Tag: historical fiction

Day 865: Arctic Summer

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Cover for Arctic SummerFrom its description, I thought that Arctic Summer might be one of the most interesting books I’m reading from the Walter Scott Prize list. It is described as a fictional biography of E. M. Forster, particularly leading up to his publication of A Passage to India.

That is certainly the time period the novel covers, and A Passage to India is one of its preoccupations. But the novel spends most of its time on Forster’s obsession with his homosexuality and his desire for sexual experience. As I’m not all that interested in reading about anyone’s obsession with sexuality, this novel was not the best fit for me.

The novel begins in 1912 on Forster’s first trip to India. While he is there, he will visit a good friend, Masood, and he has hopes that his life will open up, particularly in regard to sex. At the age of 33, he is still a virgin, his fear of disgrace holding him back from expressing his sexuality at home. Perhaps in India he will have an experience, maybe with Masood, whom he loves.

Unfortunately, Forster, who goes by Morgan, has a tendency to fall in love with heterosexual men and prefers men from a lower class, so nothing quite works out the way he wishes. Even when he finally has some encounters, years later, what he is actually looking for is love, which he never finds. The novel follows him during the long gestation of his novel about India, back to England, to Alexandria during World War I, and back to India again. During this time, his most significant relationships are with two friends who do not return his feelings.

The novel is extremely well written, and Galgut deeply characterizes Morgan, if not the other characters. It did make me wonder if any person could be so relentlessly focused on sex, although of course he is also lonely. It also made me wonder how, if he really felt this unrelenting focus, he ever got anything written. Certainly this novel makes you feel for Forster—he was a sad man.

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Day 862: The Remains of the Day

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Cover for The Remains of the DayBest Book of the Week!
Having seen the movie The Remains of the Day years ago, I think it is just as well I waited so long to read it. Even so, some of the book’s scenes made me envision the movie, though I had forgotten most of it.

Stevens is the butler for Darlington House in the 1950’s. Lord Darlington, whom he served for 30 years, is gone, and now Stevens works for Mr. Farraday, an American. At Mr. Farraday’s suggestion, he has decided to take a holiday to visit the former Miss Keaton, who used to be the housekeeper in Darlington House. He surmises that her marriage is not altogether happy. She has split from her husband, and Stevens hopes she will agree to return to Darlington House as housekeeper. As he travels, he keeps a diary reflecting his thoughts on the journey.

To Stevens, his professional capabilities are the most important areas of his life. He reflects a great deal on such concepts as what dignity consists of. He has removed himself emotionally from the events of his own life, so much so that when his father is dying in the house, he won’t leave the dinner party he is serving. Stevens’ dedication is taken to such an extreme that when he sees in Mr. Farraday a disposition to banter with him, he, who has no sense of humor, begins to practice witticisms.

The Remains of the Day is the striking portrait of a unique individual as he comes to consider some of his life’s decisions. He has devoted his life to the service of Lord Darlington, whose political decisions before World War II left him a ruined man. Stevens thought he was helping Lord Darlington do important work, but later he had to re-evaluate that idea. In the meantime, Stevens ignored a possible other life for himself with Miss Keaton.

This novel tells a sad, sad story. Stevens is not always a reliable narrator for us, as his perceptions are as limited as his point of view. This is a novel of depth and brilliance, intricate as a puzzle box, as we delve the depth of Stevens’ psyche.

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Day 856: A God in Every Stone

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Cover for A God in Every StoneA God in Every Stone is a novel that seems to be trying to convey some profound truths. The trouble is, I couldn’t figure out what they were.

It begins in pre-World War I Turkey, where young Vivian Rose Spencer is on an archaeological dig. She is entranced by the thought of the history of artifacts, particularly by a story told her by Tahsin Bey, a friend of her father. He tells her of a circlet worn by the 5th century explorer Scylax, which he believes may be found in Peshawar, where the Persian King Darius sent him to explore the Indus. Viv’s visit is cut short by the start of the war, but by then she has promised herself to Tahsin Bey, who says he will fetch her in London after the war.

