Endcap: A Crowning Mercy, Fallen Angels

Title: A Crowning Mercy
Authors: Bernard Cornwell, Susannah Kells
Genre: Historical romance
Publication: Harper Collins (24th Nov 2003)
Paperback: 480 pages
ISBN: 0007168233
Endcap: 2/5
Details at Amazon.co.uk

This formulaic tale of girl meets boy to have adventures is set in the turbulent era of the English Civil War. I can easily imagine a Hollywood treatment of the material.

Campion is the woman at the centre of the horrors and strife. She goes through life with a faint knowledge of her milk and honey purity and an ugly name. Her father is a zealous Puritan widower with an ignoble constitution. Her brother, Ebenezer Slythe, is a cripple with a vengeance. The housekeeper is the transparently named Dame Baggalie. Campion is the odd one out, too beautiful and gentle by nature.

Toby Lazender, the urbane young romcom hero, christens her after the flower at their initial meeting wherein he spies the awfully beautiful creature swimming about. The couple do have a happy ever after but not before they undergo the necessary trials and tribulations. Toby gets away from the bad guys with little trouble due to his gender whereas the wretched Campion suffers phenomenally.

Since the setting is the Civil War, the author has the task of tackling his Puritans and Royalists. They are poles apart. No Puritan is worthy of the reader's imaginative sympathy and every Royalist is fun-loving, liberal and equipped with a sense of humour. This biased treatment is amateurish and flat. We know who the good guys are by page one. Cornwell's characters are common stock from the so-so historical ficiton's bag of tricks that pulls down the merits of the genre.

The plot is therefore action driven. It is built around the mysterious legacy surrounding Campion. She isn't the daughter of the dour Puritan after all. She is coerced into marriage to a filthy friend of the patriarch's who tries to wreck her chastity, etc. She has to face more similar, increasingly sensational threats to her virtue as the story progresses. I wouldn't mind giving the clue to the conundrum - a barely concealed intrigue - but I'll leave it to the reader who is perhaps rocked by curiousity to have a go at Cornwell this weekend or something.

Title: Fallen Angels
Author: Bernard Cornwell
Genre: Historical romance
Publication: Harper Collins (7th Feb 2005)
Paperback: 496 pages
ISBN: 0007176422
Endcap: 1.5/5
Details at Amazon.co.uk

There is a sequel, Fallen Angels. The action takes place amidst the madness of the French Revolution. Sense the pattern? There is a Toby and Campion here too, but they're siblings now. Toby is off to France, hunting down the man who ruthlessly murdered his lover. Naturally, the wolves come out to howl at the doorstep of Lazender castle, where the beautiful Campion dwells alone. She worries a bit, but her mind is more occupied by the arrival of a tall, dark and handsome gypsy. *chokes*

The antagonists are the Fallen Angels, a bunch of smelly, overweight anarchists with a penchant for ultra violent criminal machinations. Their only goal is to kill all who come between them and their boiling cauldron of mumbo jumbo, Bavarian tinged fairy tales of political aspirations.

Cornwell swiftly ends Campion's leisurely days of admiring the gypsy by bringing the threat of the Illuminist anarchists to Lazender castle. The trembling heroine flees with the gypsy and they readily embark on a cheesy affair.

The climax plays out in the dark chambers of the society's headquarters as the doubtful girl struggles for her life while her once-lover, the gypsy, holds a knife or some such weapon to her slender white neck. All is not what it seems when a wave of denouncements occur, revealing all and sundry.

From my commonplace book: Melodrama and mayhem. Bernard Cornwell, I wanna kick you.

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