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Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: Ben Hopkins

Lucky Seven: Another Blog Birthday

25 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ben Hopkins, book reviews, Carol Edgarian, Eleanor Morse, Esi Edugyan, First World War, historical fiction, Ian McGuire, James McBride, Janet Fitch, Jess Walter, Lisa See, Maggie O'Farrell, P.S. Duffy, Peg Kingman, R. N. Morris, Rivka Galchen

As I do every year at this time, I recap my favorite reviews from the last twelve months of Novelhistorian. This year’s crop includes several that will stay with me a long while.

Start with Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell’s extraordinarily intimate, subtle portrait of: a courtship and marriage; the gossamer boundary between life and death; the longing for love and connection, despite that; and daily life in Elizabethan England with Shakespeare at the center, though his last name never appears, and most of the narrative belongs to Agnes, his wife. (Yes; Agnes, not Anne.)

Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral tells of thirteenth-century serfs in Alsace buying their freedom and moving to a city where a cathedral is being built. From that singular occurrence emerges a beautifully imagined tale of greed, politics, skullduggery, sex, bigotry, and piety, while the coming Renaissance lurks in the distance. This narrative has zest and fire; a masterpiece.

A coming-of-age novel for both a young girl and her native city, the San Francisco of 1906, Carol Edgarian’s Vera casts an outwardly unsentimental eye on fraught mother-daughter relationships and the all-consuming question of how women can wield power. At the same time, the girl never loses her deep yearnings, possessing a rich inner life at odds with her circumstances. A remarkable duality, there, that few authors can portray so convincingly.

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan’s story of a slave in nineteenth-century Barbados who dares dream of a life he wasn’t born to have, is that rare novel about a victim who expresses no self-pity or bravado, and which conveys every character, even the villains, in their fullness. No earnestness, here, only a protagonist who never stops striving and loving, no matter how many blows he takes.

Unlike any other novel I’ve ever read about the 1960s, Eleanor Morse’s Margreete’s Harbor captures the essence of the decade, that ineffable vibe. The narrative rests on small moments writ large, depicted in gorgeous prose, and which show you characters as deep as the Maine harbor on which they live—contradictory, sometimes cranky, secretive, and altogether real.

The Cold Millions, by Jess Walter, reads like a thriller about labor strife in Spokane, Washington, 1909, enacted by larger-than-life characters. Life’s a fight to the finish, and so much wrong blankets the landscape, you seldom know where right is hiding itself, let alone how to act accordingly. The political and social divisions portrayed here parallel those of the present.

The First World War is my historical specialty, and I’m always on the lookout for authentic novels about the era. Consider, then, The Cartographer of No Man’s Land, P.S. Duffy’s moving portrayal of a Canadian infantry officer’s war and the home front he leaves behind. She effortlessly captures the camaraderie of men at war, the search for meaning amid the violence, the tension and release of battle. Even readers who avoid such stories may find much to keep them glued to this one—a debut novel, no less.

The Revolution of Marina M, by Janet Fitch, realizes the Russian atmosphere, be it Petrograd or rural peasantry, with bold, lush strokes and complete authority. Like the Russian novels the author admires, hers goes deeper than a sweeping lens and epic events. You understand what motivates these characters, all of whom have inner lives for the reader to navigate, and the weight of events never feels like a burden, even at 800 pages.

In The White Feather Killer, R. N. Morris excels at characterization, the atmosphere of 1914 London, and the craft of whodunit. So many scenes in his novel start out one way and shoot off unexpectedly in another, the essence of tension, because something touches a nerve in his legion of fragile people. Some readers may find these tortured souls off-putting, but the rewards here are many, not least a soul-searching detective, an unvarnished portrayal of police work, and a similar, gritty depiction of a great metropolis straining at its bounds.

The Great Unknown, Peg Kingman’s philosophical novel about the origins of life, set in 1845 Edinburgh, evokes a country on the brink of moral upending through scientific discovery. It’s also a thought-provoking daily drama playing out chance and consequences, fortunate or tragic, and people trying to figure out whether these outcomes mean anything or merely display the benign indifference of the universe. The usually droll tone delights.

With The Abstainer, Ian McGuire puts a capable, compassionate Irish detective in Manchester, England, in 1867, whose job is to keep tabs on Irish revolutionaries. When our man, who faces bigotry and obstruction from his superiors, hears that a cold assassin has arrived from America to settle scores with the highest and mightiest, staying one step ahead of the killer proves more than merely difficult. The tension in this fine thriller never relents.

A driven narrative of sibling rivalry, Shanghai Girls, by Lisa See, describes that city in 1935, the eve of personal disaster for two sisters, and a greater catastrophe for their country. See writes with the force of gravity, and when the worlds she creates collide, the shock waves are enormous, playing out themes of duty and tradition versus modernity and independence.

A south Brooklyn housing project in 1969 provides a whole world for James McBride in Deacon King Kong. What begins with a shooting turns into a complicated, finely woven story, involving a church, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, racism, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope. It’s also a rollicking good time, full of sprawling, delicious sentences with spicy flavor.

Rivka Galchen depicts an eccentric busybody who happens to be Johannes Kepler’s mother in Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, a tale set in the Duchy of Württemberg in 1618. Frau Kepler’s neighbors twist her admittedly cranky behavior into proof she consorts with the devil, which doesn’t stop them from pestering her to get her astronomer son to cast their horoscopes. A brilliant narrative, this, at once chilling and hilarious, as absurdity vies with truth to explain how conspiracy theories take root.

