Sharpe's pretty but vain and silly young wife Jane has been tempted into leaving France, where Sharpe is busy battling Napoleon's troops, and running off to London with all of Sharpe's money by her new friend, a war widow who has been supporting herself as kept woman since her husband died. The widow has presented the trip as a kind of vacation, an extended shopping spree, meant to teach Sharpe a lesson for breaking a promsie to Jane.
Once back in England, the widow contrives to push Jane into the arms, and then into the bed, of another officer of her acquaintance, a man who is as down on his luck as the widow and needs to find a rich woman to keep him. Together the officer and the widow manage to spend all of Jane's money.
Pretty soon, as happens to all pretty but silly and vain wives who betray their hero husbands, Jane finds herself broke, friendless, alone, full of remorse, and facing the choice between death and a life as a prostitute.
Trapped inside by the rain yesterday, the teenager and I watched a couple episodes of the Sharpe TV series starring Sean Bean, including the one I'm describing here, Sharpe's Revenge.
The TV movies, like the Bernard Cornwell novels they're based on, are gritty but thrilling high-adventure yarns with enough realistic touches and historical details to hide the tale tale and soap opera absurdities at their core. As stories they have more in common with Arthurian romances than with their other nearest model, Alexander Dumas' historical adventures. Which is why it isn't surprising that Cornwell has been working on a series of novels about Camelot when he's not been writing about Sharpe.
Dumas was far more of cynic than Cornwell is and, I think, his cynicism gave him a far more sympathetic insight into human nature. In scenes between his greatest hero, D'Artagnan, and his ostensible villains, Richelieu or his successor, Cardinal Mazarin, you understand why either cardinal is a great man running a whole nation and why D'Artagnan is a nobody, stuck in the lower rank of officers, and not likely to go higher on his own. You also understand why D'Artagnan is still a hero and the Cardinal still a villain.
In any meeting between Sharpe and a historical figure like Wellington, understanding what makes Wellington Wellington depends on the real Wellington's reputation being carried into the novel by the reader.
I've been reading Twenty Years After, Dumas' first sequel to The Three Musketeers, and, while I know I have Terry Pratchett on the brain these days, the first scene between D'Artagnan and Mazarin reminded me so much of encounters between Sam Vimes and the Patrician that I'm convinced that Pratchett is a better student of Dumas than Cornwell. Vimes is a bit smarter than D'Artagnan---and it's to Dumas' credit that he deliberately makes D'Artagnan a little dense---and the Patrician is much more of a benign despot than Mazarin, but in both Dumas and Pratchett you understand why the hero is just a good soldier or a good cop and the tyrant is a great politician.
Cornwell's heroes and villains (except for Obadiah Hakeswill) aren't all good or all bad, but their range of thought is limited and their motivations are fairly simple and confined to the moment, plot-necessitated desires to get from here to there in as straight a line as possible.
I enjoy the novels, even more than Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series (Sorry Tom, sorry Mr Shakes), and the movies are lots of fun, mainly because of Sean Bean, I think, but I don't read the one or watch the other to learn very much about human nature. They don't usually bear reading or watching in that way, while with Dumas and O'Brian you can take your eyes off the duels and the battles, intrigues, plots and counterplots, and look at the characters as people and see people busy being people, being human.
But there's a moment in Sharpe's Revenge...
Jane has just realized the desperate nature of her situation and she pleads with her friend the widow for help and advice. The widow simply laughs at her and suggests that if all else fails Jane can set up shop as high priced whore.
The scene is one of the most true to life in the whole series.
In the movie it's probably all due to the work of the two actresses and the director; I'll have to go back to the book to see if it's there too, although the books and the movies don't always match up scene for scene, plot point for plot point. But what's true to life here is that the widow is not simply being cruel, nor is she, as a similar character in a similar situation in a soap opera or hack romance would be doing, throwing aside her mask and revealing her real evil self.
The widow has in fact been Jane's friend up until that point. She's been Jane's friend only because of Jane's money and she's enjoyed ruining Jane because it makes her feel better about her own life as essentially a prostitute to bring another woman down to her level, but she hasn't known that's what she's been up to. In her mind she has been Jane's friend.
