After Tolstoy, Jesus and Hitler, AN Wilson’s latest subject is Captain Cook, seen through the lightly novelised eyes of Georg Forster, the Polish-born German botanist who tagged along on Cook’s Pacific voyages. Forster’s tales of clap, constipation and cannibalism alternate with the miseries of his life on dry land after Cook’s killing by Hawaiians in 1779. Wilson’s library card has evidently taken a beating, but it’s not obvious how much value he’s added to his sources. Historical fiction’s old fall-back of focusing on sex for drama yields dubious results: when Georg finds solace from marital discord in the arms of a “rubber-nippled, conversational, aesthetic, intuitive, good, generous-thighed woman”, it seems as if Wilson, too, is in the grip of the “onanistic miasma” aboard Cook’s ship. Walk-ons by Goethe and others make fun 18th-century star-spotting, but Resolution would probably have been better off as straight history.
Resolution is published by Atlantic (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99