Viv begins the war nursing, but after a while she is unable to take the stress. Her mother agrees to allow her to journey to Peshawar as an archaeologist, but first she is drawn by patriotism and naiveté into a betrayal.

Qayyam Gul is a proud Pushtun soldier whose regiment is practically wiped out at Auber’s Ridge. He loses an eye, but it is his experience of being an Indian soldier in England that makes him begin rethinking his loyalties.

In Peshawar, Viv befriends a young Pathan boy, Najeeb, who becomes fascinated by the objects in the museum. She begins giving him lessons in the classics, but when his mother finds out, she makes him stop. Najeeb is Qayyam’s brother, and Qayyam accompanies Najeeb to Viv’s house to return her books. Not much later, Viv is forced to return to London.

Fourteen years later, Viv is enticed back to Peshawar by Najeeb’s letters. He is now employed by the Peshawar Museum and wants her to excavate the site that she hoped to explore years before. Qayyam has in the meantime become involved in the Congress, which wants to separate India from England. Viv arrives, but after violence has already begun.

Although I was interested in the characters and wanted to know what happened to them, I felt that Shamsie presents us with threads of different stories, all unexplored. We don’t learn very much about Qayyam’s experience at Auber’s Ridge or Viv’s nursing experiences, for example, or what’s going on in the Congress. We never find out what happened to Scylax’s circlet. It is almost a McGuffin. The best parts of the novel are her depictions of Peshawar. But even there, the readers’ experience seems fragmentary. In a dramatic portion of the end of the novel, a girl is introduced as an apparent partner for Najeeb, only to be killed within a few pages. The author’s intentions seem confused, as if she started with too many stories to tell and couldn’t decide between them.

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Day 854: Demelza

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Cover for DemelzaAgain I had difficulty separating this novel from the Masterpiece series televised a few months ago, which covered the first two of the Poldark novels. The focus of this novel is Demelza Poldark, the kitchen maid whom Ross Poldark married at the end of the first novel.

At the beginning of the novel, Demelza is in labor with the couple’s daughter Julia. Ross has engaged Dr. Choake, who takes the situation more casually than Ross would like. The doctor checks Demelza and goes away, saying she won’t deliver until the next afternoon. But Julia arrives before the doctor does, and Ross makes yet another enemy of his own class.

Demelza has come to believe that Ross’s gentle cousin Verity should have been allowed to marry Captain Blamey. She sees Verity’s sadness and feels she has aged ten years in only a few. So, without Ross’s knowledge, she begins plotting to draw them together.

Ross is striving to avoid the Warleggans’ financial takeover of the whole district. He is pressured to take the lead in forming a business to purchase and smelt copper in an effort to bring up the price of copper for the mine owners, as smelters are bidding low to keep the profit in their own pockets. Since several of the business partners are in debt to the Warleggans, they are concerned to keep their participation secret. However, the secret comes out, in a way that destroys Ross’s relationship with his cousin Francis.

Since the Masterpiece series so closely follows the books, it will not be until I read the third book that I will be able to tell how well the book series stands on its own. However, it seems well grounded historically and is particularly interesting when dealing with the problems of ordinary people of the time, when poverty was threatening many. I also like Ross and Demelza and feel sympathy with their struggles.

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Day 852: The Lake House

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Cover for The Lake HouseThe Lake House is another of Kate Morton’s enthralling novels about family secrets. It is set in two time periods, 1933 and 2003.

In 1933 Cornwall, Alice Edevane is 16. She loves her life in the woods and gardens of the family estate, Loeanneth, and she spends her time writing stories of romance and mystery. She reads her stories to Ben Munro, an itinerant gardener whom she loves. Her newest one is about a kidnapping, set in her own home.

