Reavers, The [Import] [Paperback]

George MacDonald Fraser (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harper (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007253842
• ISBN-13: 978-0007253845
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,056,586 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Funny, but not his best, November 29, 2007

By 

Richard Quarles "Rich Quarles" (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Reavers (Hardcover)

The Reavers is very much in the style of Fraser's "Pyrates" but, in my opinion, not as successful. For those of you more familiar with the Flashman books, both The Reavers and Pyrates are more over-the-top, more fantastic, and the narrator is constantly interjecting with a wink and a nudge.

Pyrates is probably my all-time favorite Fraser novel-- but The Reavers felt more like a rehash. Even so, I definitely enjoyed it.

If you haven't read Pyrates yet, I'd recommend reading it instead.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Imagine an Explosion in the Library . . ., June 23, 2009

By 

T. Berner (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Reavers (Paperback)

. . . and a volume of SJ Perelman smashes through the collected works of Sir Walter Scott and takes a corner off a Harry Potter tome before plunging into a history of Hollywood swashbucklers. That will give you a flavor of the late great George MacDonald Fraser's last work.

Fraser wrote five kinds of books in his illustrious career. There were his peerless Flashman books, of course. There were his solid histories - A Hollywood History of the World remains the best and most engaging study of the subject matter ever written. There were his two volumes of memoirs - Quartered Safe Out Here is easily one of the five best firsthand accounts of World War II, a classic which should be on every shelf of military history for the next millenium. There was Fraser's other fiction, ranging from the comic McAuslan novels to the dark and brooding Candlemass Road. Then there were his two nonsense novels: Pyrates and this, his valedictory novel.

Personally, I've never cared for this sort of humor. It is too loose, too many word plays, no structure to hold on to. I've never seen the point of the Marx Brothers or Perelman. Nevertheless, this is a superior example of this sort of fiction and I found myself laughing out loud far more often than I ever had while watching Duck Soup or reading Westward Ho!

And as someone who read the first, newly published Flashman in high school, I have received a lifetime of enjoyment from the author. If as his last work, he chose to write a book which gave him the undoubted pleasure The Reavers gave him, then I say, bravo, Mr. Fraser.

Now if only his publisher can convince Fraser's daughter - a fine writer in her own right - to resume the Flashman novels, all will be well in the world. The literary world, at any rate.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Farcical Farewell, September 18, 2008

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Reavers (Hardcover)

Like most others who will pick up this final book from Fraser, I am a longtime devotee of his Flashman series. And the sheer pleasure of reading that series has driven me to seek out and read most of his other fiction and non-fiction over the years (including this book's ancestor, The Pyrates). Of these twenty or so books, this one is clearly the silliest of the lot, and anyone picking it up should be ready for a pretty heavy dose of wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

The book is essentially a farcical rewriting of his earlier novel, The Candlemass Road, complete with many of the same characters and situations. The story is set in the same 16th-century Scottish/English borderlands that Fraser wrote a history of under the title The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers. It concerns a Spanish plot to kidnap King James and replace him with an impostor (and if that sounds familiar, it's because Fraser used the device in Royal Flash). Seeking to foil this plot are an Elizabethan secret agent, a Scottish highwayman, a stunning English noblewoman, and her saucy sidekick.

If this sounds like a delightful historical thriller, well, be warned that Fraser wrote this one with his tongue even more firmly planted in cheek than usual. It brims with modern pop culture references, anachronisms, authorial asides, and over-the-top renderings of thick Scots dialect. None of these bothered me, but plenty of other readers seemed to find some or all of these elements annoying. However, in the preface, Fraser is pretty clear that the book was primarily written to amuse himself, so I'm willing to go along with the ride. Especially since it's the last we're likely to get from such a great storyteller. (Unless, that is, a literary executor manages to uncover one last packet of Flashman adventures....)

Ultimately, a pretty minor and self-derivative work from a very entertaining writer. If approached in the right frame of mind, it should provide a few hours of very light entertainment, and possibly spur the reader to check out some of the true history of the setting.