Tag: England

Day 187: A Perfect Spy

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for A Perfect SpyWhen I was younger, I used to confuse John le Carré and Ken Follett, but last year I went to see the excellent movie Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. After that, I began reading le Carré again (my review of the novel is here) and have realized that he is the real spellbinder.

Although le Carré writes about espionage, these are not your typical James Bond novels. Le Carré is interested in the moral ambiguity of the work and in psychological drama rather than action. Nevertheless, his novels are extremely suspenseful.

At the beginning of A Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym has escaped his bosses in the British government and the Americans who are investigating him and has arrived at his secret rooms in a small British seaside town to write his novel, he says. As the British search for him feverishly and his boss Jack Brotherhood reluctantly begins to wonder if he is the traitor the Americans claim, Pym writes the sad story of his life.

Pym’s father has recently died, and Pym feels himself finally free to be himself, but perhaps even Pym doesn’t know who he is. His story begins with his charismatic father–a man who is beloved by many but who is also a liar, a cheat, a con man, and a thief. Pym learns to lie and pretend everything is fine from a master, and he goes on pretending for his entire life. But Pym’s motivating force, unlike his father’s, is never money. It is love. He will be anyone and do anything to make people love him.

Is Pym a traitor or isn’t he? As his boss and his wife frantically try to find him, Pym recalls the circumstances and tangled events that lead him to where he is in the present time, alone in his rooms contemplating the next step.

It is difficult to convey, without giving much away, just how compelling this novel is. Le Carré’s genius is that he can make you care for this deeply flawed character and keep you riveted by his story. A Perfect Spy is said to be the most autobiographical of le Carré’s books. It is certainly an involving novel.

Day 186: The Red House

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Red HouseI really enjoyed Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, so I was looking forward to reading The Red House. Curious Incident employs unusual narrative techniques, such as including math games, to try to re-create the thought processes of an autistic teen. The Red House also plays with narration, only not as effectively.

After being estranged for years, siblings Angela and Richard have met again at their mother’s funeral. In an impulsive attempt to restore ties with his sister, Richard rents a holiday house in Herefordshire and invites the other family to join his for a week. Richard’s family consists of his second wife Louise and her teenage daughter Melissa. Accompanying Angela are her husband Dominic and their children Benjy, Alex, and Daisy.

Each of the characters is dealing with issues. Angela had a miscarriage 18 years ago, and she has dwelled on this lost child ever since, naming her Karen and neglecting her teenage daughter Daisy as a result of this obsession. Dominic is having an affair. Daisy has become very religious and fights with Angela about it. Teenage Alex is yearning to have sex with Melissa. Richard is dreading a possible lawsuit from a patient. Louise barely knows the other family and is having problems with Richard. Melissa is awaiting the time when her parents learn that bullying by her group of friends has caused another girl to attempt suicide. Only young Benjy does not seem to have some sort of obsession.

The book jumps among the narrations of all eight characters. The voices are not always so distinct that you can immediately tell them apart. The one that is distinct is expressed as disjointed lists of things, but it is difficult to attach to anyone. For awhile I thought it might be that of the dead daughter and later I thought it may be Angela having a nervous breakdown. Most often, to figure out who the narrator was, I had to relate the narration to something that was already going on. One technique Haddon uses is to interject part of what each person is reading, which at first helps you know which person it is, but after awhile becomes tedious.

Virtually plotless, this dour novel consists of the characters struggling with their own thoughts and with each other. Generally, I disliked most of the characters and thought the novel was a frustrating reading experience.

Day 177: Below Stairs

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

Cover for Below StairsThis is actually my posting from yesterday. We were having some internet problems.

Below Stairs is the memoir of a kitchen maid that inspired the series Upstairs, Downstairs. Margaret Powell worked in service in the 1920’s from the age of 15 until her marriage. She was an intelligent girl who could have been a teacher, but her parents couldn’t afford to support her while she qualified, so she left school and began working at 13. Later, after her sons were grown, she went back to school and passed her 0-levels at the age of 58, followed by her A-levels.

Powell began as a kitchen maid and worked her way up to cook, mostly through ambition and nerve because she never really received any cooking training. (You had to feel sorry for the first employer who hired her as a cook, because she admits she only knew how to cook vegetables!) Her memoir describes the conditions the servants worked and lived in, sometimes very bad; the work she had to do, including ironing shoe laces in one position; and the way she resented how servants were treated by many of her employers. Although Powell wanted to become a cook, as it was the most privileged job available to her, her biggest ambition was to be married so that she could leave the life of servitude.

