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Prequel Problems: Sharpe’s Reading Order

I tend to be keener on chronological order than @Thande, but well-argued (I'm almost tempted to argue the correct position is the reverse of what Thande says he has done/intends to do with Sharpe, and read in publication order then reread in chronological order). And I certainly agree with other points
One thing I would say is that it seems to suggest Sharpe's Rifles the book includes Sharpe's promotion from the ranks, when I'm pretty sure that's TV only.
 
I do like how this article starts off fairly restrained, but the irritation builds until by the end it's very much 'And another thing! Let me tell you about his baby. Do you know Sharpe had a baby? Bernard bloody Cornwall didn't!'
 
I've seen some series that also have very clear-in-hindsight shark jumps too, so a lot of the complaints about Sharpe rang true. The most obvious is Jack Ryan with The Sum of All Fears (Having to deal with the post-USSR technothriller issues and having hard-to-top high stakes and becoming more and more editor proof all at the same time after that), but there's also the Survivalist (First 9 books are a ridiculous and fun action romp, there's what could be a good conclusion as Rourke saves the world, then we get a giant timeskip and then it turns into the author getting to write the science fiction he always wanted, becoming more scattershot).
 
This is a fantastic article by @Thande and I absolutely loved helping out with it

Though the discussion of Book versus TV canon has just reminded me of the much-scorned Sharpe's Justice, aka The Only One Not Based On A Book (at least until those wretched ITV specials a few years ago) and which I like to mentally refer to as Richard Sharpe And Thomas The Tank Engine's Great-Great-Grandfather
 
Also I still find it very strange that Cornwell just straight-up ignores the Flanders campaign of 1794-98, when canonically Sharpe is at the Battle of Boxtel before transferring to India.

Because the Flanders campaign of that period is legendarily bloody, confusing, mostly pointless, and has some fantastic conflicts in it. It seems like the perfect place for a couple of prequels for Private Richard Sharpe, new recruit (maybe even a cheeky Harper cameo or something) and yet Cornwell completely ignores it in order to crowbar in the Interquel Books and their Pointless Temporary Antagonist
 
Of course, just like Obadiah Hakeswill lurks in the background until Sharpe deals with him, this is lurking in the near-future for @Thande to deal with

Screenshot_20201109-114812_Chrome.jpg

According to Cornwell's personal blog, this is (provisionally?) titled Sharpe which is ominously both vague and definitive.

Will it be yet another shoe-horned battle that @Thande will have to update the article for? Or will this perhaps be something set post-Devil to act as a final ending for our London-Yorkshire transplant?
 
Thanks to @Skinny87 for helping with this one!

Jared said:
I know nothing of the Sharpe novels other than as "those books which Amazon uses to keep actual AH out of the AH bestseller list", but put me down as another in favour reading series in publication order. Chronological order creates too many tonal shifts.
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I do allude to that towards the end of the article.

OwenM said:
One thing I would say is that it seems to suggest Sharpe's Rifles the book includes Sharpe's promotion from the ranks, when I'm pretty sure that's TV only.
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Ah, that's a phrasing issue on my part, I think I intended to include a sentence saying it was meant to happen in India.
 
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I think the Star Wars Machete order is at least well argued as a specific example, but otherwise publication order certainly fits better.

I suppose the interesting question is what do you do when there's loose links between books which only become obvious later. Reading The Baroque Cycle before Cryptonomicon spoils a lot of the mystery around Enoch Root, but there's no indication at all that they're even in the same Universe until you start noticing the repeating surnames.
 
Alex Richards said:
I think the Star Wars Machete order is at least well argued as a specific example, but otherwise publication order certainly fits better.

I suppose the interesting question is what do you do when there's loose links between books which only become obvious later. Reading The Baroque Cycle before Cryptonomicon spoils a lot of the mystery around Enoch Root, but there's no indication at all that they're even in the same Universe until you start noticing the repeating surnames.
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Good example, and like Owen said, I kind of now want to read Cryptonomicon again to make sense of it with that in mind.
 