In 2003, Sadie Sparrow is a police officer on an enforced holiday. She got over-involved in a case, in her partner’s opinion, and went to the media when she thought it was mishandled. Her partner is trying to keep her name out of the subsequent investigation, but he wants her on vacation for a month.

Sadie chooses to visit her grandfather Bertie in Cornwall, where he recently moved after her grandmother’s death. In traipsing around the woods with the dogs, she comes upon the abandoned house at Loeanneth. When she tries to find out about the house, she learns that it was deserted after the disappearance of a little boy, Theo Edevane, who was never found.

Sadie decides she would like to look into the cold case with the help of retired officer Clive Robinson. She tracks down Alice Edevane, now a famous novelist, and writes asking for permission to enter the house. But she hears nothing back.

Alice has always believed she knew what happened to Theo and thinks it is her fault. She has no desire to reopen the investigation, however unofficial. But a frank conversation with her sister Deborah reveals something she didn’t know, which leads her to re-evaluate her belief in what happened long ago. When the persistent Sadie writes again, she agrees to see her.

The story alternates between the investigation in the present and the events leading up to Theo’s disappearance. We see the past events from the points of view of several different characters but mostly from that of Eleanor, Alice’s mother.

I absolutely loved this novel, with one caveat. It is intricately plotted and beautifully written, as are Morton’s other novels. I also found it completely absorbing.

However, the coincidence of what happened to Theo I found a bit much. I can’t explain more, but read it yourself and tell me what you think.

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Day 845: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Cover for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoEven after thinking about the novel for some time, I can’t decide whether I liked The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. On the one hand, there’s the energy with which it is written and its inventiveness, wedging a portion of the narrative into footnotes that convey some of the most interesting information (a technique used also in The Sunken Cathedral and by such writers as David Foster Wallace). On the other hand, there’s the unrelenting sexism and objectification of women expressed by the principal narrator as well as by other characters. Okay, that’s an important part of the character’s personality rather than an attitude of the author, but I found it disturbing.

Oscar is a misfit. He is a fat, nerdy boy from the Dominican Republic, highly intelligent and well read but unable to interact normally with people, especially girls. He is interested in Star Trek and Tolkien, but even his other geeky friends eventually get girlfriends while he remains alone and still preoccupied with his obsessions. He dreams of being a science fiction writer.

In college at Rutgers he has one reluctant friend. Because Yunior (Díaz’s persona for much of his fiction) is in love with Oscar’s sister Lola, he agrees to be Oscar’s roommate. He tries to get Oscar to exercise and invites him out with friends. But his efforts aren’t sincere, or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that his intentions are mixed, so he eventually gives up on trying to make Oscar more normal.

Of course, Yunior’s perceptions are all colored by his own preoccupation, sex. Although he loves Lola, they break up several times because of his unfaithfulness. Yunior sees Oscar as a young man wanting to get laid. Well, of course he does, but what he really wants is love.

Oscar has grown up with the romance of his sci-fi and fantasy epics. Yes, they are also full of action, but they are in a sense the continuation of the chivalric romances that obsessed another famous character, Don Quixote, and that’s the book this novel reminds me of. Of course, we know from the title that Oscar will die, and we can guess he will die for love. Also like Don Quixote, although the story is ultimately tragic, its tone is comic.

What I found most interesting in this novel was the story of Oscar’s family, for this is an inter-generational saga about the fortunes of his family in the Dominican Republic. In a combination of narrative and footnotes, the novel tells the recent history of the Dominican Republic and especially of the Trujillo regime, where Oscar’s family ran aground.

This time period was also the focus of another book I’ve reviewed, In the Time of Butterflies, which this novel references, along with a lot of other pop culture. I complained of that book that it assumed its readers already understood all about the Trujillo dictatorship. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao does a much better job of explaining Dominican history and exposing us to its culture.

