Monsoon
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REVIEW BY ROBERT C. JONES
Wilbur Smith's chronicles of the turbulent, ambitious, adventure-hungry Courtney family began with his first novel, When the Lion Feeds (1964). Since then, Smith has written 26 best-selling novels -- nine of them additions to the Courtney saga: The Sound of Thunder, A Sparrow Falls, The Burning Shore, Power of the Sword, Rage, A Time to Die, Golden Fox, Birds of Prey. Now comes the most recent entry to the saga -- Monsoon. The sequence of publication of the novels does not follow the chronology of the Courtney family. Birds of Prey (1997), for example, is a flashback to the coming-of-age of 17th-century English privateer Hal Courtney, questing for treasure and glory off the coast of South Africa during the war between England and the Dutch Republic. Monsoon takes up the Courtney saga some dozens of years after Birds of Prey leaves off. William, Stadholder of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and Mary, daughter of deposed King James II, are the rulers of England. Hal Courtney -- now patriarch of a brood of four disparate, quarreling sons -- has been commissioned by his colleagues of the East India Company to lead a squadron of ships against pirates preying on East Indiamen. Hal leaves his oldest son, William, in control of the Courtney estates and embarks with twin sons, Tom and Guy, and his youngest son, Dorian, on this punitive mission to the Ocean of the Indies. When Hal dies, as a result of wounds suffered during the siege of the pirates' island stronghold, the focus of the novel turns to the fortunes and coming-of-age of the Courtney children. Fierce passions, however, control and divide the four young men. William is by law of primogeniture the Courtney heir. His brooding, possessive, and treacherous nature is one of the self-destructive forces that creates enmity between him and his younger brothers. Tom and Guy -- alike in appearance but diametrically opposed in character -- become bitter rivals for the affections of a young woman. Only Tom and Dorian sustain a brotherly relationship, through storms and disasters at sea, through bloody conflict with pirates, through years of separation. In Monsoon, as in all of his novels, Smith is at his best in his depiction of explosive adventure -- fierce moments of hand-to-hand combat, scenes of chase and confrontation, montages of violence that grab at one's throat. The real excellence of Monsoon, however, is in Smith's insight into the interplay of raw human emotions, the star-crossed love and hate of family relationships that is the trademark of Smith's Courtney novels. Robert C. Jones is a reviewer in Warrensburg, Ohio.
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