Monthly Archives: October 2019

Five Years, and I Still Haven’t Read Everything

28 Monday Oct 2019

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Novelhistorian celebrates its fifth birthday this week with the usual retrospective of the books that have made the deepest impression on me during the past year. I’d also like to thank you, my readers, for making this blog worthwhile. I’m glad you’ve stuck with me, and I hope it’s rewarding.

There are thirteen books this year, more than normal, because I couldn’t bear to leave any out. In no particular order, they are:

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker, retells the Trojan War from the point of view of Briseis, Achilles’ captive concubine, whom Agamemnon seizes and thereby causes rifts within the Greek camp. Tradition holds Briseis to blame, but, as the protagonist of this superb novel points out, the tellers of that tradition are male. Barker’s storytelling is so acute that you can imagine she has known these mythical figures all her life.

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason, offers an unusual romance and coming-of-age story set against harrowing, scrupulously observed scenes at a First World War field hospital in Poland. Mason not only renders his characters in full psychological depth, he explores what medicine means for the healer as well as the patient, a fresh, compelling theme.

Sugar Money, by Jane Harris, shows you late eighteenth-century slavery in the Caribbean, and what a heart-breaking, riveting picture that is. The novel succeeds as adventure, a tale of another time, sibling rivalry, and an exposé of colonialism; the prose, vivid as a poem, relies heavily on Kréyol phrases and at times reads like music.

Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard, recounts the courtship between an up-and-coming Illinois backwoods lawyer and a Kentucky belle, revealing the lighter side of each as well as their lonely, tortured souls. Often hilarious, this novel reminds me of Austen for its wit and social observation, but you also see the president in the making.

Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, tells the mystery of how a child in late nineteenth-century Oxfordshire emerges from a river apparently dead, only to revive — and no one knows who she is. The solution involves violence, loss, conspiracy, and romance; storytelling doesn’t get more seductive than this, and though the premise sounds woo-woo, it isn’t.

Wolf on a String, by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville), tells an age-old story about a young man on the make. But the year is 1599, and the court of mad Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, is a snake pit, especially if you have to solve a murder to survive. The tension never flags, and the story has the ring of historical truth, even though the author made most of it up.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar, narrates the unlikely romance between a straight-laced eighteenth-century English merchant and a courtesan. The story reminds me of a modern-day tale by Henry Fielding, complete with intricate plot, ribaldry, and social commentary, much of the latter concerning how men use women as possessions.

Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans, features a once-famous English suffragist in the 1930s who, decades after her heyday, mourns the lack of passion and radical feeling among the young—and her own irrelevance. The solution to both problems propels a funny, engaging story and involves a maddening yet sympathetic heroine.

In The Dream Peddler, by Martine Fournier Watson, sometime in the early 1900s, a well-dressed salesman with courtly manners arrives in a Midwestern rural town and offers his customers the dreams they desire, with a money-back guarantee. At first, the townspeople suppose he’s a charlatan, but he’s not; and in a way, that causes more trouble.

The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason, spins the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species into a brilliant psychological thriller involving an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria and multiple murders. I hate suspense novels whose surprise solution involves a psychopath, but here, the villain is in plain sight. So are Prince Albert, Karl Marx, Thomas Huxley, and many other figures, including three famous Charleses — Darwin, Dickens, and Field, our hero detective, a real historical figure.

The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, tells the utterly madcap story of the seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Leibniz visiting a recluse astronomer who, alone in Europe, has predicted a total eclipse for a certain hour. Start this novel, a howlingly funny sendup of philosophy and its practitioners, and you too will want to know whether the eclipse will happen.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman, invokes the trope du jour. This particular bookshop, vintage 1969, belongs to an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (huh?), who falls for a taciturn Australian sheep farmer who doesn’t read books and hasn’t heard of Auschwitz. Treacle? Not in the least, because nothing in this novel happens without reversals, second thoughts, mixed feelings, or a sense of dread; the author has taken his characters’ measure and renders them as mature adults.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, narrates a series of murders in 1327 at an abbey where a conclave debates such issues as whether Christ laughed. Such a premise might seem pointless or abstract. But this discursive yet mesmerizing novel explores profound philosophical and political issues; offers a page-turning mystery; and illuminates the past by its own lights, therefore revealing the present. The latter, to me, is the highest purpose of historical fiction.

