The
Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure
Edited
by Lawrence Ellsworth
Well,
with a title like that, how was I supposed to let this book pass me
by? All told, I'm glad I didn't, although the 19th-century prose and
occasional alien sensibilities made it slower going than I perhaps
expected from a book purportedly all about adventure. It is evident
from his general and story-specific introductions that editor
Lawrence Ellsworth is devoted to the swashbuckling adventures popular
throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries and that he is
well-read (or at least well-informed), although I was alarmed at the
proportion of the biographies that focused on authors other than the
ones at hand and remain a bit skeptical about his skill as an
anthology editor. I also found myself disappointed at the large
number of extracts from novels and longer narratives; having read the
climaxes of several stories, I'm now unsure whether I'll bother to
read the preliminaries. Though Ellsworth generally chooses
self-contained stories within longer works, a lack of established
context sometimes contributes to a general sense of indifference and
incompletion.
Likewise,
while all of the stories do fit, more or less, into a swashbuckling
paradigm, Ellsworth does little to define the characteristics that
these stories and, more importantly, their characters, are meant to
embody. He often sings the praises of swashbucklers, in all of their
many forms, and his enthusiasm is obvious, but doesn’t offer
satisfactory explanations of his chosen parameters. As a reader with
only a vague sense of this era's adventure literature, I would
appreciate more context: why, for example, does the collection
include so many English-language stories set in France? This lack of
visible deliberation and oversight, combined with a story order that
appears haphazard and more or less random (except for the fact that
few similar stories appear back-to-back), can make the book a bit of
a whiplash experience as readers are jolted from one paradigm to
another unexpectedly and seemingly without rhyme or reason. Readers
are left to reset and quickly adapt to new settings, moods, and
themes with each new story; this could, perhaps, have been avoided
with a clearly defined organizational scheme, whether chronological,
geographic, or thematic.
As
a rule, most of the stories display the fundamental characteristics
one might expect from the era's literature, such as a weighted
exposition-to-action ratio and a particularly well-defined sense of
honor. I was a bit disappointed to find little moral ambiguity in
these tales- as many swashbucklers do, by definition, adopt a
slightly more lax view of the rule of law- but did appreciate those
stories that did allow their heroes the slightest bit of outlaw
stature. Taken as a whole, the book offers an excellent demonstration
of the authors' moral codes, and modern readers with a certain sense
of irony will appreciate the great pains the authors take to ensure
that their heroes are entirely morally upstanding, regardless of
their actions or the circumstances. The plots, however, might leave
its more seasoned readers a bit wanting; in many cases, I was able to
plot most or all of a story's developments and twists well before
they occurred, and I found many to be no more action-packed than
other works from the same era.
Nonetheless,
and despite an over-reliance on pre-Revolutionary France that isn't
satisfactorily explained, the collection does include a pleasant
array of stories that take place in locales both expected (England,
Renaissance Italy, the pirate-laden Caribbean) and surprising
(India). The book includes requisite, but pleasing, cameos by Robin
Hood and Zorro, as well as a number of other expected tropes that are
quite satisfying here, in their proper context. While I was
disappointed with a lack of an Arthurian adventure, which seems to me
to fit the category, I was pleased with the various authors'
abilities to make their chosen settings come alive. In the majority
cases, I felt myself transported across space and time, and while I
only occasionally felt the kind of heart-racing tension that the
stories must have elicited in their own eras, I thoroughly enjoyed
most of these adventures. The Big Book of Swashbuckling
Adventure is a bit lacking in
context and, perhaps, editorial oversight and deliberation, but it is
a satisfying collection that offers plenty of excitement, well-placed
poetic interludes, and an adequate introduction into the literature
that defined the golden age of swashbucklers.
Grade:
B+
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