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Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Monthly Archives: April 2015

No Time for Morality: Motherland

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1944, air raids, euthanasia, everyday life, Germany, Hadamar, historical fiction, Holocaust, home front, Jews, Maria Hummel, survival, sympathy, World War II

Review: Motherland, by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 2014. 375 pp. $26

The year 1944 is coming to a screaming, bloody close in Germany, but the war goes on, demanding ever more sacrifice. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon in Hannesburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, has been drafted to an army hospital in Weimar. Two months widowed, he has remarried so that his three sons, the youngest of whom is an infant, have a mother to care for them while he’s gone.

Liesl, his new bride, must feed, clothe, and bring up three children who don’t know her. Food and clothing are impossible to find; air raids worsen life every day; the two elder boys run wild; and the neighbors treat her with suspicion and dislike, glad to tell her that she’s nothing like her beautiful, friendly, fun-loving predecessor. She’s done nothing wrong, but of course, that’s not enough. “The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.” And Liesel sticks out, leading people to wonder what secrets she has to protect.

One secret concerns eight-year-old Anselm (called Ani), the middle child, already young for his years, who’s been acting strangely, showing signs of cognitive damage, if not mental disturbance. A doctor has told Liesl that Ani may need to be evaluated at Hadamar, a psychiatric hospital where, it is whispered, the unfit are put to death. Frank Winkelmann Hadamar What Liesl does to keep him and her two other boys safe requires a remarkable degree of inner strength, which, she realizes, may vanish in an unguarded moment. Like the fine novelist she is, Hummel has set herself and her protagonist a tall task, for Liesl isn’t quite cut out for struggle. She grew up in her aunt and uncle’s home, treated like a servant among her six cousins:


Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried.


Meanwhile, Frank has his own troubles. He plans to desert if the Russians break through, only a matter of time, but that’s a deadly game. His superior, Captain Schnell (!) seems more devoted to punishing subversion than running a hospital, and when Frank hears a rumor that the medical officer at nearby Buchenwald may be infecting the inmates with typhus, Schnell warns him not to be curious. Frank takes the hint.

I admire much about Motherland, a novel head and shoulders above the other two I’ve reviewed here about wartime Germany (City of Women, David R. Gilham, December 11, 2014; The Undertaking, Audrey Magee, March 19). Hummel can make even a visit to the kitchen a tense occasion, and she captures the atmosphere of fear and deprivation without resorting to cartoon Nazis or melodrama. She’s also an excellent prose stylist. Women’s faces “looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.” Dust gathers on furniture, “as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard.” It’s details like these, rooted firmly in the mundane, that tell the story of day-to-day survival.

Yet Hummel lets her characters off the moral hook, despite her best efforts. She explains that she based her novel on family history, notably a series of letters that say nothing about the death camps or the totalitarian state, only about trying to cope. Okay. She resisted the temptation to allow her characters acts of resistance–wisely, I think–and says it hurt to leave out all but scant references to Jews or the Holocaust. (One brilliant, subtle description evokes the death camps and crematoria in a different, unexpected context.)

Fair enough. I accept that ordinary people, just trying to remain overlooked, would focus instead on where their next meal was coming from, especially when the bombs are falling. However, it’s those bombs that Liesl doesn’t think about, as in why Germany’s enemies are so relentless, or why the war has lasted so long. Nor does she ever connect the dots between the laws that may send Ani to Hadamar and those that condemn Jews.

Buchenwald was built in 1937, the first such camp on German soil, so Frank can’t be completely ignorant of what its purpose is, even if he’s never heard that inmates are injected with typhus. But he simply doesn’t think about it. Nor does he ever stop to consider that the horribly maimed men he treats have their counterparts on the other side. Nor, more broadly, does he reflect on what war has done to Europe.

