Review of Sharpe’s Command by Bernard Cornwell
Another Exhilarating installment in the Richard Sharpe saga.
Bernard Cornwell reminds us once again why he’s still the master of military historical fiction.
The setup is simple: two French armies have a river keeping them from uniting and destroying a British Army that’s intent on driving them out of Spain. Major Sharpe and his green-jacketed riflemen must reconnoiter the one bridge that could bring those French armies together into an unstoppable force.
But nothing can ever be simple for Sharpe. Treachery and his own hotheadedness turn a simple reconnaissance mission into a desperate fight for his life.
Sharpe’s Command is the twenty-fourth novel in the Sharpe series. But chronologically, it’s book fourteen. The story lies between the Sharpe’s Company and Sharpe’s Sword novels. The book centers around the historic Battle of Almaraz in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars in the Spring of 1812. It features real historical characters like General Hill and Lieutenant Love, among others.
Cornwell published the first several books of the series in chronological order in the early eighties, but has since written novels that take place earlier, later, and even, as with Sharpe’s Command, in between previously published books. That’s more easily done because the Sharpe novels are more episodic than serialized, meaning each book is a self-contained story that can be read out of order, like watching a TV episode of The A-Team. Even though I’ve already read novels about Sharpe’s adventures at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and after the war, I could still enjoy this story, which takes place years earlier in his career. Cornwell gives you all you need to know in each novel as if it’s the first of the series you have read, instead of forcing you to do homework and read everything prior.
Sharpe is the embodiment of class struggle. He’s a bastard son of a long-dead prostitute. He was raised in an orphanage and promoted from the enlisted ranks. He has an anti-authority chip on his shoulder that causes him to rail against slights,real and imagined, from upper-class officers. He soothes his self-conscious impostor syndrome with crassness, disobeying orders, and diving headlong into fights with brutal savagery. This causes him plenty of problems.
But Sharpe is also fair-minded, heroic, and sometimes even kind, making him a hero we can root for. This book is full of intense action sequences, some of which had me gripping my Kindle with white-knuckled anticipation. Cornwell is a master of writing battle scenes as well as foreshadowing, leading you through the narrative page by page. Cornwell also deftly explains many technical aspects of early nineteenth-century warfare, like the advantages of British rifles over French muskets, the seven-barreled volley gun, and the heavy cavalry saber.
Sharpe’s Command is an action-packed romp which I plowed through with reckless abandon. I can hardly wait for the next installment!
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