If there’s a common thread here–besides the obvious upmarket/literary slant–it’s each author’s ability to show via concrete detail what another (and, in my view, lesser) writer would choose to tell. Getting closer to physical vividness has been my mantra as writer, especially in the past year, and many of these books have inspired me that way.

Thanks again for reading.

Teach Your Children: Grievous

21 Monday Oct 2019

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Review: Grievous, by H. S. Cross
FSG, 2019. 524 pp. $30

John Grieves, a.k.a. Grievous, has never felt so tested, pained, or enraged, despite a life that has given him much heartache. The cause of his current frustration and anguish is a fourteen-year-old student, Gray Riding, whom everyone says will win a scholarship to Oxford one day — unless he’s expelled from Saint Stephen’s, the public (private) school in Yorkshire where John is his housemaster.

Eton College boys wearing hats corresponding to the various rowing teams competing on the Thames, June 1932, photographer unknown (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons; Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13350 / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Naturally, he’s the most sensitive housemaster at the school; the others would have caned Riding black and blue until he shaped up or shipped out. But in the year 1931, John understands that though the momentous issues of the day never penetrate Saint Stephen’s gated walls, his struggle with Gray, and how he manages his own strengths and weaknesses in that effort, matter just as much in their own small way. That knowledge, however, generally offers little consolation.

Gray follows an adolescent code of honor typical of Saint Stephen’s, and of the public-school culture: never show feeling, never flinch, never make yourself vulnerable, never betray a friend. Inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s rebellious schoolboy character, Stalky, the friend he chooses is one determined to break every rule, even those the school hasn’t thought of yet. Mind you, that’s even before John’s thirteen-year-old goddaughter, Cordelia, shows up and smites the boy in a heart that others suppose has been encased in lead.

The genius of this novel resides in the urgency with which Cross imbues John’s attempt to redeem young Riding, and why the boy resists. Didn’t such novels go out with saying goodbye to Mr. Chips? Well, no, as Cross amply proves here. This British public school resembles an infernal machine that stamps its inmates with snobbery, sadism, treachery, and cold-hearted contempt, while hunting down the homoerotic impulses it otherwise does so much to encourage. Any sensitive soul like Gray would howl in rage and pain, but only to himself. His outlet is a Tolkienesque story he writes during class lectures, featuring characters named Valarious and the Elf Rider. Already chained by Kipling’s Stalky, he wonders, during a very risky escapade with his reckless friend, whether stories can help him at all:

The ground was damp, his seat soaked, his teeth coated in licorice. If they could make it back intact in every sense, Gray silently vowed to devote himself to ordinary life and stop confusing it with stories. In stories, you didn’t risk your life and your arse waiting in a field to perform your heroics.… In stories, a coherent hand guided the plot; there was no tumble of make-believe just when you needed to think clearly. Friends in stories never lied to one another.

This passage, which occurs around page 60, marks the point at which, for me, the narrative overcomes obstacles that may deter even a dedicated reader. Cross explains absolutely nothing of Saint Stephen’s myriad intricacies, letting you infer them as you go along, including the schoolboy slang, which reminds me of Anthony Burgess novels in which he invents languages. How maddening. Nevertheless, you have the sense that if you can only hang on, you’ll be rewarded; and so you will. That said, the author need not have refused to clarify more of her transitions, so that I don’t have to ask myself which character’s voice I’m tuning into right now. I could also have done without the long dashes that introduce dialogue instead of quotation marks, an affectation I dislike.

Names matter in this very literary novel. John Grieves is an apt handle for a man who suffered as a conscientious objector in the Great War and who’s never gotten over a disappointment in love. Dr. Sebastian, the headmaster, acts as though he’s been pierced by many arrows, though John, a lifelong friend, actually takes more of them. Most importantly, I think, Gray’s first name is Thomas, and because the two names and their initials appear several times, I can’t help think of Thomas Gray, the eighteenth-century poet whose masterpiece, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” hung in the back of my mind while I was reading. You can apply the poem’s most famous line, “the paths of glory lead but to the grave” to John’s story, and, even more significantly, Gray’s father. And John’s initial motive to help Gray, one that many teachers must feel, appears in this subsequent couplet: “Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

I wish Cross had given Grievous a more fully resolved ending. But, as a sequel to Wilberforce (whose title derives not from the famous British abolitionist but an older student who tries to liberate Gray from his self-imposed emotional shackles), I expect another volume in the series to bring the story further.

