Tag: historical fiction

Review 2672: Night Watch

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This novel begins in 1874 with ConaLee, a thirteen-year-old girl in a wagon with her mother and a man she calls Papa. Her mother had twins three months before and has not been able to care for herself since, nor does she speak. On the journey, Papa tells ConaLee that he is not her father, that he has given away his children by her mother and sold everything. He is taking her mother to an asylum, where she is to say her mother is called Miss Janet and she is her servant. He drops them off at the gate and goes on, and they do what he tells them, only her mother soon begins to speak and care for herself.

Returning to 1864, we follow ConaLee’s father, a Union sharpshooter in the Civil War. He has hidden his family, his pregnant wife Eliza and the woman he considers his mother, Dearhbla, as high up on the West Virginia ridges as he can, hoping to keep them out of the war. He has been gone three years, but in the Wilderness battle, he is injured so badly by an explosion that he loses an eye and part of his brain—and his memory. Thus, when the war ends, he does not return home. And his family is left prey to Papa.

This novel contains quite a few mighty coincidences. One that gives nothing away is that Dearhbla, an Irish wise woman with second sight, travels to the hospital in Alexandria because she knows her son is there. They will not let her in because of an epidemic, so she gives the name he took when he went to war—for all of them are fugitives. But no one of that name is there, so she leaves. All the while, he is watching her from the window, with no idea that he knows her.

Despite the coincidences, I found this novel absolutely enthralling. It captures the chaos during and after war, the fear that doesn’t stop just because the war does. It is altogether a compelling story. I read it for my Pulitzer Prize project.

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Review 2671: The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club

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Constance Haverhill has an uncertain future post-World War I. She and her mother helped out her mother’s school friend, Lady Mercer, for years, and she took them in after the death of Constance’s father, a farmer. However, now that her mother has died, Lady Mercer has made it clear there is no place for her. She is giving her the summer as a companion to her mother, Mrs. Fog, who is recovering from serious illness at a seaside resort. A problem is that, with the end of the war, young men are returning to the work force, so young women are losing their jobs.

In the lobby of the hotel, Constance encounters Poppy Wirral, who runs her own business transporting people around the seaside town in the sidecars of motorcycles. She has ridden there to meet her mother, Lady Wirral, for lunch, but she has forgotten to bring proper dress. Constance ends up lending her a skirt, and Poppy invites her to lunch with her mother and brother, Harris, an ex-RAF pilot who lost a leg in the war.

It’s obvious from the beginning where the relationship between Constance and Harris will go, although there are impediments. Most of the novel is about the remaining effects of the war, particularly upon women and disabled soldiers. Harris, for example, tries to get work as a flight instructor and failing that, a promised job in his late father’s bank, but everyone just assumes he can take up the job of running his estate. But the estate needs money. Poppy has been employing only women motorcyclists in her transport business, but then she is told that a new law by the labor board will require her to employ only men. Constance, although she ran the Mercer estate during the war, faces sex discrimination and worse when she tries to find a job as an accountant or bookkeeper.

Of course, the problem with all this is the predictable romantic finish. It’s all very well to write a book protesting the problems of women trying to make a living, but that message is undercut somewhat when the heroine’s problems are all going to be solved by marriage. (I don’t think this is going to be a surprise for anyone, so I didn’t warn about spoilers.) I commented on this same thought in a recent review of a contemporary novel from the same period.

Another theme is snobbishness and racism, as embodied by Lady Mercer and her daughter’s fiancé, an American named Percival Allerton. It was actually hard for me to imagine that a man in the diplomatic services would behave the way he does. Part of this theme involves Mrs. Fog’s reunion with old school friends, Mathilde de Champney and her brother Simon. Mrs. Fog’s family has repeatedly separated her from them, as they are of mixed blood.

Another thread in this theme concerns Mr. Pendra, an Indian representative of one of the states of India, whom Constance and the Wirrals befriend.