And now that Jane is not worth being friends with anymore she rejects her as if she, the widow, would never have had anything to do with such a weak and foolish and immoral character as Jane.
She has completely forgotten herself.
And Jane, terrified, frantic, begging for help from help from a woman she knows can't help her and wouldn't be likely to help if she could, insulted and outraged at the widow's suggestion that she sell her body to stay alive, has completely forgotten herself too.
In her mind, she is not the runaway wife, and thief, who has spent the last few months sleeping with a man who is not her husband---and, it's implied, having other kinds of sexual adventures on the side---she is the same little girl lost Sharpe rescued and married several episdoes ago.
And the widow, who after she sweeps out of the room in self-righteous triumph, congratulating herself on her own superior virtue and character, is going to throw herself into the bed of the first half-way presentable rich man she finds, is thinking of herself as a respectable middle class woman true to the memory of her war hero husband.
And that's exactly how the actresses play their characters in the scene, as two "good" women, each suddenly discovering that her friend has led her astray.
I think this is true to life because it fits with my own theory that people are guided mainly by their appetites and their vanities and what looks like virtue in them is usually just the luck of their circumstances---they are good because there's no reason for them not to be, and not many temptations either. They have fallen into a moral life the way a twig falls into a stream and they are carried along with the current. When they climb out of that life and find their way into another they usually get themselves into trouble because they have no experience guiding their own behavior.
I also think that most people move from one stream to another and then back without even knowing it. They don't "know" what they are doing, they "know" only what they are telling themselves they are doing.
Quoting myself here:
People feel themselves to be virtuous. They don’t need to be good to believe they are. They just need to sound good to themselves and to their friends and fellow hypocrites. They are very adept at thinking good thoughts about themselves. This is becoming a regular theme of mine. I've used the example several times of adulterers who can, without a twinge from their consciences, sniff scornfully at other people cheating on their spouses. These hypocrites are able to do it without a blush because they have very carefully arranged their thinking about what they are doing in bed with someone they're not married to so that the words adultery, sin, right and wrong, and possibly even sex never cross their minds.
But all kinds of sinners, cheats, frauds, hypocrites, and thieves feel morally superior to other sinners, cheats, frauds, hypocrites, and thieves simply because they've managed to talk themselves out of thinking of their own misbehaviors and crimes as what they are. They've carefully selected vocabularies that allow them to talk past what they're actually doing and even describe it in terms that turn it into, if not virtue, then not vice.
Neither Jane nor the widow know themselves for what they are or what they've been. It wasn't the case that either was deluded or psychotic while they were busy in bed with men they weren't married to. It was the case that while they were, they found words to describe to themselves what they were doing in a way that made it feel right. And because the words didn't match their actions, neither the words nor the actions were real to them. They themselves weren't real to themselves. All that was real was their appetites and their vanities. Which is why it's so easy for both of them to drop the old words, forget what they've been, who they've been, and adopt new vocabularies and new selves on the spot.
Scenes of this kind of psychological complexity aren't rarities in the Sharpe novels---the TV movies don't have as much time to explore character---but they aren't high on Cornwell's list of priorities. I don't think they were high on Dumas' list either, he just seems to have been able to work them as a matter of course, possibly because he was writing at a time when readers were more patient and didn't mind lulls in the action and digressions from the main plot, but more likely becauce it was temperamentally congenial to him to work that way.
Still, one of the strengths of the Sharpe novels is that Sharpe is a reflective character. He isn't an intellectual character, so his moments of reflection are often coarse, simplistic, and incoherent. But he is always thinking about what and who he wants to be. The novels chart his moral progress from street rat and thief to officer and gentleman.
Sharpe has decided, half-consciously at first, that he wants to be a certain kind of man, a different kind of man, and he figures out quickly that becoming that man isn't just a matter of changing his circumstances. He isn't an officer and a gentleman just because he gets promoted. (Another of Cornwell's themes is the virtue of egalitarianism, and there are plenty of characters who don't practice it and are therefore quick to remind Sharpe that his rank is just a penny stamp to them.) And he figures out that being a hero isn't the same as being good. He wants to be both.
