Customer Reviews

Ramage at Trafalgar

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

After a good deal of interesting matters on shore, Ramage and his faithful crew (already rich with prize money but faultlessly loyal to their captain) race off to join Admiral Lord Nelson before Cadiz in Spain, and the great naval battle of Trafalgar in 1805. More than any other nautical novel I've read, this one makes clear just how revolutionary were Nelson's killer tactics. It is worth reading just for the views of Nelson at home and at war. The reasons why Nelson is Britain's greatest hero are made clear. The story is constructed with a long narrative line building to a thrilling climax, and a wonderfully sad ending as Ramage appears headed for another court-martial due to his valiant actions taken without orders.

Book notes: poorly proof-read for a McBooks book. The only title in the Ramage series with a genuinely old painting on the cover (but has nothing to do with the story). While it can certainly stand on its own better than most in the series because it more closely concerns real historical figures than usual, as the 16th of 18 this volume is probably not the place to start.

Not only entertaining reading but much detail of how living ws in that century.

Also really detailed info on how ships and their cews lived and died.

The description of the gunpwder room is particularly detailed, something missing from other eloquent writers of this genre.

After the disaster of the previous book (Ramage's Challenge), this one is a welcome relief. It starts off a little slowly--getting the ship ready in England and sailing out to join the fleet off Cadiz. And Pope, in usual fashion, can't move things along quickly enough. Well, Ramage joins the fleet and is sent onshore as a a spy to get information from an informant. This episode is not particularly helpful to the story, though. Things really get good when the Franco-Spanish fleet sets sail. From here on, the book reads like a thriller and the battle is very good. Pope really rises to the challenge and gives the reader a treat. too bad he didn't get right to the good stuff right away. This could have been a great book.

I do have some problems with weaving fictional characters into historical events. Yes, sooner or later, all our fictional heroes must be at the big battles. But Ramage seems to play too big a part. He's not just some guy on a ship shooting a gun, but a relatively major, or at least noticeable, player in the battle. I'm a bit uncomfortable with that.

Dudley Pope might be thorough on the nautical detail, but when it comes to general historical detail of the period, this book is seriously flawed. Ramage apparently has one servant who does everything around the house (butler, groom, coachman - and poacher and smuggler); his wife, the daughter of a marquis, travels without a maid; and don't even get me started on the scene where Ramage gives his own wife a sponge bath in the London town house of Ramage's parents' . . . These people are wealthy aristocrats, for pete's sake! And they never act like it! Pope needed a serious dose of Georgette Heyer to do the on-shore scenes better.
The rest of the tale? A yawn-fest about the Battle of Trafalgar, as Ramage and his familiar crew race to the scene in the Calypso, carry out an all-too-easy espionage mission, wreck one ship and then capture another during the battle itself. This story should have been flowing and exciting; instead, it is as top-heavy with incidental detail as the Santissima Trinidad. Ramage disobeys orders and gets away with it yet again, naturally.
I appreciate the difficulty of grafting a fictional character into historical events. But "Ramage at Trafalgar" is seriously unbalanced, the large chunk of the book taken up by Ramage's family having nothing to do with later events and introducing a feel that does not match the second half of the book. Why not just limit it to a nautical tale focused solely on the battle? There's more than enough material there, after all. And why have Ramage and Nelson apparently forgotten the events in "Ramage and the Guillotine"? Other Ramage books are much better. This one is perfunctory and boring in its execution.