An intoxicating sample of 'Absolute' heroism
Bedlam: A Novel of Love and Madness
By Greg Hollingshead
St. Martin’s, 312 pp., $24.95
Jack Absolute
By C. C. Humphreys
St. Martin’s, 320 pp., $23.95
Sharpe’s Fury: Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Barrosa, March 1811
By Bernard Cornwell
HarperCollins, 337 pp., $24.95
In the Irish seaside town where I grew up, old soldiers were a common sight. One, shell-shocked in the First World War, used to jump aboard slow-moving buses and shoot selected passengers with his index finger. Another, blinded in the Second World War, played accordion badly outside the pork butcher's. Various wrecks muttered to themselves on park benches. Wherever you looked, the connection between war and lunacy was evident. That war itself was lunacy seemed obvious, even to a child.
In ``Bedlam," Greg Hollingshead's superbly disturbing new novel, lunacy acquires a third bedfellow: politics. ``It's not anything I did," incarcerated enemy of the state James Tilly Matthews confides. ``It's what I know." What Matthews knows -- and what has him bundled off to London's madhouse in 1797 -- is that leading British politicians secretly colluded with the hated revolutionary government in France to avoid war and to overthrow King George III before installing their favo rite as king. Matthews also knows that an evil gang has infiltrated England and taken over certain people's bodies, all by means of an ``Air Loom" device that emits gases to influence political events and individual thoughts.
Could Matthews be right about one conspiracy and insane about the other? Hollingshead lets us decide. He is more intent on re-creating the infernal world of Bethlem Hospital, London's infamous asylum, as it is seen through the eyes of Matthews, who became its most renowned inmate; of Dr. John Haslam , Bethlem's apothecary, who wrote many respected volumes on insanity; and of Matthews's wife, Margaret , who never stopped fighting for her husband's release. ``For most it's like drowning in a pitch-black well while their guardians stand around and lob rocks," Matthews reports from his cell. ``It's farther in here to justice than to sanity. The fist is always right in our face."
There is plenty of horror in ``Bedlam," but none for its own sake or for grotesque effect. Flawed character is what interests Hollingshead, and Haslam personifies it. `` I considered how you can think of yourself as a certain sort of person yet watch yourself behave as quite another," the young doctor muses. `` And so, like everybody else, at the same time as you inwardly congratulate yourself on your goodness and work toward your admirable goal, you silently endure a nagging fissure in your soul and go on wreaking blind havoc in everything you do."
Matthews may be insane, but he is principled. Haslam, on the other hand, is weak, ambitious, and vain, a healthier combination for someone living in a decadent empire that is busy fighting abroad and incarcerating or hanging its dissenting subjects at home.
If ``Bedlam" is a decidedly intellectual yet profoundly moving examination of both mental and political lunacy, then ``Jack Absolute," by C. C. Humphreys, is a bracing antidote. Who can resist a novel that opens with a duel and introduces a hero who deciphers coded messages, spots Masonic signals a mile off, speaks fluent Iroquois, slips into a loincloth in a trice, wins fair lady, and faces hanging with flair? Well, almost hanging. This is the first in a series of Revolutionary War novels introducing Absolute, so we know that he will survive. In May 1777 that does not seem to be difficult. All the ex-soldier has to do is win the duel, rebuff his old commander's plea to enlist in the British fight against the American rebels, and instead sail to the West Indies to salvage what is left of the family business.
Absolute sails for Quebec instead, of course, where adventures begin that will take him to Ticonderoga, Saratoga, Stillwater, Oriskany , Tarrytown, New York, and eventually Philadelphia. There is skulduggery and double-dealing on every side except the Iroquois, the one to which Jack's heart truly belongs. This convincing novel reminds us that the American Revolutionary War was the Native Americans' civil war as both the British and the Americans cajoled and coerced tribes on opposing sides. None of this is lost on Jack. When his rebel sweetheart quotes the Declaration of Independence at him, he retorts, ``My fear, Louisa, is that, in seeking happiness for yourselves, you would coerce others into providing it for you."
Captain Richard Sharpe would have applauded Jack's skepticism and, paradoxically, his fealty to the crown. As he puts it himself: ``For some reason . . . I'm a loyal bastard. God knows why." The rough-hewn hero of Bernard Cornwell's monumental Napoleonic War series, Sharpe now fights his way through the 21st adventure novel in the series, ``Sharpe's Fury ," which takes him to Spain, where the British Army is surrounded by French forces that have conquered all of the country except for the vital seaport of Cadiz. As usual, rifleman Sharpe, still smarting from ill treatment by a weasly commander, receives a secret mission: He must derail the fiendish Spanish plot that would destroy the Spanish-English alliance and grant France easy victory. Doing so means foiling a blackmail scheme that hinges on steamy love letters written by a British ambassador. Sharpe and his handful of fellow reprobates must also flatten the Spanish plotters by fair means or foul, something they do with great gusto. All this before the real battle starts, one that Cornwell depicts with equal flair and infectious enthusiasm.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com. 
