Tag: historical fiction

Day 230: The Candlemass Road

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Cover for The Candlemass RoadBest book of the Week!
At first The Candlemass Road seems like it will be a romantic adventure story similar to Lorna Doone, but George MacDonald Fraser was an expert on the border counties of England and Scotland and far too cynical for that, so it is an adventure certainly, but not a romance.

Lady Margaret Dacre has not been home to Askerton Hall in Cumberland since she was four years old, but now her grandfather Lord Ralph Dacre has been murdered and rumor has it that Lady Margaret has been sent away from court by Elizabeth I herself. At the beginning of the novel, all of the hall’s servants, including the narrator Frey Luis Guevara, a Catholic priest, are frantically preparing for her arrival.

Young and beautiful, she arrives in a temper. She has been accosted on the road by George Bell, one of her tenants, who has come to complain that he has received no help from her bailiff about the dreaded Nixon clan, who has demanded blackmail. None of Lord Dacre’s tenants have had to pay blackmail because he protected them, but after his death, his men at arms all departed.

When Lady Margaret asks Land Sergeant Carleton for protection for her people, he says the problem lays outside of his purview–he has merely come to pick up a prisoner. Incensed, Lady Margaret refuses to give him the prisoner, who was caught stealing bread and cheese from the kitchen.

The thief is a broken man–that is, one who has no master or clan–named Archie Noble the Waitabout. Lady Margaret is about to let him go free when she finds he got his horse from a famous villain, who tried to murder him in his camp. Already angered by Archie’s impudence, Lady Margaret declares him a murderer and threatens to hang him unless he goes by himself to aid the Bells, whose blackmailers return that night.

The short novel is beautifully written with dialog in a northern dialect that is still understandable, with Elizabethan expressions thrown in. The novel is an exciting yet chilling and occasionally humorous picture of the time and place.

Day 228: The Night Circus

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Cover for The Night CircusIt is the mid-19th century. Prospero the Enchanter raises his daughter Celia Bowen as if she were an apprentice magician, only it is not magic she is working. Continuing an ancient disagreement, Prospero challenges the man in the gray suit to a competition–his daughter against any opponent. So, the man in the gray suit takes a young boy out of an orphanage.

Both children grow up training for this elusive competition, and when they are adults, the man in the gray suit collaborates in creating the Night Circus and sends his protégé Marco to work for its designer. Soon Celia is employed by the circus as an illusionist, and Celia and Marco take up the competition with no understanding of its rules. Celia doesn’t even know who her opponent is.

The Night Circus is a marvelous place, all white and black and gray, constantly growing and changing. It becomes the venue for and creation of the competition.

The Night Circus has been extremely popular, and it seemed like it was right down my alley. However, although it is entertaining enough and is certainly based on an original idea, at some point my interest began flagging.

I think one major problem of the novel is that we are constantly told how wonderful the circus is, but Erin Morgenstern fails to describe it in a compelling way. Descriptions are vague instead of specific enough for readers to imagine a scene. In two or three consecutive pages, for example, I just happened to notice that Morgenstern used the word “elaborate” five or six times with no attempt to describe each object beyond that word. The details she does divulge don’t sound as if they would be that interesting, and frankly, a black, white, and gray circus seems to be the invention of a person more concerned with style than enchantment. An important part of a circus is the vibrancy of color. I felt no sense of wonder, was never surprised or beguiled, and I was occasionally confused, especially concerning the “wonderful coalescence” described in one scene. What does that mean? Although the competition turns out to be about life and death, I also never felt any sense of danger.

Another problem for me is the fable-like quality of the novel, which treats the characters more emblematically than as real people. You feel some sympathy for Celia and Marco, but you don’t know what they are like. Overall, I found the novel mildly disappointing.

Day 221: The Postmistress

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Cover for The PostmistressIn The Postmistress, Frankie Bard is a radio reporter working with Edward R. Murrow in London at the beginning of World War II. She meets an American doctor during the Blitz who has left his new wife at home to come help in London, inspired by Frankie’s broadcasts. He gives her a letter for his wife right before he is hit by a car and killed.

Instead of mailing the letter, Frankie carries it around Europe for three months while she interviews Jews who are fleeing their countries. All that time, the wife, Emma Trask, doesn’t hear from her husband and is not notified of his death. Frankie also witnesses the murders of innocent people by Nazis and never reports them. She just goes home.

In the doctor’s small Massachusetts home town, the postmistress is Iris James. She doesn’t seem to be that important a character, although the book surrounds her with this great mystique that she is the center of the village because she knows all its secrets. What she actually does is withhold a letter to Emma from Dr. Trask’s landlady saying that he has disappeared, and she does this because Emma is pregnant.

