Weevils, sodomy and flogging or Baker rifles, jangling bits and ragged squares? For most authors dealing with the Napoleonic era, it’s an either/or. C. S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian do the Royal Navy, Bernard Cornwell does the land battles. But there’s one greedy-guts out there who wants to have his cake and eat it. Step forward Allan Mallinson, creator of both cavalry officer Matthew Hervey and sea Captain Sir Laughton Peto.
Not that we’re complaining, obviously. It’s true that it can be irritating when a book’s narrative hops between the separate adventures of two distinct characters, but in the case of Mallinson’s latest, Man of War, it works splendidly.
It being 1827, Hervey doesn’t really have any decent foreign wars to fight in, so his job in this book is to mooch around the clubs, parade grounds and grand houses of England, warding off scandal, slyly angling for the job of CO of his beloved Light Dragoons, and not quite successfully trying to persuade himself that the ghastly, frigid Kezia Lankester is the woman with whom he ought to be spending the rest of his life.
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