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[N.Y.: William Morrow, 1975]

This is almost a funny book. Not intentionally, of course. Intentionally, it's bigoted, full of nasty ethnic stereotypes and generally hateful. The trouble is that it goes so thoroughly overboard about it that there are moments when it unintentionally becomes self-satirizing, albeit in an obnoxious way.

It's too bad, too, because it started out with an interesting approach, looking at the Southern Campaign through the eyes of Alec MacLeod, the fifteen-year-old son of a Scots immigrant living in the Carolina Upcountry. The main events of the war, starting with the siege of Charleston, are distant from Alec's life, arriving as snippets of news passed along from family to family. In the first couple of chapters there was a good presentation of the political schisms within the community before they turned deadly, where neighbor called neighbor "damned rebel" or "damned King's Man" without following the words up with murder. For about the first thirty pages, I thought I might like it.

By a hundred pages or so into it, though, it had become glaringly obvious that it wouldn't be getting any good reviews from me. By then I'd met Alec's dad (a King's Man, and hence brutal, drunk, loutish and abusive), his grandfather (branded a traitor in the '45, now a rebel supporter, and so fiery, clear-eyed and noble), his neighbor Jamie (Loyal, and therefore sneaky, drunken, vicious, petty and -- oh, yes -- stupid), Donal (a rebel spy and therefore proud and stalwart), and so on. We even meet a man who's been tarred-and-feathered, but of course he's a rebel punished by his Tory neighbors. (In the real world, tar-and-feathers were a form of entertainment first introduced by the rebels for use against their Loyalist neighbors. Pre-war rebel newspapers even published "how to" manuals on it.) Sense a pattern that is truly bricklike in its subtlety?

And then there's the patented Beatty version of Ban Tarleton, which really rates high on the Ban Butchery scale. (That's Butchery of Ban, by the way, not by.) Pale and emotionless to the point of apparent mental disorder, the first thing we see him do is casually pull out a pistol and shoot one of his own Tory scouts through the heart over the results of a card game -- in front of dozens of witnesses and smiling vapidly as he does it. We're beyond caricature here, we're talking whole new levels of scene-chewing, baby-barbequing nastiness. If Hannibal Lector invited him to dinner, this guy wouldn't just offer to bring the Chianti, he'd truck along dessert.

Like I say, it is all just so, so, SO overdone that there were times when I found it funny in an infuriating, head-shaking sort of way. Take, for instance, Tarleton's intro scene. The details were obviously lifted from Parton's "Horsebreaking" story -- everything from Ban's pristine white uniform (in this universe there is apparently no dust in Carolina in June) to a weird emphasis on his pallor. "His face...marble-white." (p113) "Milk-white Tarleton." (p165) Etc.

Okay, let me go off on a tangent for a minute, because that image is too good to ignore. Combine South Carolina in June with a redheaded kid from the north of England, and what do you get? "Milk-white" isn't the image that forms in my mind. "Sunburned within an inch of his life with a strip of skin peeling off the end of his nose" sounds far more plausible. (South Carolina in April always gives me a sunburn, and I just live a few hundred miles farther north. I wonder that the Brits survived at all.) Either that, or while he's riding about the countryside at random, burning and hanging whoever takes his fancy (or doesn't take his fancy, as the case may be), he's been holding a parasol over his head to protect his peaches-and-cream complexion. It can't be doing much for his bad-boy image, which may be why he's acting so mean, in an effort to keep up appearances...Not to mention it must be hard on the arm, since he'd need to hold it up very high to keep it clear of the feathers in his hat...Well, perhaps he's rigged some sort of sling that holds a beach umbrella to his saddle...

But seriously...No, actually, not seriously. If I take this thing seriously, I'll like it as much as I like Cast Two Shadows. The utterly terrifying thing is that, according to the afterword, both authors taught American history.

