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Monthly Archives: December 2022

A Heroine Revisited: Joan

26 Monday Dec 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, Catholic Church, Charles VII, court politics, cult of heroism, epic, fifteenth century, France, historical fiction, Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc, Katherine J. Chen, literary fiction, military leader, religion, revisionism, secular leader, strong characterization

Review: Joan, by Katherine J. Chen
Random House, 2022. 343 pp. $28

One summer day in 1422, ten-year-old Jeanne d’Arc gathers stones for a fight between the boys of her village, Domrémy, against their Burgundian neighbors. The singular, disturbing ending to that brief battle will stay in the girl’s memory forever. But that day ends like any other; her father beats her, this time for dropping a bowl.

She is using her palm to ladle as much stew as she can into her mouth, so that she can’t be accused of wasting food. . . . Also, she is eating from the floor because, in spite of her grief or owing to it, she is starving. In her haste, she has swallowed a bit of the bowl itself, a hard and tiny crumb. . . . Fresh rushes are spread on the floor, and somehow she has chewed a bit of them, too. There’s the taste of grass in her mouth, along with everything else she has gulped down already.
The room has turned sideways. It takes her a moment to understand why, until she pins down the source of her pain: her ear, her left ear, is inside her father’s fist.

Over several years, his blows harden her, both to the pain and because her efforts to elude him lead her to perform useful, physically demanding chores for neighbors, which take her out of his reach—carrying sacks of grain, patching a roof, lifting a cart from the mud.

Jeanne grows tall and powerful, but she’s also a thinker. She’s drawn to her ne’er-do-well uncle because he’s kind and has traveled. She too dreams of going elsewhere, but how, to do what? And could she ever leave her beloved older sister, Catherine, who’s tried to protect her?

This is Joan of Arc, unwittingly preparing for her role in history. You know she’ll leave Domrémy, pass numerous tests that let her penetrate the inner circles of power in a divided France burdened by constant, unsuccessful war against the English invaders. She’ll meet the Dauphin, the future Charles VII, who’ll allow her to lead his soldiers.

Jean Fouquet’s 1444 portrait, oil on wood, of Charles VII, called the Victorious or the Well-Served, the latter more accurate (courtesy Louvre Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Except that this Joan is secular. Chen’s creation hears no saints’ voices, has little use for the Church, and comes belatedly (and reluctantly) to claim divine sanction. In her way, this Joan has religious faith, but I think from a perspective rare, if not unknown, in fifteenth-century France. Rather, she’s a soldier, first and foremost, and how she becomes a fighter and strategist makes a compelling, epic story.

Chen’s approach will offend those who believe historical fiction should render history as faithfully as possible, and since the sources on Jeanne d’Arc are many, these critics will decry the book as revisionism. Readers who have particular affection for the traditional story, perhaps for cultural or religious reasons, will also take exception; I know because I’ve discussed the book with people from both camps. I respect their sensibilities, though I don’t share them.

But I don’t accept how certain naysayers ascribe unsavory motives to the author, whether the urge to trample values others hold dear, or the lure of making money, and to hell with history. What utter nonsense, which suggests how threatening iconoclasm is. Too bad.

Chen is not only a brilliant novelist, she clearly loves her characters and has great respect for the time period, especially the politics and certain aspects of daily life, which she renders beautifully. From the field at the stone fight in the beginning to a town fair to a room at the Dauphin’s castle at Chinon where an enemy tries to entrap her into treason, the narrative imbues physical spaces with mood and character.

Tension thrums throughout, though I particularly admire the court scenes at Chinon and the characterizations that emerge: the Dauphin, his mother-in law, and Joan’s future comrades-in-arms, Dunois and La Hire, to name a few.

Admittedly, I don’t sense the fifteenth century in Domrémy—too much friendliness, not enough superstition. But it’s not twenty-first century either, and however old these events and characters really are, they seem entirely coherent among one another, complete, and logical. One measure of this understanding is how Chen has Joan argue for making artillery—fanciful, I suppose, yet intriguing, given that the king who shrugs off this notion in distaste would later accept it from the mouth of another famous commoner, Jacques Coeur.

