Tag: historical fiction

Day 470: Reread—The Iron King

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Cover for The Iron KingI already reviewed The Iron King during my first year of blogging, but that review was based on my memory of the novel, having read it several years before. I recently re-read it and would just like to mention it again, as it is so good and easier to find now that the first three volumes of the series have been republished.

The Accursed Kings series concerns the history of the last Capet kings of France. The first in the series, The Iron King, begins with some fateful acts that eventually affect the future of the kingdom.

The novel begins in England with Queen Isabella plotting with her cousin, Robert of Artois, against her three sisters-in-law. Queen Isabella, the daughter of Philip IV of France (known as the Philip the Fair or the Iron King), is unhappily married to Edward II of England, who disdains her and lends the power of his throne to the Despensers, the family of his male favorite. Isabella is disposed to make trouble. Her cousin has brought her his conviction that at least two of her three sisters-in-law are being unfaithful to their husbands, her brothers, the princes of France. Isabella and Robert hatch a plot to expose them.

Robert of Artois has his own reasons for the plot, for his father’s property was awarded to his aunt Mahaut instead of to him so that it would pass into the hands of King Philip the Fair’s two younger sons when they married Jeanne and Blanche, Mahaut’s daughters. Robert is only too happy to ruin Marguerite, Queen of Navarre and wife of Philip’s oldest son, along with the two other girls, as she is Mahaut’s cousin.

Awaiting their own fates are the last four members who are not in hiding of the once wealthy and powerful Knights Templar. Years before they had refused to admit Philip the Fair as a member, as it was against the rules of their order to admit royalty. Since then, Philip has plotted their ruin, assisted by Pope Clement, who covets the riches of the order. Now they have been condemned of heresy, largely on trumped up charges.

Early in the book, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake. During his burning, he curses the King, Pope Clement, and Guillaume de Nogaret, Secretary-General of the Kingdom, to their thirteenth generation. The Pope is dead within 40 days, de Nogaret soon after. Thus the name of Druon’s fantastic series, The Accursed Kings, for you can be sure that Philip the Fair will be dead by the end of the novel.

This series is being marketed as the original Game of Thrones. Perhaps there are some similarities. The court is a nest of vipers—those in power are constantly engaged in political machinations and those not in power in other kinds of plots. The world Druon presents is fascinating, depicted with cynicism and wry observations. The novel is extremely well written, about an extraordinary time in French history.

Day 468: The Invention of Wings

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Cover for The Invention of WingsBest Book of the Week!

When I began reading The Invention of Wings, I thought it was purely historical fiction. It wasn’t until later in the novel, when some names rang a few bells, that I realized I was reading biographical fiction about two women whose accomplishments have been forgotten—Sarah and Angelina Grimké. A third important character, the slave Hetty, is fictional, except that Sarah was given a slave by that name when she was 11 and they both got into trouble when Sarah taught her to read.

The novel tells a remarkable story, narrated alternately by Sarah and Hetty (known as Handful), beginning in 1803. Sarah was born into privilege in Charleston, South Carolina. When she is given Handful as an 11th birthday present, slavery is already so abhorrent to her that she tries to free her slave. But legally doing so has been made more difficult, and her parents won’t allow it. Sarah is her father’s pet, and he takes pride in and encourages her intelligence, but when he finds out she thinks she can become a lawyer, he firmly rebukes her and bars her from his library.

Handful’s mother Charlotte is a strong and rebellious figure and a wonderful artist. She is the best seamstress in town and keeps the history of her life in a quilt she is sewing. By earning money hiring herself out behind Mrs. Grimké’s back, she is trying to save enough to buy the freedom of herself and her daughter. After Sarah’s mother has her brutally punished, she takes whatever liberties she can get away with, including sneaking away to have an affair with a freedman named Denmark Vesey.

