Mercenaries - four new tales by John Fraser

Mercenaries: soldiers of fortune, conottieri, knight errants ... Soldiers have always been paid, somehow; a wage? ... or by their own practices of looting, enslavement, often taking it out on others for vengeance or pleasure, taking prisoners and ransoming - hostages. Yet people who soldier for the money

are singled out, and looked down on ... and yet, however you do it, losing, whether done for money or the cause, is never pleasant. Being a prisoner, or dead, gives no material credit whether you are a courageous, altruistic type or needy and conscripted. Now, with people's wars, mass invasions and

generalised hostilities - everyone is a soldier. At least, everybody suffers like a soldier, not all bear arms. Many are also mercenaries - have been, would like to be. They are like samurai, who cut the personal risk by doing deals with similars - momentarily, the enemy.

Mercenaries concerns attempts by mercenaries to engage more mercenaries to carry out humanitarian work. Maybe it ought to work. It should be clean. What can be accomplished, tying political aims to cash? Suppose the aims are impeccable....

The short concluding pieces, Round Heaven, Square Earth, Hope and Stop, are illustrations of how political schemes might be achieved by force of will, without the cash. All our modern realities, and their dilemmas, are treated here.

John Fraser lives near Rome. Previously, he worked in England and Canada. Of Fraser's fiction the Whitbread Award winning poet John Fuller has written: 'One of the most extraordinary publishing events of the past few years has been the rapid, indeed insistent, appearance of the novels of John Fraser. There are few parallels in literary history to this almost simultaneous and largely belated appearance of a mature œuvre, sprung like Athena from Zeus's forehead; and the novels in themselves are extraordinary. I can think of nothing much like them in fiction. Fraser maintains a masterfully ironic distance from the extreme conditions in which his characters find themselves. There are strikingly beautiful descriptions, veiled allusions to rooted traditions, unlikely events half-glimpsed, abrupted narratives, surreal but somehow apposite social customs.'