Patrick O’Brian’s publisher is saying Blue at the Mizzen may be the last in his superb series of historical fiction, and we can only hope that is not so. Still, we have to admit that it could not last forever. After all, O’Brian is well into his eighties, and the subject matter the Napoleonic wars has, with this 20th novel, come finally to an end, with Napoleon safely on St. Helena and Aubrey and Maturin fomenting revolution in Chile and sailing the frigid seas off Cape Horn. Without the backdrop of the French wars, O’Brian’s characters (assuming that he sticks to historical accuracy) would be about to enter two generations of peace. And while there is much peacefulness in this work, it relies on the electric excitement generated by the sudden appearance of an enemy on the horizon.

Perhaps, then, it is time to assess the whole series, of which this book is a worthy member. There is nothing unique in a series of genre fiction in which you could read any single book intelligibly or could view the whole series as a sustained narrative, nor in the addictive quality of this massive work. After all, people get addicted to genre writers from Danielle Steele to Zane Grey. What makes us want to give one of these books to every reading friend, to stay up all night with the latest installment, to reread the whole series in between new books, even to read the cookbook based on the series (anyone for soused pig face)? Well, you have to admire the manifest quality of O’Brian’s work. His erudition, for example, extends to the natural history of mammals, insects, and birds, to the ethnography of more cultures than I can count, to astronomy and navigational mathematics, to vintages of 18th-century wines, to naval tactics and practices, and to the truths of the human heart. We grow to know these fictional characters and to admire their foibles and courage so much that they become old, valued friends. And here, I suppose, is the secret of O’Brian’s art: that his genuine hard work at mastering and relating to us a body of arcane knowledge makes us trust him enough to listen to what he has to say about friendship, patriotism, courage, and love.

This is a work of genius, and in the face of its inevitable end, I can only think with pleasure at the now 20 volumes on my shelf. ¦ J.

W. Foster is an attorney in Columbia, South Carolina, and an avid sailor and equestrian.

At the onset of the Civil War, Mississippian Gawain Harper is ambivalent about the Southern fight for independence, preferring instead to focus his efforts on teaching English at a school for girls. The Confederacy is a bad dream that he dismisses as a short-term aberration of history, until two things occur that bring the reality of the war home to him: First, his school is forced to shut down because of the war, and, second, the father of the woman he loves makes it clear that Harper will never marry his daughter unless he volunteers for military service. Gawain Harper learns what so many before and after him have come to realize: That the turning points in a person’s life are invariably capricious in nature and almost never subject to the will of the person most affected. With no job and perhaps more importantly no marital prospects, Harper joins the Twenty-First Regiment of Mississippi and marches out of the small community of Cumberland, Mississippi, to find not so much glory as peace of mind.

For the most part, Howard Bahr’s new novel, The Year of Jubilo, is about Harper’s return to Cumberland after the war. The author writes with such precision and passion about the devastation that greets Harper, it makes you wonder if Bahr, a war veteran who saw combat in Vietnam, created his main character with more recent history in mind. Bahr is a gifted writer who adheres to the dictum advanced by one of his literary heroes, William Faulkner namely, that the best writing is always about the conflicts of the human heart. Although Bahr’s story is firmly rooted in the Civil War, it is the quality of his writing, his ability to define characters by their actions as much as by their thoughts, that distinguishes this novel.

Bahr’s debut novel, The Black Flower, earned him the 1998 Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Year of Jubilo should earn him more accolades and, hopefully, an even wider audience.

The holy grail of historical fiction is to recreate a real moment in history so that we, secure in our reading chair, surrounded by 20th century comforts, can taste it. Like all searches for a holy grail, it never works perfectly, and usually doesn’t work at all, producing second-rate genre fiction that is neither real history nor a well written novel. We can be thankful for exceptions, however, and this is one.

Mallinson is an active duty colonel with the Royal Hussars, and knows whereof he speaks. This is his first published novel, but none of it has a freshman feel. He tells the story through the eyes of Matthew Hervey, cornet and later lieutenant of a cavalry regiment in the Napoleonic wars. We first meet Hervey at the end of the Peninsular Campaign, when the British and their allies have Napoleon on the ropes and he is about to take his short vacation to Elba. The novel takes us from the Peninsula to Ireland, where Hervey is an officer of an army of occupation, and finally, as Napoleon breaks out of exile, to Belgium.