And this is something Cornwell shares with Dumas and Pratchett, an understanding that character, as the word is used to describe the habits of decency and virtue, is an artificial thing. You have to construct it. You make it up, you make yourself up, and you do it with words. The right words. The exact words. You have to be always telling yourself the truth about yourself.
Which is not at all easy.
Vimes and the Patrician are better men than D'Artagnan and Cardinal Mazarin because they are more honest with themselves. They are better able to describe themselves to themselves. They have set their minds to being specific kinds of men and they work at it partly through constantly comparing what they are to what they want to be.
This is not to say that Pratchett is a better writer than Dumas (not being able to read Dumas in French, I'm not in any position to make that judgment), because Dumas deliberately and expertly shows D'Artagnan and Mazarin failing in the act of self-reflection.
D'Artagnan is just not a sophisticated enough thinker, possibly not a smart enough person, to understand himself in the way Vimes understands himself.
And Mazarin is too vain and too greedy and too afraid and too insecure and too crazy with lust for the Queen to think straight, let alone honestly enough to understand himself.
In his comment on Robin's Last Arrow, Mike Schilling reminded me that by the end of The Man in the Iron Mask Aramis isn't much of a hero anymore. But as it turns out none of the Musketeers, including D'Artagnan, is the hero he once was.
They are all overwhelmed by history and overmatched by the doings of the unheroic but "great" men whose tools and dupes and opponents and obstacles they've more or less accidentally become.
In short, their story is a tragedy.
Bernard Cornwell seems to have completed Sharpe's story. All the Sharpe novels he's turned out since Sharpe's Devil have been set in Sharpe's youth, "before" the series began, or they've been placed in gaps in the timeline of the original set of novels. He's been filling in rather than advancing the story.
Perhaps someday he will get around to writing the story of Sharpe's death and maybe it will be a tragic story. For now though Sharpe's tale is one of triumph.
Nothing had changed despite the banging of guns and clangor of swords, but even that did not matter, for [Sharpe] was full of happiness, and he was at peace, and he was going home. For good and forever, he was going home.
Sharpe wins in the end by becoming what he set out to be, a good man and a hero.
This is fine. Some stories should end happily. It just seems to me that Sharpe gets there through some cheating on Cornwell's part.
Sharpe really isn't smart enough to manage it on his own. It's not simply the case that Cornwell has to make him impossibly lucky. It's that Sharpe doesn't seem to have the intellectual wherewithall to have made the leap from street urchin and thief to an aspiring officer and gentleman.
Cornwell has shown that it's the change in Sharpe's circumstances that begin the change in him, which is true enough in life. But it does seem more a case that the change in his circumstances have allowed his innate superior virtue to shine forth rather than a case of Sharpe deciding to take advantage of the changes.
Which is all just to say that I prefer Dumas the cynic to Cornwell the romantic.
I think Dumas is more true to life.
There's an old joke: A guy walks into a bar and sits on his usual barstool, orders his usual. He looks down the length of the bar and sees a familiar face at the other end. "Hey," he says, "that guy must be a real drunk. He's here every night!"
Posted by: mac macgillicuddy | Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 04:00 PM
“(...) I am broad-minded. If Uncle George wants to marry waitresses, let him, say I. I hold that the rank is but the penny stamp — ”
“Guinea stamp, sir.”
“All right, guinea stamp. Though I don’t believe there is such a thing. I shouldn’t have thought they came higher than five bob. Well, as I was saying, I maintain that the rank is but the guinea stamp and a girl’s a girl for all that.”
Posted by: Rasselas | Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 05:29 PM
OK, that's twice on the O'Brian tweakage, my friend - I may be called upon to respond! (At some point - soon - maybe).
Posted by: Tom W. | Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 07:41 PM
I concur. Seriously, Lance, how can you deride the epic poem of the age of wooden ships and iron men? (To paraphrase, not seriously, Takakura Kan's admonition about giri in The Yakuza, a man without a collection of Aubrey-and-Maturins is not a man.)
I'd never suspect you of condemning O'Brian for some of his more Tory fans (that Scalia thing was a bitter drink, much like William Buckley's endorsement of the movie), but do his occasionally old-fashioned attitudes put you off? Does his style?
Posted by: Rasselas | Sunday, August 27, 2006 at 08:44 PM
mac,
Great joke.
