Tag: historical fiction

Day 165: Alexandria

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Cover for AlexandriaFor years I avidly collected all of Lindsey Davis’s Didius Falco mysteries. My passion has cooled a bit, as it usually does for series mysteries, but I still enjoy them enough to pick them up when I find them.

Marcus Didius Falco is a cynical, rascally, wisecracking “informer” during the Roman Empire of Vespasian. I have followed his path from the first book when he met Helena Justina, the fiery, unconventional daughter of a senator. Falco has had to work his way up from the plebeian rank and earn enough money so that he can legally be permitted to marry her.

In Alexandria, the 19th novel in this series, Falco and Helena Justina have been married for awhile when they travel to Alexandria with their two daughters, their adopted teenage daughter, and their mongrel dog for a vacation and visit to his uncle. Almost immediately upon arrival Falco is plunged into an investigation when his uncle’s dinner guest of the night before, Theon, the head of the famed library, is found dead, locked in his own office.

Of course, Falco has to figure out how Theon was murdered and why. He soon finds that several of the library’s scholars may want Theon’s job. Of course, people begin dropping like flies, including a philosophy student who is mauled by a crocodile. Falco begins to suspect that something else might be going on.

Davis’s books always involve a multitude of interesting, shifty characters and lots of dirty politics and other shenanigans, and Falco is always engaging and amusing. Davis does a convincing job of re-creating the ancient world in her books.

If you are interested in this series, I recommend that you start with the first book, Silver Pigs (recently renamed The Silver Pigs). Although the mysteries are stand-alone, developments in Falco’s personal life make it more enjoyable if you read this series in order.

Day 161: Peony in Love

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Cover for Peony in LoveI’ll start out right away by saying that after reading the touching and engrossing Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, I was disappointed by Lisa See’s Peony in Love. The innocuous description on the back of the book gives you no warning of the subject of the novel. I think that is unfortunate, because not very many readers of See’s other books will be prepared for it.

Peony’s sixteenth birthday is approaching. In six months she will “marry out” to the man who has been her fiancé since she was a child, although she only knows his name. She is excited because that night her family will begin hosting an epic opera by Tang Xianzu that she loves, and the secluded women will be allowed to watch it through a screen.

The story of the opera is important to the novel. It is about a girl who dies for love and haunts her lover until she is eventually brought back to life in honor of her steadfastness.

That evening, Peony peeps out from behind the screen and spots a handsome young man, with whom she falls instantly in love. Later in a brief absence from the performance she encounters him accidentally, and he begs her to meet him the next night. Such behavior is strictly forbidden. She has never been alone with a man outside her family, but she meets him anyway.

I usually try not to give away important plot points, but I will tell you one thing that happens in the first third of the book because I don’t think you can make a fair decision about reading it without knowing. So, this is my spoiler warning. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to impart my objections without revealing this key plot point.

Convinced that she will be forced to marry a man she does not love even though she doesn’t know who her fiancé is, Peony starves herself to death, like the heroine in the opera. Just before she dies, when it is too late to save her, she finds out that her beloved actually is Ren, her fiancé (a twist that I found predictable). Presumably, she spends the rest of the novel as a ghost. I say presumably because after another 100 pages or so I quit reading.

I was already fed up with Peony because she wastes two opportunities to avoid the misunderstanding that causes her death. As in many movies, a few words could have cleared things up. That is, she and her lover never bother to exchange names. In addition, after the opera, when she is still in the audience, her father introduces her fiancé to the company. She is so convinced he is a stranger that she shuts her eyes. How likely is that?

Peony is already an extremely foolish girl even before she begins starving herself. I continued reading out of interest in Chinese beliefs about the afterlife, but when Peony begins manipulating Ren’s wife, I found this development too distasteful to continue. I regret that I cannot recommend this book, although I am still eager to try other books by Lisa See.

Day 156: Winter Garden

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Cover for Winter GardenI want to start out this review by saying that I usually avoid reading tearjerker fiction (by the way, that’s different from being brought to tears by emotion that is evoked honestly in fiction) and I don’t like things that are too heartfelt, if that makes any sense. Having misgivings, I read Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah upon the recommendation of a friend because I have always been interested in Russia. This decision was a mistake for me because I found this novel too corny, contrived, and predictable.

