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Tag Archives: 1845

Westward, Ho!: The Way West

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, A. B. Guthrie, American West, characterization, historical fiction, Native Americans, nineteenth century, Oregon, small moments, wagon train, wilderness

Review: The Way West, by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
Mariner/Houghton, 2002 [1949]. 340 pp. $14

A wagon train sets forth from Missouri in 1845, bound for Oregon. That may not sound like much of a premise. Nor does Guthrie stud his plot with grand, sweeping action. Nevertheless, this classic Western (from the author who wrote the screenplay for Shane, also a classic) provides as gripping a tale as I’ve read in a while, simply by recounting the trials involved in traversing more than a thousand miles of unmarked wilderness, day after day, month after month.

Alfred Jacob Miller's painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Alfred Jacob Miller’s painting, from memory, of Fort Laramie, Wyoming, before 1840 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

His secret? The desires, dreams, and perceptions of his characters–their inner lives–spill from every page. I feel that I know these people intimately, so I care what happens to them, even if I don’t like them (and some are decidedly unlikable). At times, they act like a loose-knit family, with all its kindnesses, quirks, and dysfunctions. But their disputes, alliances, interests, and consideration for one another (or lack of it, sometimes), however minor or mundane they are, take on outsize proportions.

For instance, when one of the needier, less accomplished travelers pleads openly for help, his request sounds “womanish” to one man, prompting that listener to grapple with what he’d never reflected on before, notions of how men and women differ. It’s a recurrent theme in the novel, especially evident in how the supposedly weaker sex displays tremendous strength and fortitude. But the character’s reflections imply another, larger purpose. The people making this journey aren’t just finding a new home; they’re finding out who they are.

Guthrie handles this brilliantly. He portrays his characters from several angles–how they feel about themselves, how they want others to see them, how they behave in groups, and when by themselves. The politics, in the broadest sense, start from the first pages, when the self-appointed leader of the expedition tries to recruit men he thinks will be useful to him. It’s a vivid, involving scene, because you can already sense which way the power lines run; what each man hopes to accomplish; what seduces them; and who’s trying to seduce. Even the man serving them drinks has a viewpoint, subtly suggested–he’s worried that good customers will be leaving town. And the only thing that “happens” is that these men begin to think of pulling up stakes and heading west. I admire this kind of writing, which can make high drama out of a glass or three of whiskey.

Among my favorite characters is Dick Summers, a laconic mountain man hired to guide the wagon train. He always knows more than he says, which is why the more perceptive people seek him out, and he never rushes to condemn anybody. It doesn’t hurt that he’s a dead shot, a gifted tracker, understands and partly admires Native American ways, and knows the trail. However, as in many other novels about the American West, Dick also represents the man who’ll have no place in the society that the people he’s guiding will create. What sets him apart most is an outlook:


These [men] couldn’t enjoy life as it rolled by; they wanted to make something out of it, as if they could take it and shape it to their way if only they worked and figured hard enough. They didn’t talk beaver and whisky and squaws or let themselves soak in the weather; they talked crops and water power and business and maybe didn’t even notice the sun or the pale green of new leaves except as something along the way to whatever it is they wanted to be and to have. Later they might look back, some of them might, and wonder how it happened that things had slid by them.

At times, Dick Summers seems a little too good to be true–always on the right side, ever patient, never selfish, understands himself clearly. Yet the above passage strikes me as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. Reading The Way West, I have to wonder whether dreams are useless, if you miss what happens on your way to realizing them.

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

All Husbands Are Boring: Daughter of Fortune

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, authorial voice, California gold rush, characterization, Chile, fate, feminism, historical fiction, Isabel Allende, nineteenth century, obsessive love

Review: Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende

Harper/Perennial, 2000. 399 pp. $15

“Any man, as miserable a man as he may be, can do whatever he wants with you.” But Eliza Sommers, a vivacious sixteen-year-old, doesn’t believe this dire prediction, which means, of course, that she’ll have to live it out to learn in her own way.

Since this is the late 1840s in Valparaíso, Chile, and Eliza’s a foundling child to English guardians, her stubborn belief in romantic passion pits her against a strict Victorian code. If her adoptive parents have anything to say about it, Eliza will be safely married off to a respectable, established, older man, the most she can hope for, especially given her shameful origins. Not that her foster mother, Rose, has much to say for marriage, having never tried it herself. “All husbands are boring,” she says. “No woman with an ounce of sense gets married to be entertained, she marries to be maintained.”

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

An 1849 advertisement for passage to the gold fields. (Courtesy Shmoop; public domain).

However, Eliza begins a clandestine affair with Joaquín, a dirt-poor young man of electric presence, who bolts for California when news of the gold strike of 1849 reaches Valparaíso. Be it known that Joaquín isn’t worth two minutes of Eliza’s time. Writer of floridly passionate letters, he’s disappointing in person, lecturing her about revolution and redistribution of wealth–when he bothers to talk, that is. Mostly, he uses her for sex, not bothering to wonder whether she has needs or desires, leaving her more hurt and frustrated than she realizes. But since Eliza’s fated to be trapped, she lets herself get swept up. Or so Allende asks us to believe.

I’m not sure I do, entirely. Eliza has wanted freedom all her life, but that’s not what Joaquín represents, despite his political soapboxing, a wonderful irony that utterly escapes her–and keeps escaping her well past any credible sell-by date.