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

Land, Fens, Love: Call Upon the Water

14 Monday Oct 2019

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Review: Call Upon the Water, by Stella Tillyard
Atria, 2019. 269 pp. $26

Summoned to England in 1649 to help oversee the draining and development of wetlands called the Great Level, Jan Brunt, a Dutch engineer, seeks professional advancement. A reserved, taciturn man who outwardly reveals little other than his seriousness of purpose, within, he harbors great passion for the natural world he would master. Sharp-eyed and introspective, Jan follows currents of thought like the watercourses he strives to control, both of which lead him to startling places. Most significantly, his ramblings bring him to Eliza, a reactive, passionate woman of the fens where he measures and surveys. Such people, according to Jan’s informants, are half-savage and of no account. But Eliza and Jan begin an affair that prompts him to question much of what he thought he knew of life.

From this tantalizing premise, Tillyard weaves a narrative at once physical and metaphysical, using the most basic elements, water and land. With an elegant simplicity I admire, Call Upon the Water explores what land and water mean, how will and freedom struggle against natural and human-made obstacles, and what that implies for love between two people of very different worlds and outlooks. Consequently, Tillyard offers a profound look into our essential surroundings, which usually pass unnoticed because they’re constantly within sight. Her novel gradually takes you over, giving you much to ponder, a magic that begins with her deceptively simple prose:

I am a Dutchman and an islander. Water and the sky are safe to me as my mother’s skirts. I know an empty silence and a full silence. Stand still in a full silence and it’s loud with noises. A heron takes flight; he creaks like a ship in sail. Ducks scuffle in the reeds. I hear the beat of wings, the movement of creatures in the grass, water rippling, and the wind that accompanies me everywhere, sighing and roaring. Nature, that seems so quiet, pours out its songs. Even in the darkness there is a velvet purr of sound, of moles underground and field mice above.

Tillyard uses similar pared-down, evocative language to establish the way things work in the 1650s, whether she’s recounting Jan’s surveying procedures, describing the harbor of Nieuw Amsterdam (which figures in the story), or narrating how indentured servants live in North America. These vivid pictures show Tillyard’s grasp of social history, and a deep one it is. What a shame, then, that the jacket flap reduces this rich, complex portrait to a bland recitation that goes out of its way to spoil the story, recounting the action up until about the last thirty pages. If you read Call Upon the Water — and there are good reasons to do so — do not, repeat, not look at the jacket flap.

Now that I’ve said that, I confess I wound up liking the book less than I thought I would. That’s partly because the storytelling jumps around from the Great Level to Nieuw Amsterdam and elsewhere like a restless traveler. It’s as though Tillyard has set her sights on a circular narrative with two beginnings that eventually meet, and she’s invested too much in this device to back away from it. But if we’re meant to be surprised on reaching that long-awaited junction, the resulting aha! doesn’t justify the heavy lifting required to get there. Similarly, when Jan realizes he loves Eliza, a shift in narrative perspective calls undue attention to itself, an affectation particularly unnecessary, since the words already convey how smitten he is. Tillyard doesn’t need artifice to tell this, or any other, story.

Conversely, she seems oddly unwilling to clarify certain aspects of her narrative, perhaps because she fears to show or tell too much, another form of artifice. Still, I want to know why Eliza behaves in certain ways, or what she sees in Jan, worthy though he is; yet, for much of the novel, she’s a shadow figure. When her voice finally appears toward the end, it’s a shock, more so because I don’t find her entirely credible. To cite one example, I like her feminism, which she sums up as, “No man should think because I am a woman and a slighter shaped, that my eyes and my thoughts are smaller than theirs. That is a mistake easy to fall into, as others have done.”

But I don’t know how she comes to this attitude, which surely begs for explanation, especially in 1650. Nor do I understand how Jan and Eliza manage to ignore conflicts inherent in their relationship—not that they have to talk them through, but they should at least recognize that they’re there. All you know is that Eliza claims a preternatural ability to house deep or inconvenient feelings in well-contained, separate compartments. I’m not convinced.

Despite these reservations though, I can recommend Call Upon the Water as a portrayal of life seldom seen, with much to reflect on, told in marvelous prose. For many, that will be more than enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher, in return for an honest review.

