Tag: historical fiction

Review 2743: These Days

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These Days is the last book I had to read for the 2023 Walter Scott prize shortlist, and boy, it made me feel uninformed. Of course, I knew about the bombing of England during World War II, but I had no idea that Belfast suffered similar bombings. But of course, I realized, that’s where they built the ships.

The book blurb makes it sound like this book is only about two sisters, Emma and Audrey, but it also spends time with their mother Florence and their younger brother Philip. Audrey is engaged to be married, to Richard Graham, a doctor who works at the hospital with her doctor father. Emma has volunteered to serve in a first aid station. Florence has been somewhat detached as a wife and mother, still grieving her first love, who died during World War I. Philip is just being 13.

It’s April 1941, and so far, things have been quiet. Emma has befriended an older woman named Sylvia, and they fall into an affair. For her part, Audrey doesn’t seem particularly excited about Richard or being married, more like she’s trying to convince herself.

Then one night when Richard and Audrey are at a dance, the attack comes full force. Richard has to go to the hospital, so Audrey finds herself in a shelter all night. Emma has been with Sylvia and has just turned back toward the first aid station when she is knocked unconscious by a blast. Florence and Philip spend the night huddled in a shelter.

The devastation is terrific. Whole neighborhoods are gone and hundreds of people are injured, killed, or missing. And this is the first of four major attacks.

This was certainly an eye-opening book for me. We have long associated Belfast with sectarian violence, but there was none of that in this novel, just a common fear of the Belfast Blitz. Earlier in the book, a transfer to Audrey’s job from England remarks at how much easier it is there to get decent food and goods. Well, that changes.

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Review 2742: Precipice

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It’s the eve of the First World War, and Venetia Stanley (sharing the name of her famous ancestor, subject of the novel Viper Wine) is having an affair with Prime Minister Asquith, more than twice her age. Perhaps it’s not a sexual affair, but it is certainly an emotional one. Asquith is known for his relationships with young women, but this one seems to be more serious.

In an incident that seems unrelated to the rest of the novel for a while, Venetia decides to meet Asquith at a party instead of going on a pleasure cruise with the set she hangs out with. During the cruise, two young men drown as part of a bet. The investigation brings in the character Detective Sergeant Paul Deemer, who notices Venetia’s name on the guest list and calls on her to take her statement.

Periodically, we check in on Deemer as he is recruited into Intelligence after the war starts, his job to find German spies. But most of the time, the book follows the relationship between Venetia and Asquith, leaving me wondering when and how the characters would link up.

Asquith’s behavior is frankly shocking, especially during war. Riding around in his limo with Venetia, he shows her a confidential message and then wads it up and throws it out the window. He encloses confidential and even secret telegrams in his letters to her and asks her opinion. Some of these actions make her uncomfortable, and she doesn’t know what to do with his letters, locking them in a box. He writes her several times a day.

The stories finally begin to link up when Deemer is assigned to find out about several messages turned in by the public. The conclusions of the initial investigation end with Deemer assigned to intercept Venetia’s correspondence.

This is not the taut thriller that Harris often produces. I found it interesting but got a little tired of reading especially Asquith’s letters, which are cringingly romantic. As the affair continues, Asquith writes Venetia letters during cabinet meetings and seems more obsessed by her than concerned about the war. Venetia in turn begins trying to find a way to escape the relationship.

I had very little sympathy with him, although I began slowly to sympathize with Venetia. It was interesting to learn about politics of this period and this odd relationship, but this wasn’t one of my favorite Harris novels.

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Review 2736: Venetia

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I’ve already reviewed Venetia for this blog, but my purchase of a new Folio Society copy seemed like a good excuse to reread it.

Venetia Lanyon has lived an isolated life, mostly with only her brother Aubrey for company. Her late father having refused her a London season when her aunt offered one, she has only attended a few local dances. However, she has two suitors—Edward Yardley, a worthy neighbor, and Oswald Denny, a quite young man who emulates Lord Byron in his careless dress and sulky manner. Venetia is interested in neither of them and plans to make a home for Aubrey, a studious teen with a bad hip, after her older brother Conway returns from the wars to take up his position as head of household.

But two incidents complicate this plan. One is her encounter with Lord Damerel, a neighbor she and her brothers called the Wicked Baron when they were children because of his unnamed crimes that made his family disown him when he was young.