 

In the Sommers’ home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear.


 

But this is a novel, and the requisite wise woman has said that Eliza is doomed to suffer. So the girl bends her considerable resourcefulness and courage to follow Joaquín to California, managing to stow away through the aid of Tao Ch’ien, a Chinese doctor, who becomes her friend and mentor.

In California, he tries to protect Eliza from herself, with intermittent success. I liked this part of Daughter of Fortune the best, starting with the descriptions of the hard life, frontier justice, and greed, but also what the gold rush offers, the chance to be free and make something of oneself. Eliza embraces it wholeheartedly, thanks in part to the passing parade of larger-than-life characters, who prompt her to live larger herself. Along the way, Allende makes excellent observations about what love means for powerless women, and how pride, male and female, gets in the way of intimacy.

I dislike her habit of explaining motivations at length, however beautifully she writes (as with the quote above). More annoying is how she reveals secrets out of the blue, as if, by clapping her hands, she can avoid having to unfold them in her narrative. Whatever reversals of story or character they imply simply happen–poof. She does this twice, and each feels like a cheap conjuring trick, as if to tell the reader, Fooled you!

Nevertheless, Daughter of Fortune is a wild ride, entertaining, vivid, and colorful. I’m impressed at how Allende renders the gold rush in many, complex facets, and, except for Eliza’s obsession with Joaquín, how the author explores the many layers of love and attraction.

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

Keeping Focus: The Movement of Stars

14 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1845, Amy Brill, astronomy, characterization, feminism, historical fiction, Nantucket, navigation, nineteenth century, Quakers, whaling, women

Review: The Movement of Stars, by Amy Brill
Riverhead, 2013. 388 pp. $28

Hannah Price wants the moon, or, to be precise (and she values precision above all else), a comet. A Quaker woman living on Nantucket in 1845, Hannah scans the skies nightly, searching for a comet that no one else has catalogued. If she succeeds, she’ll win a prize from the king of Denmark, but Hannah’s not looking for fame (though the prize money would come in handy). Rather, she dreams of contributing to scientific knowledge.

On Nantucket, or anywhere in 1845, this isn’t the path women are supposed to follow, especially Quaker women. Hannah has a little leeway, because her father is an astronomer; they repair and adjust chronometers for the ships that come to port, the island’s economic lifeblood. Better yet, her former teacher, the influential Dr. Hall, has encouraged her brilliance at mathematics and science. However, men are always the ones to decide what she can do, and where. And since her mother died when she was very young, her only ally is her twin brother Edward, now away at sea.

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

U. S. Coast Survey chart including Nantucket, 1857 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Into this delicate balance steps Isaac Martin, a whaling crew member to whom Hannah offers lessons in celestial navigation. Their friendship sets tongues wagging, especially since Isaac comes from the Azores and is dark-skinned. Unlike its Ohio counterpart in The Last Runaway (April 23), the Friends Meeting of Nantucket is firmly abolitionist, though hardly more tolerant. Hannah risks being kicked out of Meeting (and suffering her father’s discipline) by having social relations with a nonbeliever, proper though these relations are–for the moment.

The Movement of Stars is worth reading for its protagonist. Hannah is a very difficult person, for whom the only ready emotion is anger, and who sees slights everywhere. That she’s often correct doesn’t obscure how socially inept she is, even cruel. She’s more than dimly aware that her inability to make chitchat or contribute to the necessary social grease has cost her. Brill has done superbly here, creating sympathy for an unpleasant outcast, no mean feat. That Hannah also learns to see more clearly, extending her search for the truth of the heavens to those of human interaction, is another masterstroke. Yet she never gives up her anger at being thwarted or manipulated by men, even those she loves, and I admire her unwillingness to compromise what she believes. Against her will and love of precision, toward the end, she reluctantly concludes that “two competing Truths could in fact coexist in one mind.” (By the way, F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that this ability was the test of a first-rate intelligence. It’s one of my favorite quotes.)

Unfortunately, the rest of The Movement of Stars doesn’t live up to its heroine. None of the other characters seem full to me; I’m disappointed in Dr. Hall and Hannah’s father, Nathaniel, who feel like straw men, at times. Brill tries to suggest more, and I like Hannah’s confusion about their motives, but I’m confused too. Most importantly, I can’t grasp Isaac, who reads like a stock character–the taciturn, down-to-earth sailor whose homespun wisdom turns Hannah’s life around. I believe her attraction for him, all right, for what he represents, and the internal struggle she has over the pull he exerts seems real and significant. But Isaac assumes that any hesitations she has about him must be due to race or class prejudice alone, which makes him the only man in the novel who gets away with ignoring the barriers she faces as a woman.

There’s one other way in which The Movement of Stars loses focus, and that’s the prose. The last few chapters stray from the nineteenth century in tone and manner, as when Nathaniel says, “Thy travels have certainly impacted thee.” Whoops. To be sure, it’s a first novel, and an accomplished one. But it’s fair to ask how Brill, skilled at observing interactions, would tell, tell, tell: “When she was near him, Hannah felt both exhilarated and free at the same time, the way she felt when she was observing. The idea of parting from him was excruciating.” That reads like shorthand, not characterization.

That said, I still recommend The Movement of Stars. Not only is Hannah a fascinating character, I liked reading about the whaling and Quaker communities (highly intertwined) of Nantucket.

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

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