Tag: historical fiction

Day 88: The Iron King

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Cover for The Iron KingBest Book of the Week!

The Iron King is the first of seven books in the “Accursed Kings” series by the French novelist Maurice Druon. Unlike many historical novels, this series does not follow a fictional hero or heroine but is an interpretation of actual events in French history with all historical figures. This series was popular in its time (it was written in the 1950’s), but may be difficult to find now. If you are lucky, your local library may have it.

It is 1307 in France. The kingdom is broke, and King Philippe IV, known as the Iron King, is looking for sources of money. The Knights Templar, one of the wealthiest organizations in the world, seems like a good place to get it, but they refuse France a loan. Some charges of heresy, obscene rituals, and other abominations have been laid against them by a defrocked knight. Everyone knows they are false, but with the collusion of Pope Clement, who fears the knights’ power, Philippe orders the members to be arrested all on the same night, and seizes their assets.

In the meantime, Robert of Artois has been cheated out of his inheritance by his aunt, Mahaut.  He decides to get his revenge by bringing down her daughters, who are married to the King’s sons.

Druon’s writing is elegant and ironic, his novels thoroughly researched. He doesn’t over-explain; instead, the novel is compelled forward solely by the events in the plot. Few of the characters are sympathetic; nevertheless, it is a fascinating series. I have often read opinions that Druon is one of the best historical novelists ever.

Day 84: Bring Up the Bodies

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Cover for Bring Up the BodiesBest Book of the Week! Year!

If Wolf Hall was a wonderful historical novel, Bring Up the Bodies is masterly. In this second of a trilogy, Hilary Mantel continues the story of Thomas Cromwell. Bring Up the Bodies is more focused than the last book, because it deals with a much shorter time period and defined subject–the downfall of Anne Boleyn.

The writing is elegant and impeccable. I have read a few comments that Wolf Hall was sometimes difficult to follow because the readers could not always tell who was meant by “him” or “he.” Mantel has written both books using a strict third person limited point of view, from that of Cromwell, and people don’t think of themselves by their first names. Hence, the difficulty, which I did not notice as a problem in Bring Up the Bodies. This technique is very difficult to employ successfully–we are much more used to a third person that changes from character to character or even to third person omniscient. But Mantel uses it effortlessly to create a memorable character in Cromwell–kind but implacable, one who fosters the growth of others but does not forget the crimes and indignities committed against Cardinal Wolsey, whom he loved as as a father.

Henry VIII has already decided he wants to rid himself of Anne Boleyn and marry Jane Seymour, but Anne has one more chance. She is carrying a child, and if it is born alive and is a boy, she is safe. Henry must have an heir, and he has decided that if he hasn’t been given one, God must have found some fault with his marriage to Anne just as there was one for his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. Thomas Cromwell must find him some way out of his difficulties.

Of course, Cromwell helped Anne to her position in the first place, but the Boleyns have made many enemies in their enjoyment of power, and they have treated him with disdain. More importantly, Anne Boleyn destroyed the Cardinal, and her brother mocked him in his downfall.

From the moment you begin reading, you find yourself plunged into the Tudor world of shifting politics and intrigue. Of course, we know what happens to Anne Boleyn, yet the novel maintains its suspense. The Boleyn and Howard families are going to suffer a huge defeat, but they will go down fighting.

Day 82: Cotillion

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Cover for CotillionOne of my favorite authors if I want the lightest of reading material and a good laugh is Georgette Heyer. Although I am not a romance reader, for her meticulously researched and comic Regency romances I have to make an exception. Her period pieces are absolutely convincing, as she was an expert on Regency dress, deportment, and speech. In fact, she became such an expert on the period’s idioms that she once was able to successfully sue a plagiarizer by proving that the expression the other writer copied appeared only in some records to which she had been granted private access.

But Heyer was also an expert at creating charming comic characters and situations. Cotillion is one of my favorites of her books, and one of the silliest.

