Casca 22/Mongol

The enigma of the Mongolian people's rise to power has always held a fascination for me, so the chance to read a fictional story of how this all came about was something I jumped at. This is my first Barry Sadler 'Casca' story and I was pleased at how fast the story took me along. The start has him a captive fighting as a circus-type attraction to the death in contests on the wild steppes. He is rescued by a boy who will turn out to be the great Genghis Khan in the future. Much of the struggle to gather an army and a people to a cause is detailed in this novel, and only when victories are won does it get easier to attract followers. My only quibble is that the story, having got to a point where they are on the verge of great deeds, suddenly withers and dies. Its an anticlimatic ending to a very readable tale, but it shouldn't spoil the chance to pick the book up and read it. I shall certainly seek another by this author in this series.

Every so often a story comes up which saves a series. This is one of them. The Casca series was sinking into a morass of self-indulgence and indifference until this one appeared. Its like going back to the old Cascas with a plot that holds well together (the growth of the youth who will become Genghis Khan) and Casca's tuition. The relationship between the two was reminiscent of Cascas to Glam or Jugotai. The pace of the story never slackened and you went along with it without wanting to put it down, which is what some of its immediate predecessors (and the two following it) lacked. I found it fascinating reading, especially in seeing how the writer interpreted the genesis of the Mongol Horde that eventually built the biggest empire the world ever saw.

Barry Sadler's Casca books, 22 in all of the (currently written) 26, varied in quality. Some were very good, some ordinary and a couple simply awful. Most of this was due to Sadler's name being put to the work of ghost writers so you can excuse some of the bad novels being written by people who knew nothing of the character. As for Sadler himself, most of the time he managed to write punchy stories with good amounts of action and they rarely disappointed. The Mongol was found on his PC after he died, almost completed. The last bit was finished off by a colleague (and if you look closely you can tell the difference in writing style from the rest of the novel). This was easily the best of the latter dozen of the books attributed to Sadler and concerned the early years of Genghis Khan's rise to power, guided by our eponymous hero afte rbeing rescued from a life of slavery fighting a-la Conan the Barbarian as a chained fighting dog against other slaves. The process of moulding the disparate tribes of Mongolia into a fighting force is dealt with here, as Casca and the young Temujin - who would one day become Genghis Khan - gradually built up their followers and battled against the odds and jealous warlords to fashion the unstoppable Mongol Horde that would one day cover the biggest area any empire in history achieved. The relationship between the teacher (Casca) and the student (Temujin) is of interest and you can see how the Mongol grows into a confident young warlord and eventually outgrows his teacher. The only gripe I had about this was the sudden ending and of course this is understandable as Sadler died before he could finish it. I am left wondering how he would have completed it, but that's something we can only ever guess at.

The word is that this was found on Sadler's word processor after he died. In that case its his parting shot for the series, and was one of the best of the last ten or so novels. The background to the rising star of the Mongol horde is written against treachery, survival against the odds and you can sense the vast, open plains of the steppes as you read the pages. Picking Casca up from a get together of all the tribes, the future Genghis Khan learns his trade from the Eternal Mercenary and binds together the separate tribes of the region into an unstoppable force with Casca behind him. Anyone who loves a story of building great things will enjoy this story, and its a credit to the late Barry Sadler that he could still write like this after so many had been published.

In this story Casca wanders to the Mongolian plains in the late 1100's to meet up with a young tribesman who will someday be known as Ghengis Kahn, leader of all Mongols. He takes this young kid and teaches him the skills that only someone with over a thousand years of experience could, how to fight, lead men, and wage war.The Khan character was well developed. I actually did some research on Ghengis Kahn after I got done reading this book and found Sadlers research pretty sound. He did change some of the names of the key historical figures though, but I couldn't figure out what the reason for that was.It is too bad we can't ask him. I'm sure he'd have a good reason behind it.