If you enjoyed 'God is an Englishman' ...

books:


	• Theirs Was the Kingdom R. F. Delderfield, 1999 - 798 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Theirs Was the Kingdom

As with all Delderfield books, this is a real winner--a hard to put down book.

Richly detailed and wonderfully authentic

Adam Swann, founder of transport giant Swann-on-Wheels, sits beside his aged father's deathbed as this sequel to God Is an Englishman begins. His family with wife Henrietta is growing up - indeed, his two oldest children have already left the nest. That leaves six at home. Adam and his beloved Hetty have their hands full with the challenges of rearing the rest of their brood, and of continuing to provide help and guidance to those they've already launched. For Adam there's also the challenge of guiding the business he built from nothing, using a stolen ruby necklace as his starting capital, through an era in which technological advances are driving social change at a sometimes dizzying rate. Does this book take place in the 20th Century? Not at all. It plays out between 1878 and 1889.

Adam Swann is a surprisingly complex character, a man of business who nevertheless cares deeply about the social ills of his Victorian world. His relationship with Henrietta, and with his company's regional managers (whom he considers his other family - not at all the typical attitude for an employer of that era!), drive many of the story's threads. The rest are taken up by the Swann children's passages into adulthood. This richly detailed and wonderfully authentic historical novel can be read on its own without difficulty, as I can attest because I read it without first reading God Is an Englishman. I'm now eager to do that, however!

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Epic Saga Writ Large

This is one of those "family saga"/"sweeping epics" that I would have eaten up when I was in high school. There is more interwoven historical detail than bodice ripping, but otherwise this book is right up there with John Jakes's Bicentenial series and other books of the 1970s school of historical novels. Meaning that the men are all strong, the women are all lusty, the hero is moral but misunderstood, the villans are evil and usually deformed. The characters don't have much depth, but there are a lot of them, and separate plots involve each of them. Unfortunately, while the story is interesting, the writing is a little much. This is a typical sentence (yes, one sentence):

"It was only then that he remembered the fearful risks Avery was running by coming here, a man with a double murder charge hanging over him and no means, at this distance, to establish his innocence, for who would be likely to believe that a rake like Avery had shot a man in self-defence after a whore had squeezed him dry, and afterwards fled into the night in the back of one of Swann's frigates as far as Harwich, where he had bribed a Dutch skipper to carry him to the Continent."

Whew!

I gave it three stars because I think it is a two-star book for adults, but would be a four-star book for younger readers. If younger readers stil read historical fiction, this would be appropriate -- it is definitely PG and the history is interesting.

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If you enjoyed 'God is an Englishman' ...

If you enjoyed 'God is an Englishman' by the same author, you will want to continue reading about the saga of Adam Swann and especially his family in this sequel. Both novels are what one might label `industrial fiction,' or books that treat England's economic transformation during the 19th century and its social consequences, along the lines of a Dickens novel. Although I was attracted to read both novels for this reason, even if one isn't interested in the economic and social aspects, the story itself, based on the interpersonal relationships of a varied list of middle and lower class characters and especially the entrepreneurial Adam Swann, is intriguing enough to keep reading to the end. And `Theirs was the Kingdom' was the stronger of the two novels in this sense, especially in developing how Adam's children reached adulthood, the career paths they followed, and how they came to meet their spouses. If you want to learn the basic story line, see the reviews for 'God is an Englishman.'

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Theirs Was The Kingdom

This is the second of Delderfield's Adam Swann during the late 1800s and features his children growing into their various interests including the family haulier business established during the British industrialization age 1860+ Adam's wife, Henrietta, had taken the business reins while Adam fought in a war and lost his leg. Now she is attending their 9 children while they choose schools and vocations.

A brilliantly woven tapestry of history and adventure, this imposing novel continues the saga of the Victorian giant of commerce Adam Swann and his tough-minded wife, as it follows their fortunes in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, and in the careers of the five Swann children reflects both the triumphs and tragedies of Imperial England.

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