Nevertheless, I could settle with this–in fact, I did, for almost the whole novel–except for the outrage that Liesl, in particular, expresses against the Americans. What they do is so unjust and heavy-handed, she believes, and I sense that the reader is meant to sympathize with her. But I can’t, not about this. Liesl never grapples with anyone else’s sufferings or how they might have come about. To me, Hummel squanders the empathy for Liesl and Frank that she’s so carefully built.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Brontë Revisited: The Flight of Gemma Hardy

27 Monday Apr 2015

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1950s, 1960s, Charlotte Brontë, coming of age, feminism, Gothic fiction, historical fiction, Jane Eyre, Margot Livesey, Orkneys, Scotland

Review: The Flight of Gemma Hardy, by Margot Livesey
Harper, 2012. 447 pp. $27

When Gemma Hardy, a plain, shy orphan, loses her kind uncle to drowning, the roof caves in. Her aunt and cousins turn on her as though she were responsible, yet, as the astute young girl quickly notices, she’s the only one to mourn him. Humiliated daily, accused of sins she doesn’t commit, and punished when she pushes back, Gemma comes to believe that anything she loves will be squashed, and that no one will love or accept her.

Offered the chance to go to Claypoole, a girls’ boarding school, Gemma seizes it with both hands. A sympathetic teacher tries to warn her that where she’s headed will feel more like an orphanage than a school, but she’s so desperate to escape–and to learn–that she ignores his advice. On arriving at Claypoole, she realizes that he was right: As a “working girl,” she’s more servant than student and the object of scorn and bullying, in which the faculty take the lead.

No, this isn’t Dickensian London, though at least one adult to whom she manages to reveal her plight invokes the comparison. It’s 1950s Scotland, and the literary ancestor is Brontë, not Dickens. Livesey has set out to retell Jane Eyre, and what a captivating, satisfying job she does. I don’t remember the original that well, but Gemma meets her Rochester–a Mr. Sinclair, who owns a country house in the Orkneys–and their complicated relationship is fraught with untold secrets, none of which involves a madwoman or an attic.

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

St. Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkneys (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the US).

I’d guess that Gemma has more poetry and resourcefulness in her than Jane, and maybe a stronger spirit of independence, though Gemma can more likely afford that, living a century later. Livesey paints the era lightly, in the background, yet it’s there, in the gradual, increasing breadth of opportunity for women not born to wealth or social position.

However, the real story here is of course Gemma’s struggle to find a place–any place–for herself. Her late uncle was a minister, and when she ventures into his study, she comes across his last sermon, left half-written at his death:


We each begin as an island, but we soon build bridges. Even the most solitary person has, perhaps without knowing it, a causeway, a cable, a line of stepping-stones, connecting him or her to others, allowing for the possibility of communication and affection.


Gemma spends the rest of the novel trying to realize these words and to understand what more her uncle might have said about them had he lived. Her journey takes her a long way, not in miles but in insight, and through many a heartache. Her hunger for connection, and her setbacks in finding it, lead her to think, “Not everyone who was fond of me died, but everyone came to harm.” However, she never, ever stops striving.

The calamities come thick and fast, at times, but I never felt the narrative descended into melodrama, because–those of you who’ve read my reviews can guess what I’m about to say–Gemma has a highly developed inner life. Her dreams and desires feel real and earned, and Livesey has taken care to make even Gemma’s worst tormentors real people, invariably because they have their own torments and terrors. The brutes in Livesey’s world behave cruelly mostly because they feel precarious too. That they may also gain by it matters, of course, yet it’s secondary.

Livesey grew up in Scotland, and she renders her native landscape, harsh as it sometimes appears, with such beauty that I feel a stirring to visit the Orkneys. She plays down the Gothic elements, a choice that suits me fine, though they’re there–voices in the wind, legends, a character or two with second sight. Toward the end, Gemma goes through a couple emotional transitions that passed by a bit quickly, maybe with more ease than I expected, and a final scene that comes about rather neatly. But this is a small criticism to make of a terrific novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Freedom to Belong: The Last Runaway

23 Thursday Apr 2015

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African-Americans, Civil War, Fugitive Slave Act, historical fiction, Ohio, race relations, slavery, Society of Friends, Tracy Chevalier, Underground Railroad, United States

Review: The Last Runaway, by Tracy Chevalier
Penguin, 2013. 305 pp. $27.

