“Bran Mak Morn: The Last King”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Gary Gianni

 

 

376 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345461544

 

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; Bran Mak Morn: The Last King, illustrated by Gary Gianni, was the fourth volume to be published. This edition likewise has all of the tales ever published dealing with the doomed King of the Picts, along with a collection of sundry materials: the stories Men of the Shadows, Kings of the Night, Worms of the Earth, The Dark Man, The Lost Race, The Little People (along with a facsimile of the original typescript) and Children of the Night; the poems Chant of the White Beard, Rune, Song of the Pict, Song of the Race, The Drums of Pictdom and The Bell of Morni; Bran Mak Morn: A Play; a variety of untitled fragments and drafts; and appendices that cover the whole of Bran Mak Morn.

 

Along with Solomon Kane, I found Bran Mak Morn to be a fascinating character, again probably because of his semi-historical roots. As the last king of the dying Picts, an historical people that Howard embellishes, Bran does battle with the ever-hostile legions of Rome while simultaneously struggling to draw his people from out of the pagan pit of savagery. But all of his actions are tinged with melancholy, as King Bran knows that he is ultimately doomed to fail and the Picts will fall; but he battles on regardless, as Kings must carry on for the good of their people, no matter the consequences.

 

Why is it some characters succeed and others fail? I have no problem with Conan being so popular and transcending his niche, but Howard wrote so many interesting characters besides, like…well, Bran Mak Morn. Maybe the historical setting threw people off, or his aggrandizing history to add in occult elements – hell, may be people just didn’t like his poetry. Anyway, if only Howard had lived longer he may today be seen as the American answer to Tolkien – or, to be strictly accurate, Tolkien would be seen as England’s answer to Howard (ah, how different things might have been if only Robert E. wasn’t such a mama’s boy).

 

What this collection of tales shows also is Howard’s versatility, as the character of Bran Mak Morn is every bit as alive and fascinating as the Cimmerian and the Puritan without being like them. Our stubborn and forlorn king cannot just yield to fate but struggles on, going so far as delving into the underworld to seek the aid of long-dead kings as he tries to maintain the First Race. Of course, his failure is complete as the Picts are destroyed, although Howard’s tales are maddeningly incomplete; however, as they stand, the unfinished chronicles of our doomed King serve as a rather poignant and proper ending to these tales.

 

In the last dozen years of his sadly truncated life, Howard created a whole universe of pulpy goodness. If you’ve read all the Conans and the Kulls and the Solomon Kanes, you still have these jewels of fast-paced blood-drenched bosom-heaving skull-cleaving story-telling to look forward to. These are among my favorites in Howard-world: he’s hip-deep in the kind of lost-race mythology that he loves, and the stories here of Bran Mak Morn really sing. Nobody did it better, for even when Howard uses a cliché he makes it his cliché, and you instantly forgive him for it. He took such joy in creating these fantasies of wish-fulfillment that you’re swept heedlessly along and find yourself wanting more.

“The Kings and Queens of England: A Tourist Guide”, by Jane Murray

 

 

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 308 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0684138893

Why would I buy a book like Jane Murray’s The Kings and Queens of England: A Tourist Guide? I mean, it’s as old as I am almost (published in 1973) and really can’t add anything that other, more recent books I have read on the subject. Partly it was the title, and I was expecting there to be several terrestrial locations explored and described in connection with the kings and queens in question – say, William the Conqueror’s landing place, or a tour of Bosworth Field…something like that – but no, what Murray has written are a series of thumbnail sketches of all of the monarchs of this sceptred isle in reverse chronological order, for as the author says in the introduction, when you talk about your ancestors you always start from your parents and work your way back (oh, and the price: $3.25 from 2^nd & Charles).

Although typically skimpy in political and social contexts (each ruler only gets three or four pages each, give or take), The Kings and Queens is a pleasant read, particularly for one who loses track of which Henry is which or can’t remember who built this castle or that one. Each chapter begins with a statement of how each ruler copped the crown, either by divine right or unholy wrong (each option is equally viable). Some purists will not like some of Murray’s snap estimates – is Elizabeth I really “more celebrated for being the Virgin Queen than for any other of her achievements”? – but the author is not offering a scholarly dissection of these men and women, rather a grand procession to keep the tourist marginally informed and entertained while on that slow boat down the Thames to the Tower.

“The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire”, by Francesca Cartier Brickell

 

‎ 656 pages, Ballantine Books, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0525621638

The Cartiers: The Untold Story of the Family Behind the Jewelry Empire by Francesca Cartier Brickell (the great-great-great granddaughter of Louis-François Cartier, the company’s founder) breaks down the history of this French institution point by point and describes how the House of Cartier became the well-known, high-end, globe-spanning name that it is today. From pearls to giant engagement diamonds to watches to all the rest, this book spans the Cartier catalog and the history behind the pieces.

