Customer Reviews

Sparrowhawk, Book One: Jack Frake

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Everywhere I go, every book store and library I walk into, I find myself faced with "important" books, books I "should" read, and books that have garnered all kinds of critical acclaim. All too often, I read these books and end up feeling dissatisfied or depressed. I'd like to blame the authors' writing skills, but that wouldn't be fair, because sometimes, it's only the writer's evocative prose or clever style that gets me to the end of the book. So what is it that disappoints me? It's the pictures their words paint. So many of these "important" books paint pictures of dull, desperate lives, weak minds, and general hopelessness. As accurate as these portrayals may be, I don't need to see them over and over again. Honestly, I'm surrounded by dead-end people, dead-end jobs, and dead-end ideas in my daily life. I fight my own battles against laziness and mediocrity every day.

So, where are the books that portray brilliance and worth, instead of just misery and dependence? Look no further than the Sparrowhawk series. In these books, you won't find heroes who deny themselves in hyper-melodramatic self-sacrifice or who wear white robes and fling lightning bolts at their enemies. If that's what you're looking for, go read "Lord of the Rings" again. What Sparrowhawk's heroes display is belief in themselves, indomitable will, honesty, and the courage to strive for greatness in the face of a world that fears, resents, and tries to destroy greatness. I may never have the extraordinary abilities of a Jack Frake or a Hugh Kenrick, but the very idea of them inspires me in a way that no Oprah book has ever managed to do. I wish there were more books like these.

What a rare pleasure to read a new novel by an author who shares my values explicitly and consistently. It's been 20 years or more since I have enjoyed a reading experience as much as I enjoyed reading Edward Cline's just-published Sparrowhawk.

The hero of the story, Jack Frake, is introduced as a ten-year-old boy in the process of discovering that his mind can measure all things. His teacher has shown him a map of his homeland, and for the first time he realizes that there is more to the world than the range of his immediate awareness. There is a land called England, great enough to extend far beyond his vision and small enough to fit comfortably within his thoughts. The realization begins Jack's great adventure and ours.

Cline calls the moment when Jack realizes that there is more to the world than what he can see a "charge" that precipitates an event of startling perception in the boy's mind. "...Where before he had been aware only of hills, fields and cliffs...now he held in his mind an abstraction...Beyond that tiny realm lay the thrilling, unexplored empire of the island."

Cline describes this revelation in a manner that leaves no doubt as to its importance and its nature. We are witnessing a watershed event in the life of Jack Frake.

"It is when the fog clears," he writes, "and the moon and stars are brilliant, and the white sails of faraway ships on an invisible horizon are sharp and almost luminescent as they glide past on their grand, unknown errands, that a boy of ten may take stock of himself and of the world he knows. This is a quiet, precious time; he knows that the world is not so much focused on him, as he on it, through a special lens in his inchoate soul. The brevity and suddenness of this moment...signals its own importance, for its incandescent violence must make one passionately certain that one is a worthy crucible."

This is a brilliant and perceptive description of a profound intellectual connection; at once deeply personal and universal. I recall with clarity moments of my own such as this. They are the turning points of my life.

Cline tells Jack's story not as a group of isolated, random events but as a journey illustrating the self-making of a soul. He learns to trust his own judgment, that life is to be enjoyed to the fullest, that enjoyment is a selfish emotion that consists of achieving personal values, and that values are worth fighting for. He learns about the nature of evil and why one must oppose it. He learns these things for himself, with nothing to guide him but his ability to observe, make connections and apply his conclusions to his choices of action.

The writing is intelligent, clear, essentialized, eloquent, frequently poetic and always historically accurate. The characters are consistent, the action rational and often heroic.

This is a book and a series that deserves to be a big success. I highly recommend it.

Edward Cline's novel Sparrowhawk brings to mind Ayn Rand's dictum, "Just as Man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul." This novel is the story of young Jack Frake growing up in early eighteenth century England and the process by which he makes his own soul. The greatest value in the novel lies in the climax, when young Jack Frake observes the fate of the two men who have meant the most to him, one the father he never had, the other an older brother he never had, both of them lost to Jack because of laws that treat people as servants of the Crown. Jack resolves to understand the cause of the injustice brought down upon the men he has admired, and to write it down, and thus reclaim the liberties taken from the best men in England. And so the stage is set for Jack Frake's arrival in America, where, one hopes, he will meet men of like mind and soul.

Stylistically, the novel is as pure and clean as the white sails of a great clipper ship. Cline's descriptions of the English countryside and the intimate details of individual life of that time immerse the reader in the physical reality of the time. His dialogue rings true, but is never hard to follow. And of particular note is Cline's riveting and visceral description of old London in all its filthy hectic madhouse magnificence, at once a city awe-inspiring and horrifying, attractive and repulsive, irresistible and repugnant--and exactly the type of place to flash a young boy's imagination with both the brutal and noble possibilities of life. Also of note, some keen action sequences, especially the climactic battle at sea, where Jack Frake fights for and wins more than he can possibly know. This scene is a stirring finale to the novel, and a fitting final tribute to the character of Jack Frake and the possibilities implicit in the soul he has forged through the events of the novel.

