Tag: England

Day 98: The Poison Tree

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Cover for The Poison TreeWhat starts out as a seemingly ordinary novel about a young woman who makes a fascinating, exotic new friend builds slowly to the macabre in The Poison Tree by Erin Kelly. This is not a traditional mystery, but more the foreboding story of how several characters’ lives are changed irrevocably by the incidents of a careless summer in 1993.

In a story that begins ten years before the novel’s present, Karen Clarke is a naive but high-achieving linguistics student who is soon to graduate from a college in London. Her academic success has more to do with a natural ability to learn languages than application, and she finds herself unable to decide what to do with her life. After being very focused for years, she is inclined to let her near-term future be decided by fate.

One afternoon near the end of the term she meets the flamboyant, charismatic Biba Capel and is immediately captivated by her and drawn into her circle. Biba lives in a sprawling, ramshackle house with her brother Rex and other assorted people, and they spend most of their time partying.

The novel’s present day begins with Karen picking up her husband, Rex Capel, from prison, where he has served 10 years for murder. With her is their ten-year-old daughter Alice. Karen has been supporting her small family, economically and emotionally, for years, and knows she must continue to do so, as Rex will find it difficult to get work. She is very protective of Rex and Alice and afraid their new life will be ruined if people learn about their past.

How Karen goes from the carefree life she adopts that summer—which she spends with a bunch of irresponsible young people partying all night and sleeping all day—to the fearful present involves the Capels’ tragic history. As she learns about this history and learns more about her friend, she is drawn into tragedy.

Well written and absorbing, the book slowly builds from normalcy to a sense of dread.

Day 96: The Forgotten Garden

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Cover for The Forgotten GardenKate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden was one of my big discoveries two years ago. I absolutely love this book.

A four-year-old girl walks off a ship in Australia in 1913 with a little white suitcase. No one meets her. She won’t say who she is or where she came from. The harbor master takes her home, calls her Nell, and adopts her, and she forgets her previous life. When she is 21 and on the verge of marriage, he tells her about it. This information is so shocking to Nell that she breaks with her fiancé and her family and isolates herself, feeling that she has been living a lie.

In 1975, Nell’s irresponsible daughter drops her own teenage daughter, Cassandra, at Nell’s house and drives away, never to return. Nell has other plans, but puts them aside to take care of her granddaughter.

In 2005, Cassandra is mourning Nell’s death. She has inherited Nell’s property but is only vaguely aware of her history. When she looks through Nell’s things, she finds a white suitcase with a book of fairy tales in it. She also finds that Nell never stopped looking for her real family. Continuing Nell’s search, Cassandra ends up in a small Cornish village where she learns she has inherited a small cottage on the Mountrachet estate.

Cassandra finds an entrance into a walled garden, and another one from there to the estate. Eventually, she also discovers the history of her grandmother’s parentage.

The book traces Nell’s history by alternating among these times. The modern story is one of investigating one’s roots, but the older tale is more gothic. Ultimately, it is the story of two cousins, the wealthy Rose Mountrachet and the slum-born Eliza Makepeace, who comes to live with her and be her companion.

A mystery about family secrets, the story is complex and enthralling. Some readers may be daunted by its length, but once you begin reading, you will not be able to stop.

Day 89: The Wars of the Roses

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Cover for The Wars of the RosesThe Wars of the Roses were a series of complex events involving numerous significant figures. As such, when I have previously read about them, I’ve found it confusing to keep track of events and people.

In The Wars of the Roses: Through the Lives of Five Men and Women of the Fifteenth Century, Desmond Seward presents the clearest and most interesting explication I have read. He organizes the material and infuses interest by following the effects of the wars on five people–William Hastings, Edward IV’s best friend and one of the most powerful men in the realm during his (Yorkist) reign; John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, head of an ancient family and a loyal Lancastrian; Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry Tudor’s mother; Dr. John Morton, a loyal Lancastrian clergyman who turned Yorkist; and Jane Shore, mistress of Edward IV and daughter of a successful London businessman.

A series of battles between rival factions of the Plantagenet family for the throne, the Wars of the Roses lasted 32 years. The roots of the dispute lay in Henry IV’s usurpation of the crown from Richard II years before. Henry IV and his son, Henry V, were strong rulers, but Henry V’s heir, Henry VI, succeeded at the age of 15. He proved a weak and ineffective ruler who was dominated by his favorites and his wife’s rapacious relatives. Henry also managed to lose the portion of France that his father had so arduously and expensively won back, and England’s state of law and order had almost completely broken down.

