Gilding bright, cover very good. Overall condition near perfect. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3296662.html

One of the 28th is a classic boys' adventure published by the prolific G.A. Henty in 1890; the copy I have was a Christmas present to my great-uncle Maurice in 1902 (he would have been thirteen, and grew up to survive getting gassed in the first world war, living until 1956). It comes with some glorious illustrations by William Heysham Overend.

One of the 28th is a standalone novel, whereas A Close Run Thing, published in in 1999, is the first in a series of thirteen (so far) chronicling the adventures of Matthew Hervey, the latest of which came out last year. I would be astonished if Mallinson had not read Henty before starting to write. There are some clear similarities between the books - both the protagonists are from middle-class family backgrounds (Hervey's father is a vicar, so is Ralph's prospective father-in-law), struggling to rise in the officer caste of the army; both protagonists fall in love and get married at the end of the book (sorry for spoilers); both novels feature questions of inheritance; and in both, the protagonist and his comrades are sent to Ireland - indeed, both to Cork - to keep order during the interval between Napoleon's exile to Elba and the Hundred Days.

But the take of the two books on Ireland is very different. By superior intellect and judgement, Ralph Conway of the 28th manages to capture a Galway ruffian and liberate the locals from the tyranny of untaxed liquor distillation, er, well. Hervey on the other hand gets into trouble for defending the local peasants against eviction, having got himself sensitised to the Irish situation by reading Maria Edgeworth. I don't find either scenario particularly believable, but I do find it interesting that both authors felt they needed to invoke Ireland in some detail to set the scene for the later phases.

One of the 28th also has a glorious parallel plot where Ralph's mother's ex-boyfriend has died, leaving his estate to Ralph and to the local vicar's daughter, but his evil sisters have managed to prevent the will from being found and continue in possession of his property - until Ralph's mother disguises herself as a senior housemaid and successfully locates the missing document. This is after Ralph has spent the first few chapters a prisoner of the French in the West Indies. It's all quite implausible, but entertaining.

When it comes to the actual Battle of Waterloo, both have pretty detailed accounts of the fighting, drawn from the usual sources. Mallinson goes into it in more depth, but wears it a bit better because he has been giving us military detail all through the book (especially about horses). He also puts Hervey, who conveniently speaks German, into a crucial role in liaison between the Prussians and Wellington. Henty's detailed account of the battle is a jarring deviation from the tight-third of most of the book, especially since Ralph himself is more at the worm's eye than bird's eye point of view, rather like Stendhal's protagonist in The Charterhouse of Parma.

However Henty redeems himself a bit by having Ralph's arm shot off during the battle. ( )