As Sarah gets older, her sense of injustice deepens to the point where feels she must leave Charleston to move north to Philadelphia and become a Quaker. She is eventually followed by her much younger sister Angelina (Nina), where they become infamous for their lectures and articles on abolition, racial equality, and feminism.

http://www.netgalley.comFor the first half of the book, I was fascinated most by Handful, a character with a distinctive voice and personality. She becomes as gifted with her needle as her mother and loves to hear Charlotte’s stories of her African homeland. More subtly subversive then her mother, after Charlotte disappears, Handful visits Denmark Vesey’s household and assists with his attempted slave revolt. Later when Sarah and Nina find their purpose in life, I found both stories equally interesting.

This novel is remarkable. The Grimkés’ story is amazing, especially for their time, which was years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But Handful’s story is evocative, compelling, and touching.

Day 466: Literary Wives: The Inquisitor’s Wife

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Today the Literary Wives blog group members all review The Inquisitor’s Wife. Be sure to check out the other reviews at the links at the bottom of this review. We encourage you to participate by submitting your comments or a link to your own review to any of our blogs, or you can submit a comment or link on our new Facebook page! For more information, see my Literary Wives page.

Cover for The Inquisitor's WifeThe Review

The Inquisitor’s Wife is a historical novel with a promising concept that is not fulfilled. Although set in an interesting era and place, its characters behave as they need to just to drive the plot.

Marisol Garcia is the daughter of Diego, a respected Old Christian of 15th century Seville, and Magdalena, a converso, or Jewish woman forcibly converted to Christianity. Although as a child Marisol observes her mother’s celebration of the Sabbath on Friday nights without understanding what it means, when she is 11, she is ridiculed by the neighborhood children for being a Jew. Humiliated, she turns against her mother and refuses to take part in her rituals.

This, aside from a complete lack of a sense of their household and daily life, was my first problem with this novel, because Marisol’s loyalties and feelings about her heritage shift back and forth throughout the novel. Having adored her mother, she turns against her in an instant after one incident. Later, she changes her mind several times, and in general her behavior as a young woman is more like that of a spoiled adolescent.

As Queen Isabella gains power, the conversos of the city hope she will protect them, as she herself has married one of them, King Ferdinand. They are about to be gravely disappointed.

Eventually, everyone hears rumors of an Inquisition, and Magdalena becomes terrified that the horrible events of her childhood will recur. She urges Diego to move the family to Portugal, but secure in his own innocence and unaware of his wife’s activities, he is firm in his belief that they are not in danger. Marisol follows her mother outside one night to the river and sees her drown herself, apparently from despair.

Marisol has been in love with her neighbor Antonio since they were children. They are engaged while he is away studying, but after she does not hear from him for over a year, she believes he has abandoned her. Shortly after her mother’s death, she finds out her father has made some kind of deal with another neighbor, whom she detests, Gabriel Hojeda, who is a civil administrator for the Inquisition. She is forced to marry him, and her father renounces her.

Of course, he is trying to protect her as the Inquisition is going after him (for no apparent reason but that his wife was a converso), but it takes her awhile to figure this out. She continues to be clueless throughout the novel, not picking up on any of the hints that are strewn everywhere. Then, on her wedding night, Gabriel’s intimidating brother Fray Hojeda asks for a promise that the two will not consummate their marriage for a month. There is no apparent reason for this request either except the plot’s need to save Marisol for Antonio and to introduce a sadistic sex scene toward the end of the novel.

I can go on and on about the unlikeliness of the plot as Marisol and her father fall deeper into danger. But one tiny spoiler reveals how poorly thought out this novel is. Marisol and Antonio don’t hear from each other in a year. Why? Because jealous Gabriel is stealing their letters. How he does this is not explained, but mail is not exactly sitting out in the mailbox. Oh, let’s have another example. In a late scene in the novel, Marisol and Antonio swim to safety—this in a time when most Europeans didn’t swim, even sailors, not to mention gently born Spanish ladies dressed in enveloping and heavy garb. She would have sunk immediately.

As I mentioned before, there is no sense of the characters’ daily lives except for Magdalena’s time spent painting ceramics, and that is in service of the plot. When Marisol gets married, instead of taking over the household as a well-trained wife of her class would do, she asks her husband what she should do and since he gives her nothing to do, apparently does nothing except run around town unchaperoned. Except for Marisol, all of the characters are completely undeveloped. Everyone is either good or bad. Although this novel has the opportunity to say something about the Inquisition, it disintegrates into a messy damsel in distress story that becomes more absurd as it continues. If it was purely a romp, I wouldn’t judge it so harshly, but it seems to have pretensions to something more serious.