My final criticism hints around at a spoiler. Harris’s and Constance’s insipient romance is disturbed by the intervention of a spiteful character. However, this problem is resolved in about two pages, and then (spoiler, really!) Constance gets to run into his arms for that blissful finish. Only if it was me, after what happened, he’d have a lot more ‘splainin’ to do.

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Review 2667: Dean Street December! Cecil

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Through about 20 years’ time, Lady Anne Guthrie becomes more and more concerned about the relationship between her husband’s much younger stepbrother, Cecil, and Cecil’s mother, Lady Guthrie. Anne’s husband Charlie was already an adult when his elderly father married Edythe, who was very young. They had only one child, and Lady Guthrie, who plays the invalid card, does everything to keep her son with her, saying he is too nervous to be sent to school, keeping him out of university, and opposing his proposed career as a diplomat. This novel is set in the late 19th century, seemingly for no apparent reason, perhaps because the events later in the novel are more believable then.

Anne, who finds Lady Guthrie tiresome, thinks her decisions are misguided, but Charlie’s cousin Nealie thinks Edythe is more selfish than misguided. As Cecil grows to an adult, it becomes obvious that his mother will do anything to prevent his marriage, but Cecil sees only the sacrifice she has made to live with his frequently ill father and raise him virtually on her own.

Charlie and Anne try to help Cecil, whom they are fond of, but the events of the novel become darker as it proceeds. This is a terrific character study of a “delicate” woman who uses her health and close relationship with her son to manipulate him. I found it very involving.

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Review 2655: #NovNov25! A Pale View of the Hills

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A Pale View of the Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, is restrained and delicate and at first seems relatively straightforward. But towards the end, ambiguity sets in, forcing the reader to think back through the events of the novel. I read it for Novellas in November.

Etsuko is a Japanese woman, a widow living in England whose eldest daughter, Keiko, has recently committed suicide. Her younger daughter, Niki, is visiting from London, and a child they see on a walk together reminds Etsuko of her life in Nagasaki just after World War II. Particularly, she is reminded of her friendship with a woman named Sachiko.

Nagasaki is recovering from the bombing. Etsuko is married to Jiro only a short time, and she is pregnant. The other women in her apartment building talk about Sachiko and say she is unfriendly. She lives with her daughter Mariko in the only house left in the area, a rundown cottage.

Etsuko meets Sachiko when she expresses worry about Sachiko’s young daughter, who seems to be left alone quite often. Sachiko talks as if her daughter is the most important thing in her life, but she doesn’t worry when she is out late, and Mariko is a very strange girl. Also, we eventually learn that Sachiko has an American lover, Frank, who keeps promising to take them to America but then abandons them and drinks up all their savings.

For her part, Etsuko behaves like a dutiful housewife and entertains Jiro’s visiting father, whom she likes very much. But in the present time we understand that she left Jiro to move to England with Niki’s father.

The plot of the novel centers on Sachiko’s choice—whether to return to live with her rich uncle and cousin, who welcome her, to live the life of a traditional widow, or to go off with Frank. The girl Mariko detests Frank, by the way, and she is also concerned about the fate of some kittens.

There is a moment late in the book that made me doubt that I fully understood what was going on, and this ambiguity is not resolved. As a narrator, Etsuko is not altogether reliable, but whether this moment is a slip of self-identification or of something more sinister, readers have to decide for themselves. Certainly, by then the story has taken on a darker tinge.

Some readers may not care for this ambiguity and others, I understand, have come up with some far-fetched theories, but along with its elegiac pure prose, it is this moment that turns the novel into one you will remember and think about.

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Review 2653: #NovNov25! For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain

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The fourth novella I chose (via eeny meeny miney mo) for Novellas in November is about two real figures in Medieval literature, Margery Kempe and the anchoress Julian of Norwich. Julian of Norwich’s book Revelations of Divine Love is the first surviving book written by an English woman, and the book Kempe dictated (as she was illiterate), The Book of Margery Kempe, is the first-known autobiography in English.

