A review by brynhammond
The Horsemen by Joseph Kessel, Patrick O'Brian

4.0

I have strong reservations. If I remember rightly I did as a young teenager when I first read and loved this; I wondered then whether I was adult enough, but I'm adult now and I still can't follow him through much of the second half of the plot. At times I thought this was plain bad. Yet the magic was there for me again, with a revisit: the evocation, heightened by a lovely old-fashioned translation from Patrick O'Brian; an inclination for perverse psychology, that just became a bit laboured later on. Tursen and his son Uroz are not people to like; Uroz is fairly insane, in ugly ways; they are eaten up by 'the fiend of pride' and neither can for the life of him display emotion. Nevertheless I threw myself into Uroz, back then, and my eyes wet for Tursen, now.

One note. Whatever the position of women was in 50s Afghanistan (I wouldn't know) I detect that the author adds his own sexism. It comes with a caution that way.