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Monthly Archives: June 2016

Deception: The Paris Winter

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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art, book review, diamonds, feminism, gender prejudice, historical fiction, Imogen Robertson, literary fiction, no and furthermore, opium, Paris, respectability, sociopath villain, thriller

Review: The Paris Winter, by Imogen Robertson
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $26

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But Maud Heighton, the protagonist of this excellent thriller set in 1909, can’t help herself. She’s slowly starving in Paris, garden of earthly delights, while learning to become a painter at l’Académie Lafond. All Maud’s classmates are women, which keeps predatory bohemians out, but Lafond charges his female students double what he would if they were male–the image of respectability costs extra, you see.

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Quai de Passy, Paris, during the flood of 1910 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Not that anyone of the male persuasion believes in that respectability; Maud’s brother, a lawyer back in England, disapproves of his sister’s choice to live in that sinful city, and many men freely offer their opinion that art is a masculine preserve. So as Maud’s meager funds drip away to finance her education, and as she covertly lunches on the tiny cakes served at class sessions, she’s terribly alone. She loves Paris, but it’s out of reach–and so is Maud, a proper Englishwoman who keeps her distance, living in her books and sketch pads.

In the full light of day Paris was chic and confident. The polished shops were filled with colour and temptation and on every corner was a scene worth painting. It was modern without being vulgar, tasteful without being rigid or dull. A parade of elegant originality. Only in this hour, just before dawn on a winter’s morning, did the city seem a little haggard, a little stale. . . . The streets were almost empty–only the occasional man, purple in the face and stale with smoke and drink, hailing a cab in the Place Pigalle, or the old women washing out the gutters with stiff-brushed brooms.

But Maud can’t remain impervious and aloof forever. Tanya Koltsova, a wealthy Russian classmate from Lafond’s, befriends her, determined to show her a good time and feed her enough to restore color to her cheeks. Naturally, Maud’s too proud to accept charity, but through Tanya, she learns of a situation as a lady’s companion. Sylvie Morel, a pale, blonde beauty with a sensual face who could have stepped out of a pre-Raphaelite painting by Edward Burne-Jones, is very sickly, and her older brother wants someone to coax her into the world and help her gain her strength. How perfect for Maud; it’s precisely what she needs for herself. In return for her room, board, and a princely wage, all she need do is entice Sylvie away from her sickbed, teaching her English and giving her drawing lessons.

There are complications, however. As Morel confides, Sylvie is addicted to opium, which he indulges within limits, hoping to wean her off the drug. Yet he praises Maud’s efforts to get her out and about and insists that he can see real progress.

Then a madwoman pounds on the door one day when Morel’s out–as he usually is–and forces her way into the apartment. Morel’s a thief, the woman declares, and Sylvie’s not his sister but his wife. The Morels have ruined her life, besmirched her good name. Naturally, Maud can’t believe a word and is horrified that she couldn’t ward her off; luckily, the concierge and her husband arrive in time and threw the madwoman out.

I probably don’t have to tell you that things unravel quickly from there, and that the Morels aren’t who they seem. The Paris Winter tells a gut-wrenching, dark story while exploring the theme of how money imprisons people who have too little or too much of it. I like the storytelling very much–Robertson makes skillful use of “no; and furthermore”–and most of her characters, who come from all walks of life. Tanya’s poor-little-rich-girl act wears at times, and I wish the author had given her more than a good heart, a taste for beautiful dresses, and a quest for what it means to marry for love. A worldview, maybe? But the weak link here is the Morels, who seem like sociopaths (especially Sylvie), and, as I’ve said before, I dislike thrillers or mysteries in which the villainy comes purely from psychological distortion.

Even so, I enjoyed The Paris Winter immensely.

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

Don’t Trust Him: My Notorious Life

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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abortion, Anthony Comstock, book review, contraception, feminism, historical fiction, Ireland, Kate Manning, literary fiction, midwifery, misogyny, New York City, nineteenth century, pointless prologue, voice, women's rights

Review: My Notorious Life, by Kate Manning
Scribner, 2013. 435 pp. $27

Early on in this superb, unflinching novel, its protagonist, Ann “Axie” Muldoon, learns never to trust a man who says, “Trust me.” It’s a lesson she has cause to remember many times, not least because she sees what happens to other women who fall for it.