Literary Wives logoWhat does this book say about wives or the experience of being a wife?

Marisol’s marriage to Gabriel is just a plot device. Even its motivation doesn’t make sense, because if she and her father are in danger just because of her mother, Gabriel’s having married Marisol would logically put him in danger. He would not be able to protect her and in fact, does not really try to. As to the other marriage, her parents’ is warm but only scantily depicted. The only true family, that of Marisol’s uncle, comes to the novel late, and we don’t see much of it.

In what way does this woman define “wife” or is defined by “wife”?

This novel doesn’t really concern itself with wifehood. Gabriel’s definition of a wife is someone who is in his power. Other than being another threat to the damsel and a way to keep her and Antonio apart, Marisol’s status as a wife is hardly even regarded or treated with. In fact, in another unlikely plot twist, she is asked to keep her marriage a secret, even though she is living in her husband’s house unchaperoned and would have her reputation damaged if she was not thought to be married. Diego and Magdalena love each other, but Magdalena deceives Diego in continuing to observe her religion, and we don’t see much of them together.

Be sure to view the posts of the other “wives,” as follows:

Ariel of One Little Library
Audra of Unabridged Chick
Carolyn of Rosemary and Reading Glasses
Cecilia of Only You
Lynn of Smoke and Mirrors

Day 463: The Luminaries

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Cover for The LuminariesBest Book of the Week! Year!

This last year I read several books that played wonderfully with structure. I’m thinking particularly of A Visit from the Goon Squad, a series of stories linked by their characters that somehow forms a whole, and Life After Life, in which the heroine’s life is repeated, with slight changes that lead to significant ones. I loved both of these inventive approaches to structure, and now I add to this list The Luminaries, the latest winner of the Man Booker Prize. This book is also my second recently reviewed novel set in New Zealand.

Walter Moody is newly come to the gold fields of the South Island of New Zealand in 1866. He has arrived in rough seas and is shaken by an apparition he has seen in the bowels of the ship. Seeking warmth and comfort, he checks into a seedy waterfront hotel and enters the parlor, where he accidentally interrupts the meeting of 12 other men.

After some initial hesitancy, the men begin telling him a series of tales, all interconnected, but the whole of which they cannot make out. The tales concern a missing trunk, a fortune found in a dead man’s cabin, the disappearance of a prominent citizen, the apparent attempted suicide of a whore. Each man at the meeting has his own part of the story to impart. Moody is able to make some sense of the story, but all go away from the meeting knowing that pieces are missing.

This section of the book is the longest, making up almost half its length. The cover of the novel, showing a waning moon, gives you a hint to its structure. It is divided into 12 sections, each one shorter than the one before but each one adding to the revelations of the original tales, until the final very short slivers of sections reveal all.

Each of these sections is also headed with an astrological chart that shows how the heavenly bodies are positioned within the signs of the 12 initial characters. This I did not understand at all, but Catton provides some indication at the beginning of the sections about what the astrology predicts.

The chapters of the novel are charmingly headed with old-fashioned descriptions of what happens in the chapter. Over time, the descriptions themselves begin to drive the narrative.

In The Luminaries, we’re presented with a novel that embodies a puzzle, a complex tale of villainy and foul crimes but also of love and loyalty. I was completely engrossed in  entangling the threads of this story. Despite its beginnings as a tale of cheats and chicanery, you may be surprised to find that you are reading a love story about two characters connected by their stars.

Day 462: The Return of Captain John Emmett

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Cover for The Return of Captain John EmmettThe Return of Captain John Emmett is the first of Elizabeth Speller’s Laurence Bertram mysteries set just after World War I. I previously reviewed the second in the series, The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton.