Meredith is a caregiver. She takes care of her father’s business and tries to take care of everything else for everyone. She has also tried to love her cold, withdrawn mother all her life, but her mother remains unknowable. Meredith’s sister Nina, on the other hand, is a photojournalist who seems unreliable to Meredith and hardly ever comes home. This, Meredith resents.

Their father has a heart attack, which brings Nina home. During his illness, he insists that the girls force their mother to tell them a fairy tale she used to tell them as children, only this time, she is to finish it. Then he dies, and Nina returns for the funeral.

It is obvious from the beginning, even before we hear a word of the tale, that it isn’t a fairy tale but a true story about their mother’s difficult life in Stalinist Russia. Of course, you immediately know that by listening to the story, the women will grow to love and understand their mother. By the way, they will also figure out how to reconcile their relationships with each other and solve their other life problems. A review I read says “Although this book starts off fairly maudlin, it evolves into a gripping read.” I have to disagree. I think it starts out maudlin and stays that way.

Day 152: The Master

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Cover for The MasterThe Master, Colm Tóibín’s engrossing novel about Henry James, is virtually plotless. Over the course of five years, James works, visit friends, and remembers significant events in his life and people who are important to him. At the same time he muses on how the people, tales they tell, or incidents he has observed have informed or will inform his writing.

I have often found James’s work perplexing, feeling as if there is a lot going on under the surface that I don’t understand. A novel about him, therefore, is not an intuitive choice for me. Nevertheless, I found myself extremely involved in this story about a man who appears to have always stood back and watched. In Tóibín’s view, James lived a life of “pure coldness.”

The book delicately depicts a complex man, social on the surface but always at an emotional remove from others, homosexual but so concerned about propriety and public opinion that he never acts on it (perhaps–that is not entirely clear) and avoids situations where he may be tempted. He is sometimes very cold in his inaction, such as when he deserts his best friend, Constance Fenimore Woolson, because she has been too open for his taste about their completely innocent relationship, causing some friends to blame him for her subsequent suicide.

The most fascinating part of the novel, in my opinion, is how it illuminates the way that a writer may take a situation, a sentence, thoughts about how a pair of people interact, and turn them into a complete work of fiction. For example, a tale told to him about two children alone on an estate reminds him of his relationship with his sister Alice. As children, both of them had been abandoned as their family toured Europe and have never been fully included in the events and emotions of the family. These memories finally emerge in the ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” Similarly, his memories of his intelligent, vivacious cousin Minny Temple are brought back to life in first The Portrait of a Lady and then The Wings of a Dove.

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, The Master is an evocative novel about the inner life of an emotionally crippled writer.

Day 151: Moonfleet

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Cover for MoonfleetMoonfleet is a boy’s adventure story similar to Kidnapped or Treasure Island. Written by J. Meade Falkner in 1898, it was very popular for many years. I had actually never heard of it but picked it up out of curiosity a couple of years ago.

John Trenchard is an orphan boy who lives with his aunt in the small village of Moonfleet in the south of England in 1757. The village has been dominated by the Mohune family for centuries. There is a legend that Colonel John “Blackbeard” Mohune stole a diamond from King Charles I and that his ghost roams the crypts looking for it.

One day John hears noises from Mohune’s crypt, and when he goes to investigate, finds the landlord of the local inn, Elzevir Block, and Mr. Ratsey, the sexton, who say they are looking for damage from a storm. John assumes they are looking for Blackbeard’s ghost. He finds his way into the crypt through a large sinkhole and gets inadvertantly trapped there overnight. While he is trapped there, he overhears enough to realize that Block and Ratsey are actually smugglers.

John’s aunt assumes he has been up to no good when he doesn’t come back for the night, so she throws him out of the house. Fortunately, Block takes him in. But when Block’s lease expires, the lease goes up for auction and is purchased by Maskew, the unpopular local magistrate. Before Block leaves the area, John accompanies him on one last smuggling venture, during which Maskew, who has lain in wait for the smugglers with the excisemen, is accidentally shot by the excisemen. John is wounded and is falsely accused in absentia of murdering Maskew, so he must flee to the continent.