Axie grows up in 1860s New York, in the most squalid tenement imaginable:

. . . the cabbage cooking and the piss in the vestibule, the sloppers emptied right off the stair. Mackerel heads and pigeon bones was all around rotting, and McGloon’s pig rootled below amongst the peels and oyster shells. The fumes mingled with the odors of us hundredsome souls cramped in there like matches in a box, on four floors, six rooms a floor. Do the arithmetic and you will see we didn’t have no space to cross ourselves.

But the one thing she has is her family, which consists of her mother, younger sister, and toddler brother. They’re devoted to one another, proud of their Irish origins, ready to laugh when they may, and careful not to provoke evil sprites through a misstep. But when trouble brings about the family’s dispersal, Axie discovers what real suffering is, and you just know there’ll be no magical ending.

New York City's Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

New York City’s Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, Axie’s not the type to give up, and she finds her feet with a married couple named Evans, both doctors, and their kind-hearted housekeeper, Mrs. Browder. At first, Axie has no idea what kind of medicine her benefactors practice and is content to learn the domestic skills that Mrs. Browder is all too happy to teach her. Gradually, however, her curiosity leads her to the Evans’s library, and to understand the medical texts she finds there, she learns to read better. I like how Manning handles Axie’s discoveries, evident to the reader long before the girl herself figures out that Mrs. Evans is a midwife and sometime abortionist. You sense right away that Axie will learn and practice these skills and that she’ll never turn away an unfortunate woman who seeks her help.

Meanwhile, though, a boy she once knew has crossed her path again–Charlie, an orphan like herself. Daring, charming, born with the gift of gab, Charlie sweet-talks her, urging Axie to trust him. That in itself is a red flag, of course, but Axie can’t always help herself. Their scenes together provide ample evidence of how even women who know better can betray their common sense. Something tells Axie that Charlie may not be a scoundrel after all, but, without giving anything away, let’s just say that he tests that hope.

If you read My Notorious Life, and I heartily recommend that you do, skip the jacket flap until you’ve finished the book. I’ve made that a habit these days, sampling just enough to get the premise, and then only if I haven’t learned it from another source. And in this case especially, I’m glad I skipped it. Scribner’s publicist did Manning a tremendous disservice, telling far too much, and, if you ask me, not always accurately.

For similar reasons, I once again have to ask why an author as talented as she, in such command of voice, character, wit, language, and sheer storytelling, should settle for a prologue and chapters that jump ahead when she could have narrated My Notorious Life in sequential order and done just fine. Most men Axie meets are ignorant hypocrites when it comes to female sexuality, and most women accept their judgments as truth, even if they should know better. So it’s no secret that if Axie persists in her newfound calling, she’ll run into trouble. I see no reason to foreshadow that.

That said, however, I can’t praise My Notorious Life enough.

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

The Word No One Wants to Hear: The Emperor of All Maladies

20 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, cancer, carcinogens, clinical trial, medical arrogance, metaphor, oncology, research, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Susan Sontag, talking heads, twentieth century

Review: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Scribner, 2010. 592 pp. $18

When I picked up this book, I hadn’t thought to review it. Much of the narrative takes place too recently to qualify as history, as I define it in these pages, and part of that story is Mukherjee’s clinical experience as an oncologist and researcher–memoir, in other words, which I seldom read and never review. But now that I’ve finished The Emperor of All Maladies, I feel more confident about my grasp of a terrifying, necessary subject, information I’ll be glad to have one day. And if you read it, I bet you’ll feel the same way.

