Tag: historical fiction

Day 925: Warleggan

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Cover for WarlegganIt seems that the more books I read in Winston Graham’s Poldark Saga, the more interesting I find it. In the fourth book, Warleggan, we get more insight into whether George Warleggan is the villain Ross Poldark thinks he is. Short answer—yes.

Ross and Demelza’s marriage undergoes serious tests in this novel. First, at a party, Elizabeth, Ross’s first love, lets him know she made a mistake when she married his cousin Francis instead of him. Ross is no fool, and he realizes that this inability of Elizabeth’s to know her own mind has poisoned her own marriage to Francis, because Francis has realized that Elizabeth prefers Ross, too. Ross is sure that his betrayal by Francis, now forgiven, is at least partially because of this perception.

Early in the novel, though, Francis has an accident in the mine and dies. Demelza becomes more worried about Ross’s feelings for Elizabeth, especially since there is a new distance in her marriage with Ross.

The mine that Ross placed his hopes on, based on Mark Daniel’s comment after spending a night in it while hiding from the authorities, is not panning out as expected. Ross and Demelza are struggling financially, and the money to mine won’t last much longer. So, Ross decides to involve himself more directly with the smuggling trade by going along with the smugglers to see Mark, in hopes of finding out where he saw the ore. But there is an informer in the village.

Dwight Enys has finally decided to elope with the rich heiress Caroline Penvenen, because her relations won’t agree to her marriage with a penniless doctor. However, he must agree to leave Cornwall to marry her, and he is not happy to leave his patients.

Finally, the situation in Europe has become more unstable. Soon there will be a war with France, and no one knows how that will affect the country.

So far, this novel is the one in the series that has most involved me. I don’t know if this is because of my sympathy for Demelza or my ability to finally divorce this series from the new television series, which I saw before I began reading. I think there are eight more novels to go, and I’m looking forward to them.

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Day 918: Ghost Light

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Cover for Ghost LightBest Book of the Week!
The Irish playwright John Millington Synge was engaged to marry an actress, Molly Allgood, when he died in 1909. Their relationship was of several years’ standing, but it was considered scandalous because of the difference in their ages and stations. Synge was nearly twice as old as Molly, and Molly was from a poor and uncultured family.

Ghost Light is a fictionalized account of this relationship, and O’Connor freely admits to taking liberties with it. The novel begins in 1952, when Molly is an old lady, nearly destitute and living in a cheap rooming house in London. The story follows her for one night and day of her life, during which she remembers the events in her love affair with Synge.

This novel is beautifully and atmospherically written, poetic at times, and partially in different flavors of Irish vernacular. It eloquently tells a story of frustrated love and loss. This is a compelling characterization of Molly and her view of the character of Synge. Ghost Light has been another interesting experience from my Walter Scott Prize list.

Day 911: A Place Called Winter

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Cover for A Place Called WinterI read A Place Called Winter for my Walter Scott Prize project, the second book I’ve read for the 2016 list. Like one of the other books I read recently for that project, Arctic Summer, it has as a major theme the main character’s homosexuality. However, I found myself feeling much closer to the characters and more interested in the plot of this novel than I did for Arctic Summer.

At the beginning of the novel, Harry Cane is being treated, or rather mistreated, in an asylum in Canada. Shortly thereafter, he is transferred to an experimental center that treats the patients much more humanely. We understand that Harry has committed a crime, but we don’t know what it is. Between short chapters about his life at the center, we learn what brought him there.

The story of Harry’s life begins when his wealthy father dies. His brother Jack is still in school, and Harry undertakes his education and expenses. Harry is a man of no occupation who feels that he would like one, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. He feels vaguely that he would like to work an estate or a farm but thinks he has to be born to it. A shy man with an occasional stammer, he likes reading and horses. Eventually, he marries a shy woman, Winnie, who informs him on their wedding night that she loves someone else. Nevertheless, he cares for his wife and loves his daughter.

An investment recommendation by his brother-in-law takes a large part of Harry’s inheritance, and Harry and his family are forced to move in with his in-laws. He is an innocent-minded person, so it is not until he meets an actor named Browning that he realizes he is homosexual. He begins an affair with Browning, but then disaster strikes. His affair is exposed to his in-laws by a blackmailer and Harry is forced out of the family. Even his brother Jack, whom he loves, is pressured by his wife not to correspond with him.

