Book review: Waterloo by Bernard Cornwell
Celebrity battle,
butcher’s work
on both sides…
Book review:
Waterloo
by Bernard Cornwell, New York: Penguin Books, c1987, 2001.
378 pages
This is my first read in Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe series. It’s both brilliant and deadening. Waterloo is a celebrity battle for most people, including me before I started Waterloo, and I guess most folks know little more than the outcome: Wellington and the Prussian commander, Blücher, put an end to Napoleon’s final fantastic comeback in Europe. The Little Corporal died six years later in exile.
Cornwell is an appealing storyteller and his exacting descriptions of characters, places and the battlefield milieu are almost a reward in themselves. It’s really impossible to feel detached from what’s going on. Ay, there’s the rub. I felt distress and then full-blown horror as the fighting wound up and then wound down—nearly 50,000 men were killed or wounded in frantically compressed combat that ended on June 18, 1815, in a small valley in Braine-l’Alleud near the Belgian town of Waterloo, which gave the epic battle its name.
Even the slightly Hollywood bravery of Richard Sharpe doesn’t soften the impact of reading about the butcher’s work done on all sides in that violent meeting of men and ambitions. The somewhat formulaic treatment of the lives and loves of key characters is a slight distraction, but it really doesn’t hinder the accelerating martial excitement of Waterloo.
Cornwell is a compelling storyteller. I was greatly moved by Waterloo, but I can’t say I’m glad I read it.
As usual, I offer my kind of book summary here. This is not a standard history book. The characters and plot are all too familiar. I offer my reflections about the author’s style and about the terrible horror of the decisive battle near a little town in Belgium.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.
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