenda as the most exciting book he had ever read (and reread), he confessed, ‘When I reach Rassendyll’s climactic line to Flavia: “God forgive me, madame! I am not the king”, I always sob a bit.’ Despite our supposedly stoic code of honour, that struck a guilty chord with many another Hope aficionado.
This masculine world was successfully invaded by Baroness Orczy who, between 1905 and 1940, published 11 novels and two books of short stories featuring Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, besides rendering a piece of doggerel (‘They seek him here...’) as immortal as the Iliad. The superficially foppish Sir Percy taunting his enemy Chauvelin (‘Sink me! Monsieur Chambertin...’) was an icon of aristocratic reaction. While most of the swashbuckling authors, despite the undemocratic instincts of their characters, were liberal in their opinions (both Mason and Hope were Liberal politicians), when Emmuska Orczy categorised the lower orders as ‘canaille’, one felt she meant it. Her parents had fled Hungary in fear of a peasants’ revolt.
After the first world war the swashbuckling novel enjoyed a renaissance due to the exceptional talent of Rafael Sabatini — his name even sounded like the clash of sword blades. His achievement was the more remarkable in that English was his sixth language, but his vehicle of choice because ‘all the best stories are written in English’. His two masterpieces were published in successive years: Scaramouche in 1921 and Captain Blood, described by George MacDonald Fraser as ‘one of the great unrecognised novels of the 20th century, and as close as any modern writer has come to a prose epic’, in 1922.
The literary distinction of Scaramouche was signalled by its arresting opening sentence: ‘He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.’ It is the epitaph on Sabatini’s gravestone. MacDonald Fraser himself made no mean contribution to the swashbuckling genre, albeit with the cynical antihero Harry Flashman. Perhaps that was the only guise in which sabre-rattling antics could find acceptance in the post-1960s world.
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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?