Tag: historical fiction

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.

Day 439: Shanghai Girls

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Cover for Shanghai GirlsIn 1937 Shanghai, Pearl Chin and her younger sister May are having the time of their lives. Thoroughly westernized and modern girls of a wealthy family, they spend their time shopping, socializing, and having their portraits painted. They are two of the Beautiful Girls, whose images appear on advertisements and giveaway calendars.

Pearl has a slight source of discontent at home, for she feels her parents favor and spoil the more beautiful May. Nevertheless, the girls are inseparable.

They are heedless to the rumblings of trouble, including the changes in their home and in their own father’s voice when he wants to tell them something. Soon he forces them to listen. He has gambled away his fortune and has arranged for his daughters to marry the sons of a wealthy businessman from the United States.

It is not long before they have met and married Sam and Vernon Louie. Sam seems pleasant to Pearl, but Vernon, May’s husband, is only fourteen and never speaks. Their father is stern and humiliates the girls on the morning after the wedding. The men leave to conduct their business and agree to meet the girls in Hong Kong before sailing, but the girls have no intention of going.

All this while there have been other signs of trouble. The Japanese are invading China and working their way toward Shanghai. The girls and their mother are forced to try to make their way to Hong Kong amid the brutality of war. Finally, they have no choice but to flee to America. A lot has already happened to the girls, but there is much more to come.

Shanghai Girls is an absorbing historical novel that examines the treatment to which Chinese immigrants were subjected for decades in the United States. The novel continues until the early 1950’s, when we learn how the Red Scare affected scores of settled Chinese immigrants, many of whom had long lived in America when China was taken over by the Communists.

I wasn’t sure how believable I found the end of the book, but it is clearly the setup to a sequel. Although I missed the delicate writing style of See’s earlier novels, her style here is appropriate for this more modern story. I am not sure I want to follow Pearl’s heedless daughter Joy into danger, but I probably will.

Day 436: The Son

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Cover for The SonThe Son is the saga of a powerful Texas clan, the McCulloughs, from the points of view of three different generations of the family.

The action begins in 1849. Eli McCullough’s father has moved his family to a more remote area of Texas on the Pedernales River after the land grants of the original settlers in Matagorda were overturned by corruption and the connections of new arrivals. The Pedernales is a dangerous area, rife with Comanches.

Thirteen-year-old Eli has spent part of the day tracking and hunting game, but he is worried about the safety of his family with his father away. His older brother seems unconcerned, and his older sister and mother have spent the day drinking.

Late that night, the dogs awake the family as the cabin comes under attack by Comanches. Eli is ready to fight to the death, but his mother lets them in. Soon his mother and sister have been raped and murdered and he and his brother taken captive.

Eli’s story is exciting and will be revealed, but he obviously survives, because interleaved with his story we read the diaries of Eli’s son Peter over the course of several years. Eli’s experiences first with the Comanches and then with his efforts to protect his land southwest of San Antonio make him a ruthless man.

Peter is haunted by an incident that took place years ago, when a livestock theft resulted in the massacre of the McCullough’s neighbors, the Garcias, and the subsequent slaughter of almost every Mexican or Mexican-American in the area. Peter cannot get over the guilt and depression and sees it as a dark shadow in the corner of the room.

Closer to the present time, Jeanne McCullough, Peter’s 86-year-old granddaughter, has had some kind of accident. She is lying on the floor and thinks someone is in the room with her. As she lies there, she revisits scenes from her life. She knew her great-grandfather, Colonel Eli McCullough, but never her grandfather Peter, whom the family refers to as “The Great Disgrace.” As a young girl she agreed with the Colonel that her father Charles was a fool who mismanaged the ranch. After her father’s untimely death, she took over the ranch, eventually focusing on the oil business. Although the family has been made fabulously wealthy by her efforts, she has fought blatant sexism from her peers and sacrificed her family relationships to business.

The novel explores the tumultuous history of a hard family, moving back and forth in time and eventually revealing the secrets of this powerful dynasty. In doing so, it tells the history of Texas during the difficult times of the Republic of Texas, the vicissitudes of the Civil War, the viciousness of the range wars, and the fluctuations of the oil booms and busts. It is bold, sometimes violent, sprawling, and compelling reading.