What a disappointment this was. Rathbone's earlier novel, Joseph, was an absolutely splendid piece of historical fiction, so it was with a great deal of eagerness that I looked forward to sinking my teeth into this one after learning it was more recently published.
It starts off pretty good. The narrator, a dwarfish, hairy, ape-like fellow, has stowed away aboard Darwin's Beagle, comes to know Darwin himself, and suggests to him the theory of natural selection. Hilarious! You figure this is going to be a real romp, a Flashman-esque tour through America in the 1840's. Sure enough, he shortly thereafter becomes a castaway on a Pacific island, manages to get to Acapulco, Mexico, and subsequently joins Santa Ana and the Mexican army as a doctor on its advance to and attack on the Alamo.
The narration borders on the silliness on occasion, but it is shortly after the battle that things start to get really, really absurd. To assuage a health problem of some of the soldiers, the narrator is told to get some opiates from a farmer, "called Thompson, known as Hunter." They come across some slaves, owned by a, "G. Bush." He meets one of his fellow travelers and asks him what he is doing. "Jus' sittin' on the dock of the bay," he says. "Watchin' all the boats go by." And there's more.
What was he thinking? Why was it necessary to inundate his reader with these doltish topical references? Although the book is pretty well-researched and the story moves along okay, it was the above-noted boat comment that brought the book to an unceremonious end for me; "unceremonious," in this case, defined as, "abruptly heaving it across the room and kicking it into a corner." If the author is going to treat his material as if it were a big joke, he's got no business expecting the reader to take it any more seriously.
Hmph.
Get more detail about Birth of a Nation: The Further Adventures of A Very English Agent.
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