The Matter of Britain, Pirates, and Tough Guys

Statue of Boudica in London

I'm diving back into Henry Treece's Celtic tetralogy for Black Gate this coming week with Red Queen, White Queen. It's set during Boudica's bloody uprising against the Romans in 60 AD. Instead of the bloody queen, the book's perspective is from two soldiers, one Roman and the other a Briton. Where Artos and Medrawt in The Great Captains (reviewed at Black Gate) were building the great myths themselves, the protagonists here are only mortal moving through a legend-wreathed and spirit-haunted world.

Caractacus faces the Romans

The remaining books in the quartet are The Golden Strangers and The Dark Island. The first is set during the invasion of Britain by bronze using proto-Celtic tribes and their conquest of the stone age natives. The second is about Caractacus' war against the Romans.

I continue to be enthralled by the myths and history of early Britain. Even though my own roots are with the Saxon invaders, these stories have suffused the earth of the island itself and imprinted themselves on to all its inhabitants, including me through my ancestors. British resistance to foreign domination, be it Spain, France, or Germany, feels like it has its roots in the battles of Caractacus, Boudica, and Arthur. The seemingly endless struggle to bring a modicum of justice in times of chaos that lies with those stories as well.

I just finished off Rafael Sabatini's Captain Blood books: Brethren of the Main, Captain Blood: His Odyssey, Captain Blood Returns, and The Fortunes of Captain Blood. I'll go into more detail on them later (with Howard Andrew Jones - the worst instigator of book buying around these days). For now, just let me say that they, are rollicking, swashbuckling adventures of the first order.

I've also gotten back into some good hardboiled books as well. I finally picked back up and polished of Bait Money, Max Allan Collin's first Nolan book. The reason I hadn't finished it was it wasn't grabbing me. Nolan's a little too nice and the caper wasn't shaping up as something too thrilling. I think part of the problem was that years ago a friend told me Nolan was nothing more than a Parker knockoff and I went in expecting something more brutal and cynical than it is.

While inspired by Richard Stark's master criminal, Collins had his on take on that archetype and explains it afterword. He wanted to look at that sort of a man in the later years of his career as well as exploring Collin's own baby boomer generation through the character of Jon. But when I first started reading the book I was expecting something different.

Well, I'm glad I returned to it. The end is explosive and a great setup for the sequel, Blood Money. And don't get me wrong, there's a fair amount of cynicism, it's just tempered compared to what you find in the Parker books.

I'm also in the middle of Fast One by Paul Cain. I'd never hear of Cain until seeing him included on Jones' (Chris Hocking's actually) list of hardboiled books the other week. In keeping with its title, this is one of the most fast-paced books I've ever read. Within a few pages it's like getting hit by a train, a bloody, booze-soaked train. Not done yet but great so far.

Based on that list I also bought The Mouse in the Mountain by Norbert Davis, The Complete Casebook of Cardigan: Vol. 1. by Frederick Nebel, Solomon's Vineyard by Jonathan Latimer, and The Name of the Game is Death by Dan Marlowe. All look like a lot of fun, but I have to admit I bought the Davis book because it's got a big dog in it.

There are really a lot of similarities between hardboiled fiction and swords & sorcery. Both are tougher, more cynical and feature heroes more concerned with staying alive or getting the money than fighting evil. Richard Stark is to Agatha Christie as Karl Edward Wagner is to Prof. Tolkien. This has been talked about before (can't find the links, but trust me, people have discussed this), and reading the Cain and Collins only reinforces this belief in me.

So that's what's going on off the pages of Black Gate for me bookwise. I'm not even sure what heroic fantasy book I'm going to pick up next. I think I need to find something truly odd and from off the beaten track (of course, lazy as I am, I probably won't make the effort and I'll just grab something I've read already).

Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque futurus

Just reviewed Henry Treece's The Great Captains over at Black Gate. My dad had Treece's The Crusades lying around, but it was only when I got Moorcock and Cawthorn's Fantasy: 100 Greatest Books that I had any sort of real understanding of who Treece was. 

Great Britain has a vast literature, much of it fantastic, that examines the island's real and mythical history. Sometimes it's about the very land itself and how the actions of the waves of people migrating to or invading Britain have left imprints that still resonate today.  I'm not totally sure why it appeals to me as much as it does. I trace a quarter of my ancestry to England, so maybe there's something going on there, some part of my deepest Jungian-type race memory's being tickled. When I read Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood I felt like I was reading the pre-history of my own English antecedents. I was brought up deeply aware of my English roots. If my Dutch background had been emphasized would these stories hold the same appeal?

   Much of the literature specifically called the Matter of Britain and deals with the mythic (or at least mythic versions of) the kings of Britain. I'm not that familiar with the older stuff like the Historia Brittonum, only the modern. 

I'm a big fan of the Arthur stories. I love T. H White's The Once and Future King as well as its spin-off, Camelot. I also find that magnificent wreck, Excalibur, riveting. The whole struggle to fight against "might makes right" and stave off the impending long night appeals to our hope to see justice done. One claim about all the kingly literature is that it was written to establish a body of patriotic myths for the land. Well, you really can't do better than Arthur Pendragon. The Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle makes the story more poignant, humanizing a potentially demi-god-like character. 

   Other authors who've dug into Britain's past that I can recommend include Alan Garner and Susan Cooper. Garner, more than any other author I'm familiar with, has dug the deepest into the mythic history of Britain. Keith Robert's Pavane and The Chalk Giants are also favorites, exploring some of the same subjects, but in sci-fi settings.

Being a fairly young country with no real

connection between the original myths of this continent, America doesn't have the same sort of body of literature. That we're also immigrants from all corners of the world only makes the a unifying myth harder to create (you could argue about the Founding Fathers holding that place, but I don't think the deist ones would appreciate it). Maybe that's why I'm so enthralled by these stories. While my roots go back to this country's founding, they really go back much further, to another land. Maybe there's something buried deep in the bedrock of my cultural/genetic past that calls to me from back down the years.

   Reading The Great Captains put me in the mood to cue up some Jethro Tull albums. In particular, Thick as a Brick and Songs from the Wood got lots of play. I haven't listened to the latter that much in a long time. Does liking Jethro Tull make me hopelessly uncool?

My next Black Gate post will be a review of October's short stories from the usual suspects. After that I it's either de Camp's The Fallible Fiend or the new Deepest, Darkest Eden from Miskatonic River Press. As to music, I just put on Manowar's Battle Hymns. Overused as it is, the only word is AWESOME!