Tag: historical fiction

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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Day 888: Tinkers

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Cover for TinkersGeorge Crosby lies dying. He is an old man who retired and then became a clock repairman for 30 years. As he dies, he remembers the life of his father, who was a tinker—a traveling salesman of household items in the rural wilds of Maine—and an epileptic. In a way, of course, George also tinkers, with clocks.

This novel’s writing is truly astounding. Harding has a way of examining ideas and objects down to the bone. At other times, musings seem almost hallucinogenic. I wasn’t sure I understood the point of view, though. If all of the novel is from the point of view of George, as most reviews of the book seem to imply, how does he know what happened to Howard, his father—or is he imagining a life for his father?

To me, the novel seems to be about both men, in particular, about the circumstances that led to George being raised without his father. In the hard primitive life of backwoods Maine, George’s mother is resentful and cold. It is his father who is more considering and thoughtful, but a poor provider who might stop to weave pallets of grass instead of selling his goods. After a particularly bad epileptic attack, the only one witnessed by the Crosby children, George’s mother decides to have their father committed.

This novel was difficult for me to read, because I was so interested in some aspects of the plot that I glanced over some of the gorgeous prose or couldn’t concentrate on it (not my usual approach). The prose is the point of this book, however, and the meditations it evokes.

I believe this book is related to another book that also bought. I can’t remember if it is the sequel to the other book, or the other book is a sequel to it. I’ll be interested to see if reading both books enlightens me more.

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Day 887: Fair Helen

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Cover for Fair HelenBest Book of the Week!
I was completely entranced by Fair Helen from the first moments of reading it. It’s based on a 16th century ballad, “Fair Helen of Kirkconnel Lea.” Since one of my interests (although sadly not pursued for years) is early ballads of Great Britain, Ireland, and Appalachia, this is a good fit for me.

Harry Langdon is a city man, a scrivener from Edinburgh, the son of a craftsman, so the Borderlands seem wild to him when he answers the summons of his good friend Adam Fleming. Adam feels he needs his friend’s support. He fears his stepfather, his father’s brother, might be trying to kill him. And Harry is surprised to find Adam’s stepfather in the role of Heidsman instead of Adam after the recent death of Adam’s father. (If this sounds familiar, it’s supposed to.)

But Adam is more concerned about the disposition of his love affair. He has fallen madly in love with Helen Irvine, a beautiful and vivacious girl. But the Irvines and the Flemings have been feuding for years. (If this sounds familiar in a different way, it’s supposed to.) Helen’s parents want her to marry Robert Bell, a man with more prospects than a member of an unmade family.

We know from the beginning of the novel that none of this will end well, for we have the text of the ballad before us. And Harry in his old age is telling this story of the most important event in his life and the two people he loved most. For Helen is his cousin, and the two of them were very close as children.

The situation is complicated by the politics of the Borderlands. Harry finds himself summoned by Walter Scott of Buccleuch, a lord who frankly terrifies him (a very different Wat Scott of Buccleuch than the one depicted by Dorothy Dunnet), and is forced to spy on his friends. It becomes clear to him that there have been attempts at murder, if not of Adam, but who is behind them and why?

The novel is written in a mix of Scots and English, with a glossary provided. It is a strong style that goes well with its subject matter. At first, I was thrown off by the footnotes, which are all in the wrong places. I didn’t realize what was going on and thought they were simply non sequiturs. When I figured it out, I spent a lot of time flipping pages, trying to match them up. I honestly wasn’t sure if it was a printing error until I ran across the following passage:

I had aimed to set down plainly only what I witnessed concerning the events at Kirkconnel, to correct the folk haivers and bring some understanding. Yet already I find footnotes, asides and addenda have begun to run wild down the margins and among the lines. I like to think of them as bright wildflowers that border and run through the acres of turnip and kale by which we feed ourselves.

So, Greig is having some fun with us and in more ways than one, although this is in general not a light-hearted novel. It is lovely, though, full of yearning and regret, with a backbone of history for those who are interested.

In my recurring theme of quality printing, I have to say that this is the first modern book with properly bound signatures that I’ve seen in a long while, as opposed to the signatures being hacked off and glued. That’s great, and it means my book will stay together longer. However, the end papers were pasted down carelessly. They have creases, and some of the pages of the book stick out beyond the cover. So, Quercus Books, one big step forward and a few small ones back.

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Day 875: The River of No Return

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Cover for The River of No ReturnThe River of No Return was popular a few years ago, but I didn’t get around to reading it until now. The plot combining time travel and romance reminded me of The Time-Traveler’s Wife, which I loved. I found Ridgway’s book not nearly as interesting, though.

Nick Davenport appears to be a wealthy dilettante dabbling in cheese making in 2013, but in 1810, he was Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown. While fighting in the Peninsular Wars, he was suddenly thrust forward in time to 2003. There he was picked up by a society of time travelers called the Guild, trained to live in modern times, and given a potload of money to live on. Now, the Guild wants him to travel backward to 1815, something he didn’t even know could be done, and resume his earlier life to carry out a mission for them.

Back in 1815, Julia Percy’s grandfather has just died, leaving her at the mercy of an unknown cousin. Since she was a child, Julia has watched her grandfather play little tricks with time. She is just beginning to realize that she can do it, too. Then her cousin Eamon arrives and begins looking for something, a talisman. Julia eventually realizes that she herself is the talisman.

When Nick arrives back in time, he learns he is to find a representative of a rival time-travel society called the Ofan and kill that person. The Guild has learned that the time period within which they can go forward is moving backward in time, and they think the activities of the Ofan have affected the river of time. The Guild thinks this Ofan member lives in a house neighboring Nick’s, the home of Julia Percy.  But Nick has no intention of killing anyone.

A portion of this novel is more romance novelish than I like, a fairly standard romantic plot with unlikely (for the time) sex scenes. Since I am not a fan of the standard romance novel, this was not a plus for me.

Worse, though, is the theory of time travel and its link with human emotions and monetary exchange, which is scientifically absurd. Audrey Niffenegger’s genetic abnormality is at least faintly believable.

All in all, my reaction was fairly meh. The novel is well written, but I wasn’t particularly interested in most of the characters. I thought Nick was incredibly naive about the Guild and went along with it far too long. An alternate explanation of the moving time horizon seemed immediately obvious to me, although it is not addressed in this novel. Because this novel is clearly designed for a sequel, only the romance plot is resolved.

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