Laurence Bertram has felt himself at a loss since the war ended. He is haunted by his memories of the war and also by guilt at his lack of grief over the deaths of his wife Louise and baby son, whom he never saw. Ostensibly writing a book about church architecture, he is finding it difficult to work. So, it is with a bit of relief that he responds to a letter from Mary Emmett, the sister of an old school friend John Emmett, in which she asks him to come visit her.

Laurence has fond memories of some school leave visits with the Emmetts after his parents died but feels Mary has misunderstood the depth of his friendship with John, whom he has not seen in years. Of course, he has heard of John’s death, an apparent suicide. Mary explains that John had been staying in a rest home because of mental disturbance following the war. Since he seemed to be improving, she and her mother cannot understand why he committed suicide. She asks John to find out what he can about John’s motives.

Laurence feels uncomfortable but agrees to look into it because he has always been attracted to Mary. With the help of his friend Charles Carfax, who gets his detective skills from reading Agatha Christie books, Laurence investigates the rest home and anything he can find out about John’s state of mind before his death. Included in John’s curious scraps of paper and photos is a list of the beneficiaries of his will, some of whom cannot be identified or located, and some photos from the war.

Laurence comes to believe that John’s death has something to do with his war experience, possibly with an execution over which he was forced to preside. And it seems John may not have committed suicide after all.

Speller takes her time with these mysteries. The settings are beautifully described and the period effectively evoked. A true sense of depth of character emerges. Even though I was about 100 pages ahead of Laurence, not in identifying the perpetrator but in realizing the motive, I enjoyed every bit of this novel.

In the last few months, I have read several historical mysteries where the author did little with the time or place, simply using the historical events to frame the plot. Thankfully, Speller has taken more care with this interesting period of history.

Day 460: March Violets

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Cover for March VioletsThe blurb on Philip Kerr’s collection of three noir mysteries, Berlin Noir, compares him to John Le Carré and Alan Furst. I wouldn’t say that is an apt comparison. For one thing, the other two are writing in a different genre. For another, they are better writers. Still, if you like noir, March Violets has its own qualities.

This novel is the first in a series featuring private detective Bernie Gunther. It bears many of the hallmarks of a typical noir mystery. Its main character is a smart, wise-cracking tough guy who used to be a cop. It features beatings, untrustworthy dames, thugs, and murder. What makes it stand out is its setting in 1936 Berlin.

Bernie is hired by millionaire industrialist Hermann Six to find a family heirloom necklace. It was stolen from the safe of his daughter Grete and her husband Paul Pfarr when the two were brutally murdered in their beds and their bodies burned. Herr Six explicitly instructs Bernie not to look into their deaths but to find the necklace and return it to him. Of course, Bernie begins looking into everything.

Using credentials as a representative of an insurance company investigating the fire, Bernie soon finds out that Pfarr was a member of the SS, with a mission from Himmler to seek out corruption in the labor movement. That mission made him a lot of enemies. He also had some kind of friction with Herr Six, who is rumored to have ties to organized crime. In addition, there were unexplained problems in the Pfarr’s marriage.

Typical of noir fiction, the plot becomes very involved. The setting is convincingly evoked, especially the constant threat of violence for ordinary citizens under the Nazis. Bernie specializes in missing persons, and the novel makes clear that hundreds of people go missing from Berlin daily.

Since I am more familiar with classic noir, the novel occasionally struck me as too coarse, but that didn’t bother me as much as other uses of language. First, idioms with which I am unfamiliar are used constantly. Perhaps they are period German idioms, but they often seem clumsy and inapt, which idiomatic  language seldom does. Also clumsy and inapt are Kerr’s many metaphors, for example:

The butler cruised smoothly into the room like a rubber wheel on a waxed floor and, smelling faintly of sweat and something spicy, he served the coffee, the water and his master’s brandy with the blank look of a man who changes his earplugs six times a day.

Perhaps this style of writing is meant as a send-up of traditional noir style, but it is certainly overblown and irritating. (To be entirely dated in my references, it sometimes reminds me of the passages read by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the old TV series Ten Speed and Brown Shoe, but those were explicitly tongue in cheek, and I’m not as sure about Kerr’s writing style.) Although at one point I considered putting the novel aside, I finally decided to continue, and found the book moderately entertaining.