The rest of John’s adventures include diamond hunting, being imprisoned for theft when he is cheated by an avaricious diamond merchant, working as a galley slave, and shipwreck. Moonfleet is an exciting book with a gripping story line that is still popular with children.

Day 147: Quo Vadis

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Cover for Quo VadisI picked up Quo Vadis because I so much enjoyed Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Polish history trilogy, as you know if you read my review of With Fire and Sword. This novel is about a young Roman patrician, Vinicius, who falls in love with Ligia,  a Christian, in the time of Nero’s rule. Sienkiewicz did extensive research on the period to get the details right.

About half of the book is about Vinicius’s pursuit of Ligia, first through ruthless means, including kidnapping (presumably pagan patricians have no morals), and later through conversion to Christianity. I was frankly uninterested in either Vinicius or Ligia, who are cardboard characters, and I couldn’t care less about whether they got together.

The last half of the book is about the burning of Rome and the persecution of the Christians. It features the last days of St. Paul.  The pace picks up a little here, but overall the novel is marred by its focus on extolling Christianity. All of the Christians are noble, and most of the other characters are not. Sienkiewicz was a devout Catholic, as is obvious from a few scenes in all his books, and I can only think that the added emphasis on this aspect in this particular novel gets in the way of the book’s effectiveness, at least as viewed by a modern audience.

I know that Quo Vadis was extremely popular in its time (it was published in 1896) and contributed toward Sienkiewicz winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. I also know that Sienkiewicz was capable of creating more interesting characters and writing more exciting scenes. Perhaps the times have just changed too much since this book was written for it to appeal to a wide audience now.

Day 143: West of Here

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Cover of West of HereThis peculiar novel starts out as a straight intergenerational history showing how the building of a dam by a small town in 1890, which was meant to make the town prosper, ends up determining its future as a permanent backwater. The novel also tells the story of a nearly disastrous expedition into the Olympic Peninsula. The time alternates between 1890, when the dam becomes an idea of an early entrepreneur, and 2007, when the town is beginning to dismantle it. 

If there is such a thing as ensemble fiction, this is it, since the book has many characters, none of whom seem to be more important than the others. Because it has many characters, it has many stories, the oddest of which is that of a mute Klallam Indian boy in 1890 who somehow shares consciousness with a troubled Indian boy in 2007. In 2007, everyone assumes the boy is psychotic and he is admitted to a mental ward. In 1890, he starts his own cult.

Characters in the historical portion are an early feminist fleeing her lover; a prostitute who is fighting with the owner of the whorehouse; the Klallam Indians, already on their way to being destroyed; and an idealistic entrepreneur. Characters in the later story are a Bigfoot enthusiast, a seafood plant worker who longs for the days when he was a high school basketball star, an ex-convict who wants to live off the land, and an environmental scientist.

Evison has written a quirky, interesting book that is sometimes humorous, but I found it a little too diffuse, with too many characters, and too much going on. Although we may be meant to contrast the vigorous original settlers with the sad sacks of the present, the seeds of the area’s troubles are there right from the beginning. Perhaps that is the point. Still, I think the intentions of the author are unclear, and the novel is muddy as a result.

Day 141: Shadow of Night

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Cover for Shadow of NightAs with most second books of a trilogy, Shadow of Night is transitional and therefore harder to describe than the first book.

At the end of the A Discovery of Witches, the first book of Deborah Harkness’s “All Souls Trilogy,” Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and nonpracticing witch, and her husband Matthew Clairmont, a geneticist and vampire, were forced to flee because a union between a witch and a vampire is forbidden. Using Diana’s newly discovered time-travel skills, they have arrived in Elizabethan England so that Diana can find a witch to help her learn her powers. Even more importantly, they want to look for Ashmole 782, an enchanted manuscript that Matthew believes may hold the secret to the existence of witches, vampires, and daemons. This decision proves potentially hazardous, though, as the age they’ve chosen is one of persecution of witches and Diana has a tendency to draw attention to herself.