Kitty Charing is an impoverished orphan who has been raised in discomfort by her miserly old guardian, “Uncle” Matthew Penicuik. A great one for manipulating his putative heirs, Uncle Matthew announces that he will leave his entire fortune to Kitty, but only if she marries one of his four grandnephews. Then he invites them all to come calling. Priggish Reverend Hugh Rattney and doltish Lord Dolphinton arrive, and the married Lord Biddenden comes to represent his rakish brother Captain Claud Rattney, but dashing Captain Jack Westruther, whom Kitty has grown up hero-worshipping, does not make an appearance, as he is unwilling to be manipulated.

Kitty is furious that Jack doesn’t appear, but even more furious at being put in this position. She soundly rebukes all of her “cousins,” except Lord Dolphinton, who is too stupid to be responsible for his actions and has been compelled to come by his mama. But then Uncle Matthew announces that if Kitty refuses to marry one of her cousins, he will leave her with nothing. What is a spunky Heyer heroine to do but run off into a snowstorm with only a few possessions and an impractical plan to get a job as a house maid?

She arrives at the local inn to find her cousin Freddy Standen, who has absolutely no idea why he has been summoned. Freddy, not the brightest of bulbs but a kind-hearted young man, is perfectly wealthy in his own right and has no intention of getting married. When he meets Kitty at the inn, she talks him into pretending an engagement with her and inviting her to go up to London so she can acquire some “town polish,” buy some nice clothes, and (she hopes but doesn’t tell Freddy) enchant Jack into a proposal.

Freddy, an expert in deportment and fashion who can always be relied upon to accompany a young married woman to a dance or concert, is not really a lady’s man. When he and Kitty arrive in London to find his harassed mother attempting to care for a house full of children with mumps, he is dismayed to find he is left responsible for a naïve girl who tends to fall into difficulties and odd friendships.

The novel is crammed with comic characters, such as Kitty’s foolish governess “Fish,” who has a turn for quoting romantic poetry; Freddy’s frippery married sister Meg, who wears color combinations that shock him to the core and spends her time trying to avoid her mama-in-law; Camille, Kitty’s real French cousin, who is impersonating a lord; Lord Dolphinton, who is terrified of his mother but strictly charged by her to get Kitty to dump Freddy and marry him; and the silly doe-eyed Olivia, whom Kitty befriends but Jack is pursuing to be his mistress.

Day 81: A Whistling Woman

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Cover for A Whistling WomanI may have been less bemused by A Whistling Woman if I had known that it was the fourth in a series by A.S. Byatt, of which I have only read Babel Tower, and that long ago. Instead, I kept having the feeling that there was something I just wasn’t understanding. My impression was that it was about too many things, so I was relieved to find a review in The Guardian that criticizes it for having “too many ideas” and being an “over-ambitious jumble.” The intent of the series, says The Guardian, is to depict the social and imaginative life of Britain in the 1950’s and 60’s. Well, that is quite a job.

The title refers to a story published by a peripheral character about people on a perilous journey. On the way they meet creatures who are half woman and half bird and whose whistling cries are unbearable. The prince in the story has learned many languages and finds he can understand the creatures, so they tell him their tale. I don’t want to go into it further, but it is clearly a statement about feminism, which is logical since A Whistling Woman is set in 1968 and features several women who are struggling with their place in society.

The action focuses (if focuses is the word) around Frederica Potter, the host of a fashionable TV talk show; a protest movement against a university; a conference on body and mind; and the growth of a cult. Frederica is planning a show around the conference, where the scientists’ rationalism is pitted against the results of their experiments, which show that the brain is not built for reason but to make the body work. At an alternative therapy clinic, the psychoanalyst Elvet Gander is falling under the influence of his patient Joshua Ramsden, a schizophreniac, around whom a messianic cult is forming. Ramsden’s essential goodness is being muddied by his increasing psychotic episodes. Some outsiders are encouraging the students at the university to form an Anti-University, the sole purpose of which is apparently to protest.

