The Sharpe Cycle

For the past several years, Bernard Cornwell has been one of my favourite authors, and over that time I've read almost everything he has written (which is a lot). However, until last year I'd mostly stayed away from the Sharpe novels, as the few I'd read had felt rather too close to the TV series, which is good for TV but not so good for the books.

However, having run rather short of things to read, I decided that the time had come to read Sharpe, and so I did. And now I've finished the cycle, just in time for a new book in the series to be published.

It has been an interesting experience, largely because so many of the books are so close to the TV series, and the rest feel very much like they could have come from it. In terms of quality they're really good, though not quite uniformly so - at their best they can be exceptional, at worst they are reasonably enjoyable. I probably enjoyed the final book I read, "Sharpe's Prey", the most, and I didn't really care too much for "Sharpe's Fortress". I don't really know why that might be.

In terms of reading order, I started with "Sharpe's Rifles", the revised starting point of the series (written to tie in with the first episode of the TV series), then proceeded mostly in chronological order (skipping three books I had read some years ago). After getting to the end I skipped back to the five prequel novels Cornwell had written. I don't think I would recommend that order - in hindsight, "Sharpe's Tiger" is probably the place to start.

But I have no complaints. All in all, this was a great series, and stands as a nice companion piece to O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series - they're very different, of course, but deal with two branches of the armed forces in the same, or mostly the same, time frame.