Sharpe’s Storm (The Sharpe Series, 19)
A benchmark of quality in military historical fiction, the long-running Sharpe series already takes the eponymous hard-fighting rifleman from 1799 to the 1820s, but Cornwell has been shoehorning further adventures in within the sequence. Here, we are in the final winter of the Peninsular war, 1813-14. Through driving rain, British soldiers have pushed the French back from Spain into the south of their own country. Major Sharpe is here given a series of independent commands, firstly to ford a stream at night, then to escort naval officers into the battle area so that they can advise on bridging a strategic river. One of these is Joel Chase (a captain in Sharpe’s Trafalgar, but by now an admiral) who is always careless of his own safety; the spectacle of Sharpe having to urge caution on anyone else is an amusing feature of this book.
There are two full-dress battle scenes bookended by two scenes of stealthy nighttime assaults. The cast of characters includes such favourites as Sergeant Patrick Harper and Rifleman Dan Hagman, along with Lord Wellington, a harsh leader but always aware that Sharpe has earlier saved his life. A vain and cowardly officer, named, remarkably, Peacock, turns out according to Cornwell’s Author’s Note to have been a real man. At times our knowledge of the later series enables us to second-guess the characters in a rather fascinating way – for example, here Sharpe spends much time fondly pursuing his errant wife Jane (if we have read Sharpe’s Waterloo we will know how that relationship will end).
This story is always good value, with endless superbly described action scenes in which the tough, brave and loyal characters vividly leap off the page. Cornwell hints that this may be the last Sharpe novel. If so, the series has ended in triumph
