The Complete Brigadier Gerard

I have read quite a lot of Doyle over the years and this is by far his most fun work. This book collects together all his Etienne Gerard short stories (plus one random story at the start about a differently named character but in the same style so I guess a sort of prototype of Gerard). The editor has added some historical context at the start of each story but I found this actually confused me far more than just reading the stories alone so I skipped them on a second read. The stories jump about in time and I found that this added to their charm.

The set-up is that you're sitting in a French café listening to an old man tell you tales of his youth as a mounted soldier in the Napoleonic wars. Gerard is an unreliable narrator on two show more fronts, one because you don't know how much he is exaggerating or making up in his stories (he's exceedingly vain), and two because he is an idiot and misconstrues certain situations which are clear to the audience, so you get this satirical humour at his expense. However personally I didn't enjoy these moments so much. It's hard to believe that Gerard is such an idiot when he shows so much cunning and quick thinking in dangerous or tricky situations. I think the idea is that he is gullible and too trusting, but it still didn't really gel with his clear intelligence shown in other situations. Sometimes the satire can almost be a little sour, as Gerard casually mentions the looting and 'womanising' that goes on during war as if it is perfectly acceptable, although he has the decency to not revel in death and generally goes out of his way not to kill people if possible. The stories certainly are funny, although they didn't make me laugh aloud, more just gently amused, but by far what I appreciate about them is how damn exciting they are. Although there is a little repetition of situation in a couple of the tales, mostly they are all surprisingly different and inventive and also incredibly thrilling as Gerard gets into some dangerous and seemingly impossible scrape and you excitedly read on to see how he will get out of this one.

I did skip one story because it is about fox hunting, although Gerard manages to mention how he killed the fox in practically every subsequent story, so I'm not sure how much I saved myself there. The joke seems to be that Gerard doesn't understand English 'sports' but thinks he does, but that joke will be somewhat lost on a modern audience. There is one particular story in which he is in England and there are several gags to this nature which I feel press the point a little too heavily and the joke gets tired. The first time I read these stories I was pretty furious that Doyle bothered to reintroduce the character of Bart only to kill him off, but since I was prepared a second time around, it didn't bother me that much. It also seemed clumsy that both Bart stories have villains who use the same scheme to trick the hero. Aside from that though, I really enjoyed these stories. show less

Engaging, gripping, historically accurate and beautifully written, these stories deserve to be much more widely read. As a comic character, Brigadier Etienne Gerard is a flawed but thoroughly entertaining narrator worthy of his spiritual ancestor Sir Harry Paget Flashman; as a swashbuckler he is a worthy descendent of Charles de Batz-Castelmore d'Artagnan.

Humorous, interesting look at the French side of the Napoleonic Wars