Tag: historical fiction

Review 2086: Beyond the Rice Fields

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I was looking forward to reading Beyond the Rice Fields as the second book set in Madagascar that I’ve recently read (the other was Red Island House) but even more so as the first book ever translated from Malagasy into English. It is set during a fascinating period in the 19th century.

The child Tsito has been a slave since his family were killed or sold into slavery, but his luck changes when he is bought by Rado, a trader in zebu who travels all over the country. He purchases Tsito more as a companion for his young daughter Fara, the product of an unmarried union with Bao, a very beautiful dancer. So, Tsito grows up in a family unit with Fara, Bao, and Bebe, Bao’s mother.

When he is older, Tsito learns to read from foreign missionaries, and this makes him valuable to Andriantsitoha, the provincial lord. He takes Tsito to the City of Thousands to work for him. Tsito is hoping to earn his freedom, because he is in love with Fara. However, the political situation is looking more uncertain since rule of the kingdom was forcibly seized by the Sovereign Queen after the death of the Sovereign King. Powerful lords are taking land away from others who seem to have no judicial recourse, and Andriantsitoha has very little power in the city. The country becomes more chaotic, as a backlash against Christianity leads to large-scale denunciations and slaughter.

I know nothing about the history of Madagascar, so I probably would have found this novel fascinating except for issues that may or may not be cultural. It was hard for me to know. I often found myself confused about the larger picture because except for the final dramatic scenes in the last 50 pages of the book, Naivo doesn’t explain what’s going on very clearly. He tends to only bring in information or characters when he needs them, and if then, doesn’t really give them much dimension. For example, some of the children that Fara and Tsito play with become important later in the book, but he hardly mentions them as children and doesn’t show you what they are like, except the bully.

The narrative point of view switches between Tsito and Fara, and Fara spends a lot of time recounting stories and thinking about some family curse that is never fully explained. So, during the first half or so of the novel, I wasn’t always sure whether we were in the past or the present.

In general, I felt that Naivo had a problem knowing what to tell and when.

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Review 2081: The Night Ship

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In 1628, Mayken, the child of a wealthy Dutch merchant, sets sail on the Batavia to join her father in the Spice Islands after the death of her mother. She is accompanied by her nursemaid, Imke, but Imke being ill from the beginning of the voyage, Mayken soon has the run of the upper ship. Dressed in raggedy boys’ breeches, she also sometimes explores the depths of the ship.

In 1989, young Gil has gone to live on an island in the Indian Ocean with his fisherman grandfather after his mother’s death. Gil’s mother and her father Joss had been estranged, and Joss doesn’t seem happy to have him. The island is inhabited by fishermen who only live there during the fishing season and by archaeologists exploring the site of the sinking of the Batavia. There are rumors that the island is haunted by a girl who died after the shipwreck.

This novel is utterly fascinating. Kidd does a great job with her characters, especially the enchanting Mayken. The story of the Batavia, an actual shipwreck, is gut-wrenching, but Kidd makes her more modern story almost as interesting. This book is great.

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Review 2078: The Silver Collar

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Antonia Hodgson states in the Notes to The Silver Collar that she intended to write this novel from the very beginning of the Thomas Hawkins series. The Silver Collar is the fourth book in the series.

It’s 1728. Things are going well for Thomas Hawkins and his beloved Kitty Sparks, but Thomas begins to feel discontented because he is being supported by Kitty’s wealth and her pornographic bookstore. Then the couple quarrel because Thomas learns she has secretly been seeing Magistrate Gonson, who recently got him unjustly convicted of murder.

After they argue, Thomas stomps out. He returns to find out belatedly two things—Kitty is pregnant and Magistrate Gonson has conspired to help her mother, Lady VanHook, kidnap her.

