The Sun Over Breda [Hardcover]

"The Sun over Breda" is the third (and for the moment) last book in the Captain Alatriste-series. It deals with the siege of Breda in 1625, when the Catholic Spanish troops under Ambrosia Spinola besieged the Protestant Dutch garrison (Diego Velazquez actually made a quite famous painting of the surrender of the Dutch garrison). Captain Alatriste and his band have joined the Spanish army, and Inigo Balboa, aged 14, is with them as 'mochilero' (servant, page, forager and powderboy all rolled into one).

As in the first two books, Inigo Balboa is the narrator of the story and it's in many ways primarily his story instead of Captain Alatriste's. The long siege with its endless (often pointless) attacks and counter-attacks, the drudgery of digging trenches, the horrors of close combat, and witnessing death at first hand become a sort of rites of passage for Inigo. In those circumstances he is forced, as would any boy, to quickly become a man in order to survive.

So although there are indeed frequent battle-scenes, this book is much more than 'an action-packed pageturner'. It is as much an insightful book into the development of an adolescent into a man, and as such is akin to the old genre of the picaresque novel.

The book does not come without its difficulties: the language for instance is a lot more stilted and at times pompous than we are generally used to. Although this is no doubt historically correct (this was an age where manners and mannerisms ruled), it takes getting used too. Also, it is perhaps a bit weird to read a novel subtitled 'the adventures of Captain Alatriste' and then find that this character doesn't say a dozen lines in the entire book.

But all in all, if you're willing to take the effort, this is a very rewarding book with a lot of insights, not so much on war itself but rather on 'how to survive as a young man caught up in a war'. I hope this will not prove to be the last book in the series because they keep getting better.

This is a novel about the siege of the Town of Breda, an event in the Dutch Wars that took place in 1624-25. The conceit of the book is that it is a translation of the memoirs of a participant, Inigo Balboa, who was about fourteen during the siege. Balboa, then, was born in 1610. We are informed that his public career ended around 1660, so it may be assumed that these memoirs were the retirement project of a well-off old soldier who was looking back from the age of fifty.

It so happens that Inigo Balboa has some interesting real-world contemporaries. Hercule Sevanien Cyrano de Bergerac was born in 1619, fought in wars on the French side against the very armies in which Balboa might have been found, and died in 1655, under ambiguous circumstances. Like Balboa, Cyrano had a literary bent, a considerably more successful one. Less bookish, but more successful as a soldier and courtier was Compte D'Artagnan (yes, he actually existed!) He was born in 1611. He joined the King's Musketeers in 1632, eventually became their commander, and got himself involved in all manner of goings-on at the Court of the Sun King. In 1673, he died during the course of yet another siege.

Balboa, then, has a career that runs parallel to those of his illustrious--and, indeed, fascinating--contemporaries. He differs from them, however by being a pompous, portentous bore. Considering that he is supposedly writing old soldier's tales featuring himself as a feral, homicidal urchin/monster who serves in a hard-as-nails army of unpaid, starving, honor-mad, scarecrow-like, merciless, pillaging raveners, and who fought what amounted to a no-quarter war amid a distant and implacably hostile land, that endless boredom is quite a literary achievement! A pointless one, of course, but an achievement, nonetheless.

The attitude of the narrator is bad enough, but things are made even less palatable by his habit of relentlessly serving up historical commentary in largely undigested lumps. This book is supposed to be a personal memoir, not a chronicle of the age. It is characteristic of real memoirs that memorists tend to slide over large-scale background events on the perfectly reasonable assumption that their readers will be younger contemporaries who already know or should know all that stuff. That is why modern academic editions of old memoirs swim in footnotes for the benefit of readers never imagined by the original authors.

The fact that Balboa, his hero Captain Alatriste, and author Perez-Riverte, himself, appear to be utterly devoid of wit, humor or irony is not in itself a fatal flaw. But it doesn't help very much, either.

Balboa's frame of mind is that of someone of our own time looking back over centuries of inglorious gloom to the last times in which Spain could honestly claim to be a major and indeed dominating military presence in the world. He sees failure and decay everywhere about him and he has no hope for renewal or even change. I don't buy it. I don't think that any Spaniard writing around 1660 would have so thoroughly written off his own country--especially in the light of the pig-mess the crazy, heretic Englishmen had just made of their cold, northerly country.

The two earlier books in this series have been highly praised. They seem, if the reviews are to be believed, to have an entirely different texture, setting and plot structure. I have not yet stumbled on those books, but it would seem reasonable to regard this series as a five-act play which starts off with a bang, becomes stuck in the middle-act doldrums and picks up again as it comes to an end.

Three becalmed stars.

Whilst this novel has many of the elements that made the first two books in the series a success, this one fails to live up to them. The story is well told and engaging but, finally, lacking.

This time the backdrop for Alatriste and Inigo is Flanders rather than Spain. Alatriste has rejoined his old tercio in the low countries and the story follows them through the campaign up to the siege of Breda. Perhaps the military setting doesn't help - it undoubtedly brings to mind unflattering comparisons to books such as Bernard Cornwell's historical military fiction - but the more serious issue here is that what we have is a collection of incidents from a war without any proper plot to bind them together: the result doesn't satisfy.