The point of view alternates between Julian and Kempe. Both have experienced revelations, although at that time to do so was considered heretical. Julian experiences losses of everyone in her family and eventually decides she wants a life of contemplation. She becomes an anchoress, a woman who lives in a small room attached to a church, cemented in, the room with three windows—one to observe the church services, one to pass things back and forth with the maid, and one looking out on the street. People can talk to her but aren’t allowed to see or touch her.

Margery reacts to her revelations differently. She has had 12 children but doesn’t seem to like them or to like sex with her husband. Her point of view sounds like she has gone into permanent post-partum depression. She goes to the streets telling about Christ and sobbing loudly. She is several times examined for heresy. She disturbs church services and pilgrimages with her crying.

This book eventually leads up to an imagined meeting between the two women. It is well written and provides insight into the Medieval religious mindset and beliefs. Religion is seldom my cup of tea, though, so don’t ask me why I chose this book. I can’t remember.

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Review 2651: #NovNov25! The Buddha in the Attic

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This is an unusual little book, which I read for Novellas in November. It is based on the experiences of Japanese women brought to California as brides in the early 20th century. It doesn’t have any detailed characters but instead treats the women as a disparate group and is written in first person plural.

The girls and women have never met their husbands. They have apparently been married by proxy and have letters from and photos of their husbands. But when their ship arrives, they don’t recognize them. Their husbands are twenty years older than their photos, and they are common laborers, not the bankers and professional men the women are expecting. The women have been brought there not to improve themselves but to provide sex and hard labor.

The novel follows the women in their many paths until World War II and the internment of almost all the West Coast Japanese residents. Somehow, despite its lack of distinct characters and plot, it builds. It makes you sympathize with the hard lives of these characters. It’s powerful.

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Review 2649: #NovNov25! Seascraper

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I’m not quite sure what to make of this novella, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize but did not make the shortlist. It’s an atmospheric, closely observed story set in the 1950s that seems as if it is from an earlier time. I read it for Novellas in November.

Thomas Flatt is carrying on the difficult work followed by his grandfather, scraping the sea bottom at low tide for shrimp. He is the only man left doing this grueling job the old-fashioned way, with a horse and wagon, and the pickings are getting slimmer. He didn’t choose this path but was made to quit school to help his grandfather before he died. He lives with his demanding mother, but he has a secret desire to perform music at a local folk club.

One evening he comes home to find a stranger with his mother, an American named Edgar Acheson. He claims to be a movie director and produces as proof a cover of a movie magazine with a photo of his younger self. He wants to make a movie using the dismal fall sea as the setting, and he wants to pay Thomas, as an expert on the beach, to help him find locations. And indeed, the beach at low tide can be treacherous. He gives Thomas a check for £100, an astonishing amount, and arranges for him to take him with his horse and wagon that night.

And that’s pretty much all I want to say about the plot except that it holds surprises. Events happen that allow Thomas to explore feelings about the father he never met and to consider a new path for himself.

This novella was moody and minutely observes the details of Thomas’s exhausting job. It is the novella’s later events that leave me not knowing what to think about it.

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Review 2647: The Darlings of the Asylum

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Violet Pring is more interested in her art than marriage, and she meets an artist, Mr. Lilley, who thinks she shows great promise. But it’s 1886, and Violet’s parents are pushing her to marry her childhood friend, Felix Skipp-Berlase. Felix is wealthy, and Violet’s parents want her taken care of, as they are broke. Felix is willing to have Violet continue her art career, but that doesn’t seem to cut any ice with Violet.

Violet’s mother is perennially ill, and she has a doctor, Dr. Rastrick, who makes Violet nervous. Violet finally agrees to marry Felix, but on the eve of the engagement party, she commits an indiscretion with Mr. Lilley. A few days later, Violet wakes up in Dr. Rastrick’s asylum.

