Nerves.

“… Not that Pedro de Vargas knew what nerves were, but they still functioned.”

There is something immensely comforting, especially in these colder winter months, about picking up a gigantic, hardbound, historical adventure–about taking that first glance into an era and world and saying “I’m going to be here for awhile.” Knowing that one has a sprawling, epic adventure, seated deep in the past and far away from one’s own concerns, is wonderful, and all the more so when one is given a dashing hero for whom one can cheer. That last bit is why Samuel Shellabarger’s Captain From Castile is such an interesting book… the hero is genuinely likable, and yet the story’s morals are muddled, and I, for one, was never entirely sure whether or not that was on purpose.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

Nonetheless, before I get to what makes the book challenging, and possibly slightly distasteful, let me tell you what is definitely good about Captain From Castile… a whole hell of a lot.

First of all, the thing is incredibly engrossing, I would often read it in much larger chunks at a time than I usually do, and I finished the 630 page monster in less than a month, which wouldn’t be too impressive if it wasn’t also during finals, and one of the more difficult semesters I’ve ever had. Captain From Castile is tense, suspenseful, engaging, and all of that good stuff. It never stops moving, and the characters never become tiresome: even when the hero is still a really (really, really) dumb teenager, one can’t help but care about him. That this use of well-drawn, three-dimensional characters stretches to Hernan Cortes himself, making him more than the simple monster that people like me prefer to imagine, begins to get into the complications inherent in the novel, which is, if you haven’t already guessed, about the Conquest of Mexico.

To sum up the plot in a nutshell–our young, naive hero Pedro de Vargas runs afoul of The Inquisition and flees to the New World, where he takes up arms under Hernan Cortes, looking to the promise of adventure, discovery, and enough gold for him to return to Spain a man of influence. There is much, much more to the plot than that, however, and it’s a good 180 pages before Pedro even leaves Spain.

In some ways, I actually enjoyed the opening in Spain the most, as it shows a young soldier-to-be, who knows a good deal about arms and almost nothing about people, gaining a sudden moral education, and is essentially a coming of age… but with swordfights. When Pedro moves on to Mexico the morals get more confused, and Shellabarger is certainly aware of this, but the characterrs carry the story throughout.

Of particular interest is the female lead, Catana. Frankly, someone more qualified than I could probably do a very interesting feminist reading of the book, which, despite its setting and having been written in the mid 1940’s, is surprisingly forward-thinking when it comes to this character. (Barring the certain matter of a spanking at one point in the novel that could, perhaps, be written off as silly horsing around, or a prelude to hardcore S&M, but is, in all likelihood, a bit of old school sexism.) When we first meet Catana she is already described as someone who “curses like a man” and seems more than willing to kill a man who gets in her way, and while Pedro is certainly attracted to her, both know that nothing in particular can ever come of it, as he is a noble and she is not. In Mexico, while she does often do “women’s work” for the army company, she does also wear pants and armor, as well as carry sword and shield. Throughout the book, the New World is shown as representing freedom from the constraints of the Old, and nowhere is this more clear than concerning Catana. I don’t want to get too spoiler-heavy, but suffice it to say that the love triangle is especially satisfying, due to the fact that Catana’s rival is, in many ways, the typical romantic lead for a noble hero, as well as the fact that Catana herself is far too realistic to believe that she is any real competition.

That Catana is armed and fights alongside the men is all the better considering what a meticulous researcher Shellabarger is known to have been. This sense of equality does not come across as shoe-horned into history, but entirely contiguous with its setting, as indeed it must have been for it to be included. The attention to detail is amazing throughout the novel, especially in the settings: I had never before really envisioned what a pre-conquest Tenochtitlan looked like, until reading this book. I feel like such a douche using a cliche like “he makes history come alive,” but goddammit, he does! A real sense of the time period, and where the action takes place, is palpable throughout… and that feel for the time period does not stop when one gets to the thought processes of the characters, which is where the morality (and Shellabarger’s own point) become tricky. But seeing how long this review has already become, and how much more I think I’d like to say, I’ll save my issues with the presentation of early colonialism for tomorrow or the next day, in much the same way that I broke my Scarlet Pimpernel review into two parts: one being what I liked, and one being my political issues with the story.