"Fire Over England" by A E W Mason

 Mason was a prolific and successful writer of boys' adventure yarns; he is most famous for The Four Feathers, a 1902 story set against the background of the war in Sudan in which General Gordon was killed in Khartoum. Fire Over England was probably his second best book and involves spying and derring do which leads to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1902.

Robin Aubrey, the intelligent, good-looking and rich gentlemanly hero, is still a boy at Eton when he first comes to the notice of Queen Elizabeth and her devious spymaster Francis Walsingham. Four years later, shortly after he has met and fallen in love with the beautiful Cynthia at first sight, he is recruited to travel clandestinely to Spain to ferret out the secrets of Philip II's incipient Armada. But his own secret mission is to rescue his father who has fallen foul of the Spanish Inquisition. 

The plot's the thing and the characters are mostly pieces to be moved. As is typical of the time, the goodies are handsome and brave and intelligent and the baddies are ugly and sly and cunning. Thus the hero has "beauty and straight limbs and the clean look of race" (Ch 1) while the villain has "small. twinkling, reddish eyes and a little nibbling mouth ridiculous in a man; and ... a steep sloping forehead and a sharp receding chin, his face seemed to be drawn to a point at the end of a long nose." (Ch 1). It is a mystery to me how baddies ever escaped detection in the old days: since novelist invariably paired moral flaws with physical flaws one could just look at a person to know that they weren't to be trusted. The only rounded characters are the old men: Walsingham the spymaster and Santa Cruz the dying admiral.

Foreshadowing is carefully pointed out in an attempt to keep the reader going: "She was to remember ... that name of Carlo Manucci; so that great harm was done and great perils incurred" (Ch 5). There is little subtlety.

The pacing of the plot is unusual. The first 20% of the book deals with the schoolboy at Eton and has the function of a prologue. The call to adventure does not take place until after the hero has fallen in love (creating tension, because he must leave his love behind) which is about 35% of the way through. The Spanish part of the story, the next Act if you will, starts at about 50%, and the fulfilment of the quest  (Robin finding his dad) is at nearly 90%. This then leaves only the journey home. In contemporary terms this is a very start-heavy story and it is a tribute to the author that the slightly melodramatic narration is able to keep one going. 

He never fails to add colour to the setting and the settings are often used to intensify the point he is trying to make.

There is a deliberate attempt on the part of the narrator to present a positive view of England in the 1580s. The narrator regularly breaks in on the story to provide a little homily on how good the English were and how bad the foreigners. For example, he defines Englishness (of our day, ie contemporary with the authro rather than the story) as: "English of our day - English in her distaste for cruelty, English in her inability to nourish rancour against old enemies, English in her creed that poverty needed more than the empty help of kindly words." It is complacent, self-congratulatory and imperialistic, offering a justification for Empire. It is of its time, but it is a little uncomfortable to read nowadays.

Great moments:

• "He was in that tense mood which duplicates a person so that one self acts and speaks, whilst the other stands at his side, notes each gesture and word and accent and criticises or approves." (Ch 1)
• "If I tell a story, however short, I am aware long before I have done that I am winding up some dreary dead thing out of a deep well." (Ch 3)
• "Knowledge of the living tongues alone helps one to understand the diversity of men." (Ch 3)
• "If he had wanted a feather for his cap ... he would have bought three bits of a feather at three different shops and sewn them together in the dark." (Ch 3)
• "the old man's game of pretending that he was young" (Ch 15)
• "Old men are for the dust-heap as all the world knows." (Ch 16)
• "He was in that rare state when the billiard balls themselves made themselves his sycophants." (Ch 20)

Despite its limitations, Mason has a fantastic gift for story-telling and this is a classic of its kind. June 2021; 316 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God