In addition to being almost confusingly full of ideas and plots going in every direction, the book does not really echo my own experience of the times. Surely student demonstrations, at least in the States, were more meaningful and actually about something. Most of the ones I remember were about the war in Vietnam.

The book includes deep discussions of science and religion. It is interesting while offering almost too much to think about.

Day 77: Wolf Hall

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Cover for Wolf HallBest Book of Week 16!

This is a good time to write about Wolf Hall, because I was thrilled to learn that Hilary Mantel’s sequel to it has just come out. My copy is arriving soon. Mantel is always an interesting writer whose work does not occupy any one genre, although her last few books have been historical fiction. Wolf Hall won the Man Booker Prize and was one the best books I read in 2010.

The novel looks at the political and religious machinations of Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from low origins to become Henry’s chief minister. Although Cromwell has traditionally been viewed as Henry’s “heavy,” recent historians have looked at his career more kindly, showing that his work as chief minister brought England into more modern statehood and that his changes created more order for government functions that were less controlled by the whims of nobility.

Mantel depicts Cromwell as a loyal man who cares for his dependents and works to reform England. He builds up a great household as he moves from the position of secretary to Cardinal Wolsey to work for the king. Later, after the Cardinal’s downfall, he slowly, almost imperceptibly, works to bring down those who furthered their own interests by destroying the Cardinal, including the rapacious Boleyns.

Cromwell is loving to his family and friends, completely faithful to the Cardinal and then to Henry, intelligent, able in many spheres of work, and decent. Mantel paints a charming pictures of his home life. In contrast, she turns the tables on Thomas More, venerated for centuries, showing him as a sadistic torturer of Protestants who is in love with his own martyrdom.

Cromwell meets Jane Seymour when she is a young, lonely lady’s maid to the queen, teased and neglected by the rest of the court, and feels pity for her. Later, after he is long widowed, he falls in love with her. The title of the book is the name of her ancestral home, Wolf Hall.

Mantel’s approach is understated, leaving the reader sometimes to connect the ideas. The details in this novel seem completely authentic, and Mantel handles the period brilliantly. She somehow manages to generate tension and suspense even about things we know all about, like what will happen to Anne Boleyn.

Day 75: Doc

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Cover for DocThanks go to my friend K.C. for recommending this book. Writing a very interesting tale of a tragic life, Mary Doria Russell does a good job of staying true to the facts while fictionalizing what she can’t know in Doc, the story of Dr. John Henry (Doc) Holliday.

Russell begins with Holliday as a young boy, delicate, raised as a Southern gentleman and educated by his mother. Although he is frail, he shows much promise for his intelligence, grace, and wit, but his chances are hurt first by the Civil War, which ruins his wealthy family, then by the tragedy of his mother’s death caused by sickness and starving, and finally by tuberculosis.

Already by the time he sets off in his early 20’s for Dallas to work in a dentistry practice, he is ill. Shortly after he arrives, a major collapse in the world economy causes him to lose his job and casts him adrift to live as best he can. Gambling and the hope of starting his own practice bring him to Dodge City, and the Earps bring him to Tombstone for the famous gunfight.

Russell does a great job of depicting Doc: a soft-spoken gentleman with a wicked tongue, generous to his friends, profligate with his money, a fine pianist, and patient with his rapacious prostitute mistress Kate, who also fell far from a proud background.

Russell also fills out the characters of the Earps, especially happy, kind Morgan and the rather thick-headed, upright Wyatt. Bat Masterson appears as self-aggrandizing, responsible for falsely depicting Doc in the media as a hardened killer.

Russell’s approach is a little disorienting. She periodically changes her narrative style to sound more like an old codger telling a yarn and at other times sounds like she is writing a nonfiction biography. It is hard to tell whether she makes these style shifts purposely or has trouble removing herself from her source material. Although most of the book is chronological, she occasionally plays with time by going back to tell about a character’s earlier life.