In 1850, a young Quaker woman from Dorset, England, sets out for America with her sister, who’s engaged to marry a man in Faithwell, Ohio. But the sister dies en route, so Honor Bright (too cute a name by half) arrives in Faithwell bereft and alone. She’s also unexpected, for she decided to accompany her late sister on a whim, having been jilted by her English fiancé.

Instead of acceptance and welcome from her fellow Friends, Honor faces criticism of her accent, clothes, and introspective character. The one thing they admire is her ability to sew a quilt, which surpasses anyone else’s, though even there, they find ways to turn that against her. Sewing is her solace, her gift, her art (not that she’d call it that), and a respite amid so much else she dislikes. To Honor, Americans seem blunt and intrusive, and her surroundings, transient–buildings are ramshackle wood, and people act as if they’ll move further west at any moment (as some do). Worse, she can no longer stay in the house that took her in, so to anchor herself in Faithwell, she must marry into this alien community.

Slave_kidnap_post_1851_boston

However, that’s the least of it. Honor believes implicitly in the Friends’ creed that slavery is plain wrong, but that’s not how things go at Faithwell. Many runaway slaves come through Ohio, and the Fugitive Slave Act makes it a criminal offense to harbor or aid them. To Honor’s disgust and dismay, most Friends obey the law, for fear of losing their farms or going to prison.

If Honor persists in her view, she’ll be an outcast, but if she gives in, she’ll be untrue to herself. Her new neighbors tell her that slavery is an abstract concept in Britain (where it’s illegal), but in Ohio, a complex reality that doesn’t allow certainties. Their argument appalls her, but she’s at their mercy. What she does about it makes an excellent, compelling novel. I’ve read four of Chevalier’s, and I think The Last Runaway is her best since Girl With a Pearl Earring.

Chevalier makes terrific use of the tension involving runaway slaves, a slave catcher to whom Honor feels attracted, her place in Faithwell, and a potential mother-in-law who’s a nasty piece of work. But I especially like how the author unfolds Honor’s character, showing how she gradually overcomes her fear of a wild, intimidating landscape to enjoy its beauties, the first aspect of her new home to excite her. She finds pleasure in fireflies, hummingbirds, and other unfamiliar creatures, and learns to accept the products of the soil:


Honor closed her eyes and bit down, slicing the kernels with her teeth. She opened her eyes. Never had she tasted anything so fresh and sweet. This was corn in its purest form, a mouthful of life. Turning the cob, she bit again and again, to savor the taste, so different from the other corn dishes she’d eaten over the past weeks.


Chevalier also contrasts point of view, revealing Honor’s feelings in plaintive, lonely letters home, even as she tries to bear up under intense pressure. I like that touch, though the articulate, perfectly grammatical prose made me wonder whether Honor had really written them, considering that the narrative says nothing about her schooling or her reading, except for the Bible. Similarly, a few phrases from a key African-American character sounded modern to my ear, though I haven’t researched them and could be wrong.

In sum, though, The Last Runaway hits the mark, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Sister Act: The Other Boleyn Girl

20 Monday Apr 2015

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Anne Boleyn, characterization, court, England, feminism, Henry VIII, Hilary Mantel, historical fiction, intrigue, Mary Boleyn, Philippa Gregory, sixteenth century, Tudors, women

Early on in The Other Boleyn Girl, the more infamous Anne tells her younger sister, Mary, that Mary always listens to what everyone tells her, whereas she, Anne, accepts no limits. Both sisters get the irony that Anne is one of those who order Mary around. When I read this, I mentally rubbed my hands, anticipating an oft-told tale from a fresh angle: sibling rivalry, red in tooth and claw.

Mary Boleyn (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the United States).

Mary Boleyn (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the United States).

To be sure, Anne’s teeth and claws are much in evidence. There’s nothing she won’t do to advance the Boleyn fortunes and put herself on the throne beside Henry VIII, and so much the better if Mary suffers in the process.

Pushing Mary and Anne forward are their parents and uncle, who care not a farthing for their feelings, nor anyone else’s. Ambition matters above all, and when an ill-conceived jest or the failure to please His Majesty quickly enough can cost a dukedom, only the most ruthless and adept will prosper. The girls’ elder brother, George, tries to make his sisters’ lives easier if and when he can–again, a nice familial touch–but he too must play courtier. Luckily for the Boleyns, he’s good at it.

