Fiction: Birds of Prey
Author: Wilbur Smith
Macmillan/Pan Books
Price: £ 5.99
“The boy clutched at the rim of the canvas bucket in which he crouched sixty feet above the deck as ship went about. The mast canted over sharply as she thrust her head through the wind. The ship was a caravel named Lady Edwina, after the mother he could hardly remember……….”
”The scope is magnificent and the epic scale breath-taking…Wilbur Smith is one of those benchmarks against whom others are compared…”, says The Times. And having read this splendid story, certainly, I cannot help agreeing with what it says in spite of its high flown language.
Sir Francis Courtney, a Nautonnier Knight of the Temple of the Order of St. George and the Holy Grail, is an English privateer carrying a Letter of Marque signed by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor of England, in the name of His Majesty King Charles II and authorizing him to hunt down the ships of the Dutch Republic, with which England was at war; his crew in the caravel, Lady Edwina, comprise Hal or Henry Courtney, his only son and Aboli, a remarkably loyal black slave, and Ned Tyler, the boatswain and some ruffian, belligerent tars.
After about 65 days of waiting in the high seas, they capture ‘De Standvastigheid’ or ‘The Resolution’, a galleon belonging to the Dutch East India Company and navigated by Colonel Cornelius Schreuder. She carries in her holds a rich cargo of spice, of oriental timber and of bullion. Further, the Governor Incumbent of the Cape of Good Hope, Petrus van de Velde and his nymphomaniac young wife Katinka happen to be among the passengers on board the opulent galleon. Having confiscated the entire cargo, Sir Francis Courtney then goes on to hold them to a whopping ransom of two hundred thousand guilders in gold coins. Colonel Schreuder is dispatched with the letter demanding ransom money back to Holland on board Lady Edwina, now stripped of all her fire-power…
The story running into 774 pages is a magnificent tale gripping the readers` attention with its vivid descriptions of blood-curdling sea battles, of exotic landscapes, of African wildernesses teeming with ferocious beasts, and of erotic encounters between Katinka and her numerous lovers including Hal.
And Smith writing in the third person never spares his readers of the most gruesome details of ruthless killings and savage executions. The heroes, however, are but a little less evil than the villains. Clearly the legitimized piracy leads to justifiable blood-shed from which the civilized people recoil as they do from an adder or a mamba.
However, in Birds of Prey, as in all other Wilbur Smiths, what surprises me is his use of English language. His remarkably lucid and almost lyrical writing reflects an extraordinary command of English language backed by the limitless word-power of a very rich vocabulary. With metaphors and similes coming naturally to him, he writes so easily, so effortlessly that I almost begin to envy his talent for writing fiction. And we see him switching among the role of correspondent, of historian, of philosopher, of barbarian, and, most wonderfully, of poet. The novel is as much about love, loyalty, trust, glory and friendship as it is about insatiable greed, distrust, virulent hatred, gross betrayal and barbarism.In fact, this wonderful mélange of disparate and/or contradictory natures with which the novel is shot through from the first page to the last one is vintage Smith. The following passage from the novel certainly bears irrefutable testimony to Smith’s extraordinary talent for writing.
“The fabled flat-topped mountain seemed to fill most of the blue African sky, a great cliff of yellow rock slashed by deep ravines choked with dense green forest. The top of the mountain was so geometrically level, and its proportions so pleasing, that it seemed to have been designed by a celestial architect. Over the top of this immense table-land spilled a standing wave of shimmering cloud, frothy as milk boiling over the rim of a pot. This silver cascade never reached the lower slopes of the mountain, but as it fell it evaporated in mid-flight with a magical suddenness, leaving the lower slopes resplendent in their clothing of verdant natural forest…..”
If you prefer to improve your vocabulary through reading fiction, then this is a novel you cannot resist; or if you have a natural penchant for gutsy adventure stories, you will be tempted to read it for hours on end. Certainly, without a rich receptive vocabulary, it will be a little difficult to comprehend Smith’s writing. But what I am even more certain is that once you read Wilbur Smith, you begin to love his writings!
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