Overall, Doc is a sympathetic, involving effort.

Day 66: The Lacuna

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Cover for The LacunaBest Book of Week 14!

My experience with reading Barbara Kingsolver has been uneven. Her first books were interesting and heartwarming, but some of her later work is more political and sometimes degenerates to lecturing on certain causes. However, The Lacuna is an absolutely enthralling historical novel.

Harrison Shepherd is a young man, half Mexican and half American, who survives an upbringing by a feckless mother and a cold father and finally begins making his own way in 1930’s Mexico. He finds a job working in Diego Rivera’s kitchen and ends up as the cook and plaster mixer in Rivera’s household with Frida Kahlo. Later, when they give Leon Trotsky a home, Shepherd works for Trotsky as a secretary and translator, and finally he returns to the United States to write Aztec historical potboilers.

The novel covers major historical events in a turbulent period, including the Communist Worker’s Movement, Trotsky’s assassination, FDR’s terms in Washington, World War II, and the House Unamerican Activities Committee. Although Shepherd’s life is extraordinary by any standards, Kingsolver was able to make it feel absolutely persuasive. While I usually dislike historical novels where ordinary people keep running into famous people, I completely accepted every sentence of this book.

Told by diary entries, newspaper articles, and letters, the novel gets going a little slowly, but eventually enthralls. Kingsolver does a great job of creating colorful and believable characters from the lives of real, historic people, something that is not simple, and completely involves readers in the events of their lives.

Day 63: An Atlas of Impossible Longing

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Cover for An Atlas of Impossible LongingIn An Atlas of Impossible Longing by Anuradha Roy, a family in turn of the (20th) century Bengal lives in a small remote village where the husband has moved for business. He, Amulya Babu, neglects his wife Kananbala for work, but he supports a boy in the local orphanage named Mukunda. Amulya and Kananbala have two grown sons, Kamal and Nirmal. Nirmal marries Shanti and is happy with her. But after she dies at her father’s house in childbirth, he deserts his family. His daughter Bakul is brought up in his father’s house by Kamal and his wife and by Kananbala, who is soon widowed.

On one of Nirmal’s visits after his father’s death, he goes to the orphanage to see who his father has been supporting for years and brings back Mukunda, who is casteless because no one knows his parentage. Mukunda and Bakul are raised together and allowed to run wild as each other’s only friends and companions.

The story eventually becomes about the relationship between Mukunda and Bakul and in the last section is narrated by Mukunda.

I had an ambivalent reaction to the book. I felt that the glimpses of Indian life were interesting and so was the historical context, even though momentous events are touched upon lightly. The book spans about thirty or forty years and three generations, ending in the 1940’s or 50’s. For a novel of such scope, however, it seemed too short to adequately develop the material. In the multigeneration story and the themes of the book, I was reminded of two other recent books, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and The House of Blue Mangoes by David Davidar. But both of these books were much more satisfying.

I felt little connection to any of the characters, who seemed sketchily depicted. The love story that the book focuses on in the final part of the book is the least interesting part of the story because Roy has not made me care about either of the lovers. I was curious about what would happen but at the same time did not care very much about which way things would go.

Day 61: The Game of Kings

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Cover for Game of KingsBest Book of Week 13!

If you love an authentic, well-researched, exciting historical novel that makes you almost feel like you are in the period, then I can’t recommend a better author than Dorothy Dunnett.  I have been trying to get people to read her for years with the caveat that her books are challenging, not for the reader of light romantic history.

Lady Dunnett is described on her Wikipedia page as a “leading light in the Scottish arts world and a renaissance woman.” Her books are loaded with detail about medieval customs, dress, politics, religion, food, and literature, and have labyrinthine plots full of action. She is most renowned for two series, the Lymond Chronicles, written in the 1960’s and 70’s and set in 16th Century Europe and Africa, and the House of Niccolò, written in the 1980’s and 90’s and set in 15th Century Europe, Asia, and Africa. Dunnett died shortly after finishing the last book in this series.

