
"Mr. Sabatini shows his quality by
giving his personae enough characterisation to lift the
performance from the early status as cheap thriller to the
celestial place of romance." -- H.W. Boynton, Bookman,
Oct 1917
The Snare
Wellington was out to save Portugal, but there were traitors
in high places secretly opposing his methods and playing the
spy for the enemy. All depended on secrecy and unity of
action. Suddenly the drunken blunder of a young English
officer gives the plotters their chance to upset the delicate
balance. Their influence causes the Portugese Council of
Regency to demand that the culprit be made a scapegoat. He is
at large, and it falls to his brother-in-law, Sir Terrence
O'Moy, British adjutant-general at Lisbon, to promise that he
shall be shot when taken. The disentangling of the coil of
circumstances developing from this situation occupies the
remainder of this romantic narrative.
published by The Riverside Press
Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1917
As a devotee of the Peninsular War, I was intrigued to come
across a Sabatini novel set in Portugal during the Napoleonic
era. It wasn't quite the book I was expecting. For one thing,
the plot is not as tight as most of the other Sabatini novels
I have read and there are many missed opportunities in the
storyline.
The book starts out with an inspired adventure featuring the
character of Richard Butler. It is after this promising
beginning that we discover that the book actually centers on
Butler's brother-in-law, an irishman named Sir Terence O'Moy
who is Wellington's Adjutant-General in Lisbon during the
Peninsular War. O'Moy is forced to promise to put Richard in
front of a firing squad as soon as he is found. This would be
an interesting premise for a book with lots of political
intrigue and agonizing about who one owes his first duty:
one's family or one's country, but the book is more devoted
to O'Moy's troubles with his jealousy over the company kept
by his air-headed but beautiful wife, Una.
Una is not a very compelling character. She could be amusing,
but Sabatini doesn't take advantage of that aspect. On the
other hand, she doesn't seem to have enough brains or
emotions to seem even slightly tragic. She's not really worth
Sir Terrence's jealousy, as I got the impression she's not
really bright enough to cheat on him even if she wanted to.
She frets over her brother, Richard, but those thoughts don't
seem to stay in her mind very long.
Una's cousin, Sylvia Armytage and Captain Tremayne, O'Moy's
staff assistant, could have been the ones who saved the day
but they don't get to. They could have been used to personify
O'Moy's major emotional conflict: Sylvia representing family
and Tremayne representing military duty. They could have been
used as the emotional center of the novel. Instead they are
built up as characters only to be shoved aside later. Like
Richard Butler, who disappears from the narrative only to
return some time later to whine about his situation.
The last lost opportunity is that no one really gets to
change either their personal outlook or their fate. No one
really pays for their sins. Everything is simply resolved by
chance.
The Snare felt very disjointed and uneven. Parts of it
were fun to read and made me keep turning the pages. Other
sections seemed to lack the verve of Sabatini's better works.
There was so much potential in the novel with the political
maneuverings, the emotional conflict between duty to family
and duty to nation, the different kinds of love demonstrated
by the range characters, that I was even more disappointed in
the novel's resolution.
A. G.
Lindsay (rimfire)
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