A strapping adventure

Set in the Africa of the early 18th century, Blue Horizon is the latest episode in Wilbur Smith's saga about the Courtney family - merchants, soldiers of fortune, caliphs and diplomats.

The previous book, Monsoon, ended with the arrival of the brothers Tom and Dorian Courtney at the Cape of Good Hope. Now - though Tom and Dorian are still more than capable of swinging a cutlass or a fist - it's the turn of their sons, Jim and Mansur, to grow up, fall in love and hack their way to happiness through the serried ranks of the Nguni army, a squad of Dutch scoundrels led by the sinister Captain Koots, and the forces of the treacherous Zayn al-Din, usurper of the Elephant Throne of Oman.

All this is good, clean fun: a rumbustious, colourful adventure story, crammed full of incident, with corpses piled higher than Kilimanjaro, while countless hecatombs of slaughtered animals mark Jim Courtney's progress along the legendary Robbers' Road. Oddly enough, it's also marked much as dogs mark lampposts. Aware of "a rank feline stench", Jim realises that a lion has "squirted his stinking piss for the horses to smell", driving them crazy.

A little later his bushman tracker works "the masking spell for blinding an enemy" by urinating intermittently, while turning in a circle. And, finally, Manatassee, the Nguni chieftainess, urges on her warriors by sending "a powerful gush of urine" arcing towards Jim's party. Gunpowder soon settles her hash. Though, like Manatassee, all the family's enemies are dead by the end of the book, it seems unlikely that in the next episode Jim and Mansur's children will know nothing but peace.