Another measure of completeness is how all the expected issues come into play—the Dauphin’s weakness of character, the prejudice against a peasant woman, the soldiers’ devotion, France struggling to become a nation, and so on. They just happen without religion driving the narrative. Impossible in the fifteenth century? Yes, but that’s just about the only difference between the traditional story and this one.

Call it revisionism, if you like, but I recoil at what a few of my colleagues have said, that to describe this book—which they haven’t read—you’d have to drop the historical from historical fiction.

Not only do I admire this novel, I plan to study how the author has written it. Joan touches a nerve, but maybe that’s a good thing.

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

Death in Singapore: The Frangipani Tree Mystery

19 Monday Dec 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1936, book review, British imperialism, Chinese culture, colonialism, feminism, historical fiction, money worship, mystery, Ovidia Yu, racism, Singapore, social class, social inequality, women as powerless

Review: The Frangipani Tree Mystery, by Ovidia Yu
Constable, 2017. 312 pp. $14

Singapore, 1936. Chen Su Lin, only sixteen, nevertheless faces a crossroads. She has a certificate from the Mission School—first in her class—which, in theory, would entitle her to a good job, if she could find one. Her dream is to become a secretary, but she’s revealed that to nobody, because such positions are rare, whereas her relatives would object on principle to a woman working outside the home.

Sure enough, as the story opens, Su Lin’s uncle, a wealthy merchant with a finger in many pies, wants to marry her off, probably to some dutiful, boring minion whose sole virtue is his ability to earn a living. But Uncle Chen hasn’t reckoned on Miss Vanessa Palin, sister to the acting governor of Singapore and a presence at the Mission School, who tells him his niece is cut out for better things. However, the “better thing” Miss Nessa has in mind involves housekeeping or caring for children—being a servant—and Su Lin doesn’t want that.

G. R. Lambert & Co. photograph of the port of Singapore, 1890 (courtesy Leiden University Library, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Enter Chief Inspector Thomas Francis LeFroy of the CID, who needs a housekeeper—at least, that’s what everyone tells him—a most intriguing fellow who owes much of that intrigue to a famous reserve. He signs papers taking legal responsibility for Su Lin’s employment—how that works isn’t entirely clear—but, more immediately, he has a possible crime to investigate at the acting governor’s mansion.

Charity Byrne, the eighteen-year-old Irish nanny to the governor’s developmentally delayed daughter, has fallen off a balcony to her death beneath a frangipani tree. The Palins, who apparently had mixed feelings about the beautiful, flirtatious deceased (also of a low social class) want LeFroy to rule the death an accident. But he’s not so sure, and his insistence on conducting a proper investigation involves Su Lin as unofficial eyes and ears within the mansion.

She takes over for the late Charity in caring for seventeen-year-old Deborah Palin, called Dee-Dee, who acts like a seven-year-old, with all the difficulties that implies, and who instantly takes a liking to Su Lin. But LeFroy holds his cards so close to his chest that Su Lin doesn’t always know whether “unofficial” means useless or forgotten, and Miss Nessa Palin has begun to show a side of herself the girl never saw at the Mission School. Su Lin doesn’t want to admit it, but her mentor is gradually proving herself cold and hard, perhaps even a racist.

What’s more, Su Lin, who chafed under her traditional Chinese upbringing, finds that life among ang mohs, the Europeans, has its drawbacks. At her home growing up,

Uncles and aunts invited friends, acquaintances, and potential business partners to the table, and the guests usually stayed on after dinner to repay the hospitality with stories and gossip. . . . Full of Miss Nessa’s instructions on ladylike deportment, I had despised their raucous anecdotes, especially re-enactments of confrontations they had supposedly had with ang mohs—standing up to Europeans was considered daring and reckless, considering the law was almost always on their side. Now, the reserved, well-bred silence of my British employers left me feeling isolated and lonely.

To Su Lin, Dee-Dee, despite her often irritating behavior, seems like the most authentic person in the household.

