Tag: historical fiction

Review 2059: The Fortune Men

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

I didn’t read what The Fortune Men was about ahead of time, because I was reading it for my Booker prize project. That meant that at first I wasn’t sure why the novel switched between the stories of two characters, Mahmood Mattan, a Somali stoker who is a gambler and a petty thief, and Violet Volacki, a middle-aged Jewish storekeeper. However, when I turned to the back of the book, I learned that Mattan was the last man in Cardiff to be sentenced to death for the murder of Violet Volacki in 1952 and that years later he was found to have been wrongfully convicted.

Mahmood is not a perfect man. He has quit going to sea to be near his Welsh wife and children, but work is hard to find for a black man, and he has too much time on his hands. He spends it gambling and womanizing and occasionally stealing. He has a big mouth and he lies a lot. But he is not a murderer.

When the police come to see him because a woman was robbed and her throat cut, he doesn’t tell the exact truth about where he was, because he was dangling after a Russian woman and he doesn’t want his wife to know. A black man, possibly a Somali, was seen outside the store, but even after the victim’s sister and niece say it was not Mahmood, it’s pretty clear that the police decide it was him and look for people to place him there. After a reward is announced, plenty of them pop up.

This novel is well-written and should have been haunting, but first I kept having problems staying with it, and later, even after I got more interested, I felt distanced from the characters and the story. Mohamed went on side trips through the memory of Mahmood’s life that should have made readers feel closer to him, but I did not, and I noticed Goodreads reviewers complaining about the same thing.

Related Posts

Burial Rites

The Burning of Bridget Cleary

Famous Trials

Review 2054: #1929 Club! A High Wind in Jamaica

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

For some reason, I always thought A High Wind in Jamaica, which I read for the 1929 Club, was a children’s adventure story. Boy, was I wrong. Much of the book’s power derives from the contrast between its light-hearted, jaunty tone and its subject matter. The novel is frequently compared with Lord of the Flies, which should give you some idea of its effect.

No timeframe is given for this novel except that it is after the British outlawed slavery, but I assume it’s sometime in the 19th century. The Thornton children have grown up in a crumbling old house in a ruinous Jamaica running wild, and let’s just say that being kind to animals doesn’t seem to be a concept they’re familiar with. In the case of Emily, from whose point of view we follow the action, it seems to have put her so far into her dreamy imaginary world that she’s sometimes unaware of reality. At least that’s one way to look at it. In any case, the children are nearly feral.

When Emily is 10, a hurricane strikes the island and the roof of their house is torn off. Mr. and Mrs. Thornton finally figure out that Jamaica might not be a suitable place to raise their children. So, they duly put them on a ship for England. On the ship as well are an older girl, Margaret Fernandez, and her brother. Except for Emily, the children aren’t differentiated much, so I lost track of how many there were or who belonged to which family.

The ship is attacked by pirates, or attacked isn’t the right word because the pirates trick their way onboard. While they are questioning the captain about where his money is, they take the children over to the pirate ship. It seems as if this was meant to be temporary, but as soon as the pirates leave the ship, the captain takes off, leaving the children behind. He returns to tell a grisly tale of a violent encounter in which the children were killed.

The pirates are sort of bumbling and down-at heel, but they are not unkind to the children. But as a long dreamy period at sea continues, a feeling of dread grows, especially after Emily’s younger brother dies in an accident. The other children almost immediately forget him, and there is worse to come.

This is a beautiful, disturbing novel. I am not sure I believe some of the behavior of the children, but on the other hand, I’ve seen how children in my own family forget they’ve done things after a period has intervened.

Related Posts

Treasure Island

The Long Song

A Brief History of Seven Killings

Review 2047: Booth

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

Booth follows the lives of the family of John Wilkes Booth, beginning before he is born. Written from the alternating points of view of some of his siblings, it begins when Rosalie, his oldest sister, is a young girl. Her father, a famous actor, is known as much for his drunken bouts and acts of insanity as his theatrical genius. He is often away. Rosalie’s mother is in a state of depression as, one by one, several of her children have died. Rosalie herself is missing the latest one, her favorite brother, Henry.

The family lives on a farm in Maryland that is run by their black servants, the Halls. These servants are slaves—someone else’s that Junius Booth leases, but he also pays them a wage so that they can save up to free themselves. So, the Booth family’s inconsistent stance on slavery comes in right from the beginning.

