Tag: England

Day 714: Rubbernecker

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Cover for RubberneckerBelinda Bauer has stepped away from the locale of her first three thrillers, set in Shipcott on the atmospheric moors of Exmoor. Rubbernecker is a departure both in locality and tone, set in Cardiff and showing a bit of humor now and then.

Patrick is a young man with Aspergers. He is not as functional as he probably could be, especially with his people skills, having apparently received no help for his condition from anyone, including his apathetic and alcoholic mother. Patrick has been obsessed since he was a small boy by the death of his father, the patient and caring parent. He doesn’t really understand what killed his father, and above all he wants to understand things. So, he is enrolled in anatomy classes at Cardiff University.

Another character we follow at the beginning of the novel is Sam, a coma patient. Sam has begun to emerge from his coma but can’t speak. However, he first awakens just in time to see a man dressed like a doctor murder the man next to him. As Sam frantically tries to communicate, he begins to fear for his own life.

At first, we don’t know how these stories connect or even their relative time frames. We wonder if we should see anything sinister in Patrick’s obsessions.

link to NetgalleyThe novel provides us a few glimpses of humor as Patrick tries to navigate the world of roommates and anatomy class teams and his peers try to understand him. The novel is well-written and involving, but I think I prefer the black aura overhanging Bauer’s earlier efforts. There is plenty of action going on in Rubbernecker, but it is lacking the atmosphere and absolute terror of the previous novels.

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Day 704: Henry VI, Part I

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Cover for Henry VI, Part 1Henry VI Part I is my book for the latest Classics Club Spin! Enjoy the review.

The only one of Shakespeare’s history plays I’ve ever read previously is Richard III, although I once saw Peter MacNicol perform Richard II in Central Park (with Martin and Charlie Sheen two rows down in the audience). Henry VI Part I is Shakespeare’s first play as well as one of his Wars of the Roses plays, of which Richard III is the last.

As a history play, Henry VI Part I is more about the events at the beginning of Henry’s reign than about Henry’s life. In fact, he is very young through much of the play and only appears occasionally. The play depicts the discord among the powerful men surrounding Henry, culminating in the Wars of the Roses (although the seeds of the discord can be traced back earlier, to when Henry of Bolingbroke (later Henry IV) deposed Richard II). Henry IV and Henry V, in their turns, have held the country together, but Henry V’s young son shows no such ability. Although Shakespeare himself (and many historians) seems to be disposed toward the Yorkists, it is clear by the end of the play that the Lancastrians will prevail during Henry’s reign.

Painting of scene
The choosing of red and white roses, a scene from the play

The other main event of the play is the war in France. I should not have been surprised to find Joan of Arc (referred to in the play as Jean La Pucelle) the villain of this plot, since the English burned her, but it was a shock nonetheless. The gallant Lord Talbot is the hero, while Jean fights with the aids of demons.

The play is not as dramatic as some others, but it has its moments. I thought it was most interesting as showing the Tudor view of this great series of conflicts.

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Day 702: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

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Cover for Dead WakeIn Dead Wake, Erik Larson has written another fascinating history—the story of the last voyage of the Lusitania. As he sometimes does, Larson goes after the story with a two-pronged approach: on the one hand following preparations for the voyage and the actual trip, on the other hand following the progress of the U-20, the German U-boat that sank it. In this book, the story has a third, weaker prong—the romance of President Woodrow Wilson with Edith Bolling Galt, who would become his second wife.

Even though everyone reading the book knows what will happen to the Lusitania, a passenger ship en route to England from the United States during World War I, Larson manages to create a fair amount of suspense. He tells us about a number of the passengers, and we want to know who survives, of course. I think this ability of Larson’s to create suspense even from a story where we know the outcome is quite a talent.

Aside from learning about the ship, the voyage, and the results of the attack, we also learn about things that are more surprising. In particular, Larson leads us to wonder whether the British admiralty was incompetent or whether the hope that some event like this would force the Americans into the war made them negligent. There were several actions the admiralty could have taken to keep the ship safer.

I recently read an article about the man who bought the wreckage of the Lusitania, who believes that the ship secretly carried armament meant for England. It is true that there was an unexplained second explosion after the U-boat’s torpedo hit the ship, but if the theory turns out to be correct, that makes the British admiralty’s conduct even more perplexing.

