Westward Ho!

Rating:
Summary: A great 19th century adventure read
Review: An exciting tale of the "Spanish Main", South America, "The Inquistion", and adventure, Kingsley 's tale is onpar with Dumas, Dickens, Haggard, and Doyle. Though the prose may be dated for late 20th (alomst 21th)century readers and the tale may strike some as virulently anti-Catholic, the action is epic and story detailed with all the requisite twists and turns. A "ripping" good yarn.

Rating:
Summary: A great 19th century adventure read
Review: An exciting tale of the "Spanish Main", South America, "The Inquistion", and adventure, Kingsley 's tale is onpar with Dumas, Dickens, Haggard, and Doyle. Though the prose may be dated for late 20th (alomst 21th)century readers and the tale may strike some as virulently anti-Catholic, the action is epic and story detailed with all the requisite twists and turns. A "ripping" good yarn.

Rating:
Summary: Be good,sweet Kingsley,and let who will,be clever.
Review: Charles Kingsley,the Victorian socialist clergyman,would seem hardly a figure to arouse much respect today.An ardent defender of the poor-he nevertheless upheld the status quo and did little to improve the actual quality of life.A railer against celibacy and a firm believer in the normalcy of (married)sexual life-he was one of the biggest prudes in Victorian literature and maintained the double standard regarding women.A deeply learned and cultured scholar-he was incredibly ethnocentric and scorned primitive people as degenerate.A man of God,who used his writing as a pulpit to instruct and enlighten- he was consumed by an intolerance and bigotry towards Catholics.He displayed all of these faults to varying degrees in his writing,but yet was able to produce some memorable work.At his best("Alton Locke"and "Hypatia" and to a lesser extent-"Yeast" and "Water Babies")his work was measured,thought-provoking,involving-giving a real sense of the intellectual ferment of the time.But at his worst,as in "Westward Ho",all of his faults come in to play,throwing reason,justice and truth out the window."Westward Ho",tediously recounts events in England leading up to the war with Spain-according to Kingsley a war between hell and heaven(you can guess who's who).The novel seethes with hatred towards Catholics and constantly depicts them as psychopathic,cruel idiots,incapable of truth or decency,whose only purpose in life is to make others the same as they-by any means possible.Demonized as an evil bufoon,the canonized poet Robert Southwell is probably the most savagely cannibalized.There is of course not a shred of historical truth in all of this,which wouln't matter if Kingsley didn't keep reminding his readers how fair and free from prejudice he has been.The book doesn't help its cause with its anachronistic priggish "muscular Christian" hero-blond and unintellectual,but oh so superiorly Victorian,fighting against the papist evil and deigning to love a native girl,who is so lucky to experience this contact with civilization!The only thing that redeems the book from utter worthlessness is a long trek for survival through the South American jungles,though marred by a condescending attitude,is exciting and suspenseful to read and reminds us that when Kingsley chooses not to be goaded by irrational fears what a good writer he could be.Unfortunately,"Westward Ho" is one long,rabid insult against the imagination and intelligence.

Rating:
Summary: An enormously popular novelist during his time.
Review: Kingsley was extremely popular during his lifetime in the nineteenth century, but his works have somewhat fallen into obscurity now. He is well worth taking up again. His books are deeply embedded in the Victorian way of life, so he is very much a writer for his own time. Kingsley wrote quite a few books, but "Westward Ho!" has always been his most popular. It is a story of adventure on the high seas and beyond. The book starts in England, but his hero, Amyas Leigh is a sailor, and the book covers his trip to the West Indies and South America. Amyas meets many unique people and experiences many adventures before he finds himself back on "Jolly Old's" shores. Although a bit preachy, the story is pretty good and certainly kept my interest.

Rating:
Summary: Mythology Repeats Itself
Review: Westward Ho transplants the famous Greek Epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, into Elizabethan England. Complete with Achilles (Amyas Leigh), Patroclus (Frank Leigh), Helen (Rose), Paris (Guzman), and a Trojan War (The Defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588). The Odyssey too comes in, with the great wanderings in distant lands. Rather unexpectedly for a novelist of Kingsley's calibre and values, the book has transformed the Elizabethan English into a noble race of Godlike Heroes and the Spanish into villains far worse than the Trojans have ever been depicted as being. Jesuits are particularly maligned, and Indians are unfairly portrayed. This tends to dampen the reader's enthusiasm somewhat, as he/she realises that the author himself may be more remote in value system from our day and age than the characters he portrays. The one redeeming feature is the high tension it generates, but this is - probably consciously - influenced by the epics, as the author himself hints.