The shift in government began when Henry VI had a son who replaced Edward Duke of York (later to be Edward IV) as heir to the throne. This made Edward’s position precarious and he had to flee to Europe. His subsequent battles against Henry’s adherents were only the beginning of years of instability that resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty and the beginning of that of the Tudors.

History can be written with too much detail or in a too academic and dry style, or it can be so lightly researched as to seem like fluff. Seward hits the perfect balance with a terrifically interesting book that is wonderfully well written.

Day 84: Bring Up the Bodies

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Cover for Bring Up the BodiesBest Book of the Week! Year!

If Wolf Hall was a wonderful historical novel, Bring Up the Bodies is masterly. In this second of a trilogy, Hilary Mantel continues the story of Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies is more focused than the last book, because it deals with a much shorter time period and defined subject–the downfall of Anne Boleyn.

The writing is elegant and impeccable. I have read a few comments that Wolf Hall was sometimes difficult to follow because the readers could not always tell who was meant by “him” or “he.” Mantel has written both books using a strict third person limited point of view, from that of Cromwell, and people don’t think of themselves by their first names. Hence, the difficulty, which I did not notice as a problem in Bring Up the Bodies. This technique is very difficult to employ successfully–we are much more used to a third person that changes from character to character or even to third person omniscient. But Mantel uses it effortlessly to create a memorable character in Cromwell–kind but implacable, one who fosters the growth of others but does not forget the crimes and indignities committed against Cardinal Wolsey, whom he loved as as a father.

Henry VIII has already decided he wants to rid himself of Anne Boleyn and marry Jane Seymour, but Anne has one more chance. She is carrying a child, and if it is born alive and is a boy, she is safe. Henry must have an heir, and he has decided that if he hasn’t been given one, God must have found some fault with his marriage to Anne just as there was one for his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Thomas Cromwell must find him some way out of his difficulties.

Of course, Cromwell helped Anne to her position in the first place, but the Boleyns have made many enemies in their enjoyment of power, and they have treated him with disdain. More importantly, Anne Boleyn destroyed the Cardinal, and her brother mocked him in his downfall.

From the moment you begin reading, you find yourself plunged into the Tudor world of shifting politics and intrigue. Of course, we know what happens to Anne Boleyn, yet the novel maintains its suspense. The Boleyn and Howard families are going to suffer a huge defeat, but they will go down fighting.

Day 82: Cotillion

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Cover for CotillionOne of my favorite authors if I want the lightest of reading material and a good laugh is Georgette Heyer. Although I am not a romance reader, for her meticulously researched and comic Regency romances I have to make an exception. Her period pieces are absolutely convincing, as she was an expert on Regency dress, deportment, and speech. In fact, she became such an expert on the period’s idioms that she once was able to successfully sue a plagiarizer by proving that the expression the other writer copied appeared only in some records to which she had been granted private access.

But Heyer was also an expert at creating charming comic characters and situations. Cotillion is one of my favorites of her books, and one of the silliest.

Kitty Charing is an impoverished orphan who has been raised in discomfort by her miserly old guardian, “Uncle” Matthew Penicuik. A great one for manipulating his putative heirs, Uncle Matthew announces that he will leave his entire fortune to Kitty, but only if she marries one of his four grandnephews. Then he invites them all to come calling. Priggish Reverend Hugh Rattney and doltish Lord Dolphinton arrive, and the married Lord Biddenden comes to represent his rakish brother Captain Claud Rattney, but dashing Captain Jack Westruther, whom Kitty has grown up hero-worshipping, does not make an appearance, as he is unwilling to be manipulated.

Kitty is furious that Jack doesn’t appear, but even more furious at being put in this position. She soundly rebukes all of her “cousins,” except Lord Dolphinton, who is too stupid to be responsible for his actions and has been compelled to come by his mama. But then Uncle Matthew announces that if Kitty refuses to marry one of her cousins, he will leave her with nothing. What is a spunky Heyer heroine to do but run off into a snowstorm with only a few possessions and an impractical plan to get a job as a house maid?

She arrives at the local inn to find her cousin Freddy Standen, who has absolutely no idea why he has been summoned. Freddy, not the brightest of bulbs but a kind-hearted young man, is perfectly wealthy in his own right and has no intention of getting married. When he meets Kitty at the inn, she talks him into pretending an engagement with her and inviting her to go up to London so she can acquire some “town polish,” buy some nice clothes, and (she hopes but doesn’t tell Freddy) enchant Jack into a proposal.

Freddy, an expert in deportment and fashion who can always be relied upon to accompany a young married woman to a dance or concert, is not really a lady’s man. When he and Kitty arrive in London to find his harassed mother attempting to care for a house full of children with mumps, he is dismayed to find he is left responsible for a naïve girl who tends to fall into difficulties and odd friendships.