A chief charm of The Frangipani Tree Mystery is Yu’s portrayal of the racial, ethnic, and cultural conflicts of polyglot Singapore, with the Europeans running everything in hit-and-miss fashion. You see the superstitions about bad luck among the Chinese, set against the Europeans’ social snobbery, and the notions about shame and pride, strength and weakness upheld by the different groups. I particularly like how Su Lin, though proud of her heritage, shows rather too much admiration for the colonials, and how that changes over time—accurate, I think, given her education and circumstances.

The novel takes a minute to sort out Su Lin’s place in the governor’s residence, Miss Nessa’s role, LeFroy, and the crime. But if you read The Frangipani Tree Mystery, and I suggest you do, bear with this ballet despite the step or two that might seem too convenient, and you’ll be rewarded. The mystery takes yet another minute to hit its stride, chiefly because an antagonistic character seems like a stock figure, at first, only to deepen as the narrative progresses. But in the end the story satisfies.

Yu pays close attention to cultural and social markers, which inform the narrative and enrich the background. The publisher pretends that the novel portrays the world of 1936; it doesn’t. But it does explore the barriers to women, whether European or Asian, the frequent emphasis on power or money to the exclusion of empathy, and a protagonist caught between a world she admires and the one she grew up in.

Consequently, The Frangipani Tree Mystery is one of those deceptively slight novels that offers much more than the sum of its parts. I recommend it.

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

His Last Duchess: The Marriage Portrait

12 Monday Dec 2022

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1561, Alfonso d'Este, book review, child-at-risk narrative, cliff-hanger opening, Cosimo de' Medici, Ferrara, Florence, historical fiction, literary fiction, Lucrezia de' Medici, Maggie O'Farrell, marriage politics, sixteenth century, sociopath husband

Review: The Marriage Portrait, by Maggie O’Farrell
Knopf, 2022. 333 pp. $28

It’s 1561, and Lucrezia, the not-quite-sixteen-year-old duchess of Ferrara, refuses to believe that Alfonso, her husband of one year, means to kill her. She can see no cause for offense, and at certain moments, he seems tender and thoughtful, maybe even loving. Yet when Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de’ Medici and no stranger to the forms and unwritten rules of cutthroat court life, reconsiders how Alfonso has brought her to a deserted castle, she has to wonder.

A remarkable premise, this, and at times The Marriage Portrait reads like a thriller, written in O’Farrell’s trademark sumptuous prose. But this novel isn’t merely another tale of a child at risk, though Lucrezia is that; innocent, empathic by nature, a sensitive soul who loves animals, she’s ill suited to her time and station in life. Her father and husband care only to extend and preserve their power, which means that daughters exist to be sold in marriage for political advantage.

Like Hamnet, therefore, O’Farrell’s triumphant novel about the Shakespeare household, The Marriage Portrait deals with matrimony. But where Agnes Shakespeare worried about her husband’s constancy and their children’s health and struggled against the sexual double standard, here the stakes consider survival when a husband, not the plague, is the enemy. Lucrezia’s expendable, and as the novel opens, she’s coming to realize that.

Alessandro Allori’s portrait of Lucrezia de’ Medici, 1560 (courtesy North Carolina Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The back story, which narrates her upbringing and bewildering early months of marriage, imagines how a young girl must have felt to be torn from home and thrust into the bed of a man almost twice her age. But Lucrezia’s much more than a victim. She has enough willfulness to want to ask why things must be how they are, even if she holds her tongue, and she likes to test the rules.

In that vein, there’s a terrific childhood scene in which she contrives to be alone with a tigress her father has imprisoned in his basement menagerie:

She saw how the animal lifted her lustrous muzzle, nosing the air, sifting it for all it could tell her. Lucrezia could feel the sadness, the loneliness, emanating from her, the shock at being torn from her home, the horror of the weeks and weeks at sea. She could feel the sting of the lashes the beast had received, the bitter longing for the vaporous and humid canopy of jungle and the enticing green tunnels through its undergrowth that she alone commanded, the searing pain in her heart at the bars that now enclosed her.

