I am seemingly determined to work my way through all of these novels. Sharpe’s Trafalgar gives Sharpe an excuse to write about the Battle of Trafalgar and to paint a heroic portrait of Admiral Nelson that had me wondering about how historically accurate it was (in a good way!). Cornwell admits that he contrives to get Sharpe there, but as all of this series is an attempt to add reality and grit to portraits of European colonialism and the continental wars of Napoleon’s time then I’m not sure the manipulations matter all that much.
Thoughts:
- The descriptions of ship life are pretty stark and brutal and I’m guessing honest. I sort of wonder if there’s a bit of a gross-out factor happening here, but I appreciate them much as I liked how Battlestar Galactica made Star Trek seem insanely clean and sterile.
- The casualties in these battles are horrific, and the fact that bodies are dumped overboard feels insanely irreverent to a twenty-first century denizen…
- Masculinity is also under examination in this series, and the construction that Cornwell does justifies my like of the fake combat of mosh pits and rugby. Every utopia that I try to imagine has to deal with human, often masculine aggression wired into our lizard brains, and utopias that pretend that that doesn’t exist make no sense to me.
- Sharpe at one point feels guilty about his love of combat, but there is clearly some sort of emotion (perhaps it’s joy, as Cornwell describes it) in the physical contest between humans. And there is clearly something to combat…
- In the short story that follows Sharpe’s Trafalgar in this edition Cornwell has a Spanish partisan who is a woman. Unfortunately, she’s also Sharpe’s lover, but he is attempting, I guess, to include women in these types of histories…