As my regular readers will note, I’ve recapped more books than usual this anniversary. I think that’s because I’ve gotten more selective in what I review or even finish reading. If I start a book and anticipate criticizing flat characters or a contrived narrative, I put the book aside. As a consequence, I wind up praising more books wholeheartedly.

Whether that’s an entirely good thing, I’m not sure. It’s no fun ripping a book apart (and besides, negative reviews take a lot of time to write). But I also don’t want to ignore promising novelists who haven’t found their feet, or stories that deserve a hearing despite their flaws.

It’s a balancing act, and if you have thoughts about it, I’d like to hear them.

For Whose Glory?: Cathedral

21 Monday Jun 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Alsace, anti-Semitism, architecture, artisanship, artistic revolution, Ben Hopkins, book review, cathedrals, challenge to aristocracy, guilds, historical detail, historical fiction, literary fiction, moneylenders, religious mysticism, Renaissance, rise of banking, serfdom, thirteenth century

Review: Cathedral, by Ben Hopkins
Europa, 2021. 618 pp. $28

In 1229, nineteen-year-old Reichard Schäffer’s father dies, leaving him the head of the family in a quiet, out-of-the-way sheep herding village. Deciding that serfdom and sheep no longer suit him, the boy, known as Rettich, leaves his village with his younger brother, Emmerich, for Hagenburg, the (fictional) Alsatian town that gleams like a marvel in their eyes. It’s anything but, of course, but both boys will understand its depths and complexities in time, though from very different perspectives.

Right off, Rettich seeks to buy their freedom so that they may remain city-dwellers, a reminder that in thirteenth-century Europe, birth determines not only who you are and what profession you may follow, but where you may live. What Rettich desires is nothing less than revolutionary, and people who hear his plan shake their heads. But one person who listens is Meir Rosenheim, the Jewish moneylender, to whom the Schäffers appeal for the ready coin they need. Serfs normally wouldn’t prove worthy debtors, but Meir perceives something in them that decides him to take a chance, and besides, Emmerich’s remarkable capacity to calculate intrigues him. Rettich gets his money; the boys buy their freedom; and Emmerich has a job with the house of Rosenheim.

Théophile Schuler’s reimagining, in 1850, of the construction of the western wall of the Strasbourg cathedral, late thirteenth century (courtesy Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, Cabinet des Estampes et des Dessins, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

From such small beginnings great things emerge. Rettich, a gifted woodcarver, earns an apprenticeship to the stonecutters working on the Hagenburg Cathedral, very much in its infancy. Emmerich learns how to handle money and proves himself an astute businessman. From them, and the many characters that come in contact with them, spins a beautifully imagined tale of greed, politics, skullduggery, sex, bigotry, and piety, often in mystical terms. As this order of importance implies, for most of Hagenburg, building a cathedral is a religious enterprise in name only. Rettich is an exception.

But he can’t say so, at least not in the way he would like, because nobody would listen. As an artist, he believes in reproducing figures from nature, a heretical notion, especially when it comes to cathedral artwork. He does find an outlet for discussion with an architect, a true visionary, whose views are equally controversial. But change is in the air. Witness Emmerich, who learns banking—though it’s not called that—and the power that money wields in politics, when noblemen are perennially short of cash. They fear and despise him but know he’s absolutely necessary.

Both brothers embody a strain of the coming Renaissance that no one foresees—and so does their sister, Grete. She marries up, to a struggling merchant in town, of whom she quickly proves the equal. Naturally, that makes him uncomfortable, but the results speak for themselves. And Grete thinks large. She works toward the day when money will allow people of her social class—her new, acquired social class–to have a say in how things get done, elbowing her way among the aristocracy. This avant-garde feminist attempts to break several barriers, and the manner in which she goes about it makes all three siblings’ stories compelling.

Inwardly, outwardly, and sometimes both, these characters and others act with great daring. Those among the large cast who can afford to—and a few who shouldn’t—speak their minds freely, which lends the narrative zest and fire. The novel’s resident cynic is Eugenius von Zabern, a church canon and the bishop’s secretary, who has the unenviable task of finding money to build the cathedral:

The world needs clerks and lawyers in the same way as it needs leprosy, plagues, earthquakes. Without them, life would be a colourless stroll toward death. But here they are, proliferating and multiplying over the face of our earth, and taking ever more prominent positions in the chambers of power. In the olden days, virtuous rulers would surround their thrones with the flower of chivalry, but today the leaders of our world are ringed by advisers, counsellors, clerks and Jews.
I should know. I am one of this new cursèd class of quill-scratching, shadow-skulking literati. . .

Reading such prose is one delight of Cathedral, and though there’s a lot of it, I find nothing extraneous. Scenes move smartly, and the dialogue clips along, perhaps testament to Hopkins’s career as a screenwriter and director. I also admire his grasp of historical detail. Whether describing Hagenburg (a character in itself), the glimmers of change and how people react to it, or endemic belief in conspiracy theories, especially about heretics or Jews, Hopkins renders time and place with complete authority. I defy anyone to start this book and put it down.

Cathedral is a masterpiece.

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

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