Mallinson presents his hero as competent and brave, but also a real person and something of an antihero. In the novel’s opening scene our man takes a French battery and gets arrested on the field of battle for this act of valor.

Mallinson is careful to maintain a sensitivity which some might find unusual in a professional soldier. There is very little blood-and-guts until the battle itself. Hervey finds himself in relationships with young women with whom the usual consummation is impossible. He has a mystical interlude with a French nun, and a flirtatious friendship with an Irish peasant girl. When he finally gets his chance with Miss Right, his diffidence almost sinks his chances. But only almost. For this is a novel where the hero gets the girl and lives through the carnage of the bloodiest European battle of the century, and the British win the day if only by the skin of their teeth. Wellington set the casual, graceful tone of this work when he used a term from the race track to describe what was, after all, perhaps the most important battle in European history: It was a close run thing. John Foster is a reviewer in Columbia, South Carolina.

The Fencing Master is a mystery set in the mid-1800s, when Queen Isabel II was on the Spanish throne and a revolution was in the making. There is an interesting analogy throughout between the art of fencing (context), the more symbolic art of love (theme), and the art of political revolt (place). All are subtly tied together. The fencing master, Jaime Astarloa, is nearing retirement. Before his death, he has one goal: A fencing move from which there is no parry, or countermove. He calls it the Holy Grail, the thrusting move for which there is no defense. Other characters include a gambler, womanizer, and member of the Queen’s court; a disillusioned priest turned journalist; a snobbish man of noble birth whose family has run out of money; a piano teacher who once dreamed of greatness and is sadly in love; and a beautiful, mysterious woman. These characters are the mystery and to tell more would almost give the mystery away.

The Fencing Master is the story of a man’s life, of passion, of making a difference. It is a mystery of the life in every day. Feelings and intuition cannot be grasped and examined like a piece of art. Yet, as the fencing master learns, they can be analyzed in hindsight like a good match of foils: deliberate thrusts, deliberate feints. In the beginning, we find only a fencing master searching for the perfect thrust, who wishes to live his last days in peace, reliving only the joys of his past, finding macabre consolation that his days are numbered, and making his humble way by teaching the passing gentleman’s art of fencing in a disillusioning new world ruled by revolvers and firearms. Quickly, though, he realizes that life will not grant him any such peace in his old age. As with many a man’s sleepless nights and the answer to many of life’s mysteries, a single thought begins them all: There was a woman . . . Clay Stafford is a writer and filmmaker living outside Nashville.

One of the leading writers of historical fiction, Jeff Shaara follows his popular bestsellers, Gods and Generals and The Last Full Measure, with his latest novel, Gone For Soldiers. This prequel of sorts explores the early careers of several legendary military figures of the Mexican-American War who would achieve prominence 13 years later in the Civil War. Like his Pulitzer Prize-winning father Michael, Shaara relies heavily on information gleaned from the diaries, letters, and journals of his principal characters, Captain Robert E. Lee and Major General Winfield Scott.

While the Mexican War had few major battles, there was substantial loss of life after General Santa Anna’s initial confrontation with the American forces under the command of General Zachary Taylor. The outmanned Taylor wisely used his artillery to devastate the Mexican army, especially its cavalry. His victories were eventually trumped, however, by the brutal terrain of northern Mexico and the opposition’s knowledge of the territory. At that critical point, Scott offered a bold move to break the impasse by attacking the enemy from the sea, driving a spearhead through the vital port of Vera Cruz to the nation’s capital.

Shaara understands that the joy of reading these novels for military buffs and fans of Americana comes in the analytical depiction of battle techniques and the key players involved. He takes his readers into their heads, detailing their strengths and weaknesses and how each of them wrestles with the endless crises of battle.

If Scott proves the old master of tactics, then Lee is shown to be the perfect pupil as a 40-year-old engineer who has never experienced combat. It is to Shaara’s credit that he is able to depict the evolving relationship between the pair with such skill and depth.