Now, while I am the first to admit that The Cartiers is well-written and gives a thorough description of the Cartiers’ jewelry business succession, it must also be said that it’s just too damn easy to get distracted by other things (including other books; especially other books) when reading it. And I’m not sure why that is, either, ‘cause it’s not like Brickell has padded the book with trivial information or too many details. I think it’s because there were far too many moments in which she didn’t do history justice.

Throughout the book, Brickell wastes not a single opportunity to praise the Cartiers (none too surprising as she is a member in good standing of the extended clan). This relentless cheerleading results in an off-kilter history in which many of the problems regarding some of the family’s actions are downplayed or explained away, such as – hmmmmm, lemme see now – sending women to psychiatric sanatoriums for menopause, or the exploitation of diamond discoveries in Africa, and other events in history that were quite problematic (hate that word).

As usual, it’s not all bad; I especially love the descriptions of the people and society of interwar Europe, one of my favorite eras in history. As a wannabe historian, reading about past lives and lost cultures (even rather decadent ones) is always a thrill. And, having at one time sold several Cartier timepieces in one of my past lives, reading the history of the inspiration and development of these gorgeous devices was interesting in themselves and made me wish I had these little tidbits of knowledge back then to boost my presentation (if I had I may very well still be selling them).

Francesca Cartier Brickell gives the attentive, patient reader a thorough overview of the foundation, expansion and loss of family control of the Cartier Empire from its founding in 1847 to its incorporation in 1974. The Cartier’s corporate tagline “never copy, only create” comes out clearly in the firm’s relentless drive for beauty, timeliness and high craftsmanship, with the premium of Cartier’s creations appealing to their buyer’s psyche. Furthermore, Brickell offers insights into the motivations of the purchasers and sellers of Cartier’s product offerings over time.

However, as noted above, all is not well. I understand that The Cartiers is meant to focus on the Cartiers’ business and the personalities that built the company, but I suppose I was just a little flummoxed by contrasting one woman who was deemed insane by her husband juxtaposed to the long description about royal women praised for the amount of diamonds they could wear at once. I guess the world of haute couture is just not for me.

“Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England”, by Catherine Bailey

 

Penguin Books, 576 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0143126843

Who knew that the proper English world could resemble an episode of Jerry Springer? In Black Diamonds: The Downfall of an Aristocratic Dynasty and the Fifty Years That Changed England, Catherine Bailey describes how the 7^th Earl Fitzwilliam, William Charles de Meuron Wentworth-Fitzwilliam (or “Billy” to his friends) may or may not have been the natural son of William Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton MP, and his wife, Laura Maria Theresa Beauclerk, the granddaughter of William Beauclerk, 8^th Duke of St Albans. You see, the “de Meuron” part of his name refers to Pointe de Meuron in deepest darkest Canada where he was born – or traded like a later day changeling; that is, an unrelated baby was inserted into the family line in order to purge the bloodline of the epilepsy from which his ostensible forebears had suffered and to provide that arm of the family a male heir to inherit the earldom.

The mystery surrounding Billy’s birth would come to head when he inherited the Fitzwilliam fortune upon the death of his grandfather (his own father predeceasing him), and, brother, what a fortune it was. You see, the Fitzwilliam wealth was not, like that of so many aristocrats, based on land (although they weren’t short of that, either), but on coal – the “black diamonds” of the title – worth some £3.3 billion today (or over $4.5 billion in real money). With that amount of wealth on the line, several of Billy’s relations sought to strip him of it all by the accusation that he was not, in fact, a Fitzwilliam. But this is only a part of the story in Black Diamonds, for in examining “the Fifty Years That Changed England” Bailey shows how class differences and the effect of two wars, union strikes and the final blow of the postwar Labour government brought down much of the aristocracy and their vast fortunes.

While the Fitzwilliams were generally considered beneficent landlords and employers (especially compared to others in their class who can best be described as Total Bastards), the life of a coal miner in early 20^th Century Britain was hell on earth (the life of a coal miner in late 20^th Century Britain, on the other hand, was quite different; it’s easy to forget in our modern age that Unions once had a point). And although the Fitzwilliams are always at the center of the story, Black Diamonds necessarily detours into the worlds of the coal miners, British Parliament and even the friggin’ Kennedys, if you can imagine. Black Diamonds is full of fascinating, real-life stories of the spectacular lives led by England’s aristocrats, and Bailey has provided a page-turning chronicle of the Fitzwilliam coal-mining dynasty and their breathtaking Wentworth estate (the largest private home in England) and the downfall of a way of life.

“The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”, by Christopher Clark

 

‎ Harper Perennial, 736 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0061146664

The brilliance of Christopher Clark’s far-reaching The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is that he displays with a novelist’s flair just how the past can be prologue. The participants in the first, great calamity of the 20^th Century were conditioned to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment – always certain of the righteousness of their cause – but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures, patriotism and paranoia, sediments of history and folk memory, ambition and intrigue. They were, to use Clark’s phrase, “sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world”. While the historiography of World War I is immense (with more than 25,000 volumes and articles even before the centenary), Clark offers new perspectives on this most useless of wars, giving us a thoroughly comprehensible and highly readable account of the polarization of the continent and insights as to how and why the major players behaved as they did.

