The Reavers
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Average rating3
15
Ratings1
Average rating3
Elizabethan England, and a dastardly Spanish plot to take over the throne is uncovered. It's up to Agent Archie Noble to save Queen and country in this saucy and swashbuckling romp from the bestselling author of 'The Flashman Papers' and 'The Pyrates'. Spoiled, arrogant, filthy rich, and breathtakingly beautiful, the young Lady Godiva Dacre is exiled from the court of Good Queen Bess (who can't abide red-haired competition) to her lonely estate in distant Cumberland, where she looks forward to bullying the peasantry and getting her own imperious way. Little does she guess that the turbulent Scottish border is the last place for an Elizabethan heiress, beset by ruthless reivers (many of them unshaven), blackmailing ruffians, fiendish Spanish plotters intent on regime change and turning Merrie England into a ghastly European Union province. And no one to rely on but her half-witted blonde school chum, a rugged English superman with a knack for disaster, and a dashing highwayman who looks like Errol Flynn but has a Glasgow accent. To say nothing of warlocks, impersonators, taxi-drivers riding brooms, burlesque artists, the drunkest man in Scotland, and several quite normal characters – oh, yes, gossips, it's all happening in The Reavers, a moral tale obviously conceived in some kind of fit by Flashman author George MacDonald Fraser ... well, he's getting on, and was bound to crack eventually. He admits (nay, insists) that it's a crazy story for readers who love fun for its own sake.
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Fraser is best known for his series of Flashman novels. But this one is a silly stand-alone. In fact, the first sentence of his foreward to the book is: “This book is nonsense.” Which means that basically, he just wrote it for fun and he's not hewing closely to the facts of the time period he set it in (Elizabethan England, somewhere around 159-, Fraser is willfully vague). The characters frequently spout anachronisms and it's really just all done for laughs. If you're familiar with Fraser's book The Pyrates, it's close to that style. I loved The Pyrates, and this one was diverting enough but not as easy to follow. Fraser renders his characters' dialogue into their various accents (Scottish, Cockney, American Deep South, Spanish, etc.) and that tends to slow the reading speed doon abit. If ya nae ken whut ahm tockin' aboot, yer in fer a bit o' a slog. Oh, also, a passing familiarity with Cockney rhyming slang also helped in a few spots. To wit: china (plate) = mate, butcher's (hook) = look.