Patrick Ferguson fares as badly from this nasty-fest as Tarleton, which surprised me. Most modern writers don't dig back that far into the compost heap. (But then these folks were really industrious.) Given the take on Tarleton, who is introduced first, I expected Ferguson to become a semi-hero to Ban's total villain, in some incarnation of Draper's mythical feud. Instead, they came up with a whole new version of mythology embroidered just for the pair of them, with Ferguson symbolized as the "Red Beast" to Ban's "White Beast" (shouldn't that be "Short Little Green Beast with Fluffy Black Hat?" Or is that too wordy to sound properly frightening and mystical?). Both are presented as evils of biblical proportions, their Coming predicted by Alec's fey old grandmother's second sight. (Did I mention this was a weird book?)

All I can say is that authors should not eat anchovy pizza and read Arthurian legends immediately before bedtime. I'd love to know what made them decide they wanted to shoe-horn a dragon analogy into this setting. (It can't just have been the linguistic connection between "dragon" and "dragoon," can it?) It's certainly a task that needed a shoe horn of sledgehammer proportions. (Doc M points out that it may have all been in aid of a bilingual pun, since "Ban" means "white" in Gaelic.)

So anyway, after Ban and Pattie between them have massacred half the Loyal population of the neighborhood -- in the first 150 pages, neither one of them actually attacks a rebel, only their own allies -- Alec wakes up one morning, looks up at the people holding the big sharp pen over his head and thinks, "Damn, I'd better change sides quick before they notice I'm still loyal and make me evil or dead," and runs off to join Francis Marion. As the title suggests, he does end up at King's Mountain, with Ferguson's forces due to a bit of bad luck while spying for Marion. But hey, events there are all appropriately toned down. Big surprise.

Well, maybe they had good intentions. Maybe as they wrote it they were thinking, "Look, kids, the world would be a better place if you don't learn to think like this loser." Unfortunately, I doubt it...Oops, nope, can't go in that direction, it would require being serious.

I notice from an advertisement on the back of the book that the same authors once turned their collective poisoned pen on another of my very favorite historical personalities: Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine. The review claims it is a "romantic and sympathetic portrait," which, frankly, threatens to make my head explode. Don't get me wrong; Rupert was definitely a romantic and sympathetic figure. But he was also the product of a more brutal era, with far different "Rules of War." He certainly did some of the things of which Ban is falsely accused --though I don't recall him ever digging up any dead generals -- not to mention being so impetuous that he makes Ban seem downright lethargic by comparison. (Ironically, he's a bogeyman in Liverpool lore much like Ban is in the Carolinas, having taken that city by less than gentleman's rules. A couple of Ban's ancestors were among the guys he was fighting.)

So what's the deal, I wonder? Why doesn't Rupert get to be a Red Beast or Blue Beast or maybe a Peacock Beast With Really Great Hair? (He was a bit of a dandy. Reputedly he invented the garment which gradually evolved into the necktie. The men in the audience can lynch him in absentia later.) Is it because he was killing Englishmen, and therefore must, de facto, be a hero? Overlooking, of course, the fact that it was a civil war, and so he was leading an army of other Englishmen. But, hey, he was a foreign-born immigrant, even though he was the King's nephew. Maybe that makes it okay? Or maybe it's because he was fighting for a Stuart king, and not one of those nasty Hanoverians? I may have to track that one down. My Masochistic Curiosity Sense is definitely tingling.

Anyway, for another, equally unimpressed discussion of the book, check out the "Book Reviews" section on Doc M's Silver Whistle site. She and Janie shredded it quite some time ago, and the discussion offers information on the background and (mis)use of history. And I would certainly agree full-heartedly with Janie's observation that she could write a better version of the story, "with half [her] wits in cold storage."

Doc M, who is a Scot and an historian, not to mention the author of the only modern biography of Patrick Ferguson, summarized her own views quite succinctly in a recent email:

I suspect that what the authors know about 18C Scottish history, culture and politics could be written on the back of a very small postage stamp, if that. I find it pretty galling when writers have the cheek to co-opt a history they know sod all about, and use it as the vehicle for their own fantasies. It's...basically a chance to trot out patronising "noble savage" fantasies and be racist about English people.

I would not disagree with that in the least. Save your time and patience and check out The Sherwood Ring instead.