The Swift and the Harrier

4.5★s

The Swift and The Harrier is a stand-alone novel by best-selling award-winning British author, Minette Walters. It's 1642 and Britain is divided: the Royalists support the King's divine right to rule; the Parliamentarians believe the people deserve a say in their fates. Physician Jayne Swift, like her mentor, chooses to remain neutral, ready to treat the ill and injured of either persuasion.

She first encounters William Harrier when on a mercy mission to Dorchester, to treat the gravely ill baby son of her cousin Ruth. A footman for Lady Alice Stickland, she is told, but from his behaviour she quickly concludes there is more to the man. But he does prove instrumental in helping Ruth Morecott and her son escape from a cruel and negligent husband.

A year later, she's responding to a request from Lady Alice, who is apparently held captive in her own house by Royalist dragoons demanding she summon her physician. William poses as Jayne's brother to ensure her safety while treating a petulant prince posing as a common soldier. She understands William is for the Parliamentarians, but by this time, she has concluded he is very likely a spy.

Jayne's work takes her all over Dorset, and she is in Lyme Regis when the Royalists put it under siege. She finds herself running the hospital and treating the battle injuries of townspeople and prisoners with radical remedies, and gaining the respect of the town and even the male physicians. During another brief encounter William, it becomes apparent there might be feelings there, but war is still raging….

The choice of a female physician as a protagonist is a clever one, because in that profession Jayne Swift can access almost all areas, and certainly many which would be closed to less qualified women in the seventeenth Century. It also gives her some unusual weapons in her armoury. Jayne is an intelligent woman, spirited and of independent mind, vocal in her opinions, a very likeable character.

With this story, Walters demonstrates the effects of a long-running civil war on the common people, where unpaid armies encourage plunder as payment, where food is taken leaving populations starving, where conscripts would rather be home, where the fatigue of such long years lead to farmers banding together to resist appropriation of their crops and stock. And where loyalties are divided, even amongst families. Quite a different perspective.

While readers might tend not to choose seventeenth Century British history, when Minette Walters is writing it, it shouldn't be automatically rejected. Never dry or boring, this is history with interesting characters and thousands of fascinating tidbits woven in, with witty and amusing dialogue, with action, drama and even a bit of romance: who can resist!! Enthralling historical fiction.

This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by Allen & Unwin.