Although Demerel, mistaking her for a village girl, offers her an insult, he is taken aback by her reaction, and she soon finds him to be a companion who shares her sense of humor. When he rescues Aubrey from a bad fall, the three of them begin a comfortable friendship.

Then strangers arrive. Without so much as a letter of warning, Conway has married a shy, biddable girl and sent her before him with her extremely unpleasant mother to establish his household.

Now, we’re set up for Heyer’s usual romance with lots of striking characters, a good deal of lively, funny dialogue, and an engaging, sparkling heroine with an unconventional mind.

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Review 2729: Mrs. Kimble

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In 1969 Richmond, Virginia, Birdie Kimble is blindsided when her husband Ken leaves her to run off with a teenaged student at the college where he’s a pastor. The young mother of two children, she has no idea how to cope and takes to drinking instead. Her bills unpaid, her car breaking down, and her children unfed and uncared for, she comes close to having her two children, Charlie 6 and Jody 2, taken by protective services.

A few months after leaving Birdie, Ken Kimble appears in Florida with his young girlfriend Moira at her parents’ house. Although Ken is in his 40s, he now looks like a hippy. There, he meets Joan, a Jewish reporter from New York who is staying in the house she inherited from her wealthy parents while she recovers from a mastectomy. She likes Ken and invites him to stay after he and Moira break up. Soon, he has transformed himself into a real estate dealer with the help of her uncle—oh, and he’s discovered he’s part Jewish. She becomes Mrs. Kimble number two.

There’s another wife to come after Joan dies of a recurrence of her cancer, leaving Ken a wealthy man. This time, he marries Dinah, the girl who used to babysit for him and Birdie.

The tales of these three marriages are told from the points of view of the wives with an occasional look at what’s happening with Charlie. This is the story of a man who is charming, but it seems as if there’s no there there, a man who reinvents himself to get what he wants with no regard for morals or ethics.

It was interesting to me to read that Haigh began this novel as a story about Birdie and her children but became interested in exploring Ken Kimble. However, that’s what she doesn’t do, or only by inference. Despite some obvious preferences—for very young women, for example—Joan, who is near his age, is probably only acceptable because of the money—he is basically unknowable. And the section about Birdie, which is the longest, was almost unbearable to me because she is so hopeless and helpless. I’m sure there are women like this, but I just wanted her to snap out of it. She finally does, sort of, but it takes years.

I found the book relatively interesting, but it is not a favorite.

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Review 2728: Held

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Held is a poetic musing on some deep subjects framed in the fluid story of mostly one family, with a perplexing few sections about Marie Curie. It begins during World War I and goes forward for some time before looping backward and forward between (mostly) descendants and ancestors.

Returning painfully disabled from World War I, John reopens his photography studio. John and his wife Helena have a deep connection, but John is troubled by his war experiences. After he hires an assistant, an image that shouldn’t be there appears in a photograph, making him wonder if some essence of the dead exists after death.

John and Helena’s story takes up about a third of the book, and then we travel forward to 1951 and a very short section in which Helena agrees to model for a famous artist and awakens her own artistic tendencies, buried since the death of John. We also briefly meet their daughter, Anna.

Then it’s 1984, and Peter, Anna’s partner, is relieved to welcome home his daughter Mara, a doctor who works in war zones. Mara has met Alan, a journalist, who seems to share with her the same deep loving connection that each member of this family has with the others, and with their friends.

These are some of the bones of the stories, but these characters are thinkers as well as feelers, and they consider some weighty subjects. Nature is also intimately entwined in these stories.

I understand that many readers have found this novel difficult, especially because of its fluid structure and many characters. None of this bothered me, but I am not a person who dwells on the meaning of life, so I felt I was missing a lot of the more esoteric content. I still enjoyed it. It’s absolutely beautiful, and the kinds of relationships depicted are to be admired. The characters are good and kind.

I read this for my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2726: The Land in Winter

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For Britain, the winter of 1962-3 was one of the coldest on record, with massive amounts of snow in some areas. Miller has set his novel in a rural area near Bristol where two young married couples are neighbors.

