Sir Percy Blakeny, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was, in this year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty. Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking, but for a certain lazy expression in his deep set blue eyes, and that perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly cut mouth.
It's seems silly to criticise Baroness Orczy for demonising the French revolution and idealising the aristocracy. That's surely what you would expect from a novel like this. And the writing seems to anticipate such criticism somehow. There's an arch tone of voice, particularly in the earlier chapters, a theatricality throughout, particularly in the hero's impossibly successful disguises, which alerts you to the fact that this is history as a charade, as costume drama. The climax strains credulity with the stupidity of the French revolutionary soldiers. The twenty strong 'League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' are all noble young men enjoying themselves, just as they would at hounds, or some similar sport, performing their daring exploits largely for the fun of it. It's history played as a game.
Being familiar only with a vague outline of the character, it was interesting to see just how much of the story is actually more a romance, concerned far more with the feelings of Lady Blakeny than anything else, for all that it contains it's fair share of adventure.
I almost certainly wouldn't have read it if I hadn't come across a cheap paperback from the 60s in a charity shop, with a wonderful painted cover. The kind you don't really get anymore. The vivid red of the Pimpernel's coat dominates the composition. The materiality of the text added to the nostalgia of the story's love of the aristocracy. Compare Baroness Orczy with Sabatini. If it came to the quality of the writing I'd probably choose Sabatini over Orczy. He's got just a better command of language. Yet my copy of Captain Blood is the most recently republished Vintage edition. It's wonderfully designed, but the form doesn't match the charm of the adventure story. It should be old, preferably printed in a time before I was born, because that's where the adventure story belongs for me. It's surely for precisely that reason that the British covers to the Captain Alatriste series evoke older pulp conventions. Form matches content, only it can never quite match the real thing because it's too obviously the product of nostalgia. The old pulp covers weren't trying to evoke anything, other than attempting to sell you the book. Trying to evoke the idiom is fine, but there's always an air of self consciousness about it. This 1960s cover for The Scarlet Pimpernel simply is.
I'm also fascinated by the other titles recommended at the back. I've never read Naomi Mitchison or Geoffrey Trease, but both sound intriguing. Clearly there was this whole tradition of historical fiction which has rather faded from view now, perhaps through the rise of a more self-consciously meta fictional historical fiction over the last thirty years. I'm not talking about historical romance here, which has clearly continued to flourish despite whatever literary fashion might have to say. I'd put Henry Treece in the same grouping, a writer I have read.
Best of all though is the description quoted for Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets and Valerians, quoted from The Observer:
Four children (Mother dead, Father in India). Scholarly bachelor uncle decides - with aid of wise old gardener-factotum - to educate them. But beware of Lion Tor, and the mist when it takes strange shapes over Weeping Marsh. And where is Lady Valerian's lost explorer husband?
I love the peremptory tone of it, the faint echo of the opening of Bleak House. The assumptions of the reviewer. It comes straight out of the Empire. "Thrilling stuff" no doubt; you needn't read the book, just let the breathless précis do all the work of the story.
I've always loved these advertisements for other other writers, other books, which used to appear in the back of the book. The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished. It's something else I don't think we get so much any more, unless it's adverts for more books by the same author as the book you've just finished reading.
The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished reading. Or the book you're still reading, if you've flicked to back while still only half way through. It's the promise that this wonderful adventure that is reading and that is never going to end.