In Tudor England Matthew of the past is part of an intellectual group called the School of Night, the members of which include Sir Walter Raleigh and Kit Marlowe. Kit is a deeply disturbed daemon who is insanely jealous of Diana. Another hazard is that Matthew’s acquaintances may realize he is not the same person as the person from the past. In the meantime, both Diana and Matthew’s friends and enemies back in the present time watch for clues to their existence in the past.

Although this novel is a great sequel that propels you to the next book, it has the typical middle book problem of furthering the plot without arriving anywhere. Strictly because of personal taste, I could also have done without some of the heavy romantic passages, although other readers will like them. Nevertheless, I am extremely interested to see how Diana and Matthew will resolve all their problems in the final book.

Day 136: The Séance

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Cover for The SeanceThe Séance is a modern novel that is written like a Victorian gothic mystery. It features narrations by several different characters–a typical Victorian device that was used successfully in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.

John Harwood’s novel is difficult to describe without going too far into the plot, because some important characters do not appear until later in the book. It begins with the story of Constance Langdon’s dreary childhood and young adulthood. Her mother has been depressed and nonfunctional since her sister died, and her father behaves as if he lives alone in the house. When Constance reaches the age of 11, her father withdraws her from school and abandons her and her mother to go live with his sister. Later, a disastrous experiment with spiritualism (very popular in Victorian times) in an attempt to help her mother results in her mother’s suicide.

Constance accepts her uncle’s invitation to live with him in order to avoid being thrust upon a father who doesn’t want her. But shortly after moving in with him, she finds she has inherited Wraxford Hall, an infamous house, old and crumbling, where two boys died; an old man mysteriously disappeared; and Magnus Wraxford was apparently murdered by his wife, Eleanor, who has also disappeared.

The next section of the novel is narrated by John Montague, a lawyer who visits Constance. He was involved in the experiment at Wraxford Hall that ended in the murder of Magnus Wraxford, and he tells the story of the experiment. This visit and Constance’s subsequent agreement to take part in a séance at Wraxford Hall lead us to Eleanor’s story, which is taken up by a diary that Eleanor wrote. Finally, we return to Constance. When she arrives at Wraxford Hall, she finds the experiment is to take place in a spooky gallery occupied by an odd-looking set of armor and a sarcophagus.

The novel is successfully creepy and mysterious. However, by the time of the séance I had figured out one character’s crucial secret identity, which made several other plot points clearer. Some readers may find it takes a long time to get to the crux of the novel, but I enjoyed the journey.

Day 131: The Dark Lantern

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Cover for The Dark LanternI had mixed feelings about The Dark Lantern, Geri Brightwell’s novel of deception and intrigue set in late 19th century London. Although I found myself interested enough in what happens, I also thought that the odds of this much intrigue going on in one house were very low.

Jane Willred arrives in London for her first job in the city as a housemaid. Although Jane is a relatively blameless girl, she immediately finds herself caught in a web of deceit. In trying to put her past as the illegitimate daughter of a murderess behind, she has forged a letter from her mean, self-righteous former employer to omit the remarks the employer made about Jane’s past. In her first day at work, she is further embroiled when she breaks a dish and comes under the obligation of the blackmailing upper housemaid Sarah.

Upstairs all is not well, either. Mrs. Robert Bentley, Mina, newly arrived from Paris because of her mother-in-law’s illness, is hiding a shameful past. While her husband distractedly goes about his work trying to prove that an innovative system of taking body measurements of criminals is preferable to fingerprinting as a means of identification, she hides in the London house trying to avoid being recognized.

Odd things are certainly happening, as a stranger intrudes into the house on Jane’s second day claiming to be Mr. Robert and looks through his papers. How, Jane wonders later, did he know she would answer the door–as the only person in the house who hadn’t yet met Mr. Robert–since it wasn’t her job to do so?

Robert is waiting for the return of his brother Henry from India, hoping Henry will agree to sell the house after their mother’s death, as he and Mina are almost broke. Instead comes news that Henry’s ship has foundered off the coast of France and only his wife has survived–a wife no one knew existed.

Aside from the number of people hiding secrets in this novel, I also felt that few of the characters are likable. Jane is the most sympathetic, but she seems incredibly stupid at times. Nevertheless, the plot kept me interested.