This book is interesting. It follows the growth of all the Booth siblings through several shocks—the first being the discovery that their father and mother aren’t legally married. They find this out after they move to Baltimore. His legal wife tracks them down all the way from England and follows them on the street shouting horrible things. Some of them develop a fear of sullying the family honor that is eventually forever shattered.

John Wilkes Booth becomes the son favored by their mother, the handsome one, the one who can do no wrong. He is also determined to put his mark on the world but not so interested in working hard to do it.

All of the family members have their difficulties and foibles, which makes it an interesting story. Interspersed between the chapters about the Booths are short ones about Lincoln’s progress as a politician and then as President.

Fowler says she thought of this topic when thinking of the families of our recent mass murderers. That’s exactly what I thought of when reading this novel.

It’s been interesting to see how Karen Joy Fowler has been developing, from the author of a few rather negligible although readable books to what I think is still her masterpiece, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I like that she seems to be adventurous in picking her subjects.

Related Posts

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Sister Noon

The Jane Austen Book Club

Review 2038: The Last Protector

~ whatmeread ~ 4 Comments

It’s 1668. When James Marwood’s boss Williamson sends him to secretly observe a duel between the Duke of Buckingham and Lord Shrewsbury, James is alarmed. He has already come to the attention of the powerful Duke, and not in a good way. He has to do what Williamson asks, but he is observed and must flee for his life.

Cat Lovett has come to regret her marriage to the elderly Mr. Hakesby. As he has become less able, he has begun demeaning her and making demands of her. What she believed would be a marriage of just companionship has turned out not to be so, and she finds it distasteful.

When an old friend, Elizabeth Cromwell, the daughter of the last Protector, Richard, claims her acquaintance and behaves as if they were closer than they were, Cat eventually recognizes she is using her to get the plans for a building called the Cockpit from her husband. She also realizes that Richard Cromwell, who is supposed to be banished to Europe, is in the country. The Cromwells want the Hakesbys’ help to regain a personal possession, they say, but Cat thinks Hakesby is foolishly getting embroiled in treason.

The Last Protector is another fine entry in the James Marwood/Cat Lovett series set during the Restoration. It combines political intrigue with suspense in a realistic seeming historical setting.

Related Posts

The Ashes of London

The Fire Court

The King’s Evil

Review 2033: Astonish Me

~ whatmeread ~ Leave a comment

I enjoyed Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, although maybe I thought it was a little overhyped. However, I liked it well enough to look for something else by her and found Astonish Me.

When ballet dancer Joan sees Arslan Rusakov dance, she falls madly in love with him. A brief encounter leads to a correspondence, and a few years later, in 1975, Joan helps him defect from the USSR. Arslan is not faithful to her, however, and once he finds that she is not a good enough dancer to dance with him, he seems to lose interest.

Joan finds she is pregnant and decides to leave the dance life. She seduces her lifelong friend, Jacob, and marries him. They settle in to a suburban life in California.

Their son Harry develops the same kind of friendship with his neighbor Chloe that Jacob had with Joan—he worships her while she seems often embarrassed by him, yet appreciates his friendship. But as they reach their teens with both turning to ballet, it becomes obvious that Harry will be a great dancer while the jury is still out on Chloe.

At first, I was turned off by Joan’s decision to deceive Jacob. I felt it was particularly unlikely for that time. However, as the novel digs deeper into the fascinating world of dance, I found it more and more compelling. I liked, too, that Shipstead’s characters have their faults. They’re human, not perfect. If anything, I liked this novel better than Great Circle.

Related Posts

Great Circle

Pippa Passes

Ballet Shoes

Review 2029: Long Summer Day

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

R. F. Delderfield is known for his ability to capture slices of English life, and he certainly does that in this long volume, the first book of A Horseman Riding By.

Paul Craddock is just recovering from being seriously wounded in the Boer War when he learns that his father has died, leaving him a great deal of money and a half share in a scrap metal business. Paul wants nothing to do with scrap metal but thinks he’d like to buy a farm. However, Franz Zorndorff, his father’s business partner, sends him to the West Country to look at Shallowford, a large estate that’s for sale. Although it is much bigger than he had in mind, he ends up buying it.

At first people tend to treat Paul as a dabbler, but he begins to win over the regard of the people in the dale by making improvements to his tenant’s property and by his commitment to his new life. He makes friends with Claire Derwent, and people expect them to marry, but on his original trip to look over the property, he was struck by Grace Lovell.