Sparrowhawk is the novel of a mature Objectivist writing a form of inductive Romanticism, a writer who has found his own voice and given it full flower, a novel containing only dim echoes of Rand and Hugo. I first read excerpts of this novel in the Atlantean Press Review way back in 1994--and can honestly say that waiting this long for the complete story was well worth it! As Jack Frake would say, "Huzza!"

This is the story of the intellectual development of a young man- Jack Frake. While it could have happened anytime, this story occurs about thirty years before the American Revolution. While it is not even suggested in this book, by the ideas and actions young Jack takes, one can tell that he will, somehow, in a later book, be a part of the revolution.

In addition to this, we see Jack, and his heroes, take deliberate actions to further their values. I can't express how pleasurable, and uncommon, it is to read of heroes who act with principles, integrity, and honesty. The writing also keeps to the high standards by supplying enough details to allow one to imagine oneself in the action, but not so much as to bore the reader. All in all, this is the best novel I've read in quite some time.

"Sparrowhawk" is a thrilling adventure, that reveals the soul of the American Revolution.

Book 1 is the story of a young hero, Jack Frake--pauper and son of a prostitute, nurtured to intellectual manhood on the bleak Cornish coast by noble smugglers, whose daring defiance of the Crown and of arbitrary law makes them both heroes and enigmas to those around them.

In the furtive underworld of British smugglers, a master of disguise and a merchant with a price on his head struggle to understand what makes them different from the people around them--what brought them together in "a covenant of defiance," "to live free, or die." In Jack Frake they see a younger version of themselves--an outcast who takes sides with them because "a man's life is his own." As the plot unfolds, and a vicious bureaucrat closes in on the gang, the tension becomes almost unbearable--until, in a wrenching climax, the boy's heroes pass on to him their legacy--that someday, perhaps in America, he will find the words to justify their rebellion.

"Sparrowhawk" is, as the author says, the story of "what kind of spirit makes possible rebellion against tyranny and corruption."

Also not to be missed: "Sparrowhawk - Book 2: Hugh Kenrick," whose hero, a young British aristocrat, also rebels against the view that his life belongs to others.

And this time next year, look for "Sparrowhawk - Book 3," which shows what happens when Jake Frake and Hugh Kenrick meet in Virginia! (Author Ed Cline has let me read this in manuscript.)

"Would I want to be alive inside this story?" That is the question I ask myself about any work of fiction. The answer for this book is a definite yes! As an intellectual historian (*The Aristotle Adventure*), though not a fiction writer, I know the difficulties of integrating storytelling and accuracy of detail. Ed Cline provides enough historical detail that the reader can see England of the 1740s, enough ideas to understand the issues emerging at the time, and enough suspenseful action to "hook" the reader and lead him on to the next chapter. The only books I keep in my library are ones I intend to reread, and this book is one of them.

"Sparrowhawk" is a thrilling adventure, that reveals the soul of the American Revolution.

Book 1 is the story of a young hero, Jack Frake--pauper and son of a prostitute, nurtured to intellectual manhood on the bleak Cornish coast by noble smugglers, whose daring defiance of the Crown and of arbitrary law makes them both heroes and enigmas to those around them.

In the furtive underworld of British smugglers, a master of disguise and a merchant with a price on his head struggle to understand what makes them different from the people around them--what brought them together in "a covenant of defiance," "to live free, or die." In Jack Frake they see a younger version of themselves--an outcast who takes sides with them because "a man's life is his own." As the plot unfolds, and a vicious bureaucrat closes in on the gang, the tension becomes almost unbearable--until, in a wrenching climax, the boy's heroes pass on to him their legacy--that someday, perhaps in America, he will find the words to justify their rebellion.

"Sparrowhawk" is, as the author says, the story of "what kind of spirit makes possible rebellion against tyranny and corruption."

This is a tale that soars, it grips the reader for what they can be and tells of qualities and heroes that one sadly rarely meets. This is not written for the mediocre but for the aspirant and as such it is a literary masterpiece. Edward has done justice to the philosophical tenets that captured the imagination of those curious enough to ponder an alternate form of government. Where the notion of being beholden to crown would become a foreign concept. He delves into much of what must have been a turbulent and often dangerous time and captures the "rain drops" as one, the reader, understands and is awed by the profoundness of the charachters, vile or not. For those with a mind for quality look no further, you will not be dissapointed. I look forward to his 6th book in the series.

Nothing can be further from the truth than the review that paints this book as using poor fiction acting as a vehicle for a political message. There are books like that; this is not one.

The reason I stress this, countering the negative review, is that it is something similar that kept me from buying this book when it first came out.

When I did read it, I found a hero I identified with while I cheered him (and his friends) on; I found a well-told story with all the twists and turns that one could want; and, as a bonus, it had a theme I liked -- that was not the core, but it was surely the icing on the cake.

This (and the rest in the Sparrowhawk series) should be read by anyone looking for great fiction. It is beautifully written, with heroic characters and a strong plot set in a meticulously researched historical context. I find his works provoking thought and staying with me in the same way that Ayn Rand's fiction did when I first read it. The series deserves bestseller status, and would make great movie material.