Day 453: Burial Rites

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Cover for Burial RitesBest Book of the Week!

Based on the true story of the last woman to be executed in Iceland, Burial Rites is an unusual and original novel.

Agnes Magnúsdóttir has been found guilty of the murder of her employer, Natan Ketílsson, and another man when the novel begins. There is no doubt that Fridrik Sigurdsson committed the act, but Agnes and her fellow servant Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir have also been found guilty on little more evidence than that they were present at the scene. The younger, prettier Sigrídur, who was Natan’s mistress and Fridrik’s fiancée, is being considered for a pardon, but Agnes is not.

Because Iceland does not apparently have facilities for housing criminals at the time, the District Commissioner Björn Blöndal decides to lodge Agnes until her execution at Kórnsa, the farm of the District Officer of Vatnsdalur, Jón Jónsson. Agnes has requested that the young Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson, newly ordained, supervise her spiritual welfare.

Jón Jónsson’s wife and daughter are horrified to learn they are to have a convicted murderess in their house. Reverend Jónsson, known as Tóti, is confused, feeling insufficiently experienced for the task and unaware that he has already met Agnes.

We first see Agnes on her way to Kórnsa. She has been kept in a storeroom, living in filth and seldom fed, since her conviction. When she arrives at the farm, she seems almost subhuman, grimy and greasy and so thirsty that she gulps down some dirty dishwater given her to wash in. Slowly, through her hard work and unobjectionable demeanor and their own basic decency, the family comes to believe Agnes may not be guilty of the crime.

Although the focus of this novel is the life on the farm and the evolving relationship between Agnes and the family of Jón Jónsson, we eventually learn the truth about the crime, as Agnes confides it to Tóti and the family.

Kent’s gift is for depicting the hard life of 19th century Iceland—the merciless fate of itinerant servants, the prevalence of gossip and superstition, the brutal conditions and physically demanding work. Kent also describes the mental landscape of Agnes, her memories, thoughts, and nighttime dreams, and less frequently those of Margrét, Jón Jónsson’s wife, and of Tóti.

This novel is evocatively written in beautiful, spare prose. It tells a heartbreaking and haunting story.

Day 452: Under the Wide and Starry Sky

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Cover for Under the Wide and Starry SkyUnder the Wide and Starry Sky traces the relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife Fanny from shortly before the two meet. At that time, he was a young man still trying to decide his profession and she was a married woman, although separated from her husband, ten years his senior and with children.

Fanny Osbourne has a great creative urge, and she has moved to Paris for art lessons for both herself and her grown daughter Belle, leaving her philandering husband in America. Fanny meets Stevenson while on a recuperative visit to southern France after the death of her youngest son.

The novel follows closely the entirety of their relationship from courtship to his death and her life afterwards, mostly from Fanny’s point of view. They separate because Fanny wants to give her marriage another chance, but they finally come together again. Stevenson, called Louis by his friends, is a sickly man, and his health often requires them to move to climates that are better for his lungs. When it seems as though he cannot live much longer, they find that his health revives on ocean voyages, so they go to sea and finally settle in Samoa until his death.

Although Horan appears to follow faithfully the course and events of the couple’s life together, and the novel is interesting from that standpoint, she never really brings the characters or settings to life. Aside from Fanny’s devotion to Louis, Horan concentrates on her frustration at not being able to live her own creative life. The characters seem relatively flat.

http://www.netgalley.comI was struck also by how, on the original voyage to the South Seas, Horan describes almost nothing but one chieftain until they get to Samoa. If she was working from journals or letters, surely she could have researched further to find out or even imagine what the islands would have been like for Louis and Fanny, seeing them the first time. Instead, we come into their voyage toward the end, as if all the sights and experiences are routine. I’m missing the sense of wonder. Although this novel should have been fascinating in its focus on some amazing lives, it generally does not fulfill its promise.

Day 449: The Signature of All Things

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Cover for The Signature of All ThingsBest Book of the Week!

I was not really eager to read Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love a few years ago for my book club, especially the pray part. But I discovered writing that was comic and intelligent and a story that was much more interesting than I expected.