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Day 701: The Ringed Castle

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Cover for The Ringed CastleBest Book of the Week!
In this fifth book of the Lymond Chronicles, Francis Crawford of Lymond goes on a journey to an uncivilized land. He has already traveled and battled his way over Europe, North Africa, and Asia Minor, but this time he takes his small band of mercenaries to Russia. In an attempt to avoid the consequences he fears from a prophecy by the Dame of Doubtance, he feels he must stay away from his home in Scotland. So, he decides to go to Russia and offer to fight for Ivan IV (Ivan the Terrible) against the Ottoman Turks.

With Lymond and his mercenaries goes the mysterious Guzel, a beautiful, cultured former mistress of the Ottoman admiral Dragut Rais. She wants to make Lymond a powerful ruler. Lymond sees Russia as an undeveloped country full of opportunity for an intelligent leader, a place that will allow him the scope to create something great. Since Russia has no modern army in the sense of those of 16th century France and England, he offers to build one for the tsar.

Lymond’s struggles to work with the erratic tsar are complicated by his relationship with Dmitri Vishnevetsky, or Baida, the volatile Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks and a man of legend who has pledged his help to the tsar. Baida sees Lymond as a possible companion but also as a threat to his own power, and he desires Guzel for himself.

Back in England, Philippa Somerville has made a debut at the court of Mary Tudor that is surprising to even her mother, because her sojourn in the sultan’s harem has changed her from a scruffy teenager to a beautiful, polished, and sophisticated young woman. The treacherous Margaret Lennox and the queen’s sister Lady Elizabeth seem to be interested in involving her in their various schemes, but Philippa is tactful and cautious.

This novel, like the others, involves plenty of political maneuvering, adventure, danger, and battles, but also features winter sledge races and the burning of Moscow. Lymond, as usual, is arrogant, frightfully intelligent, and always ready with a blistering comment. Still, we find him irresistible. I cannot tell more for fear of spoilers, but if you decide to read this series, you will not regret it.

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Day 699: Rustication

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Cover for RusticationBest Book of the Week!
I was captured by this dark, twisty novel from the moment I started reading it. I only feared it may eventually disappoint, but it does not.

In winter 1863, Richard Shenstone, 17, appears without warning at his mother’s new home, a large dilapidated house on the southern coast of England. He has been rusticated, sent down from Cambridge for reasons not immediately explained.

Having received word of his father’s death too late for the funeral, he is surprised to find his mother and sister living in apparent poverty. Furthermore, although he doesn’t at first tell them he’s been sent down, his arrival is met by a surprising lack of welcome, indeed hostility on the part of his sister Effie.

There is some mystery about his father’s death, that is clear. His father’s pension has been denied to the family, and Richard’s mother is suing for her father’s estate as well. Effie is also up to something, for he twice sees her out accompanied only by a tall man, not proper behavior for a lady.

Richard is not a pleasant person, obsessed as he is by desire for every girl or young woman he meets and also addicted to opium. The novel is told as excerpts from his journal, interrupted by copies of a series of hateful letters that soon begin arriving at the homes of various people in the district. It is also clear from the beginning that some crime has been committed and the journal is a look back into the past. It is not clear to readers, however, how reliable a narrator Richard is or what’s going on when he roams the countryside at night in his opiated state. Soon the letter writer begins leaving corpses of mutilated sheep behind him.

This novel is atmospheric in the extreme and completely absorbing. As Richard begins trying to figure out who the letter writer is, he finds the finger pointed toward himself. He takes unwarranted leaps of logic that cause him to make many mistakes and ignores some clues that he has. Still, exasperating and unlikable as the main character is, you are urged along to the end of the novel.

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Day 694: The Paying Guests

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Cover for The Paying GuestsSarah Waters builds on some of her themes from Affinity in the post-World War I novel The Paying Guests. Frances Wray lives with her mother in the family home, a large house that is getting a little seedy. Since the death of Frances’ father, they have had to dispense with servants, and Frances does all the housework herself. Now they have been forced to take in “paying guests,” giving up most of the top floor of their house to be their lodgers’ apartment. The lodgers are a young couple, Leonard and Lilian Barber.

