SHARPE EDGE TO CORNWELL’S RETURN
Bernard Cornwell is in the wars. The creator of some of the most epic battle scenes on page and screen is nursing his own wounds, after costly skirmishing with a dreaded enemy.
“I’ve been going through the valley of the shadow of dentists,” he deadpans.
“It’s just not fun. The equation is, American dentists plus British teeth means money. But, apart from that, I’m fine.”
That’s good because Cornwell, the bestselling master of historical fiction and creator of TV hit The Last Kingdom, is about to hit the campaign trail again as he launches his latest novel.
Sharpe’s Assassin brings back his original hero, Napoleonic Wars veteran Richard Sharpe – the man who made Cornwell famous – after an absence of 15 years. Sharpe’s Fury, the last book to feature the quick-thinking, hard-fighting soldier, came out in 2006.
“I’m not sure how the Sharpe fans will take it, but we’ll see,” says the author modestly, from the Cape Cod home he shares with wife Judy. “It’s a slightly different Sharpe book.”
Shades of difference perhaps, in that Sharpe now shows occasional, relatable, moments of self-doubt. And, having found love and fathered a child, he now harbours an understandable desire not to perish as he is thrust into the dangerously chaotic dying days of Napoleon’s regime post-Waterloo.
But all the hallmarks of the other 21 Sharpe novels are there: galloping pace; a tightly-layered plot, this time centred around fanatical loyalists who refuse to accept the war is over; moments of levity; and compelling characters including familiar favourites, a new antihero and a villain from Sharpe’s distant past.
And Sean Bean – in a sense.
The British actor who played Sharpe in the popular TV adaptation is so much a part of the character, says Cornwell, that he hears Bean’s familiar Yorkshire accent when the London-born soldier speaks.
“I absolutely hear Sean. I don’t see Sean, but I hear him,” Cornwall says, explaining that he even thinks like the star when writing. “He’s certainly had a huge influence on the way I think of Sharpe, and I’m very proud of that.”
Hailing the “grumpiness and stroppiness” in Bean’s portrayal, he adds, “Sharpe came first but Sean just came along and he was the perfect Sharpe.”
Cornwell says he “really enjoyed” reconnecting with Sharpe, the gutter-born illegitimate whore’s son whose talents take him from private to officer and make him an indispensable weapon, both on and off the battlefield. (The now-lieutenant-colonel’s newest mission put me in mind of how Daniel Craig’s James Bond is deployed on unofficial, official business – with ruthless efficiency and a high body count.)
“It was very nice to be back with him, to the point where I’m thinking maybe I should do another one,” says Cornwell, politely preempting the usual “what’s next” question.
It’s dedication to research that enables Cornwell, who has sold more than 30 million books worldwide, to create believable, vivid narrative backdrops while inserting nuggets that read like fiction – but are factual.
Sharpe’s Assassin features smugglers’ tunnels under the city walls and a Guy Fawkes-style Parisian gunpowder plot that really happened; and sees our not-especiallywoke hero helping to repatriate artworks
plundered by Napoleon from across Europe.
It also features a number of well-known locations around the Somme, an area sacred to Australians familiar with the WW1 Anzac experience but with a history of warfare stretching much further back.
“It is an extraordinary landscape,” says Cornwell. While unable to travel there this time (thanks, Covid) for his usual on-theground research, the author has explored previously and leaned on a Paris-based friend for last-minute extras. “I was forever phoning him and saying things like, ‘John, go up the Rue de Montreuil and look left and tell me what you can see’,” he laughs.
In previous Sharpe-related scouting missions, Cornwell has made extraordinary battlefield discoveries: parts of muskets, ammunition and, in one Spanish village where there was brutal close-quarter fighting,
the business end of a British infantryman’s bayonet stuck in a dilapidated door.
“He’d slammed it, presumably into or at a Frenchman, and it had gone into the door and broken off,” says Cornwell, pondering what that meant for the unfortunate soldier suddenly without a weapon. “I suspect nothing good, but who knows?”
It’s a vignette that could slot neatly into a Cornwellian combat scene – cinematic yet gritty affairs.
That is something the author himself experienced when he took a cameo role in the Netflix adaptation of the Last Kingdom and, appropriately, invented his own death scene.
The sharp viewer can spot a heavily disguised Cornwell as a Danish raider, relieving himself in the woods when ambushed by main man Uhtred.
“What is so wounding is to be killed by my own hero,”
Cornwell remarks, happily. “I should have known better … never turn your back on the bastard.”
Sharpe’s
Assassin by
Bernard
Cornwell, published by
HarperCollins
Australia, is on sale from 30
September.
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