This novel covers the first nine years of Paul’s Westcountry life, beginning with the accession to the throne of Edward VII in 1902 and ending with the accession of George V. Of course, by then, the First World War is approaching, but not many of the characters in the novel seem to be aware of it. The novel gets somewhat involved in the politics of the time and in the suffragette movement, but it mostly centers on life in the valley.

There is a strong awareness of the dale with many descriptions of it. The novel itself is slow moving with only a few major events, mostly to do with the private lives of the inhabitants—marriages, births, and deaths among them. One thing I found surprising was that there was so little emphasis on actual farming issues. It’s like the estate just runs itself.

There was much of interest about this novel, but for me some of it was hampered by Delderfield’s writing style. He likes long, involved sentences that verge on being and sometimes are run-ons. He also has the odd habit of leaving out the comma in a compound sentence, which many times forced me to reread. Even with the modern tendency to use fewer commas, I’ve never seen anyone else do that and am surprised his editors didn’t add in a bunch of commas.

Am I ready to read the second book? I don’t think so. The novel has a lot to recommend it, but at 800+ pages, this first book in the series indicates that it will be very lengthy.

Related Posts

Ross Poldark

The Children’s Book

A Place Called Winter

Review 2019: Edith Trilogy Read-Along: Cold Light

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

In this third book of Moorhouse’s Edith trilogy, the League of Nations having closed and Edith’s hopes of getting a job with the United Nations dashed, Edith has decided to move back to Australia, thinking that Canberra will “snap her up.” (I was surprised that she thought this after her last job hunt in Australia.) Her husband Ambrose has managed to get a position with the British but is not happy to be there, and Edith has been back for months without any job offers. Her lack of an official title at the League, its spectacular failure, and sexism seem to be getting in her way.

Then her brother Frederick, who disappeared from the family 20 years ago, makes himself known to her. He is an organizer for the Communist party, a true believer. Talk is building up about banning the party in Australia, and in the U. S., Senator McCarthy is building power around this issue, so Edith isn’t sure what to do about Frederick and his girlfriend Janice.

Edith learns that the Canberra government isn’t hiring married women, but she eventually gets a temporary position organizing a conference about the design of the city. When the opportunity comes, she and Ambrose have just decided to move back to Europe and she thinks the job is beneath her, but by the end of the interview, she is sucked in. Of course, she uses this position to shoehorn herself into more opportunity.

I have been ambivalent about this series. At times, it is really interesting, while at other times it dwells too long on the details of some subject. For, continuing on with the theme of Edith being involved in world events of her time, there is a great deal of discussion of Communism from both sides as well as the ramifications of passing a law against it. (Edith has a long discussion with her old mentor, John Latham, a supreme court judge, who she believes voted wrongly on the issue, and it turns tedious.) The novel also deals with uranium and nuclear bombs vs. nuclear energy, as Edith makes herself an expert on uranium.

My other problem is that Edith has always seemed unconvincing to me as a woman. She is a bold and impulsive woman, true, but some of the things she does and the way she thinks don’t seem like the actions and thoughts of any woman I can imagine.

On a related issue, I was kind of fascinated by the cross-dressing aspect of her relationship to Ambrose and the emphasis on it—because there is no such emphasis on any of her other husbands. Robert is around for a millisecond, and she rarely mentions Richard after she marries him except in terms of his kids—not until she decides to leave him, at which point suddenly a chapter is devoted to their relationship.

Thinking about what Moorhouse chooses to talk about and what he ignores brought me to this conclusion. Authors often invest themselves in their characters by imagining that they are their main character (or some other). For a long time, I thought Moorhouse saw himself as Ambrose, but I finally decided that either he saw himself as both Ambrose and Edith herself or perhaps simply as Edith.

Related Posts

Dark Palace

Grand Days

A Town Like Alice

Review 2017: The Aeneid

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

When I choose books for my Classics Club list, I try to pick some from very early times. This time I realized that although I knew of many of the stories of Achilles and Odysseus before reading The Iliad and The Odyssey, I knew nothing about that other great classic hero, Aeneus. So, I put The Aeneid on my list.

Regarding the translation, I had heard good things about the Fagles translations of several of these epics, and that was the one described on the library web page when I reserved the book. The translation I got, however, was by Sarah Ruden. Apparently, whoever picked this book off the shelves sees no difference (assuming they actually had the Fagles translation), which is odd for a librarian. I didn’t look into the reviews of this translator’s works, just read it, so I have no idea how that might have affected my enjoyment of the book. Suffice it to say that this version was easy to read and went relatively quickly.