I've never seen or read Sharpe, but the Hornblower comparison is an interesting one, as those novels also started in the protagonist's mid-career, only to be followed by sequels and prequels that jumped back and forth to flesh out Hornblower's entire career from Midshipman to Admiral. The ITV adaptations of the 1990s pick up the story chronologically, following Hornblower from Midshipman to Lieutenant to Captain, ending relatively early in the novel continuity. The TV adaptation came 30 years after the literal death of the author, so there was no risk of the decline into further cash-in prequels/sequels that seems to have afflicted Sharpe, and ITV could re-adapt the source material fairly freely into a chronological continuity.

I read all the Narnia's in chronological era, though I'd previously encountered LW&W and MN independently, the former as the BBC adaptation that got shown a lot in school. I had the box set with the publishers index numbers on the spine. Read in that order the stories do evidently jump from locations and protagonists, but I found that interesting as a Creation-Judgement day pseudo-history/mythology of Narnia itself.

As an argument for "publication order" - I first started watching Star Trek following the London 2018 meetup, starting with Discovery. In approaching the rest of the canon, watching order is definitely something I've had to consider. I've started twice on DS9 based on a recommendation from @Bolt451, but while its enjoyable in itself, I always feel like I'm missing something contextually important.

I recently started on TOS - and yeah, I'm finding that so much easier to get in to. No massive weight of canon beyond the general "monster of the week" continuity. Details that would be referenced as "Starfleet" later (i.e. regulations, bases) are rather quaintly called "Space [X]", but there's no sense of "would this scene/detail be more impactful or understandable if I'd watched TNG". I'm really enjoying it, albeit as someone with a soft spot for '60s screen sci fi.

I've seen online suggestions and timelines for watching the Trek canon in chronological order, starting with Enterprise, and accounting for the back and forth overlap between TNG, DS9, and Voyager. I don't think I'd be finding that anywhere near as fun.
 
Honestly I'm the complete opposite.

Chronological order is the only order I read in unless I chance across a book mid series.


Fortunately most authors these days seem to go into the business planning out a series so its not really been a problem for me to find things jumping back and forth. If anything it seems like a uniquely 20th century thing as successful authors realised there was demand for their works and they could write book after book set in the same universe featuring the same characters doing the same things and get paid actual real money for this.


I got bored of the Sharpe Books but it wasn't because they of inconsistent quality, frankly when I was a kid I didn't notice they were not published chronologically I just found every one was basically the same book regardless of era and Sharpe the battles were fairly boring. Sharpe was always at his most interesting when fucking off to do his own thing for his own reasons. Only so many times you can read the Spanish running away and the French charging blindly into the guns and well who won the Napoleonic wars was not much of a spoiler. His disastrous love life and horrific luck with anything other than not dying pulled some dramatic strings.
 
Kato said:
I've started twice on DS9 based on a recommendation from @Bolt451, but while its enjoyable in itself, I always feel like I'm missing something contextually important.
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The opening story is clear in itself but it's definitely structured to have a regular TNG viewer uneasy & wrongfooted, from how the setting is 'wrong' to how Sisko is passive-aggressive to Picard (a thing I saw one reviewer say upset her as a kid, didn't Sisko know Picard felt really bad about being a Borg?!).
 
Charles EP M. said:
The opening story is clear in itself but it's definitely structured to have a regular TNG viewer uneasy & wrongfooted, from how the setting is 'wrong' to how Sisko is passive-aggressive to Picard (a thing I saw one reviewer say upset her as a kid, didn't Sisko know Picard felt really bad about being a Borg?!).
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Yes, I remember another reviewer saying it was a rather courageous decision to introduce your new protagonist as being that way to your beloved old one, though it is an arc where it's more settled by the end. Kind of wish Picard had cameoed in more DS9 so they could have continued that.

There's also Alexander Siddig's thing about deliberately making Bashir unlikeable at first because he correctly knew he'd have years in which to develop the character - and his backstory, though totally unplanned, fell into place so neatly to explain that.
 
This was an interesting read. I would suggest that Cornwell perhaps understands some of the issues you discuss here; I was present at an author event for the release of Death of Kings, where he spent just as long talking about Sharpe as he did Uhtred.

He said the character of Lady Grace burst in on his muse while writing Trafalgar, and refused to let go. He knew that she was the perfect match for Sharpe, and couldn't stop writing her. At the same time, he knew that she couldn't be on the scene by 1807. As she wouldn't leave him, this meant a terminal resolution. Which makes sense regarding continuity, but means that Sharpe is left as a callous arse who never considers the demise of his love, or their infant son. This problem was also acknowledged by Cornwell, by it really is a lot to overlook.

