Leaves & Pages

The Swordsman by William C. Heine ~ 1980. Alternate title: Sea Lord. This edition: McClelland and Stewart, 1980. Paperback. ISBN: 0-7704-1570-9. 246 pages.

My rating: 2/10

Boo, hiss.

Yes, my dears, this is a deeply baaaaad novel.

So why (I am sure you are asking yourselves) did I read it?

Good question.

And to answer it I must refer you back to this little episode from 2015: Untroubled by Plausibility, or, The Stupidest Canadian Novel Ever: The Last Canadian by William C. Heine.

So, if you followed that link, you will notice mention way down in the comments of William C. Heine’s second (and, small mercy, last) novel, The Swordsman/Sea Lord, which fellow Canadian reader-of-eclectica Brian Busby and I have been discussing tackling for the past year or so. He pulled it off first, and has just posted his own bang-on review, so I’ve had to follow through with my own promise to read the thing as well.

I did, and I conquered it, and I’m now feeling a little bit dirty all over, because it was a nastyish piece of work from one end to the other. And just as stupid as The Last Canadian. Unexpectedly boring, too, because one became hardened to the unlikely sex and gruesome violence early on, and soon came to view the continual bedding and blood-letting with an increasingly jaded eye.

I’m going to pass you over to Brian for a bit: The Sea Lord Unsheathes His Sword.

Got that? Good. I can therefore be brief in my own précis, without having to include any excerpts. (Thank you, Brian.)

We meet our hero Merand as he nearly succumbs to an assassin’s knife in a back alley in old Tyre. Oh, what the heck, here’s an excerpt. It gives a telling sample of Heine’s deeply pedestrian writing style.

Merand soon gained consciousness, but couldn’t shout for help; he was choking on a warm salty liquid he recognized vaguely as his own blood. He crawled, coughing blood, to the nearest door and hit it with his fist before collapsing. The slave who answered took one frightened look and called for his master. The two men dragged Merand to an inner room and lit a candle.

As the blood coagulated in Merand’s lungs, the worst of his coughing and choking stopped. He managed to tell the two men he was a slave of Tehemil, Tyre’s builder of ships. They exchanged glances over the wounded man’s body…

I always thought that once the blood coagulated in your lungs you pretty well stopped breathing, but hey! – Heine’s reality isn’t ours, so there you go.

So Merand is soon up and about, working for his rescuer, a Jewish ironworker with a gorgeous daughter. Merand instantly forms lustful designs upon her as she leans over his bed-of-pain, and, once recovered, he seduces and then marries her, either before or after he receives his freedom from the local ruler. (Some details are a merciful blur.)

There is a long flashback, describing how Merand learned to read, write, murder those who annoy him, stash himself some stolen gold, and become a master ship designer, in between sleeping with a fellow slave girl, and sacrificing his first-born child to Baal in a much-too-detailed episode describing how the wee infant is tipped into the fire to be burned alive. Apparently (in Heine’s version of history), it was mandated that every family’s firstborn be so sacrificed in Olde Tyre. Huh. Who knew?

Moving on.

Merand falls in love with a sword his new master has forged for a disgraced prince. He acquires it, learns to become a stellar swordsman, travels about gaining stunning riches, takes on a beautiful red-headed mistress (because his wife is always pregnant and a man has needs, you know), and eventually sails off into the really wild blue yonder, right across the Atlantic, it appears, fetching up on the shores of South America, where he is welcomed as a god by the local ruler and subsequently given the chief princess as a reward for being big and blonde.

Small digression into vivid descriptions of Heine’s version of Mayan (Aztec? Toltec?) human sacrifice.

Back to the old country goes Merand, lots of gold and doomed-to-die-in-childbirth new babe in tow, where he finds he is persona non grata with the king for various reasons, so he packs up his household, faithful wife Naomi still in the picture, plus Jewish father-in-law, and various offspring by assorted partners (Merand’s), and sets sail back to South America.

The end. With an epilogue describing the imaginary discovery of Merand’s tomb, complete with detailed carvings depicting his adventures, which is how we know the whole story.

Sure.

I truly believe that regrettable books like this only exist to provide a contrast to well written things.

Kind of like never truly appreciating the sun until you’ve had rain for weeks on end. Or how good a simple green salad tastes after having had to subsist on corner store deep-fried thingamajigs for a week or two. (That last bit being strictly imaginary, based on occasional exposure to the scary 7-11 food display when fuelling up late at night when it’s the only gas station open.)

Where am I going with this?

Nowhere, really, so I’ll quit.

William C. Heine: avoid like the plague. (Or a large, blood-dabbled swordsman wearing a skimpy loincloth over a suspicious bulge. Run away!)