Lung cancer cell dividing , 2010 (Courtesy National Institutes of Health http://www.nih.gov/about/discovery/chronicdiseases/cancer.htm, via Wikimedia Commons)

Lung cancer cell dividing, 2010 (Courtesy National Institutes of Health, via Wikimedia Commons)

I won’t sugarcoat it, though. This book takes you on an agonizing journey, and when you read about cancer’s physical and psychological horrors, you can’t help putting yourself or someone you love in the picture–assuming you haven’t already experienced this. But Mukherjee is a sympathetic, knowledgeable, perceptive guide, a Virgil shepherding you through the circles of hell. He shows you cancer’s variations and mechanisms–desperate, inventive, fierce, and territorial, he calls them, “a parallel species, one perhaps more adapted to survival than even we are.” But he also shows you how fierce, desperate, inventive, and territorial medical science can be, so by the end, you understand his optimism.

For me, much of Mukherjee’s appeal–and credibility–comes from his honesty about his profession. I should actually put that in the plural, for, as he demonstrates, research scientists and oncologists frequently talk past each other, if they communicate at all. One painful, ironic example is how members of the two disciplines may attend the same conferences without exchanging ideas and go home confirmed in their own methods and prejudices. It’s not that they don’t want to cure cancer; of course they do. It’s that the human traits of pride, stubbornness, and passion for excellence, the qualities that inform the drive for scientific accuracy, may also get in the way.

Unfortunately, patients can get caught in the middle, depending on whatever trend dominates current thinking. For decades, radical surgery was thought to offer the only conceivable cure, and if it didn’t work, the answer was more surgery. During the 1950s, doctors even withheld pain-relieving opiates, insisting that these drugs would lead to addiction, physical deterioration, or even suicide; if the cancer caused pain, cut more flesh until it didn’t. Then the darling became chemotherapy, and if that didn’t work, the answer was to find ever-more toxic drugs, to push the limit of what the human body could stand. However miserable the patients became after being given these poisons, they were still alive, right? To the physician, anything less meant failure.

But, as Mukherjee points out, neither the disease nor the patient belongs to the doctor. And as he also explains, patient choice, especially in a male physician/female patient context, all too often evokes issues of gender, power, and whose ego needs to be assuaged. Yet the author also writes of how difficult it is, as the clinician, to explain the available choices:

Death possessed the imagination of my patients that month, and my task was to repossess imagination from death. It is a task almost impossibly difficult to describe, an operation far more delicate and complex than the administration of a medicine or the performance of surgery. . . . Too much ‘repossession’ and imagination might bloat into delusion. Too little and it might asphyxiate hope altogether.

Mukherjee’s gift for metaphor makes The Emperor of All Maladies a particular pleasure. He writes, for instance, that explosive rise in tobacco use since the Civil War mimics the manner in which a cancer cell metastasizes, an unforgettable image. During the 1950s, when public fear of cancer became more widespread, he compares that to hysteria over nuclear weapons and Communist witch hunts happening at the time–the enemy without and within. Not surprisingly, he also invokes Susan Sontag, who drew her Illness as Metaphor from her grueling struggles with multiple cancers.

I wish Mukherjee had developed these passages, many of which are brilliant. I like how he traces cancer’s impact through history, uncovering, among other things, that the first of what we call carcinogens was recognized in 1715. I also love the science, especially when he explains how cancer cells enlist the body for their own purposes, something I’ve always wanted to understand. But there’s also much he could have left out. I don’t need to know the date, participants, and politics behind each clinical trial; try as he might, the people involved seldom rise above the level of talking heads. His language in these sections mimics businesspeak, using clichés like synergy, leverage, and seminal. I certainly don’t need the blow-by-blow description of how the American Cancer Society came to be.

To me, cancer isn’t about the philanthropists and politicians who outmaneuvered their adversaries to create a corporation. Rather, it’s about the people who have the disease and those who treat them. Luckily, The Emperor of All Maladies focuses on them.