However, after this rousing, promising start, The Other Boleyn Girl drops dead. The sibling rivalry, though played for the highest stakes, feels like a courtier’s smile, flat, without depth, little more than a concept. Anne keeps hurting Mary. Mary keeps trying not to cry. The narrative keeps going round and round the same mulberry bush, as the mercurial Henry tries to figure out how to secure his throne through a male heir, while his courtiers try to guess what he’ll do next.

But it’s not the story that makes this novel feel static. It’s the characters, who seem all one way or another, all the time. Anne never does anything that’s not selfish, nasty, and conniving, whereas Mary is forever sweet and innocent. Even less believable, she has the political sense of an eight-year-old, which gives her family the occasion to tell her (and the reader) what’s what. The parents and uncle, who are never even named, come across as fairy-tale wicked rather than capable, cold-blooded schemers with beliefs and myths to protect. Henry is never more than a spoiled child with insatiable appetites. And so on.

Generic, flat characters like these arouse sentiment, which fades, rather than empathy, which sticks around. For instance, nobody likes a wicked parent, so we can cringe when they tell their scarred, brutalized daughter to suck it up. But by the fifth time they tell her, maybe we’re not cringing anymore–and, if you’re like me, you start to wonder why you ever did. It might have helped had Mary reflected on her early life or the dreams she had growing up, or what she would have wanted her parents to be for her. But she only mentions once or twice the peculiar strain–which she never really owns–of attending the French court as a very young girl.

Gregory misses a great opportunity here to develop the crux of her novel. How did two sisters, only a few years apart in age, grow up in the same, dreadful place and become such different people? Why does Anne have an incredible drive to be the center of attention, and how did she get so good at it? Maybe you’d say, Oh, that’s just backstory, and who cares? But it’s not. It’s what makes these sisters different from any other you’ve met, yet also recognizable, what fully rounded fictional characters should be. Most important, having a sense of what moves Anne would allow the reader to understand her cruelty in its context, maybe even empathize with her.

The writing doesn’t help. The dialog swims in adverbs; people don’t just say things, they say them flatly, coldly, honestly, frankly, smartly, levelly, fiercely, and so on. Since the characters’ speech needs no explanation, I felt I was being hit over the head. I also tired of characters spitting their words or gritting their teeth to reveal how mad they were, or how often Mary restates the firmly established theme about women oppressed in a man’s world.

Comparing Hilary Mantel to just about anybody is unfair. Nevertheless, I have to point out that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies riveted me, covering precisely the same well-known history and therefore facing the same storytelling obstacles. The difference? Mantel’s characters have inner lives and complexities that make them fully formed, not just cutouts standing in for what we already believe to be right and just and true–or their polar opposites.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Weary of So Much: Driving the King

16 Thursday Apr 2015

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1955, African-American, Almena Lomax, boycott, historical fiction, Jim Crow, Montgomery, music, Nat King Cole, race relations, Ravi Howard, Rosa Parks, segregation, twentieth century, World War II

Review: Driving the King, by Ravi Howard

Harper, 2015. 325 pp. $26.

It’s November 1945, and Nat Weary, home from French and Belgian battlefields, wants nothing more than to marry his sweetheart and settle down to the life that World War II interrupted. He’s got a perfect proposal setup, too. Weary’s boyhood friend, the up-and-coming Nat King Cole, is in town to perform and has agreed to cue the big question from the stage. What could be more romantic?

But this is Montgomery, Alabama, where the unwritten law–the law that matters–says that African-Americans have no right to count on anything except humiliation and heartache. When a white man rushes the stage and attacks Cole with a lead pipe, Weary leaps to his friend’s defense, battering the assailant with a microphone. The white man gets three years; Weary gets ten. Once more, his life is interrupted, but this time, his fight against a racist enemy brings no reward except the belief he did the right thing. A decade and its promise have been stolen from him, simply because he’s black.