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Day 837: Highwayman: Winter Swarm

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Cover for Highwayman: Winter SwarmHighwayman: Winter Swarm is a novella-length story that appears to be an episode of a larger novel. This confused me a little until I read that the publisher, Endeavor Press, was publishing electronic novels in installments.

Samson Lyle is a former Roundhead major who is now a highwayman, doing his best to sabotage the efforts of Oliver Cromwell and particularly General Goffe. Lyle’s disaffection came about because of his refusal to participate in Goffe’s massacres of Catholics in Ireland. Lyle’s goodwife was killed in battle after this incident, and Lyle believes the death was no accident. Since then, he has been a bandit, seeking revenge.

Lyle, known as the Ironside Highwayman, is assisted by a teenage girl, Bella, whom he rescued as a young girl from prostitution, and a tavern owner, Eustace, whose live he saved. He also has various informants around the countryside.

The novella opens with a daring theft of the strongbox containing the back pay for the Middlehurst garrison. Later, Lyle attacks the salt detail, knowing Goffe cannot get through the winter without salt to preserve the meat.

This novella is mildly enjoyable as an old-fashioned swashbuckling adventure. If I understand what the publishers are doing correctly, I’m not sure how well it will work. As the first installment, the novella spent time on exposition that may have to be repeated, but it spent little time on characterization. In the tricks Lyle plays on the soldiers, it reminds me just a bit of the first book in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, but there is no way to judge whether the series will develop any depth. In general, I felt the approach to be unsatisfying, even though I like the idea of reading a novel in serial form, like the Victorians did. But this episodic approach, which probably doesn’t assume people will read the episodes in order, is not the same thing. It reminds me more of episodic graphic novels, without the pictures.

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Day 835: Ross Poldark

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Cover for Ross PoldarkYears ago I used to enjoy the odd Winston Graham novel, but it was his crime novels rather than his historical novels I read, Marnie and The Walking Stick. I didn’t get interested in the Poldarks until the recent Masterpiece rework of the series.

Ross Poldark returns to his home in Cornwall from the war in America to find nothing as he expected. His father has died, and his slovenly servants have not kept up the house or the farm. Someone has set about a rumor that he died, and the girl he loves, Elizabeth Chynoweth, is engaged to his cousin Francis.

Ross sets about trying to put his property in order and to deal with his feelings about Elizabeth. He investigates whether he can get one of the mines on his property back into order. He also involves himself in the problems of his tenants.

While he is at a fair to buy livestock, he plucks an urchin out of a fight about a dog. Although the child is dressed as a boy, she is a girl, Demelza. When Ross finds her father has abused her, he agrees not to return her to her family and takes her as a kitchen maid.

Ross Poldark is an interesting historical novel dealing with the problems of the time in Cornwall. I don’t know much about Cornwall, which is associated in my mind with many of the novels of Daphne du Maurier. Although this novel certainly involved me, I found myself unable to separate it from the Masterpiece series. For example, although Demelza is described as dark, I still kept picturing her as a redhead. Since the Masterpiece series is based on the first two books, I’ll have to wait until the third book before I can begin to separate it in my mind. Certainly, the first novel seems just as effective as the series, which has so far followed the novel closely.

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Day 827: Flood of Fire

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Cover for Flood of FireBest book of the week!
In the third book of his Ibis trilogy, Flood of Fire, Amitav Ghosh slowly draws most of his characters to China during a momentous period in history. The only major character missing from the first book is Deeti, making a home on Mauritius. And of course Bahram Modi, who died at the end of River of Smoke.

It is with the absent characters that we start, in a way, for at the beginning of the novel, Kesri Singh, Deeti’s brother, is unaware of what has happened to her. It is through Kesri that Deeti’s family met her husband, for he was brother to Subedar Nirbhay Singh, the highest-ranking sepoy in the battalion to which Kesri belongs. Kesri is a new character, and we go back in time to learn how Deeti helped him join the battalion and how Kesri, although wary of the character of Deeti’s proposed husband, encouraged the match to further his own ambitions. As those who have been following the series know, that did not turn out well.