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

Being Herself: Georgia

13 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Alfred Stieglitz, art, avant-garde, book review, feminism, Georgia O'Keeffe, historical fiction, literary fiction, photography, sexual attraction, struggle of egos

Review: Georgia: A Novel of Georgia O’Keeffe, by Dawn Tripp
Random House, 2016. 318 pp. $28

It’s one of those stories you couldn’t make up. In 1917, a young woman teaching art at a small Texas college receives word from a famous artist in New York that he’s hung her charcoal and watercolor abstracts as part of the last show his gallery will ever house. Without telling him, she scrapes together her savings, hops a train, and gets to the gallery two days after the show has ended. The two artists’ instant attraction, fierce and tender, is like planets pulled together by gravity. But it should be recalled that planets take up a lot of space, and that they’re not meant to occupy the same place at the same time.

This is the story of Georgia O’Keeffe before, during, and after she becomes a leading artist in her own right, and of Alfred Stieglitz, the man who makes (and hinders) her career. Stieglitz doesn’t merely belong to the American avant-garde in 1917; he is the avant-garde. Not only has he redefined photography as an art form, he has a keen eye for talent and a sense of where modern art can (and should) go next, having introduced American audiences to such luminaries-to-be as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. On the basis of her few drawings, Stieglitz knows, just knows, that O’Keeffe will be Somebody, and he persuades her to let him make this happen.

Georgia O'Keeffe, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Georgia O’Keeffe, photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, 1918 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Not that Georgia needs much persuasion; Alfred is an intensely charismatic man, and he gets what her work is trying to say, which to her is like a sexual lollipop. However, he’s also more than two decades older than she, married, with a daughter, not to mention that Georgia isn’t the first younger woman he’s charmed. Defying convention is all very well, but their affair poses greater risks for Georgia than Alfred, and she quickly realizes that one of these is dependence. Can she be her own person and still live with an all-consuming man old enough to be her father–and not just any father, but one who knows best? More importantly, to Georgia, can she be the artist she intends rather than the one he’s created?

These are fascinating questions, with obvious feminist implications, but since Georgia has no use for isms, she sees the struggle as one between two outsize personalities duking it out. That Stieglitz never gets what she’s asking, or why, tells you how self-absorbed he is. And yet, she wonders how he can photograph the sky, “seized something so ephemeral . . . and fixed it to paper in such a way that all I want to do is fall into the mystical sheen of the world he has rendered.” That magnetism is what keeps Georgia with Stieglitz, and Tripp makes this perfectly explicable, even as she depicts O’Keeffe’s anger at his manipulations.

Some readers will finish this novel and object that there’s no plot, only the two planets crashing together, and the resulting energy that O’Keeffe turns into amazing art. That’s true. But the titanic battle feels deep and real, greater than the sum of its parts. Much of this derives from Tripp’s prose, which grabs you and never lets go:

Later, I will look at that photograph, and there is something so domestic, so simple . . . I will look at that photograph–a small print, the size of a playing card–and I will try to remember if it was ever as simple and lovely as he made it appear. This was his gift. This is what we were entranced by. How he could capture the momentary flicker of a soul in the image of raindrops on an apple, or three people gathered around a small table at a meal–such a simple and intimate pleasure–the trees in the background, blurred.

Tripp has captured something herself, the way an artist sees. I’ve always felt that art is about seeing; incidentally, having viewed O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers has changed the way I look at nature. But even if you’ve never seen her work, Georgia conveys that precious quality, the gift of vision granted only to a few.

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

The Agony of Passing: The Gilded Years

09 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1896, bigotry, book review, characterization, Gilded Age, historical fiction, Karin Tanabe, nineteenth century, racism, segregation, show versus tell, social ostracism, Vassar

Review: The Gilded Years, by Karin Tanabe
Atria, 2016. 379 pp. $16

In autumn 1896, Anita Hemmings returns to the place she loves most, the Vassar campus, for her senior year. Not only is she the class beauty (by popular vote), she excels at Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and music, the subjects deemed most suitable for young ladies–along with hygiene, of course. Social convention funnels Vassar graduates toward a single profession, teaching school, if not marriage to a wealthy Harvard or Yale man. But Anita dreams of further study, a professorship, perhaps even fieldwork involving ancient Greek artifacts. For someone of her ability, it’s possible.

the-gilded-years-9781501110450_lg

Yet it’s also not. Anita is African-American, so for three years she’s been passing as white. To look at her, no one would guess her secret. But if the school were to find out, she’d be expelled, for Vassar doesn’t admit Negroes. In fact, as the story opens, the Supreme Court has just supported segregation, through the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case. Consequently, Anita has survived three years by remaining on the fringes, not exactly keeping to herself, but avoiding the spotlight.

