Al excellent raid
Felix Pryor
THE CANDLEMASS ROAD by George MacDonald Fraser Harvill, £12.99, pp, 156 Imust confess to having something of a problem with the Flashman books for which George MacDonald Fraser is so famous. The problem — and the loss — is, I am sure, all mine; but the truth is that after having read three of four in rapid suc- cession I suddenly got bored. I know I shouldn't have been greedy and bolted my food like that: but, all the same, I realised that I was being made to read under false pretences. I was reading history — albeit very good history — dressed up as fiction (this, I should hasten to add, may be com- pletely untrue of the later Flashman books — but I never got that far).
So my spirits sank a little when sent this latest in the GMF opus (even though not one of the Flashman tribe). They sank even further when I realised it was about the Scottish borders in the late 16th century. This is a subject that interests me not at all. The blurb told me — reprovingly — that it interests GMF a great deal. Apparently he's written one of the standard works on the subject, namely The Steel Bonnets.
The book isn't helped, either, by its cover illustration, a picture of a shaggy-looking man sitting purposefully on a horse, staring grimly into the distance; with a maiden scurrying into a castle on the back. Not that it's a bad picture in itself (in many ways it's a fine, admirable picture, although having the title picked out in yellow was a mis- take): but it's a bit too, well, how can I say this? — middlebrow. As if Oskar Kokosch- ,ka had been commissioned to illustrate Jean Plaidy.
According to the press hand-out, The Candlemass Road is
an Elizabethan adventure novel, a tale which reveals the vivid reality of life, love and death on the reivers' frontier four hundred years ago.
Enough to snuff out any lingering remains of interest.
The book itself is very short, only 156 pages long; a longish train-journey's worth. It is fleshed out with a 'Historical Postscript' which takes us up to p. 177 and glossary (p. 181). Neither, in my view, adds very much to the story.
In The Ring and the Book, Browning prefaces his poem by describing how a ring is crafted by mixing gold with a base substance to make it hold its shape when being worked: once the ring has been made, it is dipped in acid and the base metal disappears, leaving behind a pristine gold, cunningly-worked ring. Something like this has happened with The Candle- mass Road, except that the base metal has been transferred to the rather dull 'Histori- cal Postscript'. The book itself is wonder- ful.
The story is very simple: a description of a single border raid. The tale is told by a Roman Catholic priest in retirement, look- ing back on his past life (this — plus the plot itself — gives the book a beguiling whiff of plangency). There are practically only two characters in the story: the young Lady Dacre (memorably drawn) and `Walkabout', a sort of outlaw (ditto). The raid itself, which forms the climax of the book, is superbly described: it deserves to be filmed by the maker of The Seven Samurai in swirling black- and-white. Atmospheric isn't the word
(it's pretty horrific, too). But it is the after- math that really sticks in the mind: but that I cannot describe without flattening the thing.
The Candlemass Road is a simple tale, beautifully told; and very moving withal. Just like a middlebrow Puccini opera, in fact; or like the middlebrow Rigoletto. It is, indeed, 'an Elizabethan adventure novel', as the blurb-writer claims: but it's also a bit more than that. I don't think the publicity people realise how good it is. It's an after- noon's read that'll stick in the memory for long afterwards. Hooray for George MacDonald Fraser!
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