Frances did not see her life like this. Not so long ago, she was in love with a friend, Christina, and they planned to make a home for themselves. But after the death of her father, Frances discovered he had lost all his money, leaving her mother nearly destitute, and she decided to stay to help her mother. Now she feels as if Christina and her new friend Stevie are leading the life she and Christina planned.

Class is an important issue in this novel and comes up constantly. Frances and Mrs. Wray feel they’ve been deceived when they take stock of their new guests, who are considerably less genteel than they thought. Frances often refers to them as being in the clerk class, but Lilian’s family is considerably more common. On the other end of the class scale, Frances has to wait to do her housework when her mother is out, because it appalls her so to see her daughter doing physical work. Her mother herself does none.

Different classes or not, Frances and Lilian tentatively develop a friendship. Soon, though, their relationship becomes a love affair. Frances wants them to run away to lead their own lives, but Lilian thinks she is fantasizing. Soon, their plans put them into peril.

This novel creates a fully realized time and place, with reference to many of Britain’s post-war issues. Unemployed soldiers on the streets are a problem as well as a growing sense of a less-ordered society.

I found Frances to be an interesting character but was less interested in Lilian, who seems more formless. I found the story compelling, though, wondering how the women would get through a difficult situation.

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Day 690: Wylding Hall

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Cover for Wylding HallElizabeth Hand’s earlier novel Mortal Love showed she was interested in a connection between inspiration and folklore. Wylding Hall is also an unusual exploration of this theme.

The novel is told as a series of possible interviews, maybe for a documentary, about a 70’s folk group called Windhollow Faire. The group released two albums, but a mystery surrounds the second one, which 20 years later has been re-released as a smashing success.

The novel is narrated by the band members, their manager, and a couple of other people who visited the band during the fateful summer the album was recorded. The band’s manager Tom Haring sets off the action of the novel by renting an old Tudor mansion in a remote rural area for the band to live and work in during the summer. Part of the house has been restored but the rest of it is a rambling wreck. The band works but in a party atmosphere of drugs and booze.

The novel builds up some suspense with the hints of something unusual happening that summer involving Julian Blake, the band’s lead singer and songwriter. He is the only member of the band who is not heard from in the novel. The house is described in a way that is both beautiful and creepy, featuring an old library that cannot always be located and is full of feathers. The local inn also features some folklore and is named after an old song about killing wrens on St. Stephen’s Day.

link to NetgalleyThe locals warn the band members away from the woods around the house, and their superstitious comments add to the hints of darkness in the book. For a short novel in which little actually happens, it creates quite a mood of creepiness.

My only criticism is that most of the band members blurred together for me, because I couldn’t keep them straight. A couple stand out, but most of them are too undefined to be successful characters.

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Day 687: Someone At a Distance

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Cover for Someone at a DistanceBest Book of the Week!
I would normally not give away something important that happens well into a novel, but the book blurb openly presents it as the novel’s central conflict. The Norths are an affectionate and happy family with little to discontent them in post-World War I England. Avery enjoys his work as a partner in a publishing firm and is a loving husband and father. He dotes on his daughter Anne especially. Ellen loves her family and her garden. Although she perhaps does too much for her family, she enjoys it. Hugh is serving his term in the army but can’t wait to get out and work at his father’s firm. Fifteen-year-old Anne loves her family and especially her horse.

The only small annoyance in the family’s life is Avery’s mother, who is critical and discontented, wanting more attention than the busy family can provide. But she soon solves her own problem by hiring a companion, a French girl named Louise Lanier.

Louise is a selfish and discontented young woman who is fleeing the end of an affair in which she was felt to be socially inferior to her lover and unworthy of marrying him. Eventually, she sets her sights on Avery, heedless of any destruction she may wreak with her harmful intentions and toxic personality.

I spent the first half of this novel entranced by this perceptive and layered novel and the last third in tears. The characters are wonderfully realized. Perhaps Louise’s character lacks a little nuance, but we have all met people who are able to justify their own bad behavior to themselves. This is a great book that should have had more attention since it was written in the 1930’s.

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Day 675: Amsterdam

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Cover for AmsterdamThe Booker Prize people liked Amsterdam a bit more than I did. Although the shattering last page of McEwan’s Atonement absolutely upended that novel, the same technique did not work as well for this one. Perhaps the problem lies with my having seen McEwan do this several times already.