Eric Parry is the local doctor. His wife Irene is early in pregnancy, but he is also having an affair with a wealthy married woman. Irene, somewhat isolated in their country home, is feeling her separation from her sister Veronica, who is in the U. S.

Next door are Bill and Rita Simmons. Bill is the son of a wealthy immigrant who has left his father’s world behind to become a farmer. Rita is about the same distance along in her pregnancy as Irene. She is a lively girl with a dodgy past, but she is haunted by voices, and her father is resident at a nearby asylum.

Rita comes calling on Irene, and the two women get along well. Irene finds Rita pulling her out of herself and getting her out of the house.

Both of the households have some class differences, although they are noted rather than seeming to cause problems. Irene is quite posh in origin, whereas Eric’s father was a railroad worker. Bill has attended university and seems to be a bit ashamed of his father, who is a slum landlord, while Rita’s past hints at darker things.

This novel was more moody than anything else. For some reason, perhaps in time setting and themes, it reminded me of The Ice Storm (although that is set ten years later), the movie not the book, which I haven’t read. There’s the sterile life of the housewives, the weather, the rowdy party, and the infidelity.

Of the books I’ve read by Miller, this is not my favorite, but it is certainly atmospheric and had me genuinely worried about some of its characters. I read it for both my Walter Scott Prize project and my Booker Prize project.

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Review 2724: Ancestry

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

I wasn’t looking forward to reading Ancestry, because I haven’t really enjoyed either of the other books I’ve read by Simon Mawer. However, he keeps getting shortlisted for the Walter Scott Historical Fiction prize, which is one of my projects, so I keep having to read him.

For this novel, Mawer has tracked down records about his own family, going back four generations on both sides, and written a novel trying to make sense of what he found. I have to say that I found this idea interesting, although Mawer still managed to fit in a reference, not to labia, which seems to be a fascination, but to female pubic hair, which is about the same.

In the first half of the 19th century, Isaac Block is growing up on the Suffolk coast as a subsistence agricultural worker. However, as a young teenager, he gets an opportunity to go to sea and takes it. Later, as a young man on leave, he meets Naomi Lulham, a single mother lodging with his Uncle Isaac.

This story is interesting, but Mawer was obviously able to find out more about the Mawer side, because he spends a lot more time on the story of George Mawer, a corporal in the Queen’s 50th regiment, who marries an Irish girl, Ann Scanlon. This story leads up to and spends a great deal of time on the Crimean War.

I found a lot of the details about these people’s lives interesting, but with all of Mawer’s novels, apparently, there is such distance from the characters that I didn’t get that involved with them, again.

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Review 2723: The Three Musketeers

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My reading rate really slowed down in late January to mid-February because I read two real chunksters one after another. This one was the second, and A Fortunate Man was the first. This one was a lot more fun.

D’Artagnan is a youth on his way to make his fortune in Paris, carrrying an introduction to Monsieur de Tréville, who leads the King’s musketeers. D’Artagnan is a truculent lad, and he rubs up against two people who are going to affect his life. One is a stranger who makes fun of D’Artagnan’s peculiar horse, and the other is a beautiful, mysterious woman known as Milady. D’Artagnan is attacked by the man’s underlings and his letter is stolen.

Nevertheless, he presents himself to de Tréville upon his arrival, and he almost immediately meets the musketeers Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. They are being rebuked for having been in a dispute with Cardinal Richilieu’s guards.

Although D’Artagnan has been taught to revere both King Louis XIII and the Cardinal, he quickly learns of the rivalry between the supporters of the King and of the Cardinal, whose machinations are the focus of much of this book. Then there is Anne of Austria, the Queen, who is at odds with both, but especially with the Cardinal.

When D’Artagnan tells de Tréville about the loss of his letter, de Tréville is very interested and tells him he will help D’Artagnan get a place with the Cadets. Almost immediately upon leaving, D’Artagnan falls afoul, separately, of each of the three musketeers and agrees to meet them one after another. I felt as if the whole of Paris at this time (1625) must have been overrun by swordfights, as these guys are all so ready to fight. Somehow, instead of killing or being killed by these men, D’Artagnan ends up their fast friend.