Not only is Lucrezia like the tigress; her father, the kind of man who’d imprison the beast for his own amusement, treats his daughter similarly. That relationship foreshadows the Ferrara court, where all eyes focus on her, as though she too were a beast on display, yet no one really sees her. She craves understanding and friendship but, to her shock, can trust nobody, not even—maybe especially—her sisters-in-law. If she takes small pleasures, such as opening a window to watch a storm, her husband scolds her, often dragging her around. So he’s not just a tyrant; his violence makes him a sociopath.

Such extreme character disorders can, in the wrong authorial hands, function in an exaggerated way to create tension. But here, Alfonso’s not just an erratic personality. The narrative shows his motives, fears, and overweening pride—from his young bride’s perspective, to be sure—but nevertheless depicts him so that the reader understands what drives him, even if Lucrezia doesn’t always.

I usually dislike cliff-hanger openings, a prologue by another name, followed by lengthy back story. But again, O’Farrell goes one better, using that device to achieve several goals. First, she introduces the mystery Lucrezia’s trying to decipher, whether Alfonso truly means to do away with her—and her confusion, not just the threat, propels the narrative. Secondly, I believe that novels should start where the protagonist realizes that life will never be the same—and in Lucrezia’s case, that life appears to be short.

Moreover, O’Farrell doesn’t abuse the reader’s patience. She returns frequently to the scenes of 1561 and Lucrezia’s duress, while the back story advances rapidly, and I never feel manipulated through the withholding of secrets. Quite the contrary; a historical note before the first chapter establishes the premise, apparently inspired by a Robert Browning poem I’ve always liked, “My Last Duchess,” quoted there. That forthrightness marks the story throughout.

The resolution is predictable, based on a couple one-sentence clues dropped into the text. That bothered me, a little, though how the story gets there is anything but ordained.

Hamnet is a deeper novel, I think, offering at once a view of Elizabethan daily life, exploration of mortality and its impact on the living, and the themes of marriage referred to earlier. But The Marriage Portrait, though it has a narrower focus, is still a superb novel, and I highly recommend it.

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

Fit to Print?: Gutenberg’s Apprentice

05 Monday Dec 2022

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1450, Alix Christie, book review, coming-of-age story, fifteenth century, Gutenberg, historical fiction, Mainz, political power, printing, Reformation, scribes, social snobbery, technology, the Church

Review: Gutenberg’s Apprentice, by Alix Christie
Harper, 2014. 401 pp. $28

Peter Schoeffer, scribe, thinks he has it made. He loves Paris, his adopted city, where the Seine smells “of chalk and stone, a sharp and thrilling city thriving.” At twenty-five, he sees a path upward, because the Church will pay for manuscripts penned in a fine hand such as his.

But in September 1450, his stepfather, a wealthy merchant and bookseller, summons him home to Mainz without saying why, and you sense Peter’s resentment at the peremptory recall.

The reason makes Peter feel even worse. He’s to accept an apprenticeship—at his age, with his accomplishments!—to aid an effort that feels both socially beneath him and blasphemous. But he can’t say no, because stepdad has raised him, educated him, and made him who he is. But to be shackled to a stinking, cellar workshop and its forge alongside half-educated smiths offends his pride and aesthetic soul. He’s also uncertain where he belongs socially, so he’s free to resent those above and below him.

Fifteenth-century illustration of Peter Schoeffer, artist unknown (Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Furthermore, and most important, his new master is Johann Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, who’s undertaken a sacrilegious project out of arrogant greed—to produce scores of books at once, selling holy texts for profit. No wonder that everyone’s sworn to secrecy, for if the Church found out, they’d seize everything and have the printers arrested.

Not just that; Gutenberg represents all that Peter has learned to detest. The master belongs to Mainz’s upper crust, called Elders, one of the thirty leading families who treat the city like a fiefdom. The Elders act hand-in-glove with the archbishop to bleed the merchants, guilds, and less exalted citizens for their own gain.