Shireem Modi, Bahram’s wife, is finding her life uncomfortable since her husband died. Because his opium was confiscated by the Chinese government, she is left with nothing, dependent upon her own family. But soon her husband’s friend Jadig Karabedian arrives and tries to talk her into traveling to China to represent herself in the opium sellers’ claims against the Chinese government; otherwise, her claim may be disregarded. He also finds it necessary to tell her about Ah Fat, her husband’s illegitimate son.

Zachary Reid has finally been acquitted of blame for the incident on the Ibis but finds himself assessed fees that he cannot pay because his mate’s license has been suspended. He goes to work for the mysterious Mr. Burnham (who, although barely present, seems to affect all the events in the series) restoring a boat. There he is led into a dangerous relationship with Mrs. Burnham.

Neel, the rajah who ended up in prison for his father’s debts because of Mr. Burnham’s desire for his property, is still in China working at an English-language press. As the British Empire draws together a force to invade China, bringing most of the other characters there, Neel begins working for the Chinese government as a translator.

This trilogy clearly depicts Britain, driven by the greed of the opium growers and sellers, as the bully of Asia. Sea of Poppies shows how the Indian farmers were forced to abandon food crops to grow opium poppies, and how then the price of opium was manipulated to make them subsistence farmers. River of Smoke shows British efforts to force the Chinese to import opium, including the lies conveyed back to the British public about the behavior of the emperor. Flood of Fire draws all of our friends back to China to culminate in the First Opium War, when the British stuff opium down the throats of the Chinese.

Overall, I was very satisfied with this series. Ghosh is able to get you completely involved with his characters and is playful and inventive with language. Although I was not happy with the evolution of the character of Zachary Reid from a naive young man to the person he becomes, this is a great series.

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Day 817: The Hornet’s Nest

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Cover for The Hornet's NestIt is 30 years after the Battle of Culloden, but Highland Scots are still forbidden by their English overlords to wear the plaid, play bagpipes, or honor their heritage in other ways. Rebellious Lauchlin MacLeod and her brother Ronald, teenage children of Laird Kildornie, are always finding themselves in trouble.

So it is on the day they meet their cousin Matthew Lennox, a gentleman from Virginia journeying to visit his English and Scottish relatives. Lauchlin is marveling that this Sassenach is related to her family and doesn’t realize he has been escorted there by a troop of redcoats. She just barely avoids being caught wearing a kilt while her brother hides in the bushes with his bagpipe.

In town showing Cousin Matthew the sights, Ronald and Lauchlin attack some boys who are torturing a kitten. Later Sergeant Tucker arrives at their home to tell them that the boys are the children of Captain Green, the new area commander. The boys have lied about the cause of the attack, and Captain Green isn’t as likely as the previous commander to overlook their behavior. The next incident could be serious.

Cousin Matthew has a solution. Lauchlin and Ronald can travel to Virginia and live with his sister Lavinia until things calm down. Secretly, he enlists them to send news and drawings, for Lauchlin is a gifted caricaturist, about doings in the colonies for a paper he is founding in London called The Gadfly.

So, Lauchlin and Ronald set out for the colonies accompanied by their kitten Haggis. They arrive in Williamsburg in 1773, just in time to witness the lead-up to the American Revolution. It’s not too difficult to imagine where their sympathies lie.

This novel effortlessly mixes the viewpoints from both sides of the revolution, for their Lennox relatives are Loyalists, and some are charming characters. Lauchlin is an ebullient scamp, Ronald a boy who must learn that all Sassenachs are not the same. Their many Virginian cousins dislike them at first but then most of them learn to love them. And Haggis has his own distinctive personality.

This novel is one of my favorites so far of the Watson books I’ve newly discovered, because it is less unlikely than some of them and has really enjoyable characters. Plus, it provides an unusual viewpoint of the American Revolution. Young teens and tweens should love this book.

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