What I like the best about Driving the King–and there’s much to like–is that the narrative shows the moment-to-moment calculations, adjustments, and self-restraints an African-American must undertake to remain safe, which take such a drastic toll on the body and spirit. Safe is of course a relative term, because there are no guarantees or minimum standards. As the magnificent, harrowing prison scenes reveal, there’s always more to lose, unless you’re dead, which means there are always more games to play to keep life a hair’s-breadth more bearable.

Weary’s voice, as his name aptly suggests, is tired, measured, tamping down the fury only far enough so that it doesn’t cost him. A more passionate narrative would be hard to find. Yet Howard never lectures, rants, or explains, letting the story (and its images) do the work. What more fitting metaphor could describe the contest between Weary and the white thug–unequal in the eyes of the law–than a battered microphone? Weary, after all, has no voice that any power will listen to, and he may shout all he likes, but no one will ever hear. Likewise, when he recalls German wartime brutalities against his captured comrades, it’s plain that he’s also thinking about American racists.


 

The Germans had taken their time, bayoneting them and cutting off fingers. Those spared the knife were beaten. Maybe the marks had come from rifle butts or boots, but whatever the weapon was, they’d struck them over and over. My mind filled up with that sickest kind of wondering, thinking about who had to be the first to feel it coming down. I wondered who was the last and had to see the rest die before he did.

 

From such a powerful start, Driving the King should go farther than it does. Most of the second half is entirely predictable, and though Weary’s struggles to cope with his losses earn all my empathy, the tension drains, and the ending feels anticlimactic. It doesn’t help that the narrative repeatedly (and annoyingly) jumps back and forth in time, for no particular purpose I can see except to delay the inevitable.

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

The National City Lines bus on which Rosa Parks was arrested during the Montgomery bus boycott. (Henry Ford Museum, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

This is unfortunate, because the novel offers a worthy subplot, the Montgomery bus boycott that takes place after Weary’s released from prison. The boycott involves many, many courageous people, of whom Rosa Parks was neither the first nor the last. Weary’s relatives take an active part; a young Martin Luther King makes a cameo appearance; and Almena Lomax, who ran an African-American newspaper in Los Angeles, figures heavily in the story.

But where’s Weary himself? Working for Nat Cole in LA, which leaves him on the sidelines. There’s a lot about bringing Cole back to Montgomery for a gig, but though the two men treat that as unfinished business, it feels small next to everything else. I don’t know whether Howard felt hampered by the historical record or thought his narrative delivered fully on its promise, but I wish he’d chosen otherwise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Founding Father’s Love Triangle: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard

13 Monday Apr 2015

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American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, eighteenth century, feminism, historical fiction, illegitimate children, masochism, obsessive love, Philadelphia, Sally Cabot, Somerset Maugham, women

Review: Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, by Sally Cabot
Morrow, 2013. 353 pp. $26

Among other things, this first-rate novel shows another, selfish side to the scientist, bon vivant, and wit who helped make the American Revolution. As a printer’s apprentice in 1720s Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin has already been marked as an up-and-coming young man when he seduces Deborah Read, the teenage daughter of the house where he lodges. He heads off to London, promising to be faithful, then fails to answer her letters. Deborah’s mother, who never thought much of Franklin anyway, pushes her into a marriage with another man, who disappears with her small dowry, leaving behind only debts.

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin/i>, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, by Joseph-Siffrein Duplessis, ca. 1785, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

On Franklin’s return, he seduces Anne, a tavern maid, who bears his child. Having taken up with Deborah again–they now live together–he asks Anne to give up her infant son, William, to him, and asks Deborah to accept William as her own. Each woman hesitates, but as they see it, they have no choice. Anne lives in desperate poverty, and she sells herself to make ends meet. Her mother already has more children than she can feed–Anne’s father has died, after a long illness–and William may not even survive childhood, if Anne keeps him. Franklin has promised to educate and protect the boy, and he has the money to make good. As for Deborah, she worries that she has little emotional hold on Franklin, and no legal claim until they’ve lived together seven years. Having William under their roof is her best chance to bind Franklin to her.

