[UNR]∎ [PDF] An Infamous Army Georgette Heyer 9780434328109 Books

An Infamous Army Georgette Heyer 9780434328109 Books

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An Infamous Army Georgette Heyer 9780434328109 Books

I am a great fan of Heyer's work, but this isn't one of my favorites. Its heroine Lady Barbara Childe seems straight out of one of those "tempestuous redhead who must be tamed by a manly man" movies of the 1930s-1940s, and (for Heyer) quite cliched. Much of the book is taken up with a detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo which makes the book more military history than romantic fiction. However even Heyer I don't much like is head and shoulders above much that is being written today.

Readers should be aware that this book is the fourth (or arguably the fifth) in a series following the same family (although the dates don't quite work out). The sequence is The Black Moth; These Old Shades (in which the Duke of Andover, the villain of Black Moth, was reworked into the Duke of Avon); Devil's Cub (Avon's son Vidal); Regency Buck (the Earl of Worth is introduced); A Infamous Army (Charles Audley, the brother of the Earl of Worth, meets Lady Barbara, the granddaughter of Vidal).


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An Infamous Army Georgette Heyer 9780434328109 Books Reviews

This is Heyer’s masterpiece, but it’s more than Georgette Heyer’s best book. It’s in the rarefied air with the greatest historical novels ever written, a work of epic sweep, with a vibrant romance set against the grandeur of an incredibly colorful moment in history. That sounds like overheated Back of the Book stuff for Gone With the Wind, but actually, GWTW isn’t a bad comparison, though An Infamous Army moves at a much faster pace. I literally couldn’t put it down.

I’m a huge fan of Georgette Heyer, and I’m fascinated by the Regency period and its nearly unbroken two decades of warfare that finished at Waterloo in Belgium. These were truly world wars, with just about every country in Europe drug onto that battlefield. Even America played a part, when 30,000 battle-hardened British troops were sent here to clean up the mess called the War of 1812. It leeched the best of Wellington’s men away from him, another reason he once called his forces “an infamous army,” too few men and cannons and far too many foreign regiments cobbled together that he felt he couldn’t count on. Heyer captures the frenetic gaiety in Brussels beforehand, then lays out the battle in detail, her characters interacting with historical figures, particularly the remarkable and eccentric Wellington.

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this battle, and Heyer gives you a sense of the urgency, and how much was on the line. If you want to know more, I recommend novelist Bernard Cornwell’s Waterloo – he explains the tactics of this incredibly bloody brand of warfare and the huge numbers of men involved, but he never loses the human focus. You don’t have to read anything first, but you’ll enjoy An Infamous Army more if you come to it with at least as much knowledge as you’d get in the Wiki article on the battle. It also helps to understand what most readers of Regency romances know, that all Europe thought the long, long wars were over, with Napoleon defeated a year before, in the spring of 1814. The Allies at the Congress of Vienna were redrawing the map of Europe when Napoleon bolted from his island prison, and it started all over again with astonishing speed. Thousands of war-weary men left their homes to rejoin their regiments, and throughout the battle it looked like a win for Bonaparte. I’ve been told this novel was once suggested reading at West Point, with the battle scenes so detailed and well-written. However, I think the romance between Charles Audley and Barbara Childe is one of Heyer’s best, which surprised me. I expected it to be more focused on the history she knew so well, but, as in The Spanish Bride, I think the love story was deeper and more compelling than several of the ones she built entire books around.

Heyer does something here she didn’t do often - all the main characters came out of three of her most popular books. From Regency Buck you get the Earl of Worth, his wife Judith and her brother Peregrine, as well as Worth’s brother Colonel Charles Audley, who is the nice-guy main character. With the female lead Lady Barbara Childe and her brothers you have the descendants of the Duke of Avon, from These Old Shades and Devil’s Cub. Dominic and his wife Lady Mary, from Devil’s Cub, appear as characters here. Do you need to read them all first? It’s debatable, but you might enjoy it more if you’d read the last two. A few modern reviewers might see Lady Barbara as a cliché, the poor man’s Scarlett O’Hara. But if you’ve read them you’ll see instantly that the willful Lady Barbara is related to the eccentric and temperamental Leonie from These Old Shades. Leonie, Barbara’s great-grandmother, is never even mentioned, but fans will recognize her. Besides, both books are great, and Devil’s Cub, featuring Dominic Alistair and Mary Challoner, is loads of fun, one of Heyer’s best.

