Tag: historical fiction

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

~ whatmeread ~ 23 Comments

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

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

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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Review 2625: Funny Girl

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I have enjoyed some of Nick Hornby’s books very much, particularly some of his early ones, and others not so much. I have been watching the series Funny Woman, though, and when I learned it was based on this book, I thought I’d read it.

It’s the Swinging 60s, and Barbara Parker wants to make people laugh. Her relatives encourage her to enter the Miss Blackpool competition in hopes it will keep her in Blackpool instead of leaving for London. She wins, but when she realizes she’s supposed to participate in activities for a year, she decides not to accept. Soon, she is in London.

The novel follows her as she looks for work and a roommate, and finally an agent. The agent is more interested in sending her for modeling gigs, but she wants to act, so she gets him to send her for auditions. After some failures, she is lucky enough to come upon the writing team of Tony Holmes and Bill Gardiner, their producer Dennis Maxwell Bishop, and actor Clive Richardson. They are working on a different project that they’re not happy with, but they are so charmed by Barbara (now calling herself Sophie Straw) that they decide to write a show for her. Sophie’s offbeat humor makes her a sensation and the show Barbara (and Jim) a success. (Ironically, her character has her true name.)

I didn’t think this book was particularly funny, but it’s still a fun read that is full of detail about early British TV comedies (much of which I wasn’t familiar with), the craziness of London in the 60s, and the progress of our ambitious but likable heroine. Toward the end, it takes a turn toward conventional romance, but the ending lends perspective to everything. Although Sophie is engaging, a lot of this novel hangs on the existing synergy between the members of that original team and what happens when it inevitably cools off. And, of course, the difficulties of a young woman trying to make it in show business.

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Review 2622: The Adversary

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The Adversary is a powerful book, about a 19th century Newfoundland community and the feud that affects everyone. It is a brutal story about brutal people.

The novel begins at a wedding. Abe Strapp, the son of the richest man in town, is due to marry Anna Morels, the daughter of a powerful man from further down the coast. This match was made by Abe’s father in the hopes it would steady Abe, who is a vicious coward and bully. But there is an objection. The Widow Caines brings forward her servant, Imogen Purchase, claiming she is pregnant after being raped by Abe. Mr. Morels removes his daughter, and the Widow suggests Abe marry Imogen instead. Strapp and the Widow clearly hate each other, and it is with surprise that we learn they are brother and sister.

The Widow’s hatred stems from watching her brother being spoiled and given anything he wanted. While she had a head for business and worked for years at her father’s side, the business went to Abe when he died. Before that, he arranged his daughter’s marriage with Caines, a wealthy old man. She married him but split with her father. Upon her husband’s death, she took to wearing men’s clothes and running his business.

Abe has an employee and godfather, Beadle Clinch, who tries to keep him from his worst excesses. He is revolted by the Widow’s daring to dress like a man and run a business. So, even though he is supposed to be a religious man, he connives with Abe to try to bring her down. Despite appearances, he is the adversary. One of the things he does is to get Abe made a magistrate, hoping that will bring him a sense of responsibility. Instead, with two henchmen the Beadle put with him to restrain him, he runs rampant. Almost immediately, he murders a man for having signed a statement against him. Nothing happens to him.

For a long time, I was sympathetic to the Widow, thinking she was being misrepresented because she was different. There are some innocent people in town, but they are pulled into the maelstrom of this feud. And the Widow turns out to be as bad as her brother.

The novel is written more like a chronicle of the town, so that many of the characters are one-sided. The most developed are the two siblings, whose feud affects everyone. But even without the hatred for his sister, Abe is a vile person indeed, and his antics affect a lot of people.

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Review 2620: The Librarian

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In the 1950s, Sylvia Blackwell arrives in the town of East Mole to take on the job of children’s librarian. She finds no fault with the dingy, musty cottage her landlady shows her. She is excited to start her new job and life.

Although she and her boss seem to dislike each other on sight, she fits into the town fairly quickly, reorganizing and making improvements to the library, making friends with her neighbors, all but one, and tutoring her landlady’s granddaughter, Lizzy, for the 11+ exams with the help of her whip-smart, eleven-year-old neighbor, Sam.

By and large, she is a creature of good will, happy to help the children learn and become interested in books. And she is succeeding but has not reckoned with the effects of envy and ill-will. And she makes the mistake of falling in love with a married man.

I thought at first that this book was going to be a standard romance, but it deals with some more complex issues. I was interested in the story and ultimately found it somewhat touching. I felt, though, that Part Two, the last 40 pages, was a little too concerned with trying to tie up every little loose end and takes too long to do it.

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