In The Signature of All Things, Gilbert turns to fiction to tell the story of the life of a remarkable woman. Alma Whittaker is the daughter of a man born in poverty, the son of a frutier for Kew Gardens. Determined to become a wealthy gentleman, Henry Whittaker as a boy steals cuttings from the gardens to sell, and after he is caught, is dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks to gather plants on several voyages of discovery, including Captain Cook’s last.

Eventually, Henry breaks from Banks to start a pharmaceutical industry in Philadelphia. He marries a Dutch wife from a family of botanists and builds a series of greenhouses filled with plants from around the world.

Alma spends her childhood roaming the woods around her house and becomes a brilliant botanist but an unattractive girl and woman, tall and ungainly. She is much better with plants than with people, and when her mother Beatrix decides to adopt the beautiful orphaned daughter of a local prostitute, Alma is never able to develop a sisterly feeling for Prudence.

Although Alma spends much of her life there on her father’s estate, it is nonetheless an exceptional one, as she develops her own professional reputation, and eventually she ends up traveling farther than she ever expected she might. Gilbert takes time with her—time to develop her into a complex personality.

The course of her life takes a fateful turn when she encounters Ambrose Pike, an artist who has been living in South America and has painted the most beautiful pictures of orchids she has ever seen. Ambrose is of a spiritual turn of mind. He believes in the “signature of all things,” an old idea that god has left his imprint on everything on earth so that man will know its use. Although Alma, as a scientist, understands the fallacies in this notion, she finds she loves the man. But he has ideas about the pursuit of human perfection that she doesn’t comprehend.

This novel is beautifully written, completely different from Gilbert’s first book except for being a voyage through a human heart. I became fully engaged with Alma’s story. I grieved with her over her romantic disappointments and was impressed by how she snapped herself back into a productive life. This novel is an enthralling and satisfying story of an early woman scientist, about how a lonely but determined woman makes her own place in the world. Although Alma is not really a lovable person, Gilbert is able to make readers understand and care about her.

Day 440: Sleep, Pale Sister

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Cover for Sleep, Pale SisterA gothic novel that involves a haunting and characters in opium-fed delirium? What’s not to like? Unfortunately, there is quite a bit not to like in Sleep, Pale Sister, an early book by Joanne Harris.

In Victorian England, Henry Chester is a twisted, hypocritical man who maintains an upright, righteous reputation in society while justifying to himself his own dark secrets. He is an artist who loves to paint romantic pictures of virginal young women.

Henry has been unable to find a wife who meets his fastidious criteria, but one day he spots a young girl of pale, ethereal beauty in the park. He pays her family to allow him to paint her and eventually decides that, even though she is yet too young to marry, he will raise her to be the wife he wants, someone passive, docile, and asexual.

Unfortunately, he is doomed to eventual disappointment, for when he finally weds her, he finds his young wife, Effie, has married him for love, and her very ardor on their wedding night disgusts him. Soon, she is an ailing wife whom he keeps drugged with opium, and he takes his pleasures elsewhere.

Sitting in church one day, Effie finds she can lift herself out of her body at will and look at those around her from above. Whether this is an effect of the opium is unclear, but in these states she seems to see and hear things that she should not know about.

At an exhibition of Chester’s paintings, Effie meets a rival artist, Mose Harper, who is struck by her beauty. Mose is a total scoundrel who dislikes Henry, so he sets out to seduce Henry’s naive wife. Mose soon finds himself with an unexpectedly passionate lover.

These three characters alternate the narration of the novel, but there is a fourth voice, Fanny Miller, the madam of a whore house who has her reasons for wanting revenge against one of her clients. As soon as she is sure which client it is, she will know what to do.

And I also hinted at a ghost.

Almost everyone in this novel is vile. Effie is the most sympathetic character, but she is too submissive to Henry and too naive about Mose to really capture us. Essentially, she has very little dimension to her character, is too easily bent to the will of another to be very interesting.

The setting in the Victorian era gives Henry almost complete control over Effie’s fate, and he is soon planning a way to rid himself of an inconvenient wife.