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Finally, he reaches the Cape, and discussions about the Zulu king Shaka begin. The king seems unusually barbaric, but things take a slightly unexpected turn when their embassy reaches his palace. At this point the reader must concentrate and pick up some rudimentary Zulu in order to follow the thread. Indeed, a great deal of the pleasure to be derived from Mallinson’s prose seems to be in Getting the Reference; there is a reworking of Julius Caesar’s murder, and the comrades quote Horace, Pliny, Shakespeare and the bible liberally as they march. Usually conversation progresses something like this:
[Hervey to Somervile]: ‘I have always thought of you as formed in Pliny’s mould.’
Somervile nodded gravely. ‘The comparison is favourable. Pliny was an assiduous observer … But perhaps I should add “novi omnes dies”, for certainly Pliny never saw such sights as these.’
Hervey frowned at his old friend’s proposal to gild the lily. ‘Recollect, Sir Eyre, that assiduous observation was in the end the death of him.’
This kind of exchange usually ends with one or both of the interlocutors smiling wryly. Much of the book is made up of dialogue, and it is perhaps plausible, but it is not really where Mallinson’s talent lies.
Battle scenes are what he does best, and he produces some lyrical deaths: ‘the Zulu fell instantly to his knees, blood bubbling from the cleft in his skull like water from a spring.’ Or: ‘two dragoons, old hands, stood back-to-back as their horses thrashed on the ground, entrails spilling out like offal on a butcher’s block.’ The depictions of endurance and hardship are also absorbing, and they show with a soldier’s knowledge the physical and mental cost of active service.
With more compression, this book might have been a thrilling glimpse at both Zulu and British warriors, but Mallinson and his Somervile have a similar tendency to gild the lily: he spends too much of the book overtly calling attention to touching camaraderie and loyalty within the regiment and not getting on with his mission.
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