The memoir is written in a conversational style, including quite a bit of scathing commentary. It is an interesting book, although Powell’s memories are mostly negative. She says that she had fun, but she only slightly mentions any amusements, focusing on the numerous snubs she received and the ridiculous things she was expected to do. Of course, this adds to the interest of the narrative. One employer was actually even a bit miffed at Powell’s own name (Margaret Langley at the time), deeming it too “posh” for a servant. Although the memoir is written at least 40 years after Powell worked in service, the experience still obviously rankles.

Day 173: David Copperfield

~ whatmeread ~ 1 Comment

Cover for David CopperfieldBest Book of the Week!

I believe that David Copperfield was the very first book I ever received as a young girl that was not a children’s book. My dad brought it home for me one day when I was sick (beginning my collection of Modern Classics back when they were hardcover), and it transported me to another world.

People have differing opinions about which Charles Dickens book is best. For example, author Nick Hornby blogged that Great Expectations was one of the greatest books ever written. I myself have never fallen under the spell of Great Expectations, though. David Copperfield is my favorite. Tolstoy thought Dickens was the best of all English novelists and considered this book Dickens’s finest work.

David is the narrator of his own story, and he begins it on the night of his birth. David is a posthumous baby, and the novel begins with the first appearance of Aunt Betsey Trotwood, who comes to greet the appearance of her niece and terrifies David’s gentle, foolish mother. When David turns out to be a boy, Aunt Trotwood is mightily offended and departs.

Although David’s early childhood is idyllic, worshipped as he is by his mother and Peggoty the maid, it soon takes a turn for the worse. David’s mother is courted and won by the stern, apparently upright (and ultimately cruel and hypocritical) Mr. Murdstone, and the house is taken over by his cold and fault-finding sister Jane. David is a true innocent with only good intentions, but at every turn he is found to be in the wrong. He is soon shipped off to a typically horrible (if you know Dickens) boarding school.

After a bit of a rocky start, David finds himself made a pet of the popular Steerforth and also befriends Tommy Traddles. However, his mediocre education is interrupted when his mother and baby brother die. Mr. Murdstone sends him to London to lodge with the feckless Micawber family and work in a factory. When the well-meaning but impecunious Micawber is sent to debtor’s prison, David tires of his degrading life and runs off to find the only family he has left, Aunt Betsey Trotwood.

Although Aunt Trotwood is still disappointed that he isn’t a girl, she is kind, and from here, David’s life improves. The story continues with his education, marriage, and young adulthood. It is loaded with some of Dickens’s most delightful characters and a few villainous ones. Alternately turning from comedy to pathos, Dickens expertly drives the story along.

I believe one reason I find David Copperfield so touching is that David’s early life is taken from Dickens’s own. Dickens’s father was sent to debtor’s prison and Dickens went to work in a factory at an early age. This connection translates into a moving experience for the reader.

When innocent and loving David is punished by his stepfather because he is so terrified he can’t recite his lessons or when he is sent off to work in a factory, who remains untouched? When Barkis is willin’ or Mr. Micawber appears on the scene, who doesn’t laugh out loud? When steadfast and valiant Ham dies trying to rescue his rival, who isn’t tearful? When the slimy Uriah Heep finally gets his comeuppance, who isn’t delighted?

If you are not used to reading Victorian literature, you may find the writing old-fashioned, but you will almost certainly be carried along by the story.

Day 169: The Distant Hours

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The Distant HoursKate Morton has been one my favorite authors ever since I read The Forgotten Garden, which is still my favorite of her books. The Distant Hours is another of Morton’s atmospheric novels about family secrets.

When a letter posted in 1941 finally reaches its destination in 1992, Edie Burchill is surprised at the emotional reaction of her usually cool mother. She finds out for the first time that her mother was an evacuee during World War II at the home of Raymond Blythe, the author of Edie’s favorite childhood book, The True History of the Mud Man.

Later, after Edie has been asked to write an introduction for a reprint of Blythe’s classic, she gets lost meeting a potential author and accidentally finds Milderhurst Castle, the once stately but now crumbling home of the Blythes. Living there are the Blythe sisters, Percy, Saffy, and the invalid Juniper. In a way, too, the house is still occupied by the memory of their overbearing father.

The novel alternates between the present time and 1941, as we discover what happened during one night in 1941 that has haunted the family ever since. Morton is deft at creating a compelling atmosphere in the moldering castle and in keeping her readers in suspense.

