Book review:
A magnificent tale
“The boy clutched at the rim of the canvas bucket in which he
crouched sixty feet above the deck as ship went about. The mast canted
over sharply as she thrust her head through the wind. The ship was a
caravel named Lady Edwina after the mother he could hardly remember
.......”
Book: Birds of Prey (fiction)
Author: Wilbur Smith
Published by: Macmillan/Pan Books
Price: 5.99 pounds |
The scope is magnificent and the epic scale breath-taking... Wilbur
Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared.....,”
says The Times. And having read this splendid story, certainly, I cannot
help agreeing with what it says in spite of its high flown language.
Sir Francis Courtney, a Nautonnier Knight of the Temple of the Order
of St. George and the Holy Grail, is an English privateer carrying a
Letter of Marque signed by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the Lord
Chancellor of England, in the name of His Majesty King Charles II
authorizing him to hunt down the ships of the Dutch Republic, with which
England was at war; his crew in the caravel, Lady Edwina, comprise Hal
or Henry Courtney, his only son and Aboli, a remarkably loyal black
slave, and Ned Tyler, the boatswain and some ruffian, belligerent tars.
After about 65 days of waiting in the high seas, they capture ‘De
Standvastigheid’ or ‘The Resolution’, a galleon belonging to the Dutch
East India Company and navigated by Colonel Cornelius Schreuder. She
carries in her holds a rich cargo of spice, of oriental timber and of
bullion.
Further, the Governor Incumbent of the Cape of Good Hope, Petrus van
de Velde and his nymphomaniac young wife Katinka happen to be among the
passengers on board the opulent galleon. Having confiscated the entire
cargo, Sir Francis Courtney then goes on to hold them to a whopping
ransom of two hundred thousand guilders in gold coins. Colonel Schreuder
is dispatched with the letter demanding ransom money back to Holland on
board Lady Edwina, now stripped of all her fire-power ...
The story running into 774 pages is a magnificent tale gripping the
readers’ attention with its vivid description of blood-curdling sea
battles, of exotic landscapes, of African wildernesses teeming with
ferocious beasts, and of erotic encounters between Katinka and her
numerous lovers including Hal.
And Smith writing in the third person never spares his readers of the
most gruesome details of ruthless killings and savage executions. The
heroes, however, are but a little less evil than the villains. Clearly
the legitimized piracy leads to justifiable bloodshed from which the
civilized people recoil as they do from an adder or a mamba.
However, in Birds of Prey, as in all other Wilbur Smiths, what
surprises me is his use of English language. His remarkably lucid and
almost lyrical writing reflects an extraordinary command of English
language backed by the limitless word-power of a very rich vocabulary.
With metaphors and similes coming naturally to him, he writes so
easily, so effortlessly that I almost begin to envy his talent for
writing fiction. And we see him switching among the role of
correspondent, of historian, of philosopher, of barbarian, and most
wonderfully, of poet.
The novel is as much about love, loyalty, trust, glory and friendship
as it is about insatiable greed, distrust, virulent hatred, gross
betrayal and barbarism. In fact, this wonderful melange of disparate
and/or contradictory natures with which the novel of shot through from
the first page to the last one is vintage Smith. The following passage
from the novel certainly bears irrefutable testimony to Smith’s
extraordinary talent for writing.
“The fabled flat-topped mountain seemed to fill most of the blue
African sky, a great cliff of yellow rock slashed by deep ravines choked
with dense green forest. The top of the mountain was so geometrically
level, and its proportions so pleasing, that it seemed to have been
designed by a celestial architect.
Over the top of this immense table-land spilled a standing wave of
shimmering cloud, frothy as milk boiling over the rim of a pot. This
silver cascade never reached the lower slopes of the mountain, but as it
fell it evaporated in mid-flight with a magical suddenness, leaving the
lower slopes resplendent in their clothing of verdant natural forest
....”
If you prefer to improve your vocabulary through reading fiction,
then this is a novel you cannot resist; or if you have a natural
penchant for gutsy adventure stories, you will be tempted to read it for
hours on end. Certainly, without a rich receptive vocabulary. It will be
a little difficult to comprehend Smith’s writing. But what I am even
more certain is that once you read Wilbur Smith, you begin to love his
writings !
- Jayashantha Jayawardhana
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