Naturally, the arrangement causes as many problems as it solves, and Franklin’s the one who comes out ahead. Cabot makes the most of this deceptively simple premise. The women suffer endless torture, some of it self-inflicted, and there’s the rub: They blame one another rather than the man in the middle. The stakes couldn’t be higher, and as the women try to exert their pull on him (and on William), the tension feels ready to explode at any moment. There’s everything here: blood, reputation, passion, fear of abandonment, loyalty, insane love for a child. These are timeless themes, but Cabot has entered her characters’ heads so deeply that I never questioned for a second that they lived during the eighteenth century. Their poignant, often fruitless, efforts to fight for the justice a woman can’t get in a man’s world needs no gloss to contrast with what men talk of, freedom from British tyranny.

Despite all this brilliance, I wonder about her portrayal of Franklin the seducer. He has a gift for making a woman think he’s entirely present with her, a poisonous trait for Deborah and Anne, who’ve never earned anyone’s attention before. But they’re attracted even before they have the chance to bask in his gaze. Moreover, they stay attracted to the point of obsession, even when they’ve learned how restless and self-absorbed he is. The dynamics make sense–Anne and Deborah crave his emotional warmth and chase it all the harder when he withdraws–but I’m not convinced that he should have hooked them so easily.

This reminds me of Cathy Marie Buchanan’s novel, The Painted Girls (reviewed February 26), in which the author narrated to chilling perfection how a self-destructive love affair played out but failed to convince me it should ever have started. That kind of attraction is no easy thing to bring off in fiction. I think Somerset Maugham succeeded in Of Human Bondage, because Philip, the infatuated young man, somehow feels more complete with Mildred, though he also knows she’s not for him. It’s that sense of completion the other two novels needed to convey.

I’m also puzzled how, in Benjamin Franklin’s Bastard, Anne mellows with the years, given how bitter her life has been. She’s more credible as a young mother, crazed for love of the child whom she can’t keep, and as a prostitute who enjoys her sexual power over men. Cabot’s trying to contrast her later-in-life calm with the more rigid, less tolerant Deborah, but I think it’s a stretch.

My review wouldn’t be complete, I suppose, without mentioning pet peeve numero uno: telling the reader how a character feels. In fairness, Cabot does this rarely, but she’s too subtle and masterful a writer to do it at all, and those instances mar what’s otherwise a superb (and eye-opening) novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

This Old House: Ashenden

09 Thursday Apr 2015

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Basildon Park, class system, country estates, Elizabeth Wilhide, historical fiction, interlocking short stories, mansion, Pride and Prejudice

Review: Ashenden, by Elizabeth Wilhide
Simon & Schuster, 2012. 339 pp. $25
I knew this novel bore no relation to a short-story collection of the same title by Somerset Maugham, about a secret-service agent during World War I. And when I saw that the author had written interlocking stories spanning the two-and-a-half-century life of an English country home, I almost slid the book back onto the library shelf. Stories don’t a novel make.

Basildon Park, the model for Ashenden (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Basildon Park, the model for Ashenden (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

But I took a chance, and Ashenden rewarded me. Wilhide, who has written on interior decorating and architecture, has created a pretty good novel out of subtle joinery, rather like the decorative carpentry that gives the Ashenden mansion some of its interior charm. (For Austen fans, Wilhide says she based the architecture on Basildon Park, where a 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice was filmed.) I never felt the house become a character, which Wilhide was clearly trying to achieve. But Ashenden provides the setting for, and symbol of, an engrossing tale of social conflict, competition, envy, striving, and prejudice. There’s romance too, of course; I particularly liked how the historical chapters show how social class permeates everything, including the right to expect love.

Oddly, Ashenden stumbles only in the first and last chapters, the present-day narrative of two siblings who’ve inherited the place, which needs such extensive repair that they can’t afford to keep it. I don’t find this situation compelling, especially compared with the historical chapters, which put much more at stake. Worse, the present-day characters seem idealized, and they’re bound to Ashenden as an artifact. Had they understood all that had happened under its roof, they might have had more to struggle with. But by the end, only the reader can know that, which is a flaw in the novel’s construction.

That said, Ashenden has its pleasures. Though Wilhide indulges in unnecessary foreshadowings, my number-two pet peeve of the month, otherwise, she seldom explains too much, which separates her from many first novelists (and from more experienced authors who should know better). Likewise, I was rarely able to guess who’d show up from a previous chapter, or in what guise. The interlocking chapters actually interlock, as the social themes recombine in various ways. My favorites deal with the eighteenth-century architect who had the house built; a servant in the late 1880s; a boating party just before the First World War; and what happened in the house during that war.