Morton’s latest book, The Secret Keeper, is due out in October. I can’t wait to get my copy!

Day 162: Religion and the Decline of Magic

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Religion and the Decline of MagicKeith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, first published in 1971, is not for the faint-hearted. Thomas is a British historian, and this book is considered an important work because of its then revolutionary combination of research in the fields of history and anthropology.

With that kind of background, you might expect the book to be academic in writing style. It is not, but in fact is actually very accessible and well written. I say it is not for the faint-hearted because of its length and the numerous examples of every point, expected for an academic text but a little rough on the casual reader. These examples are mostly interesting; it is the number of them illustrating every point that threatens to become tedious. The book is 800-900 pages long, depending upon the edition, and nearly half of it is devoted to notes, additional explanations, and references. And truth be told, I was reading the electronic version so could not judge my progress, but it felt like I was reading a lot more than, say, 500 pages. (I did not read the back matter.)

Thomas concentrates upon the history of magic in England from roughly 1500 to 1700, tracing the changes in how the different types of “magic” are viewed and treated by the common people, the judicial and governmental authorities, and the religious ones. His definition of magic is rather broad, including alchemy–which at the time was considered a science and is now generally regarded as the forerunner to modern science–and astrology–which again was considered a science at the time. I believe his inclusion of these disciplines was because at some time they were also considered magic, at least by the church.

Thomas shows that the Catholic church actually encouraged a belief in magic in some ways–linking the connection between prayer and incantations, for example, and fostering a belief in the efficacy of exorcism–consciously building on pagan beliefs to encourage conversion just as it did when it adopted a slew of pagan holidays and modified them to its own purposes.

The ways in which religious leaders and common folk viewed magic, then, changed radically with the Protestant Reformation. Protestant clerics were actually less likely to, for example, attempt to prosecute witches even though the laws defining witchcraft and the penalties against it were prone to fluctuate between more strict or more lenient over time. On the other hand, prosecutions of witches that originated with demands by the common people–who initially were not inclined to fear witchcraft but had to be taught to do it–became more common and more hysterical as the Protestants increased their preaching against it.

Thomas’s premise is that the ultimate decline in witchcraft as a concern of the public and the powers of justice was a result of the Enlightenment–the increasing number of truly scientific studies and the assumption that everything can be understood in terms of science–and ultimately the increase in technology that eventually became the industrial revolution.

This book can be an absorbing study for those who are interested in the subject. I made a good-faith effort to finish it but found that I eventually was unable to cope with the myriad of examples of every point. I skipped maybe 50-100 pages to the conclusions, but when I found the same technique employed there too, I finally gave myself permission to quit. I found the writing style interesting and even dryly witty, but overall the intent of the work was too scholarly for my total enjoyment as a more casual reader.

Day 151: Moonfleet

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for MoonfleetMoonfleet is a boy’s adventure story similar to Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Written by J. Meade Falkner in 1898, it was very popular for many years. I had actually never heard of it but picked it up out of curiosity a couple of years ago.

John Trenchard is an orphan boy who lives with his aunt in the small village of Moonfleet in the south of England in 1757. The village has been dominated by the Mohune family for centuries. There is a legend that Colonel John “Blackbeard” Mohune stole a diamond from King Charles I and that his ghost roams the crypts looking for it.

One day John hears noises from Mohune’s crypt, and when he goes to investigate, finds the landlord of the local inn, Elzevir Block, and Mr. Ratsey, the sexton, who say they are looking for damage from a storm. John assumes they are looking for Blackbeard’s ghost. He finds his way into the crypt through a large sinkhole and gets inadvertantly trapped there overnight. While he is trapped there, he overhears enough to realize that Block and Ratsey are actually smugglers.

John’s aunt assumes he has been up to no good when he doesn’t come back for the night, so she throws him out of the house. Fortunately, Block takes him in. But when Block’s lease expires, the lease goes up for auction and is purchased by Maskew, the unpopular local magistrate. Before Block leaves the area, John accompanies him on one last smuggling venture, during which Maskew, who has lain in wait for the smugglers with the excisemen, is accidentally shot by the excisemen. John is wounded and is falsely accused in absentia of murdering Maskew, so he must flee to the continent.

The rest of John’s adventures include diamond hunting, being imprisoned for theft when he is cheated by an avaricious diamond merchant, working as a galley slave, and shipwreck. Moonfleet is an exciting book with a gripping story line that is still popular with children.

Day 141: Shadow of Night

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Shadow of NightAs with most second books of a trilogy, Shadow of Night is transitional and therefore harder to describe than the first book.