The novel is crammed with comic characters, such as Kitty’s foolish governess “Fish,” who has a turn for quoting romantic poetry; Freddy’s frippery married sister Meg, who wears color combinations that shock him to the core and spends her time trying to avoid her mama-in-law; Camille, Kitty’s real French cousin, who is impersonating a lord; Lord Dolphinton, who is terrified of his mother but strictly charged by her to get Kitty to dump Freddy and marry him; and the silly doe-eyed Olivia, whom Kitty befriends but Jack is pursuing to be his mistress.

Day 81: A Whistling Woman

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Cover for A Whistling WomanI may have been less bemused by A Whistling Woman if I had known that it was the fourth in a series by A.S. Byatt, of which I have only read Babel Tower, and that long ago. Instead, I kept having the feeling that there was something I just wasn’t understanding. My impression was that it was about too many things, so I was relieved to find a review in The Guardian that criticizes it for having “too many ideas” and being an “over-ambitious jumble.” The intent of the series, says The Guardian, is to depict the social and imaginative life of Britain in the 1950’s and 60’s. Well, that is quite a job.

The title refers to a story published by a peripheral character about people on a perilous journey. On the way they meet creatures who are half woman and half bird and whose whistling cries are unbearable. The prince in the story has learned many languages and finds he can understand the creatures, so they tell him their tale. I don’t want to go into it further, but it is clearly a statement about feminism, which is logical since A Whistling Woman is set in 1968 and features several women who are struggling with their place in society.

The action focuses (if focuses is the word) around Frederica Potter, the host of a fashionable TV talk show; a protest movement against a university; a conference on body and mind; and the growth of a cult. Frederica is planning a show around the conference, where the scientists’ rationalism is pitted against the results of their experiments, which show that the brain is not built for reason but to make the body work. At an alternative therapy clinic, the psychoanalyst Elvet Gander is falling under the influence of his patient Joshua Ramsden, a schizophreniac, around whom a messianic cult is forming. Ramsden’s essential goodness is being muddied by his increasing psychotic episodes. Some outsiders are encouraging the students at the university to form an Anti-University, the sole purpose of which is apparently to protest.

In addition to being almost confusingly full of ideas and plots going in every direction, the book does not really echo my own experience of the times. Surely student demonstrations, at least in the States, were more meaningful and actually about something. Most of the ones I remember were about the war in Vietnam.

The book includes deep discussions of science and religion. It is interesting while offering almost too much to think about.

Day 77: Wolf Hall

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Cover for Wolf HallBest Book of Week 16!

This is a good time to write about Wolf Hall, because I was thrilled to learn that Hilary Mantel’s sequel to it has just come out. My copy is arriving soon. Mantel is always an interesting writer whose work does not occupy any one genre, although her last few books have been historical fiction. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize and was one the best books I read in 2010.

The novel looks at the political and religious machinations of Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from low origins to become Henry’s chief minister. Although Cromwell has traditionally been viewed as Henry’s “heavy,” recent historians have looked at his career more kindly, showing that his work as chief minister brought England into more modern statehood and that his changes created more order for government functions that were less controlled by the whims of nobility.

Mantel depicts Cromwell as a loyal man who cares for his dependents and works to reform England. He builds up a great household as he moves from the position of secretary to Cardinal Wolsey to work for the king. Later, after the Cardinal’s downfall, he slowly, almost imperceptibly, works to bring down those who furthered their own interests by destroying the Cardinal, including the rapacious Boleyns.

Cromwell is loving to his family and friends, completely faithful to the Cardinal and then to Henry, intelligent, able in many spheres of work, and decent. Mantel paints a charming pictures of his home life. In contrast, she turns the tables on Thomas More, venerated for centuries, showing him as a sadistic torturer of Protestants who is in love with his own martyrdom.

Cromwell meets Jane Seymour when she is a young, lonely lady’s maid to the queen, teased and neglected by the rest of the court, and feels pity for her. Later, after he is long widowed, he falls in love with her. The title of the book is the name of her ancestral home, Wolf Hall.

Mantel’s approach is understated, leaving the reader sometimes to connect the ideas. The details in this novel seem completely authentic, and Mantel handles the period brilliantly. She somehow manages to generate tension and suspense even about things we know all about, like what will happen to Anne Boleyn.

Day 62: Interred with Their Bones

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Cover for Interred with their BonesInterred with Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell is excellent fun, the first of a literary mystery series. Kate Stanley is directing a production of Hamlet at the Globe when her estranged mentor, Rosalind Howard, a Harvard professor of Shakepeare, gives her a small box and hints that she has made an important discovery. Later that night after a fire at the Globe, Kate finds Roz dead in her office. The box turns out to contain a Victorian mourning brooch decorated with flowers associated with Ophelia.

