Hunter not beach read

I’ve never understood the concept of beach reading, where we’re supposed to select unchallenging and pulpy material for the warmer months. I try very hard not to read books I don’t enjoy no matter what the season, and don’t see the point in engaging with heat-and-serve intellectual fast food. So I’m not going to describe Christopher Buckley’s The Judge Hunter (Simon & Schuster, $26.95) as a perfect summer read or as a species of cognitive vacation just because it’s wildly entertaining.

One could even make a case for

the book as a topical meditation, given that it takes place in a world where tribalism is the rule and people seem intractably divided along religious, political, national and racial lines. That that world is the 17th century doesn’t really mitigate its pointedness; it only highlights the fallen nature of the human animal. We progress, but we really don’t.

The book opens in 1664 when Samuel Pepys, the historical administrator of the navy of England, was in the midst of keeping a detailed and famous diary (and whose name is properly pronounced “peeps” and not “pep-iss”), arranges for his brother-in-law, improvident, intermittently competent and thoroughly decent Balthasar de St. Michel (known as Balty) a commission from the recently restored Charles II to travel to the New World in search of two fugitive regicides — judges who had signed the death warrant for the king’s father Charles I.

No one really expects Balty to apprehend the men. His real purpose is to inflict his talent for annoyance on the colonists, whom Pepys’ chief patron, Sir George Downing, regards as a bunch of intolerant, pious hypocrites.

“I shouldn’t expect to catch them,” Downing tells Pepys, but sending an emissary of his majesty would remind the Colonists that the king “remembers their lack of fealty … Nothing vexes a Puritan more than superior authority. It’s why they left England in the first place. And now the monarch has returned. It’s put them in a terrible funk. Their hopes for heaven on earth died with Cromwell.”

But Downing is also preparing for a war against the Dutch, who also hold a significant stake in the New World. And he doesn’t entirely trust either Pepys or Balty with the entire truth. Naturally there’s more to the mission than is initially apparent.

If you’re a little fuzzy on the details of the Restoration of the English monarchy, you needn’t worry, for Buckley seemingly takes delight in imparting significant history in an easy-to-digest fashion. (I wonder if Buckley has ever read Kathleen Winsor’s 1944 novel Forever Amber, which might be a secret precursor to this novel. Once, when at a dinner party a professor of English literature professed to being impressed by my wife, Karen’s, knowledge of 17th-century England, she attributed it all to having read Winsor’s book. He laughed. She was serious.)

Balty, like Pepys and most of the other characters in the book, is based on Pepys’ actual brother-in-law, on whose behalf Pepys intervened to find work from time to time. Pepys’ biographer Richard Ollard once wrote that if the larger-than-life Balty “had not existed, only Dickens could have invented him.”

Similarly, other characters seem to hew fairly close to what we know about their reallife analogs. Downing is clever, with a knack of survival and self-promotion; Connecticut governor John Winthrop the Younger is worldly, liberal and yet coolly realistic about the religious politics of the Colonies, and Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland Peter Stuyvesant is humorless and suspicious as he presides over New Amsterdam, a city the English are already calling a “Sodom and Gomorrah of vice and corruption.”

The animosity is mutual. Stuyvesant has constructed a wall designed to keep the English out. When Balty asked if it has worked, Stuyvesant admits it hasn’t, but says that only means “we must have a bigger wall.”

Occasionally Buckley’s satire might seem a little on the nose, though he recently wrote on Powell’s Books’ website that he “gave up political satire on the grounds that American politics is now sufficiently self-satirizing, and turned to historical fiction.” But you’ll breeze over those parts as Balty and his intrepid guide and companion — Col. Hiram Huncks, an able veteran of the Colonial wars who despite his rough appearance speaks Dutch and Latin, quotes Shakespeare and handles every situation with preternatural confidence and skill — make their way through the nasty precincts of nascent America, encountering murderous attacks and the worst sort of religious fanaticism.

Yep, it’s historical fiction. No satire here, folks. Perfectly safe for the beach of your choice.