The novel begins with the death of Molly Lane. Two old friends, both former lovers of Molly, meet at the funeral. Clive Linley is a world-famous composer, and Vernon Halliday is an editor trying to save a floundering newspaper. At the funeral is another of Molly’s former lovers, foreign secretary Julian Garmony, a right-wing bigot whom both men dislike. They all pay stiff respects to Molly’s possessive husband George.

The brush with mortality makes both Clive and Vernon a tad hypochondriac, and they end up exchanging a pledge. But various stresses will soon interfere with their friendship. Clive is struggling to complete what he thinks will be his masterpiece in time for a performance in Amsterdam. And George has offered to sell Vernon some compromising photos of Julian that he found in Molly’s papers. Vernon has to decide whether publication of these photos will result in increased sales or backlash.

This novel is darkly humorous. None of these men is a sterling individual. In fact, they are all morally bankrupt. Clive seems the least at fault for quite some time, but then he does something unforgivable and justifies it as being for his art.

It’s difficult to explain my main criticism without revealing the ending. I can only say that the implications of the final page do not make sense, that there is no way that the character could have known how things would work out. So, I do not think the surprise ending works as well in this case as in other McEwan novels.

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Day 673: The Illuminator

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Cover for The IlluminatorIt is the 14th century, and Lady Kathryn finds herself in a precarious position. She is a widow and owner of Blackingham Manor, the mother of 15-year-old twin sons. The church has been incessant in its demands for tithes, and there are also the king’s taxes. She suspects her overseer of being dishonest, and he is certainly disrespectful, but she has no one who could replace him.

When Father Ignatius makes yet another demand of her, she has nothing to give him but her mother’s pearls. Still, the church could make trouble for her, so she gives them up. Later Brother Joseph arrives with a message from the Abbott. If Lady Kathryn will house an illuminator who is working for the abbey, along with his daughter, the abbey will let up on its demands for tithes. For the price of food, Kathryn thinks this is a bargain.

Soon the artist Finn arrives, along with his beautiful daughter Rose. Lady Kathryn is immediately worried about her son Alfred, who likes to dally with the serving maids. Finn’s arrival is made more chaotic because of the news that Father Ignatius was murdered. Although this happened after he left her house, Kathryn doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, so she lies to the sheriff, Sir Guy, and tells him she hasn’t seen the Father recently. This of course turns out to be a lie she regrets.

Sir Guy, being the rapacious type, has his eye on Lady Kathryn and her estate, which is her own and does not go to her son. But Kathryn and Finn are soon drawn to each other. To get Alfred away from Rose, Kathryn asks him to supervise the overseer. Soon involved with Finn herself, she does not notice the depth of Rose’s friendship with Colin, the younger twin.

Other important characters in the novel are Half-Tom, a dwarf who befriends Finn, and the anchorite Julian of Norwich, a real woman famous for her writings about religion, reflecting unusual views.

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. Overall, my impression could be summed up as meh. At first I was worried that it was going to be a historical romance, which I usually do not enjoy, but it was not. It shows a solid grounding in the time period, with convincing detail. I think I was turned off by the depiction of the church. This was a violent time in history, and the Catholic Church was in a period of corruption, but I don’t think that is a good reason for depicting every representative of the church (except Julian of Norwich) as a cartoonish villain. It is clear that the author’s sympathies lay with the Reformation, but that movement had its own abuses. In fact, in the 14th century, it is doubtful that many people in England would have even envisioned a Reformation. Martin Luther didn’t put up his theses until 1517.

I think that my biggest problem with the novel is that only a few characters were at all developed. The others were simply villains. I also had problems with the situations created in the novel simply by both Kathryn’s sons departing without notice. Alfred pulls a nasty trick on Finn before leaving—one that endanger’s Finn’s life and leaves Kathryn open to blackmail. Both sons behave like spoiled adolescents instead of the young men they would have been considered at the time, and Kathryn makes several poor or dishonest decisions regarding them.

There is also a theme of Kathryn’s changing religious beliefs, but I found this decision sudden and unlikely. I would have liked to see more about Finn’s art, but there was very little.

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