I wasn’t looking forward to reading Ancestry, because I haven’t really enjoyed either of the other books I’ve read by Simon Mawer. However, he keeps getting shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction prize, which is one of my projects, so I keep having to read him.
For this novel, Mawer has tracked down records about his own family, going back four generations on both sides, and written a novel trying to make sense of what he found. I have to say that I found this idea interesting, although Mawer still managed to fit in a reference, not to labia, which seems to be a fascination, but to female pubic hair, which is about the same.
In the first half of the 19th century, Isaac Block is growing up on the Suffolk coast as a subsistence agricultural worker. However, as a young teenager, he gets an opportunity to go to sea and takes it. Later, as a young man on leave, he meets Naomi Lulham, a single mother lodging with his Uncle Isaac.
This story is interesting, but Mawer was obviously able to find out more about the Mawer side, because he spends a lot more time on the story of George Mawer, a corporal in the Queen’s 50th regiment, who marries an Irish girl, Ann Scanlon. This story leads up to and spends a great deal of time on the Crimean War.
I found a lot of the details about these people’s lives interesting, but with all of Mawer’s novels, apparently, there is such distance from the characters that I didn’t get that involved with them, again.
What? Me Read? 
I like the idea of a book based on the author’s own family history. I still haven’t read anything by Simon Mawer, though, and if there’s always a distance from the characters I think that will probably be a problem for me too.
Yeah, I don’t like him much, and I think there are three books by him on the Walter Scott shortlists. You haven’t read any of them yet? Oh boy!
I’ve not read anything by him. I feel like his books were all over the place a few years ago, but you don’t hear quite so much about him now, although maybe it’s just the changing tastes on the blogosphere that make me think that. I always think his blurbs sound interesting, but generally speaking a few reviews are enough to make me feel he’s not for me.
I haven’t enjoyed him very much.