The opening of the latter chapter shows Wilhide’s descriptive pen:


 

In some parts of the country near the south coast you can hear a dull murderous boom come over the Channel, an ominous blood pulse. Not here. Here a dog’s bark annoys the ordinary silence the way it has always done and will do again, a wood pigeon hidden in a beech tree utters its lilting, repetitive coo, a freshening wind shivers through the leaves and drops again to a hush.


 

The author also has a sharp sense of social commentary. In the present-day chapters, which portray the yuppiness of the neighborhood, a woman pushes “a red three-wheeled baby buggy the size of a small car . . . conveying its little emperor.” One heir to Ashenden, who lives in New York, thinks that England suffers “the drip, drip, drip of a small island at the fag end of its history and refusing to admit it.”

Had I judged Ashenden by its cover (which depicts the back of a young woman staring out the window of a grand house), I might have put it aside. Tsk, tsk.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Defenestration and Other Sports: Night Life

06 Monday Apr 2015

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1954, Broadway, CIA, David C. Taylor, FBI, historical fiction, J. Edgar Hoover, Joseph McCarthy, Mafia, Manhattan, murder, New York Police Department, Roy Cohn, thriller

Review: Night Life, by David C. Taylor
Forge, 2015. 332 pp. $26

I have to like Michael Cassidy, a New York detective who throws a cop out a third-story window–the guy needed it–and who, in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts, tells Roy Cohn to stick it. For those of you whose grandmothers didn’t wish Roy Cohn a lingering death from throat cancer, as mine did, and have therefore never heard of him, he was Senator Joseph McCarthy’s legal counsel. So within the first ten pages of Night Life, I was already enrolled in the Michael Cassidy fan club and having a good time.

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, opposing counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

The Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954. McCarthy stands at right; Joseph Welch, Army counsel, seated, left. (Courtesy U. S. Senate Historical Office)

Cassidy defies expectations in several ways. First, he’s not of Irish ancestry, no matter what the name suggests, and how his father got that name figures in the story. Second, Michael comes from a comfortable, middle-class background (his father’s a successful Broadway producer) and appreciates jazz and modern art. Third, though he’s uptown by birth, there isn’t a pickpocket, madam, or hood he doesn’t know in Hell’s Kitchen or the meat-packing district, and he has a tolerant, persuasive way with them that nets him bits of information.

And that’s what Cassidy needs, because a Broadway dancer has been found tortured to death. Normally, nobody would care. But for some reason, the FBI (“the Feebles”), the CIA, and the Mafia are all interested, and they have ways of declaring their curiosity or punishing those who talk out of turn. Meanwhile, a tough, beautiful woman moves into the apartment downstairs from Michael’s, just the cure for his lonely, broken heart, a person with whom he can share his bed and his troubles.

I like how Taylor portrays his characters, including Michael’s father and siblings–the family scenes are terrific–the theater folk, the political figures (McCarthy, Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover), Michael’s building superintendent, the police. They seem alive to me, and they make the novel hum, even more than the constant reversals or conflicting evidence that Michael must sift through. Best of all, to this transplanted New Yorker, the city feels alive too, in its speech, sights, and smells. I’m so tired of reading about New York from authors who don’t know the place. Taylor does:


A bearded man in a white robe stood on a milk crate at the corner of 49th and tried to interest the hurrying people in the fast-approaching end of the world. The clatter and bong of pinball machines and the whoops of players at the shooting games rattled out the open door of the arcade on 47th. Just past it was a discount store that had been GOING OUT OF BUSINE$$$$ for six years. It sold cheap portable radios, Japanese cameras, World War II surplus equipment, and knives that couldn’t hold an edge at ROCK BOTTOM PRICE$$$$$.


Night Life does suffer from stereotypes, though. Nearly every woman in this book, Cassidy’s sister included, is gorgeous, and she’s just about the only one who doesn’t want to take his clothes off. Michael performs many feats of derring-do, some of which are less than believable, particularly toward the end. Yeah, this stuff belongs to the genre; but still.

