Britannia's Wolf

The Dawlish Chronicles: September 1877-February 1878

By: Antoine Vanner

Narrated by: David Doersch

In 1877, the Russo-Turkish War is reaching its climax. A Russian victory will pose a threat for Britain's strategic interests.

To protect those interests, an ambitious British naval officer, Nicholas Dawlish, is assigned to the Ottoman Navy to ravage Russian supply lines in the Black Sea. In the depths of a savage winter, as Turkish forces face defeat on all fronts, Dawlish confronts enemy ironclads, Cossack lances, and merciless Kurdish irregulars and finds himself a pawn in the rivalry of the Sultan's half brothers for control of the collapsing empire.

And in the midst of this chaos, unwillingly and unexpectedly, Dawlish finds himself drawn to a woman whom he believes he should not love. Not for his own sake, and not for hers....

Britannia's Wolf introduces a naval hero who is more familiar with steam, breechloaders, and torpedoes than with sails, carronades, and broadsides. As a boy Dawlish joined a Royal Navy still commanded by veterans of Trafalgar, but he will help forge the Dreadnought navy of Jutland and the Great War. Further books will accompany Dawlish on that voyage into the future....

The Dawlish Chronicles series, which commences with Britannia's Wolf, is in the great tradition of the Napoleonic-era naval fiction of Forester, Kent, O'Brian, and Pope but is set in the late 19th century, as Britain's empire approached its apogee. In this period old enemies were still threats, new players were joining the ranks of the Great Powers, and the potential for local conflict to escalate into general war - even world war - was never absent. Britain's ability to project force rapidly and decisively on a global scale was assured by a Royal Navy that was in transition as new technologies emerged at an unprecedented rate. But force alone was often inappropriate, and conflicts often had to be resolved by guile and by proxy. It is in this world of change and uncertainty that Nicholas Dawlish, always resourceful, sometimes ruthless, occasionally self-doubting, must contend for the advancement and happiness he hungers for.

©2013 Antoine Vanner (P)2015 Antoine Vanner

Interesting technology, stock characters

This is the first book of the Dawlish chronicles of which three exist though clearly from numerous flashbacks the author has carved out space for many prequels -- as happened with the Hornblower saga though Forester came slowly to the idea of back-filling the origins of his main character. There is so much of this that I had to check to see if I was reading the series out of order and it annoyed me from the get go. This is typical British naval genre with the twist that it involves ironclads. How cool is that. I only know of the Hazard saga by Stuart that takes place in Crimea that compares. Unfortunately there is very little description of life and battle aboard 19th C. ironclads in this book as most of the action takes place on land. The Turkish leaders are stereo typically mendacious but we are supposed to like the commoners. I couldn't tell them apart in this book. Vanner seems to be copying Forester in making his protagonist a tortured idealist forced to accept social pressure to reject the commoner he loves. The love angle is perhaps the most tedious part of the story. As for narration, Doersch is merely competent . The American accent jars against his "British" voiced characters and it sounds like an American doing stock impersonations of Brits. The results are often over the top and the voice of Dawlish is particularly awful. A better matched narrator would have greatly improved this book, but still not completely rehabilitated it. The fact of the matter is this was an uneventful period in terms of naval history. Vanner would have done better to have started with his prequels.