I felt this book was entirely frustrating, because I found the characters’ actions inexplicable. What kind of person carries a letter for someone else around in her pocket for three months without mailing it? What kind of reporter witnesses the deaths of innocent people and doesn’t tell anyone about them? A postmistress who withholds a letter from its recipient is disobeying federal law, and I suggest that the upright, responsible Iris wouldn’t think of doing that, let alone reading the letter in the first place. And who would decide it is better for a wife to be left in limbo for years? Trask has already deserted her for the war with very little explanation, which is traumatic enough.

Everything pivotal in this novel seems like a contrivance to me. In addition, the novel that is supposed to be about the postmistress gets hijacked by the reporter, whose actions throughout are irrational. I also feel as though too little attention is paid to the details of life during the war. Frankie’s journey to the continent during the height of German occupation seems to be completed with very little difficulty, and in record time. One reader on Amazon points out that Frankie and her London roommate Harriet have a refrigerator in the room, even though they were uncommon in England in the 1940’s. In other respects, the characters seem oddly untouched by the war. Although Sarah Blake wrote another novel that I enjoyed very much, Grange House, I cannot recommend The Postmistress.

Day 218: Sea of Poppies

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Cover for Sea of PoppiesSea of Poppies is an absolutely enthralling historical novel, the first of a trilogy. Set in India in the 1830’s, it is centered around the opium trade, which the British East India Company forced upon both India and China. The novel is an ensemble piece, following the fates of several characters who all find themselves by the end of the book on the Ibis, an old slave ship bound for Mauritius.

The novel begins with Deeti. Like the other Indian farmers in her area of eastern India north of Calcutta, she has been forced to replace her food crops with poppies, destined for the Ghazipur Opium Factory. Now she can barely grow enough to feed her family, while the price for poppies sinks. As a girl, she was tricked by her husband’s family into marrying a hopeless opium addict. Soon fate will cause her to leave her home and flee down the Ganges.

Zachary Reid is a mulatto sailor who ships out from Baltimore on the Ibis as an ordinary seaman. A series of misfortunes onboard leave him without officers to sail the ship to Calcutta from Africa with only the help of Serang Ali and his fellow lascars. Once in Calcutta, his employer Benjamin Burnham hires him to help refit the ship and take the third mate position for the voyage to Mauritius.

Raja Neel Rattan Halder, the zemindar of Rashkali, is deeply in debt because of poorly timed investments in the opium trade. Although Neel is careful of the welfare of his hundreds of dependents, he is careless of business and expects to go on in his pleasure-loving ways. But the self-righteous Burnham wants the Raja’s estates for himself.

Paulette Lambert, the daughter of an eccentric French naturalist, has been left destitute by his death. Burnham has taken her into his family out of charity, but she is having a hard time adapting to his household. She is expected to behave like a proper young English lady, but she was primarily raised by an Indian woman, treats her son Jodu like a brother, and prefers to dress in a sari. Jodu has recently returned to Calcutta after his mother’s death and wants to be taken on as a hand on a sailing ship.

The fates of all these characters, and others, converge aboard the Ibis, which is scheduled to journey across the Indian Ocean to Mauritius with a load of indentured workers and then to sail to China to participate in the impending Opium Wars.

The novel is filled with entertaining characters and the colors, smells, and languages of India. It is beautifully written and crammed full of unusual words–Bengali words, sailor and lascar jargon, ornate oriental English, and various patois. The book has a glossary, but it is ironically intended. Comic, cruel, vivid, and deeply engrossing, the novel is rich and teeming with life. Amitav Ghosh’s novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is wonderful.

Day 211: Affinity

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Cover for AffinitySarah Waters is great at constructing compelling plots and characters who fascinate even if you dislike them. In Affinity, Margaret Prior begins visiting the woman’s ward of Millbank Prison as a volunteer in an effort to become more active after a year of depression. As with many Victorian charities, the point of this volunteer work is to set the inmates the example of a proper upper-class woman and to make sure they have religious training. Margaret is despondent because her father treated her like an equal and employed her as his assistant, but with her father’s death, she is left with a mother who apparently despises her and with no work or purpose.

Margaret becomes fascinated with a prisoner named Selina Dawes, a spiritualist found guilty of complicity in her sponsor’s death as well as fraud and assault. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s abilities, Margaret begins to experience strange, unexplainable events. Not only does she become convinced of Selina’s powers, but she believes she is innocent.

