Wonderful book with a duel narrative one taking place during the Crimean War and the other in Manchester in 1857. You learn about the horrors of the disaster that was the Crimea and the war correspondences of the time. Full of strong, unforgettable characters and driven by a compulsive storyline. ( )

Intrigue, love lust, loss, revenge, greed, coruption, murder; there are all here in this cracking yarn about newspaper correspondents embedded in the army during the Crimean conflict and subsequently when all the characters meet again in Manchester a few year later. ( )

Thomas Kitson is a journalist, sent out the Crimea in 1854 to be the junior correspondent for the London Courier. The Courier team includes the senior correspondent, Richard Cracknell, a loose cannon who has an affair with the commanding officer’s wife and pens scurrilous pieces for the newspaper; and Robert Styles, a young illustrator who quickly becomes disillusioned by the war. The war, culminating with the battle of Sebastopol, is interchanged with a second story line, in Manchester two years later, when Kitson is a social commentator for a local paper (a “street philosopher”), and trying desperately to run from the past. What, exactly, happened out in the Crimea?

This is one of those “unputdownable” books. I read it nearly in one sitting, on an airplane ride back to the States after vacation. I needed a distraction from the 300-pound gorilla groping his girlfriend in the seat next to me, and this book was perfect towards that end. I was glued to this book from start to finish, reading on and on to find out what would happen next.

At first, I thought I wasn’t going to like the shifts in time—usually they don’t work so well, but here they’re done subtly. There are quite a lot of battle scenes, but the author’s descriptions of them are particularly well-done. The author clearly knows his mid-nineteenth century history, but he doesn’t overburden the reader with his knowledge, instead allowing the reader to take things in gradually. At the same time, the mid-nineteenth century, both in the Crimea and in Manchester, comes alive for the reader.

The story, too, is very well-written, and the plot unfolds gradually. There are hints of the unspeakable things that happened in the Crimea, but they aren’t revealed until much later. The plot is complicated, and sometimes leaves the reader with more questions than answers, but not overly so. It looks as though rights for this book haven’t sold in the US (at least not yet), which is a shame, because this is a truly entertaining novel. ( )

Victorian historical novels, that is, modern historical novels set in the Victorian Age, all into two camps. Both share the intricate plotting, the flashmob approach to characters, the episodic thrust of the action. One however, tries to replicate the language of the Victorian novel, where the other uses modern language and grammar, both trying to immerse the reader in the immediacy of the action. The jury is out over which is the more successful approach, though it is always the quality of the writing that decides the winner.

Matthew Plampin has clearly done his homework in reasearching both the war in the Crimea and life in Manchester in the mid-19th century. His descriptions of the soldier’s life in the Crimea are especially affecting. I had not realised the similarities between this war and Great War 60 years later; talk about fighting the previous war rather than this one!

Unfortuantely, I do not think so highly of his Manchester descriptions. He does not quite convey the grimness and fatality of the time, instead presenting a very stoic, stiff-upper-lip, faintly Dick-van-Dykeish picture of the working classes.

Having said that, this is an exciting work with plenty of action and plenty of characters showing their darker sides. Plampin does preovide depth to his key players and colours the incidentals enough to make me want to know more about them(what is in the heart of Mr. Twelves?). I found Cracknell too self-absorbed and insensitive for my believability, but that just may be my sheltered life coming through.

I am not sure this has been a successful first novel, although I enjoyed it. Perhaps, at a hundred pages shorter, this might have been a blockbuster. ( )

This is the first novel by Matthew Pamplin - I wish I could be more enthusiastic about it for it deals with interesting history. The author has obviously researched the period extensively and has created an interesting plot to interweave with historical fact. His failing is his use of a faux-literary style. This pads out the book to a chunky 487 pages but he would probably have done better to go for 350 - 400. Period dialogue is fair enough but he uses more adjectives and adverbs than he needs. The best example I could find is the tautological phrase "laminose layers". A good test of writing skill in my view is how sexual activity is described - referring to the penis as a "member" is heading off in a post-Lawrentian direction: to call it a "raw root" has lost the plot.

The action moves between the Crimean War and post-war Manchester. It is difficult for an author to maintain tension without concealing earlier events when writing about the later ones but I did not appreciate the overt statements that something significant had happened to the protagonists in the war, known to the characters, but which would not be revealed until later in the book. There are more subtle ways to deal with time-shifts.

to be concluded