Tales of daring capture and escapism
Barry Unsworth
THE FORTUNES OF CASANOVA AND OTHER STORIES by Rafael Sabatini OUP, £15.95, pp. 283 Ifirst read Rafael Sabatini's historical novels at the age of 14. My father had a set of them, bound in leather, with author and title in gilt lettering. Something like 25 volumes in all, I suppose there were. I devoured them in little more than a month. I thought they were wonderful, better even than Stanley Weyman. They were full of the kind of thing Othello regaled Desdemona with, hair's-breadth escapes and moving accidents by flood and fire. They had dashing heroes and spirited hero- ines and a full-blooded sense of history. Some of the characters made an impres- sion on me never afterwards to be effaced: Captain Blood, Scaramouche, above all the renegade Cornishman Salcr-el-Bahr, the 'Sea Hawk', dreaded Barbary corsair. This last novel sold a million copies and was made into a hugely successful film with Errol Flynn in the title role.
Getting on for 50 years later, the admira- tion is Undimmed, though the relish is less, which is not Sabatini's fault. There is no one who can tell a story better. There is no one I can think of who can integrate period detail and high adventure so elegantly and apparently effortlessly, with none of the pedantry that marks much of contemporary historical fiction, no tedious parade of learning, but an easy familiarity with the period he is dealing with, whether Renais- sance Italy, Carolean England or revolu- tionary France — his favourite periods. His heroes, sceptical, ready-witted, prompt to action and never too virtuous, are a wel- come relief after the long line of stereotype good guys who went before and gave his- torical fiction a bad name in the early years of the century.
Of course his people are basically untroubled by thought of any kind — I mean thought that would allow them to reflect upon their world and their place in it. No shadow of this sort touches their brows. They have certain dominant atti- tudes but no interior life to speak of. How- ever, in a period that contains Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, literature pro- vides interior life enough, if that is what one wants. Even too much, some might think. Sabatini's heroines go in for curling lips and mocking laughter and their colour frequently betrays them. Their lovers have clean lace at their cuffs and all the best lines, and they are invariably accomplished swordsmen. The course of love between these people rarely runs smooth. For mil- lions their adventures and misadventures provided an escape from the drabness of life and the recent horrors of war.
Of the 20 stories collected in this vol- ume, 17 have not been published in book form before. They were written over a peri- od of 30 years, between 1907 and 1937, and have been culled from old periodicals by Jack Adrian, who also contributes a useful introduction to the collection. They are uneven in quality, as one would expect, and perhaps not really representative of Sabati- ni at his best — for that one must go to the longer works. But several of them have the unmistakable brilliance that belongs to this author, the superb narrative sense, the con- fident handling of historical detail, the ele- gant phrasing and wry humour. There is the accustomed fascination with con-men and tricksters, the accustomed admiration for steadiness of nerve, for what Heming- way once called 'grace under pressure'.
Mr Adrian tells us in his introduction that Sabatini felt uneasy at his dual role of serious historian and hugely successful his- torical novelist. But there is no real contra- diction here. Like all supremely popular novelists, Sabatini understood the great heart of the public because it beat in time with his own. He gave us wonderful adven- ture fiction and no purpose is served by seeking to dress it up as anything else. We don't read him because of the light he sheds on the human condition. We read him because he is, quite simply, one of the great entertainers of our century.
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