The plots and adventures in this novel are too complicated for me to describe in this review, but it’s the musketeers against the Cardinal, who employs the treacherous Milady as his agent. There is a plot to incriminate Anne of Austria and the Duke of Buckingham, and D’Artagnan’s mistress, who conveys messages to and from the Queen, is kidnapped. And there is a plot to assassinate the Duke of Buckingham, who is helping defend some Huguenots holed up in la Rochelle, by combining an attack of France with the Spanish (although this part of the plot does not match with what I read in Wikipedia about how Buckingham was killed).

In any case, most of the novel is a battle of wits between the four men and Milady, who is truly evil. Although she is the Cardinal’s tool, he comes off as a little more balanced, although ruthless.

This novel moves right along from one adventure to another. Dumas has to remind his readers a few times that the men’s behavior was acceptable at the time, and that is an even bigger reminder for readers today. However, in general, this is quite a fun book to read. It was a pleasure to read it for my Classics Club list.

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Review 2720: An Historical Mystery [A Murky Affair]

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I think a friend gave me this book, or perhaps I bought it, because I occasionally buy old books, and this one is dated 1891. It is the 59th book in the series Balzac called La Comédie humaine.

The novel is based on a true incident. It begins in 1803 with Michu, a bailiff with an evil appearance who is feared by many and called a Judas to his previous employers. In reality, he has been working for them the whole time. His previous master, the Marquis de Simeuse, had been unable to secure his estate of Gondreville before it was taken from him and sold to Senator Malin, the current owner. The Marquis’s two young twin sons are in exile working for the return of the Bourbons. With them are the two sons of the D’Hauteserres, the guardians of young Mademoiselle Laurence de Cinq-Cygne, who, near the beginning of the novel, hides the four young men in a ruin in the middle of the forest.

The revolt is defeated, but the authorities are searching for the young men, and Laurence is under suspicion. Eventually the young men are able to get a pardon in exchange for their oath that they will not work against the regime.

The young men all go to live at Cinq-Cygne, where the two twins are both in love with Laurence. Laurence cannot choose between the new Marquis and his younger twin brother, however.

The young people are prideful and incautious, saying things in front of people that can be misunderstood. After the young men’s release, an old relative, Monsieur de Chargeboeuf, comes to warn them to stay away from Gondreville, as they have enemies and something is going on there. However, the young people are heedless. They have learned that Michu is in danger, so he sells his property prior to leaving, and the four young people and Michu spend the day in the forest retrieving the family fortune from where Michu has hidden it. On the last trip they ride too near Gondreville, which they tend to treat as their own property, and Laurence is seen.

Later, the young men are arrested, because while they were moving the money, five horsemen who look very much like them attacked Gondreville and kidnapped the Senator.

We know they are innocent, but the representatives of justice are prejudiced against them, and they have been foolhardy in their words and actions.

I didn’t really understand all the ramifications of the political situation but still found this novel really interesting. Although Napoleon, in a brief appearance, comes off fairly positively, Balzac is cynical about the honesty of government officials in general. He handles the trial with a good sense of suspense, although in the explanation of events that finally comes at the end, he takes some time to make the connection with the events of the novel.

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Review 2719: The Bewitching

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Maybe this isn’t fair, but I make it a practice to write up every book I read, even if I don’t finish it. In this case, I didn’t get very far in at all.

I liked Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic well enough to finish it even though it was a slow starter and had a frankly ridiculous concept. (At least it was original.) However, it did maintain a suspenseful atmosphere. So, I picked up The Bewitching by impulse at the library.

This story, set in two time frames and two countries, is really a slow starter.

In 1998, Minerva is a graduate student at a New England university who is having trouble getting access to the information she needs about the life of horror writer Beatrice Tremblay for her Master’s thesis. (As a former graduate student in English, I would like to point out that biography is not a usual focus of literature theses.) Oh well, unexpectedly she gets a chance to talk to the woman who has the source material she needs.

In 1908 Mexico, Minerva’s grandmother Alba lives what she considers a provincial existence and is entranced by her sophisticated but apparently ne’er-do-well uncle.

This was such a slow starter, and I thought I could foresee at least part of silly Alba’s story. Each time the novel went back in time, her story kept slowing down whatever pace the more modern story managed to accumulate. I only made it about 50 pages but decided to quit when the narrative again slowed down to a slog. I generally am patient with slow-moving novels, especially if I’m being entertained in some way, but in this case, I just didn’t feel as if my patience was going to pay off.

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