The novel seems to be about Violet’s unfair incarceration because her ambitions are ahead of her time. However, we find that Violet is not altogether a reliable narrator, because she has memory lapses.

The thrust of this novel is confusing. At first, it seems that the evil scientist with absurd ideas about treating mental patients is dominating a gothic novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but this idea shifts and shifts again. And Violet’s adventures turn toward absurdity by the end.

I think O’Reilly has written more of a 21st century heroine than a 19th century one, and not a terribly convincing one. He also doesn’t seem to know what his own book is about—a girl learning how to take control of her own destiny? a girl learning to understand her parents better? a girl coming to sympathize with the stresses on women in poverty? the difference between Dr. Restrick’s approach and that of the new field of psychiatry? It doesn’t seem like he knows.

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Review 2635: #RIPXX: The Bookseller of Inverness

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Iain MacGillivray was badly injured at Culloden and shipped off to work in indentured servitude in the Americas. In 1752, six years later, he is back and running a bookshop in Inverness. The town is full of British soldiers.

One evening he sees a grubby man who looks vaguely familiar looking through some books that came from Lord Lovat’s estate. It’s closing time, so he forces him out.

Iain hasn’t seen his father, Hector MacGillivray, for years. Hector has been serving King James in France and Italy. He is proscribed, but Iain has believed his father is dead. Now he finds he is in town.

Hector is searching for a book that has been rumored to exist, one that contains a list of traitors to the Jacobite cause. King James is planning another attempt to take back the throne from the Hanoverian king, and they want to make sure they know it’s not going to be betrayed.

By looking through the remaining books from Lord Lovat, they figure out which book it was. Hearing that there is a copy, Iain goes to Lovat’s castle, now occupied by British soldiers, on the pretext of buying some of the books. There he has an unpleasant encounter with the cruel Captain Dunne, who burns part of the book, but Iain is able to get away with the rest.

Hector starts trying to decode the text for names, but before he figures out each of six names, that person is murdered. The killer could be someone getting revenge, or it could be a traitor trying to cover his back.

I found this to be an interesting, fast-moving adventure that seems well researched and steeped in its time. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

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Review 2634: Restless Dolly Maunder

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I’ve enjoyed a couple of books by Kate Grenville, but Restless Dolly Maunder seemed different, written in a stripped-down style and very matter of fact. It wasn’t until I got to the end that I realized Grenville was writing about her own grandmother. That explained things to me, because I’ve noticed the tendency in some historical fiction writers to be a little too careful when writing about people who actually lived, afraid to take liberties, maybe (while other have no trouble telling outright lies).

Dolly is born in 1831 to a hard-working farmer and a mother who married down and seems to be disappointed about it. Although Dolly is the baby of the family, she doesn’t feel any particular affection from anyone. She is very intelligent and plans to become a teacher, but her father has been waiting for her to reach the legal age to quit school, 14, as he sees no benefit in educating girls. Soon, she has to face up to the fact that if she doesn’t marry, she’ll be a spinster stuck on her father’s farm all her life.

Twice she thinks she’ll be asked by men she cares about, but she is not because she’s not Catholic in one instance or from a good enough family in the other. She waits a long time, but finally settles on Bert Russell, her only choice, really, a pleasant, outgoing handsome man whom she doesn’t really like, but he’s a hard worker.

Her anger about her lack of options follows her throughout her life, affecting her relationships with other people. It is intensified when she learns a few months after the wedding that Bert had a daughter out of wedlock with her family’s servant girl while he was courting her and that her family had to have known it.

Dolly stays with Bert, but it is her ideas that take the couple off the sheep farm and from one opportunity to another, amassing money as they go. This novel follows her through World War I, the Depression, and World War II.

I liked this novel well enough, but the entire time I was reading it, I felt as if it was the bones of a longer, more satisfying novel. We don’t really get to know any of the characters except Dolly, for example. Once I understood this was about a real person, I realized that Grenville didn’t want to play loose with her family history.

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