Falklands Revenge

The Falkland Islands are nearly 800 small islands located about 300 miles from the southern end of Argentina. The islands were uninhabited when discovered by British explorers in 1690. Various countries claimed ownership over the years, but the Brits took control again as of 1833 although the Argentinians continued to make their claim of the islands which they call the Malvinas. Today, the population is around 3,000 people. Located in the South Atlantic, the islands lie on the boundary of the subantarctic oceanic and tundra climate zones. In other words, the weather is nearly always brutal.

As Charles Evans, the author of Falklands Revenge, notes the land is good for sheep and penguins, and not much else. When I visited there a few years ago, making a one-day stop on a cruise ship, the weather was relatively mild, and I thought at the time that this particular destination should not be on anyone’s bucket list of places they should visit. The islands had some geographic importance as a naval and commercial resupply station until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 after which its importance faded and the islands were left to its few inhabitants, sheep, and of course, the penguins. Oil exploration is going on all over the South American archipelago and with that, the islands may have more value. A territorial dispute between England and Britain continued, and it erupted in 1982 when Argentina invaded and attempted to reassert its control. The war lasted from April to June when Britain kicked the Argentina invaders back to Rio.

The author was a 17-year-old member of the British Navy at the time of the Argentine invasion. Although Falklands Revenge reads like a nonfiction account of the war, it is actually Evans debut novel. It is written from the perspective of Royal Marine Sergeant Harry Glass, who was the only soldier to have survived what was essentially an assassination of four soldiers who had surrendered to the Argentine forces while on a covert mission. Glass only survived because he was trapped under the dead body of one of his colleagues. As the title suggests, this was a story of his revenge. That’s really about all I can tell you about the book. There was a basic “Dragnet” like quality to the dialogue. Although it was a war novel, the account of the action was overly detailed and I thought the story was advancing painfully slowly until I abandoned the effort at the 20% mark of the book. By then, it had simply not grabbed my interest enough to keep me involved.