Gone for Soldiers is an inspiring historical yarn of courage, ingenuity, and sacrifice that depicts the growing pains of young America at a political and military crossroads.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

Evan Connell’s Chronicle captures carnage and glory of the Crusades The novel as an art form embraces a multitude of expressions, from the epistolary adventures of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to the stream of consciousness wadings of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and many other stops in between. Whether it also embraces Evan S. Connell’s Deus Lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades is a nice question, but probably unanswerable.

It may also be moot, because in pre-publication publicity Connell emphasizes that he thinks of Deus as a book about the Crusades, not an historical novel. . . . Monologues and dialogues in the book are paraphrased or condensed from those in medieval documents. Every meeting, every conversation, every triumph or defeat, no matter how small, was recorded centuries ago. The title is Latin for God wills it, the cry that exhorted Christians to go forth and wrest the Holy Land from Islam’s grip. The book runs from 1095, with Pope Urban pleading for the liberation of Jerusalem, to the end of the 13th century, when the Crusades lay in ruins along with many of the sites the Crusaders sought to liberate.

Connell, noted for Son of the Morning Star, his book about George Armstrong Custer, says that for this book he drew from numerous sources, prominently Chronicles of the Crusades by Geoffrey de Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville. He makes Joinville the narrator of Deus, looking back on the entire history of the Crusades in which generations of his family took part, including himself in their closing years.

Deus is, as its subtitle says, a chronicle. This is not a mere literary conceit; Deus literally reads like a re-creation of a medieval chronicle, with its flatness, monotone, and lack of perspective. The medieval chronicler reported events, and left it to his homogeneous audience to sort out the world-shaking from the mundane, knowing that, since they shared his world-view, his readers would be able to do that. Thus coronations, crop reports, battles, and astrological signs and portents were put down hugger-mugger, a jumble of events with scarcely any emphasis, because nothing in God’s creation is truly trivial.

So it is with Deus, with its hundreds of pages of undifferentiated head-loppings, piles of severed body parts, and unending rivers of Christian and Saracen blood each development accompanied by a pertinent, and typically vicious, moral reproof. The tone of the whole thing is morally instructive again, like a genuine chronicle and any irony is totally accidental. Of an early slaughter that did not go well for the visiting team, Joinville says, 4,000 Christians arose to glory in our Savior. To be sure, the events described, though usually gruesome, are colorful. There is the incident of the spy who came apart in the air after being flung toward Jerusalem from a catapult. What led him astray? asks the narrator. Ignorance of our Lord. It is fun to read about pilgrims in a Jerusalem released from bondage viewing the skull of Father Adam and fragments of the True Cross and the stone that felled Goliath.

And reading about the slayings of thousands of Jews and heretics in the course of a campaign to slay thousands of Muslims centuries ago, we naturally contrast that with our own times and realize that the justifications for butchery have not grown any better: Hence the wicked must be destroyed that the good may flourish. . . . Hence, for Saracens to be slain is good and necessary that their turpitude not increase. In the last quarter of the book Joinville begins to speak of his own experiences on crusade. He tells us more about the culture of the period and less about sending Saracens to the fiery pit and Christians to the arms of Jesus.

From this swamp of sanctimony-driven carnage comes the still, small voice of one old woman, who appears briefly and in passing, saying for love of God one ought to live honorably, not in hope of entering Paradise or from dread of Hell. Deus does not say so, but no doubt at some point some worthy knight improved that humanist attitude with a sword.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

Hitler’s Niece, by National Book Award Finalist Ron Hansen, is troubling for the reader. On the one hand, the reader wants to hang on to the perception of Hitler as the archvillain of the 20th century; on the other hand, Hansen’s portrayal is of a driven, inhibited, humorous, insecure, and therefore very human, man. Not sympathetic, mind you, but human. Viewed through the eyes of his beloved niece Angelika (Geli), Hitler is portrayed in this fictional work over an 18-year period from 1913-1931. The narration starts with his school days, continues through his internment in the Landsberg Fortress on charges of treason, touches on the writing of Mein Kampf, and draws to a close with his consolidation of power with the Nazi party. At this point, Hitler was little known outside Germany, a situation that was to change dramatically over the next few years.

Geli was the apfel of Hitler’s eye, from the time she was a tiny child until she grew into full-bodied fraulein-hood. Over the years, however, the direction of his attentions went hopelessly awry. Although maintaining an avuncular facade, Hitler developed an infatuation for his niece that was at once unhealthy and unrequited. Geli was entranced with the man’s oracular abilities, and his free and easy way of spending money on her, but her heart belonged to Hitler’s friend and chauffeur, Emil Maurice. And still Hitler’s obsession grew.