Given all that we now know, The Sleepwalkers is like a kind of ‘B’ horror movie: Can’t they hear the music? Don’t they know not to walk down a long back-lit hall? While Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophia died almost instantly, Gavrilo Princip, their adolescent assassin, was instantly captured but not executed as he was too young; instead, he was sent to the Austrian fortress at Terezin, where he died miserably in April 1918 (incidentally, his prison is better known today as the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where visitors can see his cell and his manacles amid the detritus of the Holocaust that he did a great deal to make possible). But Clark in fact begins his account in 1903 with the murder of Alexander I of Serbia by a secretive terrorist network called the Black Hand, who then went on to organize the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 – which resulted ultimately in the bloodbaths of the Somme, Verdun, Gallipoli and the lot. How one bullet could wrought so much suffering…

Germany has usually been blamed for escalating the conflict, but Clark refuses to play the blame game, arguing that the Germans were not alone in their paranoid imperialism. The more convincing and terrifying reality is that no nation really meant to wage war, but each sleepwalked into it. Clark brilliantly puts this illogical conflict into context, showing how pre-1914 Europe was inherently unstable, riven by ethnic and nationalistic factions. The only part of Clark’s analysis of the force fields of European political culture on the eve of the final crisis I find unconvincing is his discussion of what he calls a “crisis of masculinity”: “a preference for unyielding forcefulness over the suppleness, tactical flexibility and wiliness exemplified by an earlier generation of statesmen ... was likely to accentuate the potential for conflict”. It’s hard to say whether Bismarck was more secure in his masculinity than von Moltke, but problems with masculinity have been at the heart of war since Eden; I doubt they were more critical in July 1914 than at any other time.

The beauty of Clark’s final two hundred pages is in the care, intelligence and authority with which he explains how disaster happened; how the crisis in its many forms developed and options for action became ever more limited. Nobody at the time called the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28^th, 1914, “a shot heard round the world” (filched from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Concord Hymn), but the phrase epitomizes a judgment that crystallized only as the horrendous sequels played out.

“Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I”, by Stephen O’Shea

 

Walker Books, 216 pages, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0802713292

How does one forget a war? The First World War – or The Great War, The War to End All Wars, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, The War of the Nations – recently celebrated (?) its centennial and nobody noticed. Can you imagine? A war that, in the words of our author, “caused some 67 million men to don uniforms and go fight. One in every six of these men was killed. Of the remainder, approximately half were wounded. On the Western Front alone, more than 4 million died in their ditches”. It also caused the fall of empires and monarchies that had lasted for centuries and was the catalyst for the rise of three of the most God-awful “isms” – Communism, Fascism and Nazism – to ever curse an already benighted humanity.

Yet the centennial came and went with hardly a mutter from most. The war that saw in the bloodiest and most oppressive century in the history of Man has been all but subsumed by its infinitely worst successor to the point where many can’t be bothered to remember what it was all about. Thankfully, some do remember, like Stephen O’Shea who, during the 1980s and 90s, took to touring the battlefields of WWI in an attempt to come to grips with the needless slaughter and suffering and recorded what he thinks he learned in Back to the Front: An Accidental Historian Walks the Trenches of World War I, an awesome history-cum-travelogue in which he recounts the gruesome battles of the Western Front: Passchendaele; The Somme; The Argonne; Verdun.

Throughout, he offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage and makes us aware why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. For O’Shea, the legacy of The Great War is both personal (his grandfathers, maternal and paternal, fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the “immense wound” still visible on the battlefield of The Somme, and feeling that “history is too important to be left to the professionals” – ain’t dat de truff – he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man’s-land to discover for himself, and for his generation, the meaning of The War.

As O’Shea shows, while World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today it has yet left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of the 20^th Century, as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front, the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many millions of lives were (needlessly) lost. And all for naught, for all of the belligerents in The War to End All Wars were at it once again a mere 21-years later (no wonder some too-clever historians sometimes refer to both WWI & WWII as the Second Thirty Years’ War, never mind that the reasons for the wars differed so dramatically).

Having traversed countless American Civil and Revolutionary War battlefields over the length of my youth (thanks, Dad!), O’Shea’s experiences traversing the ordnance-and-relic filled trenches and forests to the many memorials of WWI are truly insightful and differ greatly from the kind of lionization of American Civil War battlefields that is so prevalent today; indeed, the battlefields of The War to End All Wars seem to lie in a weird sort of isolation as O’Shea frequently stumbles from one long-deserted village to another with the experience becoming ever-more discomforting. Its as if Europe collectively has decided to forget this conflict that began their slow decline into the bureaucratic moribund sick man of the world they have become.

While O’Shea can’t restrain himself from over-moralizing the futility of war, the evidence he presents conveys the true waste of war better than any memorial can. Back to the Front teaches a lesson that all too-few people will ever learn, especially those who make the decision to send young men off to die knowing they themselves will never suffer the consequences of their actions.