Now totally alone, Harry emigrates to Canada and ends up in Saskatchewan, which is just being opened to settlement by the arrival of the Grand Trunk Railway. On shipboard, he meets Troels Munck, who finds him a position where he can learn farming and then helps him purchase a homestead. Munck, though, is a bully, and from the moment Harry meets him, we know that relationship will not end well.

link to NetgalleyHarry finds that a farmer’s life suits him. He settles in, works hard, and makes friends. But we know where he is at the beginning of the book, so the tension builds as we find out how he got there.

Although the time spent to get him to Canada, where the book really captured me, seems a little long, by the time he gets there, we know Harry very well. He is a kind and polite person, but he earns our respect when he finds his niche. Eventually, I became deeply involved in his story. It was also interesting in its details of early homesteading and treatment of mental illness.

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Day 910: The Sisters Brothers

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Cover for The Sisters BrothersThe Sisters Brothers is a book I read for my Walter Scott Prize project, but it also turns out to qualify for my Man Booker Prize project. It is a peculiar novel indeed. It is blurbed as hilarious. I did not find it so. Satirical, maybe; dark, yes; picaresque, definitely.

It  is 1851, and the Sisters brothers are on their way from Oregon City to California to kill a man named Hermann Kermit Warm. They are hired killers who work for a man known as the Commodore. Charlie is the Commodore’s man, but Eli is tired of the life and wants to own a store.

This is definitely a road trip novel, and on the road, Eli and Charlie encounter many odd people. Most of them they deal with brutally. Eli and Charlie are themselves almost self-parodies, as is their mode of speech.

Although there is an underlying plot, the novel is a series of episodes, where the brothers encounter one situation after another and get out of them more or less fantastically. There is a bit of dark humor in the dialogue, but unlike some other reviewers, I did not find the novel funny. I was interested in Eli’s mental journey, but after he and Charlie blew away a bunch of people, not so much.

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Day 906: Enchanted Islands

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Cover for Enchanted IslandsEnchanted Islands is a novel based on the lives of Frances and Ainsley Conway, an American couple who lived on the Galapagos Islands in the late 1930’s and the 40’s. Although based on two memoirs written by Frances Conway, Amend has expanded the novel to cover most of Frances’s life and her friendship with Rosalie Mendel, all presumably fictional.

This book is a rather odd one. It begins with Frances and Rosalie in their old age and then returns in time to their childhood in Wisconsin. It spends some time there, following them until Frances’s late teens, when she discovers Rosalie with her own boyfriend and flees. Then it glosses over the next 20 years until Frances meets Rosalie again in California and later marries Ainsley. After that, Frances and Ainsley go on a spying mission for the Navy, something Frances is never able to tell her friends about.

The result creates a sort of divided effect. First, sections of the novel are either full of Rosalie or have no Rosalie, which made me wonder, why even bother with her? Why not just write about Galapagos? The other parts seem to belong to a different novel.

Then there is Galapagos, which Amend simplifies to the island Floreana when actually the Conways lived on three different islands. The existence there seems harsh, bleak, and lonely. There is little description of scenery or anything else to make us understand why, according to Amend, they came to love it. In fact, there is very little going on there, even including the spying.

I felt a distance from all these characters. Although we learn a lot about Frances, we don’t ever feel as if we understand her, and Ainsley is a sort of charming enigma. Most of the time, we don’t even like Rosalie.

link to NetgalleySo, a middling reaction to this novel. I was interested enough to finish it, but only mildly interested. I thought there was no sense of place in any of the settings. The characters didn’t seem like real people. The cover of the novel is lovely, but the islands seemed in no way enchanting. Did Amend bother to visit them, or is she just not good at description? Or are they not lovely?

Amend comments that she is a novelist first and only a mediocre historian. That remark irritated me, because I think that’s what’s wrong with with many historical novels. If authors aren’t willing to do the research to bring a time and place to life, maybe they should stick to contemporary fiction.

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Day 899: Jeremy Poldark

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Cover for Jeremy PoldarkThis third novel in Winston Graham’s Poldark series begins with Ross and Demelza Poldark in trouble. They are still grieving over the death of their baby daughter, and Ross is soon to come to trial for the incident of the shipwreck.

