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3.0 out of 5 stars
Desdemona, a word in your ear..., Jan 16 2004
Falstaff, Prince Hal's bawdy mentor and pal in HENRY IV, was one of Shakespeare's more wonderful creations. Sadly, he was killed off at the beginning of the sequel, HENRY V, consumed of an affliction known as Drink in a room above Boar's Head tavern, thus depriving centuries of readers of all that might have been.Robert Nye resurrects him here. And he does it in a most ambitiously imaginative style. Having drunk from the elixir of life, our hero, at the ripe old age of 81, is every bit the endearingly outrageous blow-hard that Shakespeare created. He laments, "-here I am, an old man in a dry month, having fought in the warm rain with Miranda yesterday, and at the hot gates of Harfleur and Hell with Harry Monmouth and the pride of England, heaving a cutlass, all that - here I am, employing my days in this making of Days, in this long act of recall of my youth and other follies. It is no occupation for a gentleman." For certain it is not. In fact, it's in the Gentlemanly Manners department that he invariably comes up a little slack-eyed. Nye's Falstaff is, in short, a Dirty Old Man. The novel has a fine beginning, though - Falstaff, dictating to five recruited & variously abused "secretaries," chronicles his origins. He claims to have descended from, amongst other colorful figures, a certain Gurth Fastolf, who fought for King Harold- "the story that he obtained (William the Conqueror's) favour by leading a miscellany of Saxons in the wrong direction - to wit, over a cliff on an escarpment near Dover, at the time of the skirmish at Hastings - is absolutely without foundation. It is, in short, a lie put about by envious neighbours whose talents were never so complex as to catch the eye of William's wife Matilda, a dumpy woman but not beneath my great great great great grand-dad's notice." One cannot deny that the language throughout this novel is lively and amusing. And Nye seems to have no problem at all keeping up with it. The sideline tangents into various points in history - such as the Black Death and Pope Joan - mesh well with the battles and other momentous historical events, as seen through the eyes of Falstaff, taking place during the respective reigns of Henry IV and his son Hal (Henry V). It is actually in the extraneous chapters, which all said comprise between 1/4 and 1/3 of the book, where I must draw my censure. Throughout this novel, there are so many superfluous and long-winded stretches dedicated to such things as bodily functions, parts of the anatomy, and licentious sexual activity, that I inevitably came to a point where I couldn't read another word of such stuffing without rolling my eyes in profound exasperation, proceeding then to just skim right over it. However, the chapters detailing Falstaff's part(s) in the battle of Gadshill, his invocation of Clio the muse of history, honor & onions, the number 7, and his own soul were entertaining. The chapters dedicated to anything surrounding the battles of Shrewsbury or Agincourt, as well as the evolution of Falstaff's relationship with Prince Hal, were poignant and bittersweet. Through the course of the novel, the reader develops a warm affection for each of the five "secretaries," too - even Falstaff's malicious stepson, Stephen Scrope. (In fact, Scrope may well be the embodiment of Reader's Revenge for the bulk of the braggart Falstaff's excessive wordage). All in all, I would still give Mr. Nye's book 3.5 stars. By the later chapters of Falstaff's Book of Days, I had actually come to look forward to reading the ornery old man's tall-tale narrative.
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