As Margaret’s obsession grows, she devises a daring escape plan for Selina.

Waters’ depiction of London in Victorian times is convincing, and the atmosphere of the novel is grim and foreboding. Although I was not at all sympathetic to Margaret, I was engrossed by the story and particularly interested in the explanation, if there was any, for the apparently psychic phenomena in the novel.

Day 208: The Quiet Twin

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Cover for The Quiet TwinThe Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta seems to start out as a standard mystery, but it turns out to be something else entirely. I was attracted to it because in reviews it was compared to Rear Window, one of my favorite movies.

In a 1939 Viennese neighborhood, there is a rumor of a serial killer. A man was murdered not far away, and someone has killed Professor Speckstein’s old dog in a similar manner.

The courtyard behind Dr. Beer’s more respectable apartment building is shared by some tenements occupied by poverty-stricken tenants. The view that some apartments have into others sets up the situation reminiscent of Rear Window.

Dr. Beer is called to treat Professor Speckstein’s niece Zuzka, a college student who suffers from periodic paralysis. Speckstein is a disgraced former college professor who was once accused of child molestation but has hung onto his social position by becoming a Nazi party informant. Dr. Beer, a student of Freud, diagnoses Zuzka with hysteria.

Zuzka is bored and sleepless, so she watches the courtyard from the window in the middle of the night. She has seen a man across the way washing off makeup and what appears to be blood, so she decides to investigate whether he is the killer.

Also living in the courtyard is a drunken man and his little girl Lieschen, whose body is badly deformed from an accident. Zuzka befriends Lieschen while Dr. Beer worries what may happen to her under the Nazis, having heard about some of their ideas.

A brutish police detective named Teuben appears to investigate the murders, but his actual plan is to pin them on some hapless person.

Although Vyleta has tried to depict the atmosphere among the common people of Vienna under the Nazis, I am not so sure he succeeds. Dr. Beer seems to be one of the few characters who is aware of any threat. An aura of dread persists, but it seems more dependent upon my knowledge of coming events than on any feeling from the novel, although the novel is certainly bleak. Perhaps because I read In the Garden of the Beasts only a few weeks before, I expected an atmosphere that was much more fraught with peril.

Day 206: Special Assignments: The Further Adventures of Erast Fandorin

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Cover for Special AssignmentsI have been following Boris Akunin’s Erast Fandorin series for several years. At first I liked Akunin’s shy, skinny, intellectual young hero. But then Fandorin transformed himself into a muscle-bound Putinesque superhero wannabe, so I lost most of my affection for him.

Set in Tsarist Russia, Special Assignments is actually two novelettes about Fandorin cases. The first, “Jack of Spades,” is a silly case where Fandorin is pursuing a clever con artist. It is supposed to be funny, I think, but I mostly missed the humor and found it ridiculously overcomplicated.

The second story I did not finish once I grasped where it was going. Called “The Decorator,” it is about Jack the Ripper moving his operations to Moscow. However, it becomes quickly obvious that Jack is supposed to be not only a woman but one who is murdering prostitutes because they are defiling their bodies. The whole idea was so abhorrent to me that I refused to read any more of it.

Day 205: The Journal of Mrs. Pepys

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Cover for The Journal of Mrs. PepysI began reading Samuel Pepys’ famous diaries years ago, but found it difficult to understand many of the oblique references to events of the time and found many of the entries very trivial. There was also a whole lot of drinking going on. However, I thought I’d give the fictional journal of his wife a try by reading The Journal of Mrs. Pepys: Portrait of a Marriage by Sara George.

The journal follows the course of the Pepys’ marriage and their rise in prosperity. George was careful to follow closely the events related in Samuel Pepys’ diary, which somewhat hampers the plot. The novel looks at these events from the point of view of Elizabeth Pepys, particularly how she reacts to her husband’s frequent absences and philandering.

The novel provides an interesting insight into the events leading up to and during the Restoration–particularly the eagerness with which the populous welcomes Charles II to the throne and the rapidity with which they tire of the court’s profligacy and debauchery.

Also of interest are some of the customs observed. I was intrigued by how freely the Pepyses behaved with their servants, treating them as if they were friends and then getting into spats with them for taking liberties. Also of interest were some of the social behaviors, like the celebration of Valentines Day, where women picked their valentines, who then had to buy them expensive gifts. And then there were the freedoms of male friends to walk up into ladies’ bedrooms or of both sexes to share bedrooms on a trip away from home without any indication of scandal.