Most dubiously, he has dreams that predict danger–correctly, as it turns out. Taylor handles the clairvoyance well enough so that you don’t hear wind chimes or spooky music, yet for a cop who has his feet firmly planted in the grit, it doesn’t quite add up. The ending, too, stretches credulity in a couple ways, not least a loose end–a dangerous loose end–left untied.

Even so, Night Life is just too lively to dismiss. When Michael catches one of the Feebles rifling his desk and tells him to buzz off, the Feeble asks, “Got something to hide, Detective?” To which our man replies, “Pictures of your sister from when I worked Vice.”

Got to love it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Striving After Wind: Merivel

02 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Charles II, Ecclesiastes, England, historical fiction, medicine, picaresque, pretension, Rose Tremain, scientific method, seventeenth century, Versailles

Review: Merivel: A Man of His Time, by Rose Tremain
Norton, 2012. 373 pp. $27

In his own words, Sir Robert Merivel is “the son of a humble Glovemaker from Vauxhall, and I had prospered in life only because I had a talent to amuse the King of England.” But if Merivel, as even his lovers call him, owes his success to the self-deprecating wit with which he makes Charles II laugh, no reader will hold that against him. Indeed, Merivel appeared in Restoration, where he received such good notices that Tremain brought him back for an encore.

King Charles II, by John Michael Wright or studio (National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the US.)

King Charles II, by John Michael Wright or studio (National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain in the US.)

Merivel’s appeal lies partly in adventures that go awry, often in funny ways, so that he’s a picaresque figure, a sadder-but-wiser, seventeenth-century Tom Jones facing up to late middle age. Merivel wonders whether he’s been a good father, a good master to his servants, and the king’s friend or his slave. To ponder these, he sets out for Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, probably the worst place on earth for introspection. If this sounds thin as a premise, consider what King Charles says: “All is in the story, Merivel. No artefact can come to its full significance without the telling of the tale.”

And an engaging tale it is, often in ways I didn’t expect. Merivel’s a seventeenth-century thinker who believes in the then-infant scientific method, which means he’s curious about everything and willing to ask questions. An atheist in all but name, he has plainly read Ecclesiastes, which happens to be my favorite book in the Bible (and to which Tremain has put able use). Merivel practically quotes that perceptive text on the folly of placing all desires in great undertakings, which, like life, are transitory:


But such are our days. Such are the days and times of Every Man and, no matter how hard we work and strive, we can never know when something shall be given to us and when it will be taken away.


However, Merivel has trouble living up to this creed and being satisfied with what he has. He has a sweet, loving daughter, to whom he’s very close; his profession as a doctor, which he practices with a clarity and honesty seldom seen among his colleagues; and the chance at a love more profound and satisfying than any he’s ever experienced. But whether he can be content with these most human of riches forms the core of the novel. And since, as Ecclesiastes says, there’s nothing new under the sun, Merivel’s story is as old, and yet as topical, as can be.

Likewise, I think that artifice, foppery, and pretension plague our age much as they did Merivel’s, so he seems familiar there as well. He wrestles mightily with his worst tendencies, which include self-pity, impulsiveness, and skirt-chasing. Yet if he often fails to master them, he has a good heart and can draw people to him simply by being himself. Much of this great gift comes from his empathy for self-delusion, and his grasp of the particularly sharp pain that comes when you think you’ve “held Wonder in your hands,” as the king puts it, only to lose it when knowledge strips the illusion away. This is one quality that makes Merivel such good company.

Another is the prose, which captures the time and place. Tremain gives you the seventeenth century, unvarnished, filthy, and invigorating, whether she’s describing the lice in the wig or the sublime country air or the witty conversation of intelligent people trying to grasp the science of their age. I’ve never read a description of Versailles like hers, both funny and appalling, or the grisly aspects of hospitals or inns, with quite that edge. Finally, she’s drawn a delicate, often moving portrait of a friendship between king and commoner, which ends in just the way it should–I dare not say more.

Merivel is the first novel of Tremain’s I’ve ever read. It won’t be the last.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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