Consequently, that Peter’s stepfather has chosen to bankroll Gutenberg seems corrupt, and his own presence designed to keep an eye on stepdad’s investment—until the young scribe realizes how ruthless, manipulative, and controlling his new master is. Maybe Peter’s there as Gutenberg’s pawn against his chief creditor. In any case, Peter feels like a slave, with no respite from either quarter.

Even so, he admires artistic talent, and Gutenberg never lets anyone forget he’s a genius. Christie has done a terrific job rendering the era, the political machinations, and the process of printing as its inventors devise it on the fly. Most of her characters are historical figures, including Peter, and she reimagines them with flair and attention to detail. The scenes of fashioning, failure, and gradual surmounting of obstacles are as gripping as any; I never appreciated how difficult or painstaking it was to print a book in the fifteenth century, or how many years it took.

Peter’s coming-of-age story, in which his growing technical skill and innovative sense mirror his emotional maturation, works nicely. He also comes to terms with his religious objections to the project, gradually understanding that the Church’s presumed opposition derives partly from its role as sole representative of God on earth, so its guardianship of scribes has both economic and political significance. Reproduce religious texts that any literate person can read, and the printer not only makes scribes superfluous, individual people can seek God for themselves, a gauntlet thrown down to church power. Accordingly, this narrative foreshadows the Reformation, mere decades away.

At its best, Gutenberg’s Apprentice reads like a thriller. Tension arises from the need for secrecy, compromised by the length of time the project takes, the ever-increasing number of participants, and Gutenberg’s indiscretions—he’s constantly cutting deals with clerics and merchants, infuriating Peter’s stepfather and squeezing the young man between two powerful men he’s doomed to displease. Throughout, Christie captures the mindset, the strivings, and the fixation on social class, as with this description of a scriptorium where monks gather to write:

The faces were all known to him—in the way that any face, in a place as small as Mainz, was known. They didn’t change: the jowls just spread, the noses grew redder and more bulbous. Elders all, patricians from the city or the minor nobles from the land: the clergy was made up of second sons from wealthy families, stashed and suckled by the Mother Church for life. . .He was a stranger, with a stranger’s anonymity, which brought both freedom and a certain risk.

In such a complicated narrative, it’s not always easy to penetrate the politics, despite Christie’s gift for depicting the power struggles. I’m also not persuaded, in a couple instances, that Peter would either forgive his stepfather his hard hand or feel warmly toward him; these crucial transitions seem rushed or simple.

But overall, Gutenberg’s Apprentice does what excellent historical fiction should do, and I highly recommend it.

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

The Bootlegger Cop

01 Thursday Dec 2022

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1920, bootlegging, dry law, law enforcement, Lonely Are the Brave, Prohibition, Seattle, Supreme Court, Washington, wiretapping

6 AUTOS AND 9 MEN HELD IN ROUNDUP ran the March 22, 1920 headline in the Seattle Times. The story breathlessly reported how federal agents had laid an “elaborate trap” to catch bootleggers—whose ringleader was Roy Olmstead, a Seattle police lieutenant.

Olmstead had spent a decade on the force, working his way up from clerk. He’d also been running liquor ever since Washington had passed a dry law in 1916, four years before national Prohibition. His arrest cost him his job and a $500 fine, a sizable sum in those days. So he became a full-time bootlegger.

Olmstead with his wife, Elise, his partner in crime, 1925 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I ran across these details while researching my novel Lonely Are the Brave, which takes place in 1919, and in which the state’s dry law influences the story. But Olmstead deserves a closer look.

Unusual among bootleggers, he forbade his employees to carry weapons and imported his liquor from Canada, rather than make his own. But he ran a large organization, difficult to keep secret, and in 1925, the feds arrested him again. This time, he went to prison.

However, they had obtained evidence through a wiretap put in place without a warrant, and he appealed the verdict. In 1928, his landmark case, Olmstead v. United States, reached the Supreme Court, which ruled, 5-4, that his constitutional rights had not been violated. FDR pardoned him in 1935.

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