Zulu Hart by Saul David Hodder & Stoughton HK$185
Africa has proved fertile ground for novelists, from Rider Haggard (King Soloman's Mines) to John Gordon-Davis (Hold My Hand I'm Dying) to Wilbur Smith (almost his entire canon).
Fresh to the fictional scene is Saul David, a historian who has written extensively about Victorian times. Zulu Hart is the first of a trio of novels about the eponymous George H, who - mildly stigmatised by his illegitimacy and mixed parentage - sets out to seek his fortune, the precise amount of which has been set out on paper by his absent and unknown father.
The action takes place in the 1870s, and part of the deal is ?0,000 promised Hart should he win a Victoria Cross, the British military's highest award for bravery. So it is an especially doltish reader who can't work out that Hart is going to end up at Rorke's Drift in South Africa, the site of a bloody battle between Briton and Zulu marked by the award of no fewer than 11 VCs in what was widely supposed to be a cover-up for the disastrous defeat at the Battle of Isandlwana only a few hours previously.
David, at the end of the book, acknowledges his debt to George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series, as well as his editor who helped to transform a 'pig's ear of an early manuscript'. The result is some way short of a silk purse, for the simple reason that a good historian doesn't necessarily make the transition to fiction so easily.
First-time novelists are usually advised to write about what they know - no problem here, David being a mine of information on the era and its events, weaving real personalities and incidents into the text. Hart's father, for instance, is based on a Victorian military man with a penchant for actresses and who sired three illegitimate sons.