Tom, Rasselas, I didn't slight O'Brian or Lucky Jack and the good doctor. I just said I enjoy reading the Sharpe books more. In fact, in the next sentence I praised the series for its psychological realism. But, still, Tom, I think you should respond with a defense of O'Brian. I'd like to read more of your thoughts on Aubrey and Maturin.
And, Ras, normally I hate to get a literary allusion wrong, but when it results in a correction from Wodehouse, I'm only too happy to need the edit.
Posted by: Lance | Monday, August 28, 2006 at 08:31 AM
If you enjoy both Aubrey and Sharpe, you should join us at one of the Forts Niagara, George or Erie for a rousing good time. Sleep under white canvas, drink port around a fire with a wool capote for warmth. Kids welcome, and I'll arrange a musket for your place on the line, or a job on an artillery crew if you'd prefer.
Being a fan of Sharpe (the Platonic Ideal for many Napoleonic/1812 reenactors) you would be welcomed with open arms, but you'd hate their politics - I know after the past 9 years moving in those circles that I do. You could help support me as I bescoundrel our current King George to the refugees from the reality based community.
Harper or Maturin? please discuss.
Posted by: rameau's nephew | Monday, August 28, 2006 at 07:45 PM
Of all the books you're discussing here, I've only read Patrick O'Brien's books and far from all of them.
You might be interested in this, however: A few years ago, a group of friends invited us to watch the tall boats sailing north along the Hudson as I inferred they do every year. During the picnic, the men and women argued about Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-and-Maturins series, including a few of the additions, with the men insisting, like Rasselas above, that the books were "men's books" and the women advocating the series as a woman's provenence. At first, the idea struck me as similar to your disagreement, Lance, with people who advocate particular works of art for people who are politically right wing versus art that enriches the politcally left. But then, try assigning a teen-age girl to read, Conrad's "Heart of Darkness;" or a boy, "Anna Karenina." Nine out of ten times, neither will follow the work at all, insisting it's boring.
As to Patrick O'Brien, the fact that within this social group, the men wanted to claim his books as theirs and the women wanted the same books stacked on their side of the divide demonstrates the silliness of their argument at the start. Or maybe (I'm still undecided), maybe not.
Posted by: grasshopper | Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 09:24 AM
Well, Mannion. I must say I'm very surprised to discover that you enjoy Cornwell more than O'Brian. Of course, that's not to say you're "wrong" to do so - it's a subjective opinion, after all - but I'd be curious to hear your reasons why.
I don't think there can be any question that O'Brian is the more gifted writer. As you say, the psychological realism and depth that O'Brien lends to his characters is superior, and it seems to me that in every category which a writer can be qualitatively judged O'Brian is the greater man. His historical setting is more authentically realised; his plotting more intricate; his dialogue more engaging; his ideas are more profound, and all the while his pages turn just as fast as those of Cornwell. I even found O'Brian's big set-pieces more heart poundingly exciting, and action is what Cornwell excels at (and is what I enjoyed most about the Sharpe novels). However, as good as Sharpe's Waterloo was, for me it was forgettable next to the storming of the Cacafuego, or Stephen's midnight landings on the French beaches.
The impression you give is that you probably wouldn't argue too much with any of these points. You said that you "like" Cornwell more, not that you thought he was the better writer. So is there a particular aspect of O'Brian's work that just turns you off a little, or is there something about the Sharpe series that resonates with you personally? As I said, it surprised me to learn you enjoy Cornwell more, especially given your obvious interest in the psychological interplay between characters and the moral quandaries that exist in the relations between men and women (a subject that O'Brian explores extensively).
Pray elucidate, kind Sir.
Posted by: Mr. Shakes | Tuesday, August 29, 2006 at 11:18 PM
Mr Shakes,
You are correct, sir. But I think I need a whole post to address your points. This will require some reading too. I'm going to have to re-read Post Captain and Sharpe's Trafalgar today. Sigh. Homework. It's such hard work being a blogger.