Hitler’s Niece is based largely on fact. Hansen painstakingly researched and carefully pieced together Hitler’s and Geli’s whereabouts for the narrative. Actual quotations from Hitler’s speeches pepper the text. And through it all, Hansen effectively captures the desperation of a man ravenous for love and power in equal measure, a man on the road to becoming a monster, the likes of which the modern world had never known. ¦ Bruce Tierney is a writer and songwriter.

The fanfare for this mammoth 770-page World War II novel sounded a dissonant chord or two. Is author James Thackara a literary genius with the depth of Dostoyevsky and Melville, as his publicists rave? Or is he, as some critics grouse, a pretentious poseur? In fact, The Book of Kings turns out to be one of the most ambitious, eccentric, morally driven books ever run off a press.

At its most frustrating, it is indeed grandiose in the manner of self-taught philosophy. Lyrical passages are artificially sweetened. But for much of its length, inspired writing gives impassioned witness to the destruction of 50 million human beings by totalitarian ideas, insane or wicked tyrants, and feckless democracies. Thackara reminds those who have forgotten and teaches those who never knew that World War II was more about evil than about heroism.

This is not the blue-collar combat experience of American moviemaking. The major characters of The Book of Kings, beginning with four young men who room together at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930s, move at the highest levels of European society, government, or military life. One of them knows Hitler; his friend becomes a world-renowned antifascist writer. Others include a famous film star and an important Wagnerian soprano. These grand beings have highly attenuated emotions.

Nonetheless, most will directly experience the horrors of the war, and the novel thus becomes propaganda at its most idealistic and benign. When portraying concentration camp atrocities or battlefield slaughter in high-resolution detail, Thackara’s elevated language accurately hits the high key of his humanistic theme.

Unfortunately, the cat’s out of the bag in postwar episodes. Elevated dialogue becomes pompous or goofy when the guns fall silent; noble ideas curdle into elitist fantasies. For a humanitarian, Thackara has a disturbing penchant for believing his characters superior to the bulk of humanity. Even so, this original if flawed novel is rewarding for its view of the war as primarily a European tragedy, its high-minded if self-righteous aims, and its stunning scenes of credible action in a world gone morally dark.

Charles Flowers, a freelance writer in Purdys, New York, recently received The Stephen Crane Literary Award.

It’s vacation week in Blackpool for Ruth Singleton and her family in 1959. Consumerism is on the rise, while the British textile industry is in its death throes; seaside resort towns like Blackpool will be devastated when the end comes. Ruth’s husband Jack starts his holiday with several secrets: he’s been offered jobs by both his union and the mill where he works. (“Jack is a fervent believer in cotton.”) And he’s received a surprising letter from Crete, where he spent time early in World War II.

Teenage daughter Helen feels thwarted by her restrictive mother at every turn, while seven-year-old Beth, who is recovering from a long illness, is babied, swaddled in heavy clothing and still made to take naps by Ruth. Believing the child is not long for this world, Ruth frustrates Beth’s attempts to complete the various tasks in her I-Spy at the Seaside magazine. Every chapter begins with one of the magazine’s challenges, which grow subtly more sinister in tone as the plot progresses.

All of Sallie Day’s characters ring true. Though he has his flaws, Jack is an honorable man. Helen’s efforts to shake free of her mother’s control are thoroughly convincing, and Beth, who has horrifying memories of the hospital and her surgery and who can “see the disgust in her mother’s eyes and feel the revulsion in her touch” over her scars, is heartbreaking and valiant. There are well-drawn secondary characters too. But it is Ruth who dominates the story. She is a demon cleaner who believes Jack will be faithful because she’s a good housewife. The world is beginning to change—feminism is in its early stages—and Ruth is determined to fight for her corner. “Ruth doesn’t see herself as an individual. How could she be when she’s bringing up two daughters? If she’s doing it properly there isn’t time to be an individual—when she’s not the children’s mum, she’s Jack’s wife. What decent mother has time to be an individual?” There’s something admirable about Ruth, although nothing very likeable. The Palace of Strange Girls is a striking first novel.