Written mostly in modern English, the novel manages a fine balancing act between understandability and the correct use of outdated terms or terms that have changed their meanings with time.

Although I found the novel interesting enough, by nature of the concept, it could not follow the traditional plot structure of a series of building climaxes. There is a climax at the end, but generally the novel stays fairly level.

Day 202: The Lantern Bearers

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Cover for The Lantern BearersIf you are historical fiction lover and are not familiar with Rosemary Sutcliff, I recommend that you try one of her books. She is best known for her novels about the Roman occupation of Britain and the interaction between the Romans and the various British peoples. Although many of her books are classified as children’s literature, the ones I have read are just as suitable for adults. My review today is of a Sutcliff book I read most recently, which unfortunately is the third book of her acclaimed Eagle of the Ninth trilogy, The Lantern Bearers. Although she wrote a series of eight books about the Aquila family, three are usually grouped together and sometimes can be purchased as one book. The other two are The Eagle of the Ninth and The Silver Branch.

The Lantern Bearers is about the desertion of Britain by the Romans and its subsequent inundation by marauding Saxons. Aquila is a soldier with the last battalion on Britain. He is recalled to his regiment to withdraw from Britain and leave his father and sister behind in the home they have occupied for generations.

Aquila finds that his heart is with Britain, so he deserts his regiment and returns home. However, the day after he arrives, his home is attacked by the Saxons, his father is killed, and he and his sister are enslaved.

Without giving too much away, I will say that the story eventually focuses on the rise of the British ruler Ambrosius and his adopted son Artos, from whom we get the stories of King Arthur.

I think these books are fascinating, although of the three in the trilogy, my favorite is The Eagle of the Ninth (which, by the way, was recently made into a very good movie that no one apparently went to see; I recommend it). If I had any criticism of this book, which is carefully researched, well written, and full of action, I would say that sometimes it seems as if Sutcliff thinks the Roman occupation of Britain was completely positive. I doubt if the Britains felt that way when they were conquered. However, even though her heroes are often Romans, her ideas are more nuanced than that.

If you decide to read this trilogy, I suggest you start with The Eagle of the Ninth, although the books are far enough separated in time to be read as stand-alones.

Day 201: The School of Night

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The School of NightCoincidentally, this summer I read and reviewed Shadow of Night, and The School of Night by Louis Bayard is another novel that deals with the School of Night, a group of Elizabethan scholars who pursued forbidden knowledge. Its members were Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Harriot, and Kit Marlowe, among others. The School of Night follows events in two time periods, the present and 1603.

Ten years ago Henry Cavendish was an Elizabethan scholar with a promising future, but he was disgraced when he accepted as legitimate a forged letter supposedly by Sir Walter Raleigh and presented it at a conference. Since then, he has barely eked out a living, teaching part-time, doing editing work, and taking whatever jobs he can get. His only true friend is the eccentric Alonzo Wax, a collector and purveyor of rare books.

But Alonzo is dead, having drowned himself after trying to contact Henry, and Henry finds himself the estate executor. Shortly after the funeral, Henry is contacted by another collector, Bernard Styles, who shows him the second page of a letter by Raleigh that he alleges Alonzo stole from him. This letter makes a rare reference to the School of Night. Styles offers Henry a lot of money to find the letter in Alonzo’s papers and give it to him.

Henry also meets Clarissa Dale, who claims to have made Alonzo’s acquaintance after a lecture about the School of Night. Although she is not an academic, she has been having visions of Thomas Harriot and an assistant named Margaret and wants to find out why.

Henry has barely begun to work with Alonzo’s papers when Alonzo’s secretary, Lily Pentzler, is murdered and all of Alonzo’s books are stolen. This incident makes Henry and Clarissa wonder if Alonzo was murdered, too. Soon, Henry and Clarissa find themselves investigating the secrets of the letter.

Alternating with the present-time story is that of Thomas Harriot, the leader of the School of Night, as he explores Virginia and later works on his forbidden experiments while hidden away on the estate of the Earl of Percy. Finding that his maid servant Margaret can read, he begins to train her to assist him in his experiments.

Although I guessed one important secret early on, I found this novel deeply satisfying. It is full of twists and betrayals and has interesting characters. It treats the historical plot intelligently, and although this comment is not meant as a criticism of Shadow of Night, it deals more seriously with the School of Night than does Shadow of Night (which of course has a completely different focus).

I had not read Bayard before, but he is known for writing historical mysteries that feature such characters as a grown-up Tiny Tim (Mr. Timothy) and Edgar Allan Poe (The Pale Blue Eye). I am interested in reading more.