At the end of the A Discovery of Witches, the first book of Deborah Harkness’s “All Souls Trilogy,” Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and nonpracticing witch, and her husband Matthew Clairmont, a geneticist and vampire, were forced to flee because a union between a witch and a vampire is forbidden. Using Diana’s newly discovered time-travel skills, they have arrived in Elizabethan England so that Diana can find a witch to help her learn her powers. Even more importantly, they want to look for Ashmole 782, an enchanted manuscript that Matthew believes may hold the secret to the existence of witches, vampires, and daemons. This decision proves potentially hazardous, though, as the age they’ve chosen is one of persecution of witches and Diana has a tendency to draw attention to herself.

In Tudor England Matthew of the past is part of an intellectual group called the School of Night, the members of which include Sir Walter Raleigh and Kit Marlowe. Kit is a deeply disturbed daemon who is insanely jealous of Diana. Another hazard is that Matthew’s acquaintances may realize he is not the same person as the person from the past. In the meantime, both Diana and Matthew’s friends and enemies back in the present time watch for clues to their existence in the past.

Although this novel is a great sequel that propels you to the next book, it has the typical middle book problem of furthering the plot without arriving anywhere. Strictly because of personal taste, I could also have done without some of the heavy romantic passages, although other readers will like them. Nevertheless, I am extremely interested to see how Diana and Matthew will resolve all their problems in the final book.

Day 137: Little Face

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for Little FaceIn Sophie Hannah’s complex thriller Little Face, Alice Fancourt leaves her infant daughter with her husband for a few hours and returns to find, she says, another baby in her place. Her husband David tells Detective Simon Waterhouse that the baby is theirs and insists his wife is crazy. David’s overbearing mother Vivienne is not so sure, but she treats Alice like she is the infant. The cops, for the most part, agree with David.

But Waterhouse is inclined to believe Alice and finds what he thinks is a very good reason to look into it further. David’s first wife was murdered. He thinks the key to the possible kidnapping may be in the first wife’s death.

Simon’s boss Detective Sergeant Charlie Zailer thinks Alice is losing her mind and refuses to let Simon investigate. She also thinks Simon is too protective of Alice and may also be inappropriately attracted to her. To add to the confusion, Simon and Charlie are navigating their own minefield of Charlie’s infatuation with Simon. But suddenly, both Alice and the baby disappear.

Sophie Hannah is a master of the psychological thriller, and Little Face is no exception. Her plots are carefully constructed, and Hannah employs her usual technique of alternating the point of view between characters. Sometimes I think that all the characters in Hannah’s books, including the detectives, are insane, but somehow this just adds to the atmosphere and the fun. You can bet with Hannah that the ending will be thrilling.

Day 136: The Séance

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

Cover for The SeanceThe Séance is a modern novel that is written like a Victorian gothic mystery. It features narrations by several different characters–a typical Victorian device that was used successfully in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

John Harwood’s novel is difficult to describe without going too far into the plot, because some important characters do not appear until later in the book. It begins with the story of Constance Langdon’s dreary childhood and young adulthood. Her mother has been depressed and nonfunctional since her sister died, and her father behaves as if he lives alone in the house. When Constance reaches the age of 11, her father withdraws her from school and abandons her and her mother to go live with his sister. Later, a disastrous experiment with spiritualism (very popular in Victorian times) in an attempt to help her mother results in her mother’s suicide.

Constance accepts her uncle’s invitation to live with him in order to avoid being thrust upon a father who doesn’t want her. But shortly after moving in with him, she finds she has inherited Wraxford Hall, an infamous house, old and crumbling, where two boys died; an old man mysteriously disappeared; and Magnus Wraxford was apparently murdered by his wife, Eleanor, who has also disappeared.

The next section of the novel is narrated by John Montague, a lawyer who visits Constance. He was involved in the experiment at Wraxford Hall that ended in the murder of Magnus Wraxford, and he tells the story of the experiment. This visit and Constance’s subsequent agreement to take part in a séance at Wraxford Hall lead us to Eleanor’s story, which is taken up by a diary that Eleanor wrote. Finally, we return to Constance. When she arrives at Wraxford Hall, she finds the experiment is to take place in a spooky gallery occupied by an odd-looking set of armor and a sarcophagus.

The novel is successfully creepy and mysterious. However, by the time of the séance I had figured out one character’s crucial secret identity, which made several other plot points clearer. Some readers may find it takes a long time to get to the crux of the novel, but I enjoyed the journey.