Although he certainly summoned the villagers to the wreck, some of the charges are trumped up. He never assaulted anyone or took any of the wreckage for himself, and he offered hospitality to some of the shipwrecked sailors. The worst looting and killing was done by unemployed miners.

Ross and Demelza soon have a misunderstanding that affects their marriage for months. This situation is not helped by a rapprochement between Ross and his cousin Francis, which brings Francis’s wife Elizabeth back into their orbit. Demelza is insecure around Elizabeth and envies her for her beauty and poise.

As all the Poldarks are suffering financially, Ross gets involved in some risky ventures. One could put him at odds with the law, and another could ruin him.

This novel is the first in the series that hasn’t been overshadowed for me by seeing the recent programs on Masterpiece. I think it is a good, solid series, with interesting characters and a well-researched historical background. The scene at the beginning of the novel of the election and its resulting chaos was particularly startling. I am enjoying this series.

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Day 897: That Lady

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Cover for That LadyThat Lady is another book I’ve read for my Classics Club list, and a good one it is, too. In the Preface to the novel, Kate O’Brien states that it is not a historical novel because, although all of the events are real, the scenes between characters are wholly imagined. But I would argue that this is the very definition of a historical novel, with the proviso that the author attempt to preserve the true nature of the peoples’ characters, if they are known. That Lady is based on a curious interaction between Philip II of Spain and Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Eboli, that historians are still struggling to understand.

The novel begins in 1576, when Ana is a 36-year-old widow. Her husband was Ruy Gomez de Silva, Philip’s secretary of state. But Ruy has been dead for several years, and Ana has been living a retired life with her children on her country estate of Pastrana.

Philip comes to visit, however, and tells her he wishes her to return to Madrid. He and Ana have enjoyed friendship and a mild flirtation, and he misses her company.

Ana does not return to Madrid immediately, but she eventually does in the fall of 1577. There, she becomes reacquainted with Don Antonio Perez, her husband’s former protégé and friend, who is Philip’s current secretary of state.

Although Ana has heretofore been a virtuous woman, she begins an affair with Perez, partially because she realizes she has done nothing of her own volition for years. This relationship eventually becomes a complication in a political battle.

This novel is primarily a character study of a fascinating woman and to a lesser extent of Philip II, whose poor government of Spain has stricken with poverty the inhabitants of what was at the time the wealthiest country in the world. It is also a very interesting study of the politics of the region of Castille.

At first, I found it difficult to grasp Ana’s character, but the novel centers on her strong sense of principle and protection of her privacy. It is also about the tension between her religious beliefs and her principles. That is, having committed herself, she refuses to abandon her lover when he is in trouble, even to save her soul or her life.

That Lady is a powerful novel about an unusual, strong woman who struggles against the restrictions of her life based on sex and station. I highly recommend it. By the way, the picture on the cover above is of a painting of the actual lady.

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Day 896: No Country

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Cover for No CountryA story about Irish immigrants to India seemed like an interesting change to me. But I decided not to finish this 500+-page book.

It begins in 1989 in upstate New York, where the bodies of a couple are found and their daughter is being questioned. The promise is that the novel will answer the question of who killed them or whether they committed suicide, but at least in the first 200 pages, after this brief opening, the book doesn’t return to the crime.

Instead, the story goes back in time to 1843 Ireland. There, we meet two boyhood friends, Brendan and Padraig. Through several unlooked-for occurrences, Padraig ends up on a ship to Bangladesh with every intention of returning immediately, while Brendan adopts Padraig’s illegitimate daughter Maeve and ends up fleeing the famine for Canada.

Everything about the Irish section of the novel seemed clichéd to me, and because Ray spends no time at all on characterization, we’re not especially interested in the characters. The point of view switches between characters, but they don’t have distinctive voices or personalities. Finally, there is no sense of place to the novel. So, I decided to stick it out until the novel moved to India, hoping that would change things.

In Calcutta in 1911, we meet Robert, Padraig’s Anglo-Indian grandson. I didn’t stay with Robert very long because I still didn’t feel very interested, and again there was no sense of place. It seems obvious that the couple who die in 1989 are going to find they are related in some unanticipated way, but by then the relationship will be so distant, it would hardly seem to matter.

