From cornet to colonel
Alistair Irwin
COMPANY OF SPEARS by Allan Mallinson Bantam Press, £17.99, pp. 372, ISBN 0593053419 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Sometime in 1995 Colonel Allan Mallinson came, somewhat sheepishly I thought, into my office. He was clutching a sheaf of papers that I feared would be another piece of heavyweight Ministry of Defence bureaucracy. But no, it was instead the first chapter of his first Hervey novel, A Close Run Thing. He asked if I would read it and say whether I thought it worth his while writing the rest of the book. Having rattled through it, I recommended that he forthwith abandon his military career and concentrate on converting Hervey into banknotes. Luckily for the Army the Colonel stuck to his soldiering duties by day and, luckily for those who have been bitten by the Hervey bug, he sharpened his storytelling quill in what little spare time he had. I have it on the best authority that it was not the other way round.
Hervey enthusiasts first encountered him as a cornet of dragoons in 1814. Now, six books and 13 years later, we find him in temporary command of his regiment in Hounslow. Despite amorous diversions, anxieties over a disease ravaging the regiment’s stables and an unglamorous action against a mysterious body of men raiding the Royal Gunpowder Factory, no doubt peacetime soldiering in Hounslow would soon have proved too dull both for our hero and for us. So by the end of the book the gallant dragoon has taken up a command in the Cape and has successfully demonstrated to Shaka’s Zulus, not to mention a few Xhosa cattle thieves on the way, that the best thing to do when Hervey and a troop of the 6th Dragoons are about is to put your feet up in your kraal.
It is all very nicely done, with the violence understated and no sex. In fact this is a book that a mother could unblushingly give her son for a treat, having first enjoyed it herself. But the son would need to be quite grown up to appreciate it. Despite the battle scene on the dust cover, there are only three relatively brief fights. The rest is an erudite and cleverly constructed pot pourri of military and veterinary science, politics, culture and social intercourse. The characters step threedimensionally, if sometimes predictably, off the page. Their speech suggests that they are visitors from an Austen novel; it sounds authentic, free of the anachronisms that so often intrude into this style of writing.
Mallinson is himself caught up in the same style as he spins his yarn; people ‘quicken’ and widows are seen in ‘mourning weeds’. Before long the reader too is thoroughly immersed in the spirit of the age. For those like me who have misguidedly put earlier volumes aside for a rainy day, I am happy to report that previous acquaintance with Hervey is not needed to enjoy this one. And fans can be sure of more to come, for the author has revealed to us more hooks for future tales than could be found on a dragoon’s corset. I can’t wait.
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