I’ve now read 25 of her books, but I’ve never seen Heyer do a prologue before, which tells you what the book meant to her. In it she pays homage to the classic novel Vanity Fair, which lands in the same place, with the English in Brussels threatened by the unfolding battle. But she owes nothing to Thackeray, who spends little time on the actual battlefield. He says himself in his broad, satirical story, "We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants." When I first began to study Waterloo, I wondered what all these non-combatant British aristocrats were doing in rented houses in Brussels to begin with. There were lots of reasons – some were on the run from debt, living well more cheaply than in London, some were having a little fun seeing Europe after being barred from it for most of the previous two decades, and some wanted to be closer to loved ones who were army officers stationed there. They were a tight-knit group of expatriates having a grand time. I don’t remember which historian observed that war is an aphrodisiac, but it’s true, and Heyer captures it here. The characters themselves understand it, that all the wild behavior around them feels like a shiny bubble suspended in mid-air, one that could burst at any moment. It might be that the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, brilliantly captured here, is the most bizarre event in military history. Nick Foulkes got an entire book out of it, Dancing Into Battle, with guys leaving the party at midnight when word of the invasion came who ended up fighting in their evening clothes. It became an iconic moment of British history, although some of the later 19th century representations on canvas are a hoot. The military uniforms may be correct, but the ladies’ dresses are straight Victorian, wide skirts and Princess Leia hair and heavy body coverage. No one in the Victorian age was going to show their grandmother dressed in a sheer gauze gown with a low-cut bodice, cropped hair and painted toenails in Roman sandals. This brief, shimmering moment in history puts the 1960s to rout, a flashy age with its own outrageous slang, fashions, literature and outlook.

In the end it’s incredibly sad this book has never been made into a film. Vanity Fair has been done several times, but never An Infamous Army. The reasons why would make a post on their own - Heyer wasn’t happy with the one film made of her work, and determined there wouldn’t be another. I’ve never felt as bad about it as when I finished this, one of the most cinematic novels I’ve ever read.
_An Infamous Army is one of my very favorite Heyer books -- which turns out also to have (in the and the Arrow Books editions) one of the most entertaining typos I've seen!

Here's the passage as it is in my , and in the Arrow Books trade paperback

"Baron Constant came rushing in this morning while I was with [Slender Billy], shouting out “Boney’s beat! Boney’s beat!” and you never saw anyone more obliged to take [redacted to prevent spoilers]’s leg off, I daresay? He is as gallant a man as ever I met!"

So I'm home sick, and was re-reading Heyer because what better excuse? I got to that point and thought it was an artifact of the type face size or some such, but it was very persistent, so I went to my trade paper copy (Arrow Books/Random House, 2004) only to discover the same text!

Fortunately, I was also able to find my paperback -- ancient, missing the back cover, but still readable! -- from Fawcett publications, reprinted by arrangement with E. P. Dutton and company, so if anyone else would like to know what Slender Billy was "more---" than (since the Prince of Orange was definitely not performing battlefield surgery), here it is

"Baron Constant came rushing in this morning while I was with [Slender Billy], shouting out “Boney’s beat! Boney’s beat!” and you never saw anyone more delighted than the Prince was! You heard we were obliged to take [redacted to prevent spoilers]’s leg off, I daresay? He is as gallant a man as ever I met!"

So in case you're curious -- or in case you have an "in" with whoever does the typesetting (what is that called now that there's no type to be set?) for or for Arrow Books/Random House, there's the corrected text! (apart from the bits in square braces, but those are correct in the existing texts.)
I am a great fan of Heyer's work, but this isn't one of my favorites. Its heroine Lady Barbara Childe seems straight out of one of those "tempestuous redhead who must be tamed by a manly man" movies of the 1930s-1940s, and (for Heyer) quite cliched. Much of the book is taken up with a detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo which makes the book more military history than romantic fiction. However even Heyer I don't much like is head and shoulders above much that is being written today.

Readers should be aware that this book is the fourth (or arguably the fifth) in a series following the same family (although the dates don't quite work out). The sequence is The Black Moth; These Old Shades (in which the Duke of Andover, the villain of Black Moth, was reworked into the Duke of Avon); Devil's Cub (Avon's son Vidal); Regency Buck (the Earl of Worth is introduced); A Infamous Army (Charles Audley, the brother of the Earl of Worth, meets Lady Barbara, the granddaughter of Vidal).