Lord of Darkness

Rating:
Summary: lord od literature
Review: Out of the 30 or 40 books of silverberg's that I've read, this one 'The lord Of Darkness' would have to be one of his most accomplished. Notable for his Sci-Fi and Fantasy, it came as a nice surprise to find this book of his as a Fictional/Factual historical novel. The writing is exceptionally articulate, graphic and highly entertaining. I wont go into the guts of the story, only that it's about an Englishman named Andrew Battel who was a pirate for the British, who ended up as a prisoner of the Portugals, and who spent the best part of 20years in Western Africa living among the Jaqqa's. (It's surmised anyway)
Lot's of sex and cannibalisism to satisfy any morbid reader of these sort's of books. This book has much more to offer than blood and guts though, and it's up to the individual reader as to what they get out of it.
Try it, you'll be surprised, even if you're a hardened Silverberg fan

Rating:
Summary: Exciting, serious -- a good historical read!
Review: Written in a fashion which recalls Clavell's Shogun, this is a tale of an English sailor's adventure in deepest Africa during the early years of European colonization. Lost on the shores of Portuguese Africa, our hero finds himself first impressed into the service of the European masters of this land -- later establishing himself in the local colonial community. But the real highlight of this book occurs when he finds himself trapped in the back country where he becomes a servant to a savage cannibal king whom the Europeans and other native peoples live in fear of. Sliding into the very savagery of the people who adopt him, he becomes one of them and lives, for a time, the life of barbarism & adventure their rough existence decrees -- leading their armies into grim and bloody battles and partaking in their bloody and gruesome feasts. In the end this man finds his European self again and manages to make his escape from his adopted kinsmen, returning to England with a mulatto wife to live in retirement and write his memoirs. It's not clear if this story was based on or elaborated from real events but it reads like it could have been. I read it years ago and so am a little cold on some of the details but thought, then as well as now, that it was a worthy contribution to the kind of literature which Shogun exemplified -- though it's not quite as compelling. --- Stuart W. Mirsk