Stolen From Gypsies
by Noble Smith (Aubrey House Publishing, $23.95)
STRICTLY SPEAKING, Noble Smith’s new novel is historical, an epic told by an expatriate Englishman during the Napoleonic wars about events in the city of Carthusalem 150 years previously. But both stories are actually about as “historical” as the England of Black Adder or the fairy-tale realm of The Princess Bride. This is the sort of comic novel that normally gets words like “rollicking” attached to it, and indeed it does sort of rollick along in a pleasant and unassuming way, with two very unlikely heroes, the hypochondriac storyteller and a hunchbacked accountant whose tale he tells, involved in numerous adventures, misadventures, and mock adventures. While Smith’s style is reminiscent of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, he’s looser with plot than his comic contemporaries, and the book ends up fizzling out a bit toward the end, particularly with a series of characters in disguise who never really have a reason for deception in the first place. But for a novel that seeks little more than to divert and raise a few chuckles, it does its author proud and performs its duty nobly.
