...a big, ambitious book guided by the same intelligence and sly prose that distinguished her portrait of [Mary] Kingsley ... Murray’s parsing of these escalating risks is superb. She has a knack for alluding to the era’s public events and concerns in a manner that lets us understand their impact and influence without her laboring over their details — an indispensable gift for a historical novelist ... [a] wise, illuminating novel.
...a novel as vigorous, audacious and unpredictable as Casement himself ... the dichotomy of valor and cowardice invests Murray’s narrative with shape and momentum ... although set a hundred years ago, [Valiant Gentlemen] denies the reader the consolation of centennial retrospection, and in so doing translates the past into a present as immediate as it is unnerving.
...learning about their mutual and divergent historical paths is one of the pleasures of Valiant Gentlemen ... That the novel can be so despairingly honest about a writer’s limitations while still be so entertaining says a lot about Murray’s considerable talent ... It as much a novel about the joys and difficulties of friendship as it is about the larger historical events that have thrown these two particular friends together and that also threaten to tear them apart.
What Murray's novel does very well is re-create the surprise and fascination of these men's lives without really needing all the information. Most particularly, it re-creates their friendship ... There are more than 30 years to cover, and the novel dashes through them, pausing only for quick reaction shots from our friends. And there are hasty cameos by late Victorian notables: Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Titanic.
In Valiant Gentlemen Murray ably narrates the shifting dynamics of colonial powers that led to World War I. The book consists of a series of vignettes rather than a narrative building toward a climax. This can bog the book down with extraneous material, but her well-drawn characters keep the novel engaging ... this book reveals an impressive breadth of research, which Murray naturally weaves into her vibrant scenes ... Murray is somehow able to translate these historical events through her characters as each forges their own understanding of the violence, brutality, and loss they experience.
Richly researched, Murray’s epic rendering of their story takes a deep-dive into the volatile era they inhabited ... The narrative here is so compelling — with its larger-than-life plot points and fascinating level of detail — that it’s easy to forgive the book’s chief failing, which is its crawling pace. Harder to overlook is the lack of emotion Murray conveys for her main characters ... But a book about friendship should, at some point, evoke that feeling, and the reader is unfortunately left feeling a bit cold here. In the end, Valiant Gentlemen seems to be more about Ward and Casement’s passions and less about the heart and soul of their bond. Still endlessly interesting, just not as emotionally affecting as it could have been.
....an engrossing novel, by turns dark and funny, incisive and tender ... Murray’s language is gorgeously devastating, succinct and muscular, hefting multiple meanings ... Murray shows perfect pitch in dialogue, along with an uncanny ability to define character, provide exposition, and develop the plot, sometimes all within the same sentence ... This reader found the earlier sections of the book more compelling than the last section. The politics of world war and the Irish rebellion are explained more sketchily than the politics of colonialism, and the story itself feels somewhat rushed. But these are quibbles. Valiant Gentlemen is a book to be savored slowly.