Posted by: Lance | Thursday, August 31, 2006 at 10:08 AM
As a fellow fan of the Sharpe books, does anyone else crack up at the repeated theme of Sharpe's identifying some useful piece of clothing or equipment, and then slaughtering half the French army to get it? The good boots, the green coveralls (two pairs of these if I remember correctly), the sword... I can reduce my father to tears of helpless laughter by relating an imaginary scene from one of the books in which two French officers are watching Sharpe from a distance: "Hmm, what is the Englishman doing? He appears to be looking over here... perhaps at your greatcoat, Jean? Now he's looking down at his own coat... poor and cheap... he shivers in the cold wind. Sacre bleu, it's Sharpe! Drop the coat and fly, it is our only chance!"
Posted by: LizardBreath | Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 03:47 PM
LB,
It doesn't just work on your father!
Gonna be a long time before I can read Sharpe again without laughing. Thanks a lot.
Posted by: Lance | Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 05:14 PM
I think the Sharpe series does suffer from the prequels. They have to have a pattern of Sharpe going through bad times, and yet still finishing as better off than when the book started. And that means they have to drag down his origins.
Right from the start of the series, there are Riflemen who are educated men, but not gentlemen, and they are enough real memoirs from the Rifle Brigade to support the existence of such a character.
The TV material also loses some of the knowledge of the warfare of the time. There are a few big re-enactment events, here in the UKm where they get enough people together to set of something close to a battalion volley. Cornwell gets more of the feel of such things (again supported ny memoirs and letters) than the TV productions can afford to depict.
And Sir Charles Oman got it wrong: it wasn't the arithmetic of line vs. column that won the battles. It wasn't the casualty difference from 600 men in 2-deep line being all able to fire, compared to that column with a 60-man front.
The tactic which defeated the French so often, "in the same old way", was the column coming over the crest, receiving a volley at close range, and seeing a mob of screaming maniacs with bayonets coming out of the smoke.
Cornwell catches some of that. O'Brien catches the naval equivalent, and so does the movie. But the TV, Sharpe or Hornblower, rarely does.
There's a certain mythic status for the bayonet in the British Army, but it atill works.
Posted by: Dave Bell | Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 05:26 PM
Wow. You know, it never occurred to me to compare the Dumas novels to the Sharpe page-turners. I loved the Sharpe books. My 13 year old son loved the Sharpe books. (He also likes Dumas. And Alexander Hope. You get the idea.) It is true, Dumas was the genrefiction of his time. That makes me feel a bit less guilty for reading Sharpe. In a generation or so it may even be taught in high schools! I don't read silly fiction! I read literature.
I do think it is kind of neat that reading such books gives you insights into history, though, even if it is sort of a overly-close-up look into it (knowing too much about how Baker rifles worked and not a lot about the overall reasons for why, e.g., the British went into Denmark in that one prequel Sharpe book). My son and I consider ourselves experts on the Napoleonic wars, now.
Posted by: Anna in Portland (was Cairo) | Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 01:50 PM
I think the Sharpe series does suffer from the prequels. They have to have a pattern of Sharpe going through bad times, and yet still finishing as better off than when the book started. And that means they have to drag down his origins.
And they're also inconsistent with the beginning of the original series. In Sharpe's Rifles, he's a quartermaster who knows that his superiors and his men despise him for coming up from the ranks, and that his military career is going nowhere -- he's aging (probably supposed to be under 30, but too old for his rank) and depressed and in a dead end. The hero of the original series is someone turning a stalled life around.
The prequels make him an unstoppable golden boy on a meteoric trajectory upward -- while the sequence of events from the prequels to SR is possible, the character arc is really unlikely.
Posted by: LizardBreath | Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 12:04 PM
LB,
I don't think the character arc is as unlikely as all that. It depends on what other stories Cornwell decides to put between Sharpe's Fortress and Sharpe's Prey. Sharpe is definitely on a personal downward slope in Sharpe's Prey. Lady Grace's death has devastated him, for one thing. But he has also hit a wall in his career, very probably caused by his romance with Lady Grace.
Golden Boys hit walls all the time. This is what this quote from Dumas' Twenty Years After is about: D'Artagnan didn't go on from the apparent happy ending of The Three Musketeers to a career of success after success. In fact, he's been stuck in the same spot for nearly 20 years. Maybe Cornwell's done a better job of reading Dumas than I gave him credit for.
Posted by: Lance | Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 01:26 PM