Heroism within a Christian moral code

Allan Mallinson’s Matthew Hervey series

Reviewed by Steve Weatherbe

My purpose in creating my own Christian fiction blogsite and in writing for Catholic Fiction is not to exercise my own wit or to amuse others with it but to recommend writers and books whose works I enjoy because of their mastery of a particular genre I enjoy and because of their Christian world view. For me, the Christian content need not be in the foreground. Nor need it be the theme or the subtheme. It is enough that it be the philosophical framework, unstated, for the work, and therefore tends to support rather than undermine the Christian beliefs of the reader.
I am happy to recommend the Hervey series to all who enjoy military or naval series such as those of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series about the British navy during the Napoleonic wars ( on which the movie Master and Commander was based).
There are many such series and the so-called Age of Fighting Sail provides a perfect framework because its hero can fight for a lifetime against the French, starting in 1759 if the author chooses, and ending only in 1815.
Mallinson selects a more difficult period seemingly, by starting his hero’s military career with the Battle of Waterloo, at the end of the Napoleonic era. But this is the beginning of the golden age of the British Empire, and young Hervey advances slowly through the ranks of the British cavalry while pushing the Empire into India, Africa and British North America, fighting Indians, Red Indians, Zulus and such.
Far more than Cornwell’s Sharpe series, whose hero is also an army officer, Mallinson is attentive to the conventional responsibilities, preoccupations and pleasures of his protagonist’s class and rank. This is surely because Mallinson was himself a British Army officer, who commanded his own regiment for several years retired as a brigadier, though I doubt he actually commanded a brigade at any time. The regiment is the heart of the British Army (as the division is the heart of the American army) and Hervey’s goal throughout the series is to command his home regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons.
In Cornwell’s novels such questions as who looks after the horses after the battle id over are simply ignored. Mallinson not only lovingly details the care of the horses, such care often forms a subplot, and indeed the hero’s relations with his horses carry on from book to book. The officer’s responsibilities for his men, as well as his personal relationships with many of them also carry on through the series. This is an aspect of the hero’s character which distinguishes him from some fellow officers (who make a point of not knowing their men) but not from others.
Mallinson’s treatment of Hervey’s character is what differentiates the series from many others. He is the son of a High Anglican cleric who wrestles with moral and theological questions and seems to be moving slowly towards Catholicism (I have just finished the 11 and most novel and the topic has only been explicitly raised for the first time).
Mallinson himself trained for the Anglican priesthood before stumbling more or less into his military career. I wonder naturally whether he has “poped” as the Anglicans put it.
Hervey’s social life is interesting: he has dalliances and a genuinely romantic and healthy marriage that ends tragically and grotesquely (wife tomahawked by American Indians!) and a second marriage that, after three books, I am still not sure has even been consummated. I think Mallinson is intentionally mimicking Victorian conventions in leaving his hero’s marital problems to our imaginations while describing in detail, for example, the artery-clogging seven-course meals he consumes with his friends.
But I recommend the books because the action is well-described, the historical, social and moral context for that action is also well-told and seems authentic, and because the moral and theological framework for the writer and the hero is Christian.