The Reavers. George Fraser MacDonald

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       Foreword

      This book is nonsense. It’s meant to be. If I were a “serious” writer, which I’m not (I have the word of an eminent critic for this, and I know he meant it as a compliment, because he put the word in quotes) I might describe it as an octogenarian’s rebuke to a generation which seems to have forgotten fun and become obsessed with misery, disaster, illness, operations, violence, climate change, guilt, obesity, cookery, football, racism, politics, and a general sense of doom. But not being serious as the literary world understands the term, I can offer no such pretentious excuse. The Reavers is simply G.M.F. taking off on what a learned judge would call a frolic of his own.

      It began with a novel I wrote fourteen years ago, The Candlemass Road, an Elizabethan swashbuckler set on the Anglo-Scottish border. That in turn had its origin in a play written much earlier; it was never produced, so I used its plot for Candlemass, which was kindly received by readers and critics, being full of bloodshed, brutality, treachery, and betrayal. By one of those ironies of the writing business, I was then able to turn it back into a play, for BBC Radio.

      So much for Candlemass, a plain enough tale, but since I can never resist comic experiment, and the wilder the better, I found myself considering a different approach, first imagining and then inevitably writing The Reavers as a fantasy in the style of another book of mine, The Pyrates. Both are eccentric, as advertised by the fanciful archaic spelling of their titles; both are completely over the top, written for the fun of it. In that spirit I offer The Reavers, with gratitude to the happy band of Pyrates-lovers and any others of like mind, now that sufficient time has elapsed for the original Candlemass Road to slip quietly into the shadows of bygone fiction.

      G.M.F.