The King’s Gold by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Hmm, I have some misgivings about this one. This fourth book in the Captain Alatriste series is packaged as a swashbuckling adventure, but somehow it falls short of the packaging.
Set in the later stages of the Spanish Empire, at a time when internal corruption was robbing the government blind, King Philip IV arranges the theft of his own treasure ship sailing in from the West Indies. The idea is to put together a band of fake pirates to take control of the ship and hand it over to the king’s trusted personal guard. That way the treasure goes straight to the coffers cutting out all the middlemen. Captain Alatriste, recently returned from fighting in Flanders, is given the task of recruiting and commanding the pirate gang.
Unfortunately as you start the book, it feels like you came into a movie halfway through. There are so many references to what came before that it is easy to get confused and lost. This feeling is not helped by the fact that the narration takes place in two different voices, one that of a 16 year old squire to the Captain in the first person and then moving to the third person to tell the same tale through the eyes of Alatriste. But yet the whole book is constructed as the personal memoir of the young squire written as an old man. Sorry, but the whole immediacy of the adventure is lost when the reader is constantly reminded that the whole story happened long ago with lines like ‘little did I know that I would one day wear that uniform.’
However, the big swordfight at the climax of the book was worth the wait. The other highlight was the wake for the condemned man due to hang. The wake actually takes place on the night before the hanging when the man’s friends, and friends of the friends, bribe their way into the prison with food and drink and spend the night drinking, gambling and bragging. Perez-Reverte portrays this scene with real colour and atmosphere.
The lashings of authentic Spanish poetry from the period do not help the flow of the story either. They may be intended to add realism, but I somehow have difficulty believing that anybody who pays for a hot meal by killing for hire is going to pause every few minutes and recite 4-6 lines of poetry. Better to leave the whole thing to an appendix.