Thomas knows that Kitty is terrified of her mother, whose intentions are twofold—to take over Kitty’s fortune and to torment Kitty. Finding her pregnant adds some spice. Thomas gets help from Jeremiah, a black man whose little daughter is enslaved by Lady VanHook, and from Sam and Gabriela Fleet. They find that Kitty has been incarcerated in an insane asylum, but that’s just the beginning of this fast-moving, adventurous novel.

There was one place where the pace slowed to a slog, and that was in reading Jeremiah’s letter, which was too long and went into too much extraneous detail. Hodgson created a trap for herself when she gave him speech problems, because this section would have worked much better as a dialogue. However, in all, this was an exciting entry in the series.

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Review 2075: The Land Breakers

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John Ehle grew up in North Carolina and can trace his ancestry back to one of the first three families to settle the remote western North Carolinian mountains (the Appalachians) in the 18th century. The Land Breakers is the first of a series of seven novels about the families who settled in that area.

It’s 1779: Mooney Wright and his wife Imy have been released from their indentures and are traveling around trying to buy land for a farm. However, no one will sell them land in the more settled areas. They find a store owner who offers them land in the remote western mountains, which have not yet been settled, and almost inadvertently they end up buying 600+ acres.

It is a hard journey to get there, but at last they end up in a pretty valley with soil that has never been cultivated. They are both hard workers, and they set about building a cabin and clearing land for planting the next spring. However, during the winter Imy dies of a sickness, and Mooney sinks into a depression.

Tinker Harrison, a comparatively wealthy man, arrives with his family and slaves the next spring. He wants to establish the valley as a settlement he can control. They arrive shortly after Mooney buries Imy. Following them are Ernest Plover and his family. The Plovers are in-laws to Harrison, because Ernest’s oldest daughter, Belle, married Tinker, although she is younger than Tinker’s son, Grover. Ernest is a shiftless man with seven daughters, the next oldest to Belle being Mina.

Once Mooney starts to come out of his depression, he becomes interested in Mina, who is beautiful but very young. However he has also noticed Lorry, Harrison’s daughter and the mother of two young boys. She married Lacey Pollard, but he left to look for a home in Kentucky four years earlier, and she never heard from him again. Mooney needs a wife to work for and make his plans succeed, and he is torn between the two women.

This novel is a sparely written story of the difficulties faced by those early settlers. These do not so much involve people as problems with wild animals and weather and the sheer remoteness of the area from anywhere else. Occasionally, when describing the landscape, the prose becomes lyrical. With its details of work, it reminded me a bit of the trilogy I read by Tim Pears, although that was set 150 years later. I was interested enough in this novel to order the second in the series.

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Review 2065: The Invisible Bridge

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One of the reasons I learned to love reading was that I got swept up into another time or place or even world. As I got older and more discriminating, this experience happened less often. It happened most recently within a few pages of starting The Invisible Bridge, which I read for my James Tait Black project.

Andras Lévi, a young Hungarian Jew, arrives in Paris in 1937 to study architecture. He has brought with him a letter that an acquaintance asked him to mail once he was in Paris. He mails the letter but notices the address.

Soon he is involved in the technicalities of art school, made more difficult because he almost immediately loses his scholarship, a first act of the anti-Semitisim that is perceptibly increasing, although not as bad in Paris as it was in Budapest. He seeks a job at a theater from Zoltán Novak, a man he met on the train from Hungary. When he begins a friendship there with an older actress, she sends him to lunch with friends at the address on the envelope he mailed, and that’s how he meets Klara, an older woman with whom he falls madly in love.

This novel, which starts out seeming very particular, about a love affair between two people, grows into a novel of great breadth, covering events of World War II, the Hungarian Holocaust, life in work camps, the siege of Budapest. All of it is centered in the importance of family.

I absolutely loved this novel. It is sweeping, wonderfully well written, touching, harrowing. And what a story, based on the lives of Orringer’s grandparents. I can’t recommend this book enough.

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Review 2059: The Fortune Men

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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.

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

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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.

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Review 2047: Booth

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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.

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Review 2038: The Last Protector

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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.

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Review 2033: Astonish Me

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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.

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