Aeneus and his men are refugees from the fall of Troy who are looking for a place to settle. Prophecies have informed him that he will settle on the west coast of what is now Italy and found a great empire (Rome), but he is a long time getting there. Seven years is mentioned at one point.

In the beginning of the book, the Trojans’ ships are blown off course in a violent storm. Aeneus’s ship is separated from his father’s, but they all end up in Carthage. There Aeneus dabbles with Queen Dido and seriously considers staying, but a seer tells him to go to Italy, so he does, leaving some of his people behind. Poor Queen Dido stabs herself from sorrow. I don’t think he even bothers to say goodbye. What a guy!

I found the first half of the book fairly entertaining. There is a really creepy description of a visit to an oracle, maddened by her visions (and hydrogen sulfide gas, I presume), and not too much tedious listing. That changes with the departure for Italy, as Virgil names each man who comes along, including for some a brief history of their deeds. I envisioned Virgil making sure he has included the names of the ancestors of his potential patrons.

After that, as my husband and I say about ancient stories, “There’s a whole lot of smiting going on” as Aeneus and his men arrive in Italy and proceed to evict the inhabitants. And lots of it is gory. The gore didn’t bother me but the tedium of those described battles did.

Related Posts

The Women of Troy

The Silence of the Girls

The Song of Achilles

Review 2010: Punishment of a Hunter

~ whatmeread ~ 5 Comments

When Zaitsev and his homicide team in 1930 Leningrad investigate the death of Faina Baranova, he knows there is something odd about it. Although all her clothing is practical, she is dressed in velvet and posed before red curtains the neighbors in her communal apartment say are not hers. There is something theatrical in the scene. However, after months, the team finds no clues.

In a meeting at work of the OGPU, Zaitsev is accused of hiding bourgeois origins. He claims he knows nothing about his father, having grown up in an orphanage. Pasha, his building janitor, shows up in support and claims to have known his mother; nevertheless, some days later he is arrested.

After a few months, he is released without explanation. Zaitsev soon figures out he is to solve another murder, this time of a group of people on the site of a new park planned by Kirov, head of the party in Leningrad. The unspoken message is solve the case or go back to jail. However, because he’s been released, his colleagues no longer trust him and won’t speak to him about work.

Aside from presenting an intriguing mystery, Punishment of a Hunter evokes 1930 Leningrad, beautiful but gray and tired, the atmosphere paranoid, citizens poorly clad and fed. I was convinced by this post-revolutionary world as I was not by the popular A Gentleman in Moscow. I hope Pushkin Press will be publishing more books by Yakovlevna.

Related Posts

A Gentleman in Moscow

Sofia Petrovna

The Revolution of Marina M.

Review 2008: The King’s Evil

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

This third book in the James Marwood/Cat Lovett series begins with James hearing that Cat’s cousin, Edward Adderly, has found out where she is hiding. Since the first novel, in which Edward raped her and she put out his eye, she has been hiding at the office of Mr. Hakesby, an architect, and working for him as a drafter and maid. James finds Cat on Saturday and warns her she must go into hiding. She finds refuge with Dorcas, a connection of Mr. Brennan, a draftsman she works with.

However, on Sunday Edward Adderly is found drowned in the well at Clarendon House, where Cat was working with Hakesby on a project. Clarendon has recently been removed from his offices at court, and his enemy, Buckingham, has been trying to stir up the public against him. One of James’s bosses, Mr. Chiffinch, tells him to dispose of the body. Cat is accused of murder and a warrant put out for her arrest.

James is charged with finding out who murdered Adderly, but he is also dispatched by Charles II to accompany Lady Quincy, Cat’s aunt, to Cambridge. This errand has to do with fetching a child back to court, but in both his investigation and his trip to Cambridge, James keeps encountering a mysterious man called the Deacon and his fat friend. James begins to believe both his errands are related.

I think this series is proving every bit as good as Sansom’s Shardlake series, and perhaps doesn’t have such a heavy feel to it, although neither main character seems to have much of a sense of humor. James finds himself pulled helplessly into the affairs at court while Cat into the arms of Mr. Hakesby, who has offered marriage. The plots are interesting and complex and the characters believable.

Related Posts

The Ashes of London

The Fire Court

The School of Night