If Grace needed to be in, what he could have done is given Sharpe an officer friend (in red or blue) who falls for Grace, and have Sharpe follow a similar path out of loyalty to Grace and said friend. This, of course, still ignores the fact that Sharpe has no business getting caught up in the events of the battle, mind.

The weak, self-contained antagonists are due to killing off Hakeswill, of course. It was the right decision, but it was far more right when there were 12 books. The Indian trilogy necessitated some improbable escapes for Obadiah (elephants and tigers, oh my!), but he was still a better foil than Random Toff Captain/Colonel number 17. In the other hand, Hakeswill as the architect of all Sharpe's misfortune would have been just as implausible, so I'm not sure how this can be resolved.


Other than "stop writing them after Rifles", but when you're on to a winner that pays the mortgage, that's probably quite a hard sell.
 
Geordie said:
This was an interesting read. I would suggest that Cornwell perhaps understands some of the issues you discuss here; I was present at an author event for the release of Death of Kings, where he spent just as long talking about Sharpe as he did Uhtred.

He said the character of Lady Grace burst in on his muse while writing Trafalgar, and refused to let go. He knew that she was the perfect match for Sharpe, and couldn't stop writing her. At the same time, he knew that she couldn't be on the scene by 1807. As she wouldn't leave him, this meant a terminal resolution. Which makes sense regarding continuity, but means that Sharpe is left as a callous arse who never considers the demise of his love, or their infant son. This problem was also acknowledged by Cornwell, by it really is a lot to overlook.

If Grace needed to be in, what he could have done is given Sharpe an officer friend (in red or blue) who falls for Grace, and have Sharpe follow a similar path out of loyalty to Grace and said friend. This, of course, still ignores the fact that Sharpe has no business getting caught up in the events of the battle, mind.

The weak, self-contained antagonists are due to killing off Hakeswill, of course. It was the right decision, but it was far more right when there were 12 books. The Indian trilogy necessitated some improbable escapes for Obadiah (elephants and tigers, oh my!), but he was still a better foil than Random Toff Captain/Colonel number 17. In the other hand, Hakeswill as the architect of all Sharpe's misfortune would have been just as implausible, so I'm not sure how this can be resolved.


Other than "stop writing them after Rifles", but when you're on to a winner that pays the mortgage, that's probably quite a hard sell.
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Yeah, that's kind of what I mean - it's somewhat more aggravating as a reader when the author clearly DOES understand the problem, but ignores it for the reasons you give (see also Turtledove).

One thing I didn't get a chance to talk about was how Cornwell writes in the foreword to the book after the one where Hakeswill dies that he was sorely tempted to write a scene of him bursting out of the grave like a zombie just to bring him back. At least we can be happy he went with the lesser villains over succumbing to that temptation!

I do get what he means about Grace, it's just a shame he couldn't have found a better place to make it work (perhaps a relationship like that could have been the basis for stories about Sharpe's son or something).
 
I'm currently caught in the middle of reading the Sharpe series and utterly enjoying it. But I've hit my first snag. I've been reading them in chronological order. I didn't read Tiger (#1) ... but read from Triumph (#2) through Havoc (#7).

I just started Eagle (#8) and this is where a few of the issues begin.

1) We meet Sharpe in Eagle as Harper removes the bandage from his leg. The cut was a result of a deep cut in a battle during the winter. But Havoc was fought in the Spring, and there was no mention of a cut in the winter.

2) Havoc talks heavily of his use a cavalry sabre, but in Eagle, his preferred mode is a straight sword.

3) In Havoc, the company's uniforms and boots were repaired by a grateful Portuguese cobbler ... yet two months later in Eagle, their uniforms resemble those of beggars.

4) No mention of Grace in Eagle.

Ok, I have to stop the griping, as the stories are excellent. I've been eating them for lunch and finishing each book in about 2 days time. But it's these little things which sort of get under my skin. It feels a bit Star Warish ... with some plot holes.

I'm just hoping future books won't suffer from the prequel/interval issues. I'd love a straight read with no holes. But ... we'll see.
 
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