Her senior year, however, she rooms with Louise “Lottie” Taylor, heiress to a New York fortune and a social dynamo. Lottie loves to shock, talking freely, and (perhaps) knowingly, about sex, alcohol, and other forbidden subjects. As she says, “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.” So Lottie’s the perfect foil for Anita, pushing her into adventures that threaten to blow her cover, but which Anita can’t resist. It’s not just that Lottie’s a force of nature; it’s that Anita has desires like anyone else. And those yearnings lead her toward Porter Hamilton, a Harvard man smitten with her, a handsome, forward-thinking son of a Chicago lumber baron.

It’s a wonderful setup (based on a real person, incidentally), and Tanabe goes interesting places with it. Every move Anita makes, she risks pain, indignity, or exposure, all of which she must keep to herself, which provides a constant source of tension. The first meeting of the debating club takes up Plessy v. Ferguson, and Anita has been chosen to argue for segregation. By chance, Lottie meets her roommate’s brother, Frederick, and falls for him. Anita suffers her classmates’ casual references to blacks as inferior, which she must of course swallow in silence.

With that much going for it, I wish The Gilded Years had done more to live up to its promise. The slings and arrows that Anita must endure deserve sympathy, but she never explores them to any depth. Tanabe misses many chances here, starting with the Plessy v. Ferguson debate, which could have revealed much, but which the author prefers to summarize after the fact. That explanatory style, telling versus showing, hurts the novel in several respects, especially in character portrayal. To name one example, Anita declares her passion for intellectual subjects, yet her drive to obtain top grades seems to grip her more, because you see and feel it. But her intellectual ambitions pale beside her hopes of marrying Porter Hamilton, a notion that takes her captive maybe six minutes after they meet. I sense that Tanabe’s rushing things because she wants to compress the subplot to fit a grander design, but that comes at a cost. Anita’s undue haste makes her come across more like her flighty, less substantial roommate than herself.

But even the lightning love affair might work if Anita were reflective enough to penetrate her conflicts, rather than simply ricochet off them. Shakespeare’s Juliet famously observed that a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, precisely the idea here. But Anita merely dips her toe into what life would be like with Porter but having to deny her family, or how her experience differs from, say, Frederick’s, who could pass physically but hasn’t tried. Despite that good head on her shoulders, she never asks herself what the many accolades she receives from her racist classmates imply about perceptions of beauty, character, intelligence, or social standing. Nor does she ever wonder what makes the Vassar community so sure of its racial and social superiority, what feelings might lie behind this, or how that shapes the world around her. She’s not quite a full person, in other words.

What’s more, it’s Lottie who commands attention, generous and grasping at once in her self-absorption, a grand manipulator and benefactress. It’s she who propels the narrative, has a clearer physical presence (it’s curious that Anita, the campus beauty, doesn’t even rate a physical description), and brings about a climactic confrontation. If Anita can’t drive the action, she could at least spend that energy internally, ripping things apart and trying to reassemble them. Unfortunately, she doesn’t do either.

The publisher calls The Gilded Years “Passing meets The House of Mirth,” evoking Nella Larsen’s 1929 tale of race relations, set mostly in Harlem, and Edith Wharton’s story about social climbing among Fifth Avenue bluebloods, published in 1905. Like other attempts to “package” a novel, the glib comparison misrepresents all three books. Tanabe’s publicists would have done her better service by letting The Gilded Years stand on its own.

The official pub date of The Gilded Years was June 7.

Disclaimer: I received bound galleys from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Africa, Barry Unsworth, book review, characterization of villains, eighteenth century, England, Florida, good versus evil, historical fiction, literary fiction, origin of brutality, racism, slave trade, slavery

Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.

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