Customer Reviews

Ramage & the Guillotine (The Lord Ramage Novels)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In which Lt. Ramage speaks with Lord Nelson and smugglers alike, takes passage for "Boney's" France, is astounded and becomes a shipwright, employs a thief, speaks to a policman of knives and sealing wax, and joins the French army! One suspects that Liberty - Equality - Fraternity meant only the liberty to reduce your brother citizens into equal misery. Of course, the British Navy's blockade also had something to do with the desperate state of the French economy revealed here (and rarely depicted in other seafaring series).

If you like stories of the Napoleonic era you'll enjoy this close up view of the French Terror into which idealists descended, but if your desire is only battle at sea this volume will disappoint. As far as I know this is the only nautical novel that brings its naval hero so far and long into enemy France (perhaps Pope is fulfilling the promise of C.S. Forester's "Hornblower During The Crisis" left unfinished by Forester's death before HH gets ashore).

This is easily the weakest installment in this series so far. While it is certainly readable, it is seriously flawed. First, there is almost no action at sea, which is the primary reason I read these books. Pope was very good at describing action at sea but, in general, his skills as a writer were only average. The plot is very thin, and the book really drags in the middle. The action picks up some at the end, but not enough to be really satisfying. The main problem with this book is that it just doesn't generate much suspense. Also, Ramage himself does very little in this book; he is just along for the ride as the smugglers and his subordinates do almost all the work. This book is not a total loss, however. I thought the details of the smuggling trade were interesting, and the picture Pope paints of France during the Napoleonic War is very vivid and interesting. Pope portrays France as a country tearing itself apart even as its Grand Army was conquering most of Europe. The government would execute a citizen simply because someone accused him or her of being a Royalist. This, of course, was a good way for a person to get rid of a personal enemy or business rival. It reminded me of what conditions must have been like in Stalinist Russia, where a paranoid government had its agents keeping a close watch on everyone. So, overall, it's not a terrible book, but I look forward to Ramage getting back to sea in the next installment.

"If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse's feet, don't go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street. Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie. Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!" (from Rudyard Kipling's "A Smuggler's Song"). The smuggling trade plays a major part in this novel - it is tolerated to a point because it supplies certain luxuries and is a means of handling agents and intelligence during wartime. Like his other novels, Pope relies on the reader's knowledge of history to determine the time setting. The novel seems to be between 1801 and 1805, as it is after the first Battle of Copenhagen and, as Admiral Lord Nelson is still alive, the story must be before 1805. A good guess might place the novel in the later part of 1801. That leaves a major time gap between the end of the last novel in the series and the beginning of this novel. Later novels in the series jump back to fill in spaces left blank by earlier novels, so it is difficult for the reader to get the novels in a proper chronological sequence.

The novel spans a period of two to three weeks. The story tends to go into fine detail and, at a couple of points, I found myself skimming forward. Actual naval action is limited. However, there is considerable detail on the smuggling operations between France and England (the smugglers' primary loyalty is to money), and on the so-called "justice system" of revolutionary France (which kept the guillotine busy).

Ramage is given a special mission inside France as a spy to obtain vital information. The Royal Navy was willing to tolerate unusual methods and breaches of the law as long as it produced results. The blame would be on Ramage if he failed.

Overall, the story is an interesting tale of intrigue. Actual naval action is limited.

Overall, the Ramage series is right up there with the Bolitho and Aubrey/Maturin chronologies, but "Ramage & the Guillotine" disappoints slightly, since most of the action takes place on land, with Ramage undercover in France.

I've been slowly knocking off the Ramage novels, but after this one I'm taking a hiatus. Ramage, our hero, is sent to France as a spy, so we have more intrigue than action. Fine. This should have been a great thriller, but it turns out to be a long, tedious, even boring novel. Pope just can't say in 3 pages what he can say in 50 and it wears thin after a while. Most naval fiction novels consist of a series of episodes, but Pope's books tend to be one long story. Nothing wrong with that, but if there is nothing to keep you interested, then reading it becomes a chore. And that's what this is.

This is a rather disappointing entry in an otherwise enjoyable series of naval historical novels set during the Napoleonic wars. Lieut. Lord Nicholas Ramage, who has a reputation for disobeying orders while still successfully accomplishing his missions, is in London and between ships when he's drafted for some undercover work by the First Lord and Admiral Nelson. It's a matter of coincidence, really; Ramage was present at a ball and came under their eye. His job is to sneak into Boulogne and check out Bonaparte's growing fleet of barges and transports, intended for the invasion of Britain -- but the Admiral leaves it to him to find a way to get there. Another coincidence: Ramage's uncle just happens to be the largest landowner in the marshes of Kent, the center of England's busiest smuggler population. Only the smugglers can get Ramage and a couple of his men where he needs to be -- and within forty-eight hours, he's sitting in an inn in Boulogne. And yet another coincidence: The regular courier between the French admiral responsible for building the invasion fleet and his boss in Paris just happens to stay at the same inn. And the innkeeper just happens to tell Ramage all about it before he has even unpacked his luggage. And the innkeeper just happens to have a brother who keeps another inn at Amiens, where the courier just happens to always spend the night on the two-day journey between Paris and Boulogne. Ramage, of course, gets himself to Amiens with the intention of sneaking a peek at the courier's dispatches. All this creeping around involves several hundred pages of detailed explanation and it gets pretty old pretty quick. Pope was a pretty fair schooner sailor himself and the most enjoyable plots and scenes in this series are those in which Ramage is exercising his ingenuity at sea, overcoming odds by out-thinking the enemy, dealing with hurricanes and mutinies, and swinging a cutlass. But Ramage spends only a short time aboard a smuggler's disguised fishing smack, making the Channel crossing. Instead, Pope seems to want to fulminate against the French Revolution in general and against Bonaparte in particular, describing the gendarmes in terms that would not be out of place in the Third Reich. And he waxes much too philosophical about the plight of the captured and imprisoned spy. In fact, Louis, a French smuggler and anti-Revolutionary in search of revenge, is much more interesting this time than Ramage, who has to depend on him and his contacts in order to get anything done. I'm carefully reading this series in order and I hope the next installment will see the young lieutenant back at sea where he belongs.

Ramage finds himself behind enemy lines and we are introduced to several new characters along with some endearing old ones. Very entertaining and an interesting perception on peri-Napolean France. A very entertaining read.

I have now read the series up to this book. I think this is #7, or #6. And I have noticed a really tragic trend. Since the middle of the second book, nearly the entire novel is on land. Or in a port. The character interaction is very good, but there doesn't seem to be much of any time spent on naval battles or sailing in general. The sequences in the water are pretty disconnected. While I enjoy Dudley Pope's ability to make the reader identify with the character through excruciating detail, I am very disappointed when that is ALL he does for an entire novel. Especially after he was hand picked by C.S. Forester (Hornblower series writer) to succeed him. Hopefully "Ramage's Diamond" will be better. If it isn't then it'll be the last one I read of this series.

I read this book when I was in Iraq. I really like it. I just found out there is a whole series so I have ordered the first installation.

This is a superficial and forgetable effort at historical writing. Heavily padded because of a very thin plot, all of what passes for action is carried by secondary characters sometimes acting off-stage, as Ramage, the "hero", spends pages ruminating on his navel. The author tries to flaunt his research by inserting unnecessary multi-page historical data which add nothing, while stopping the weak story in its tracks. In the end, the plot works, and the hero is triumphant only by coincidence, resourceful secondary characters, and ignorant villians. This was the first Pope book I have read (and the last) and does not compare in any way with the works of Conrad,O'Brian, Forester or Kent.