In fact, the story seems to be one of unrelenting misery, but a misery so detached that we feel little empathy as we read the catalog of horrors experienced by Brendan and his family in Ireland and on the way to Canada. The novel is ambitious to tell the story of these families but in a way that didn’t capture me or make me want to invest the time to finish it. From reviews I’ve read, it just becomes more complex, one reviewer mentioning it needed a family tree. But that would probably give away the ending.

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Day 894: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

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Cover for Everyone Brave Is ForgivenJust before I read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, I began a couple of advance reading copies that were varying degrees of bad. I did not finish either one, but the characteristic that stood out most for me was that both were written without a shred of humor. That is not to imply that all books should be humorous, but humor certainly helps me enjoy a book.

So, as I seemed to be on a run of bad fiction, my hopes for Everyone Brave Is Forgiven were not high, even though I enjoyed Cleave’s previous Little Bee. Although I’ll sometimes read one delightful book after another, this was not one of those periods. Thank goodness, I found Cleave’s book not only interesting, but at times funny, at other times touching.

Cleave starts out with some information about his grandfather, who was stationed during World War II in Malta. He has used the relationship between his grandparents as a jumping-off point for his novel.

Mary North is a young socialite who wants to do something for the war. She envisions the war office sending her on some important mission, but she finds she has been assigned to be a school teacher. She enjoys teaching, but her methods are unorthodox. When her school is evacuated to the countryside, her headmistress decides they can do without her.

Tom Shaw isn’t really interested in going to war, but when the children in the school district he administers are evacuated, he starts wondering about his role. After his good friend Alistair Heath enlists, he tries to sign up but is found to be performing an essential job.

By then he has already met Mary, who comes to him asking for a class to teach. Although most of the children are gone, there are still some about, mostly kids who weren’t wanted by the people in the country. Finally, Tom lets her conduct a small class of children, mostly handicapped, and the American negro boy from her old class, Zachary.

Tom falls madly for Mary, who is bright, beautiful, and funny. Mary also cares for Tom, who although older and more steady is also more naive. When Alistair returns, already a bit damaged from the war, Tom and Mary arrange a double date with her friend Hilda. But it is clearly Mary that Alistair is struck by, and she with him. Still, she stays true to Tom.

Alistair is stationed on Malta, which was Britain’s sole air base in the Mediterranean for much of the war. Nothing much grows on it, though, and after it is blockaded, the soldiers starve.

link to NetgalleyWe like Tom, but it is clear from the first that Mary and Alistair are meant for each other. How they will end up together is one thread of this story, but it has others. It’s about racism in World War II, about how Mary comes to reassess some of her values, about the horrors of war.

The conversations and exchanges of letters in this novel are light and amusing. The themes of the novel are more serious, but it still fits in the category of light fiction. I really enjoyed this novel. Mary is a determined character, light in approach but trying to do the right thing, even if it seems eccentric to others. Alistair is fairly shattered by his war experiences but still amusing.

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Day 890: Charlotte and Emily

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Cover for Charlotte and EmilyI have read two of Jude Morgan’s literary biographical novels but never felt I was really seeing the true character of the subjects. However, with Charlotte and Emily, Morgan seems to have found his subject.

Charlotte and Emily covers most of the Brontës’ lives, from the time they were children until Charlotte marries Arthur Bell Nicholls. By that time, all the other Brontë siblings have died.

Charlotte is the main character of the novel, although it is occasionally told from the point of view of Anne. Emily remains distant from the reader, harder to know.

Much of the novel is concerned with the focus of the entire family on the future of brilliant Branwell, the only son. The girls are sent for schooling so that they can be teachers and earn money to help educate Branwell. Although Charlotte wonders if she can become a writer and even tries sending poetry to Southey, the poet laureate, she is discouraged by both Southey and her father.

Of course, Branwell never finds a vocation and instead becomes a wastrel. Charlotte and Anne work doggedly as teachers, although they hate it. Emily gets herself sent home both from school and work.

I have read biographies of the Brontës, but this novel is the first I’ve read that gave me a sense of what their lives may have been like. I found it completely absorbing. If you are a Brontë lover, this is a book for you.

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