An Honourable Man
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
In Khartoum the trumpeters, layers of red sand glittering on their faces, are posted at each corner of the palace roof. Trapped between the desert and the Jihad, oblivious to the heat and the impending dust storm, General Gordon is waiting, hopelessly, for Wolseley's camel corps to cross the shimmering land and rescue him. He begins to hallucinate betrayals and beheadings; unwittingly he is about to touch and change lives far beyond his own including those of a London doctor, John Clark and his wife Mary, and especially the young boy from the English dockyard slums who now stands beside him, his reluctant last ally.
Customer Reviews
A (dis)honourable attempt
Well written but ultimately lacklustre. I feel the book was too short and that the author achieved this by omitting time which would have been well spent describing the physical world in which her characters laboured. Admittedly she does make some cursory attempts during her African passages however these are all too brief. The husband & wife that make up the main protagonists in this tale (don't make the mistake of thinking this book is about Gordon of Khartoum) are both highly unappealing and I found it extremely difficult to summon up a shred of sympathy for the predicaments that they both find themselves in. Gordon was painted paper thin, appearing in short, hasty chapters almost as an afterthought. The brief highlight of this otherwise tedious read was the authors description of battle in the desert which really stood out amongst the banality - to the extent whereby I gave the book 3 out of 5 rather than 2. Not good enough to make me feel that I have wasted £5 by buying this novel though.