Kate teams up with her friend, the renowned actor Sir Henry Lee, determined to solve the mystery of Roz’s discovery. She begins to believe that she is searching for the manuscript of a play called Cardenno that was produced in 1613 and that may be the same as a play with a similar name registered in 1653 but never published by William Shakespeare and John Beaumont. In her pursuit of the truth, she keeps running into Ben Pearl, a security expert, and another man who says he is related to Rosalind.

The book is a cross between traditional mystery and thriller with an admittedly ridiculous plot. Kate travels from London to Harvard to Utah and then to Spain and Washington, D.C., running down clues in a sort of parody of The Da Vinci Code. Lots of bodies pile up, and we hear about most of the crackpot theories about Shakespeare that have been vaunted over the years. The story is full of literary allusions, action-packed, witty, and fun to read. I guessed part of the mystery as soon as one character appeared, but I was too interested in the plot and characters for that to be disappointing.

Day 58: Grave Goods

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Cover for Grave GoodsBest Book of Week 12!

In the year 1154 a dying monk sees what he thinks is a vision of the burial of King Arthur after an earthquake at Glastonbury Abbey. He tells his nephew about it as he dies. Twenty years later when King Henry II is putting down a Welsh rebellion, the nephew, a Welsh bard, tells him the story hoping to save his own life. Henry sends a message to Glastonbury, which has just suffered a great fire, and the monks find a coffin buried in the described location that seems to contain the corpses of a man and a woman.

The penurious Henry would love to announce that they had found the bodies of Arthur and Guinever, because the resulting monies from pilgrimages would save him having to pay to rebuild the abbey. But how can he be sure someone won’t come to claim the bones belonging to his Uncle Tom and Aunt Gladys? By summoning his “mistress in the art of death,” Adelia Aguilar, he hopes to determine at least their antiquity.

Grave Goods is a novel in Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death series. Adelia Aguilar is a graduate of the School of Medicine in Salerno, at the time the only such facility that would accept women, and an expert on the causes of death. She arrived in England on a previous matter, but Henry has found her so valuable that he has never granted her a passport to leave the country. Since she is a woman, her word is not respected by most men, so she pretends she is a translator for her Arab servant Mansur, who pretends to be the doctor.

Henry’s soldiers find Adelia and take her away as she is travelling with her friend Lady Emma Wolvercote to Wells to claim Emma’s son’s property from his grandmother. But when she arrives in Glastonbury after meeting with Henry in Wales, Emma has disappeared. The monks give Adelia’s party an unfriendly greeting, and while she and Mansur are looking in a crypt to find samples to compare with the corpses, someone tries to bury them alive. Something is not right at the abbey, and Adelia is not best pleased to be saved by Rawley, the Bishop of St. Albans, her ex-lover.

I have been reading this series for awhile. At first, I wasn’t sure I bought the premise, but the books are rich with historical details and the forensics information available at the time, and Ariana is a likeable heroine. It’s not her or Rawley’s fault that he was made a bishop (he was a soldier when she met him), and the blending of romance and mystery works fairly well here, which is unusual. The romance is played down in favor of action and suspense. If you like a good historical mystery, you’ll probably enjoy these books.

Day 54: Started Early, Took My Dog

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Cover for Started EarlyKate Atkinson’s mysteries featuring Jackson Brodie are always complex and carefully plotted. The somewhat hapless Brodie is a “semi-retired” private investigator who usually works in Edinburgh, but Started Early, Took My Dog takes him back to his home town of Leeds in Yorkshire.

Jackson Brodie is trying to locate the family of Hope McMasters, a woman who was adopted in the 1970’s at the age of two. In doing so, he has stumbled upon the story of an old crime–a prostitute was murdered and the child found with her disappeared.

Tracy Waterhouse, a retired detective who works as a security guard at a mall, was originally on that case and always worried about the child. On impulse, Tracy purchases another abused child from a junkie prostitute. When Jackson tries to find her to ask her about the old crime, she thinks he is after her for kidnapping and flees.

Two separate groups of people appear to be chasing Tracy–or maybe Jackson. And what does Tracy’s friend Barry know about the crime? And how is Tillie Squires, an old actress who is going senile, involved in everything? And then there’s the dog.

Atkinson’s mysteries are edgy and well written, as well as humorous. She spends more time on characterization than the usual mystery novel, creating interesting individuals. The novel changes between viewpoint and time to tell the complex, interweaved stories about identity.