Harper Collins Review for The Last Roundhead.
A wonderful review from the Harper Collins team at Authonomy for an early draft of The Last Roundhead. Happy Halloween!
‘The Last Roundhead’ by Jemahl Evans is the humorous fictional story of Sir Blandford Candy, a ‘soldier, spy, murderer and thief,’ during the English Civil War (1641-1652). Told in flashback from the year 1719 – the year in which these memoirs are written – and when the narrator is old, in ill health and miserable, the main character’s witty and entertaining retelling of his life is described as a ‘historical fiction’ account of the misadventures of a young, likeable philanderer and drinker during one of England’s most fascinating, and aggressive, periods of history.
I’ll start this review by saying how much I enjoyed ‘The Last Roundhead’. The blurb pitch on the cover sheet hooked me in immediately. It’s an entertaining premise, ‘They say I am the last of them alive. They say I am the last roundhead’ – sold!
The first fifty pages (around 18,000 words) of ‘The Last Roundhead’ were superbly written, engaging and never less than absorbing. In the flawed anti-hero, Sir Blandford Candy, you have a wonderfully unreliable, but thrilling, narrator who meanders and roams around mid-seventeenth century England with freedom to bump and bounce into all sorts of likeable and not-so-likeable characters and events true(ish) to history. While I have a few minor grievances and a few slight revisions here and there, overall I found ‘The Last Roundhead’ an excellent proposal and will certainly be recommending for further consideration.
While this period of England’s history has been, from a publisher’s perspective at least, covered from every angle – spoof to satirical, academic to anthropological – that very fact highlights how fascinating and popular this period of history is, as well as outlines the sheer volume of possibilities to have fun with characters within this era, as you have attempted successfully. The set piece of Candy stealing the pig (in a time when it was a crime punishable by death), for example, had me (and Mr Blake) chortling gleefully – I was instantly able to play the scene out in my head as a mini-film, such was the delight in the way you told it (‘Don’t start laughing. Get the bloody monster!’). This would make a great scene in a BBC period-comedy.
Your writing style bounces along with ease and never once seemed to drag its feet. It’s clear you had fun writing this. I’m not ashamed to say I laughed out loud on a few occasions when your use of evocative language hit the spot: ‘The summer of forty two was golden. I spent it strumping my eldest brother’s fiancé. That should tell you something of my character,’ is one. ‘Dildos, I asked. I was young with only one thing on my mind,’ is another, and of course, ‘I could blow your mother’s tits off at a hundred paces’ was my favourite of the lurid, and foulmouthed humour that seems totally appropriate for Candy’s character and time period. Candy is a strong personality with a wicked wit, despite being out of his depth in most situations. As a reader, you like him immediately. Candy is free to roam and romp around a thrilling timeline in history and that freedom could be beneficial in developing a series of titles for this character, or a screenplay. Indeed, the character reminded me of a bawdy Blackadder.
Your attempt to merge and weave historical events around a fictional character is brilliantly executed and much fun. By doing so, the book is elevated from mere whimsy and spoof memoir to an educational read – a wise move considering the book could fall down the back of the sofa in terms of where it would sit in a bookshop’s classification or online retailer’s subject list. Even if Candy’s account is anything but reliable (as the endnotes prove) the fact that you provide a true version of events with your character’s world was welcome and I found the endnotes illuminating. However, it threw up a massive logic dilemma that requires solving – but it’s an easy fix.
You describe the book in the blurb as ‘Flashman meets The Three Musketeers, in a picaresque romp through Caroline England,’ (a spot-on summarization, by the way) – but it also highlights a major flaw with the proposal, which had me scratching my head. ‘At least my eyes are good enough to write,’ Candy tells the reader in 1719. It is clear these words are written for a purpose, as highlighted in the line, ‘with only an idiot nephew to read my words’. The endnotes are written in the future – presumably not 1719, but now (?). The endnotes speak of how unreliable Candy’s retelling is; they suggest a second voice and author writing about Blandford in the third person? Whose voice is this? A publisher/editor of the future who has published Candy’s memoirs? ‘Blandford could not have known about Damn-your eyes Ballad and his cudgel from his position on the battlefield, and must have been told the detail afterwards’, ‘Blandford’s description of the deployment on the right flank at Edgehill agrees with the main sources,’ this voice tells us. But who authored these endnotes and when? Their context of historical accuracy within the framework of the book need to be explained otherwise the reader will become confused as to who wrote them. It took me a couple of minutes to work out what was happening.
In ‘Flashman’, the book begins with an explanatory note to the reader that the ‘Flashman Papers’ were found years later during a house sale and were then published. I think, for the endnotes to work properly, you too require to insert an explanatory note before the first chapter ‘Cross Deep, Twickenham, 1642’, outlining that Candy’s memoirs are the discovered works of the supposed last roundhead, and that the endnotes are the writing of a second narrator, who is alerting the reader to Candy’s inaccuracy as a storyteller. This is a quick fix, but an important one, if I have got it right.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Last Roundhead’. I’d be very keen to know what the subtitle would be, as none is supplied. This would be a difficult book to market for a publisher in order to find its niche target reader (historical fiction/humour tends to fall down a gap) as the book is either too comical for an educated read and too historical to be taken as humour. ‘The Last Roundhead’ could be a great gift purchase for any Civil War/History buffs in the family but a good subtitle is required to clearly help define who the book is aimed at.
One final note. Surely, a great follow up title to this book would be ‘The Last Cavalier’ – a title that sees the Civil War from the other side of the fight? Could be fun.