Lost, and Found: The Redeemed

07 Monday Oct 2019

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Review: The Redeemed, by Tim Pears
Bloomsbury, 2019. 382 pp. $29

Sixteen-year-old Leo Sercombe, a native of North Devon and a skilled horseman with a deep love of the natural world, sails with the Royal Navy from Scapa Flow in late May 1916 to do battle against the Germans. That alone would be a peculiar irony, but, even worse, Leo’s encased in a steel-plated gun turret on the heavy cruiser Queen Mary, without fresh air or a window to the exterior. I probably don’t need to tell you that the Queen Mary will fare poorly in the imminent Battle of Jutland. But I should note that Pears suggests how British complacency and pride in an outdated warship brings disaster, and that the sailors pay the price.

HMS Queen Mary leaving the River Tyne, 1913. Almost 1,300 men went down with her when she sank at the Battle of Jutland (courtesy Tyne & Wear Archives and Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Charlotte (Lottie) Prideaux, an earl’s daughter roughly Leo’s age and a childhood companion (their illicit friendship having caused great trouble in an earlier volume), studies veterinary medicine on the sly. Lottie watches, pained, as her father’s estate transforms under the pressures of war and modernity. But she’s determined to follow this career denied young women, especially the well-born, and in her zeal, she trusts the wrong party, enduring violence and betrayal. There are no protections in this world.

The Redeemed is the final installment of Pears’s West Country Trilogy and makes a fitting sequel to The Wanderers, a mesmerizing novel of grace and beauty. As with the previous work, in The Redeemed, the prose remains luminous and fixed on the physical world, especially through Leo’s part of the narrative. Many writers try to do this, but Pears has the particular knack of rendering Leo through the natural and metaphysical at once, whether he’s in his gun turret or at anchor at Scapa Flow:

The Flow was a bleak immensity of water, surrounded by low, barren hills. The spanking wind gave an edge to a long summer’s day, and turned into gales in winter. They blew in carrying salt from the sea, and men on deck had to yell to each other to be heard. Though snow was rare, when it did fall the wind blew it into drifts against the gun turrets. The winter days were short and mostly wet. But Leo did not mind the changing weather. With few companions on the ship, he looked outward and felt less imprisoned by their confinement than most. There were frequent, vivid rainbows, and clear nights when the aurora borealis flooded the sky. The first time Leo saw it he thought that the powers of the heavens had been made manifest. That he would see the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Lottie’s world involves going on rounds as a veterinarian’s assistant, pretending to be male; learning how to help a mare get through a breech birth; getting angry when a farmer mistreats his animals, all rendered in painstaking detail. But she’s also the daughter of the manor, with a stepmother not much older than herself, and the precarious emotional territory that entails. Through her and the constraints she faces, the reader sees England of the past fade forever, a touching elegy to what once was.

I like both narratives very much, though I think Leo’s succeeds more fully, portraying his social skittishness and fierce desire for independence, much like the horses he loves, and his fear to ask for friendship, which he subsumes in a remarkably disciplined dedication for work. You also see how the machine has come to dominate — the gun turret, the tractor that replaces farm horses, the people he once knew who’ve changed their rural ways of life to accommodate the trend — and what gets lost in the exchange.

Throughout, whether from the narrative, the title, or the jacket cover, you sense that Lottie and Leo are meant to find one another again, but you know the path won’t be easy. Pears strings out the tension to the utmost. Along the way, both characters blunder, especially Leo, who trusts very little and has trouble claiming his own.

Compared to The Wanderers, The Redeemed doesn’t hang together as tightly, and though the story unfolds with riveting detail, it’s not always clear why and how the pieces belong or fit together. Though Pears doesn’t waste words, his discursive style may not be for everyone, though I find it enthralling.

I did bump up against one contrivance. The story implies that Leo enlists in the navy at sixteen to avoid the trenches; but if so, why didn’t he wait a couple years to see whether the war would end first? Had he done so, however, I suspect that those two years would have posed a serious problem for the novelist. What would Leo do in all that time, and might he seek out Lottie too soon? Not only that, Jutland was the only major naval battle of the war, and you can see why Pears wants to include it, for he does a magnificent job of rendering it and linking it to Leo’s character.

But that’s a minor point and in no way detracts from The Redeemed. I think I enjoyed the book more for having read its predecessor, but it’s not essential.

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