Game of Kings is the first book in my favorite series, the Lymond Chronicles. Francis Crawford of Lymond makes a rollicking and disruptive re-entrance into his home country of Scotland despite the charge of treason hanging over his head. He forms a band of outlaws and begins roaming around the countryside, sneaking across the border to play tricks on the British and harassing his own family. For quite some time, you don’t know whether he is a hero or a villain. He never explains himself, so it is left up to the reader (and the other characters) to figure out his motives for sometimes seemingly wrongful acts. His enemies think he is responsible for the explosion that killed his sister and is trying to murder his older brother Richard so he can inherit the estate. His friends are absolutely devoted to him but suffer doubts when he misbehaves, as he often does. His brother doesn’t know what to think, and his mother, Sybilla, is silent.

Francis is a mimic and a rogue, a musician and a polyglot, a poet and a swordsman, as swashbuckling a character as you will ever meet with in a novel. In among the action of cattle raids, impersonations, intrigues, duels, and archery contests, you actually learn a lot about Scottish history and politics.

Game of Kings is Dunnett’s first book, and my only criticism of it is that Lymond is a bit too fond of quoting poetry in antique languages. Most of it is incomprehensible unless you are a medieval scholar, but skipping over it does not hurt your understanding of the novel. Dunnett does this much less in the other books in the series. If you read this book and continue with the series, by the second book you won’t be able to stop.

Day 51: With Fire and Sword

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Cover for With Fire and SwordBest Book of Week 11!

Two years ago I read an exciting trilogy of Polish novels written in the 19th Century by Henryk Sienkiewicz, a Nobel prize winner for lifetime achievement in writing epic literature. The books were wildly popular for about 50 years, and Polish friends of mine tell me that they were their childhood reading. My review of the trilogy was published on Nancy Pearl’s blog (the librarian who has her own action figure), and I wrote to her awhile back asking if I could republish it here. She did not respond, so without further ado, I am going to write another review of the first book, With Fire and Sword. I will of course crib from my original review. The three books are stand-alone but with recurring characters, so you can read just one without missing important plot points.

It is 1647, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is having some trouble—there are rumblings of rebellion among the Cossacks, who are a major force in the Polish army. Yan Skshetuski is a young Polish officer in the hussars of the Ukrainian Prince Yeremi Vishnovyetski. Prince Yeremi sends him on a mission as an emissary to Bohdan Hmyelnitzki, the leader of the Cossack rebellion. Yan has just become engaged to the beautiful Helen, but duty calls, so he makes his way through down the river to where the Cossacks are gathering.

Yan has been sent too late, though, for the rebellion has already started when he arrives, and he is made a prisoner. He escapes with difficulty and makes his way through the war-torn landscape, all the time worrying about Helen.

The political situation in Poland is very unstable, so no one comes to Prince Yeremi’s aid as he is attacked by hoards of Cossacks from the southeast. Even though Helen has been kidnapped by the wild Cossack Bohun, Yan cannot take time to look for her because he is embroiled in another mission for the Prince. So, his friends, the fat buffoon Pan Zagloba, the lovelorn knight and master swordsman Michal Volodyovski, and the gentle Lithuanian giant Longinus Podbipyenta decide to help Yan by rescuing Helen themselves.

This novel is all adventure and romance, and it is truly exciting. Along the way, you learn something about 17th century Polish history.

If you are interested in reading the book, you may have  a hard time finding it (although I see it is available in a print-on-demand basis). It is also available in several translations, about which there is some debate. The original translation by Curtin is said to be truer to the book, but I took a look at it, and it is also fairly badly written. The translation that I read by Kuniczak takes some liberties with the structure of the novel, but is eminently readable, if you can find it. The cover picture at the beginning of the article is from the edition that I read.