Tag Archives: Britain

Star-Crossed Love: The Glittering Hour

13 Monday Sep 2021

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Review: The Glittering Hour, by Iona Grey
St. Martins, 2019. 468 pp. $29

It’s January 1936, and nine-year-old Alice Carew misses her mother terribly. Mama’s away in Burma with Papa, who has mining interests there, and the family’s Wiltshire estate, Blackwood, feels like a prison to Alice. An artistically precocious child with no head for or interest in reading or mathematics, Alice has no allies in the house save her beloved nanny, Polly, who can’t protect her from Grandmama, as starchy and cold an aristocrat as ever graced England’s shores.

The old lady has never liked her grandchild, censors the girl’s letters to her parents, and even denies Alice the colored pencils Mama bought for her. Good grief. Yet despite her grandmother’s and father’s opinion that Alice has a second-rate mind, the girl sees plenty, including their lack of love for her — but not the reason for it. Therein hangs a tale.

However, all this is prologue to Mama’s back story. Selina Carew, née Lennox, was a Bright Young Thing in the Twenties who burned the candle at both ends. With a passion for expensive amusements and a horror of boredom, Selina and her blue-blood friends cut a swath through London at breakneck speed, awash in champagne and jewels, tossing out arch bon mots and trying to decide whether this or that costume party or dance will be too unbearable; really, isn’t there anything better to do? To her family’s horror, the scandal sheets eat this up, from which Selina derives some satisfaction.

Selina’s no airhead (though I reserve judgment on her friends), because if she were, The Glittering Hour would have a flat, spoiled-brat heroine and require a seismic change from her that would strain credulity. Rather, she has deep conflicts, from which she’s trying to hide. She represents the upper-class cohort that survived the Great War and who dash from party to party so as to conceal the pain of loss. But Selina feels it, can’t help it; like so many women of all social classes, she lost a beloved brother at Passchendaele. What’s more, much as it hurts, she refuses to believe that all joy must end, though admittedly, she overdoes it. Worse, none of that may be spoken of:

Seven years on from the armistice and the scars of the war were still visible everywhere. One got adept at looking past them, or through them, or pretending they weren’t there at all. One got on with things in the best way one could; there was always someone worse off, like the man selling matches, or Lady Renshaw, who had lost all three of her boys… One could never complain about one’s own loss. Selina understood why her mother had buried hers in the deepest recesses of her heart and hardened her face against the world. It was her way of coping, of Getting On. But it was a sad legacy for a boy whose smile could light up a room.

Selina meets Lawrence Weston, an artist who makes his living painting portraits based on photographs for war-bereaved families, but whose real passion is photography — which few people consider an art form. Little do they know. For extra money, Lawrence takes pictures of the rich and famous making public nuisances of themselves — he knows about Selina Lennox before they meet — but he prefers photographing miners, the men selling matches, whatever social commentary his lens seeks out.

William Monk’s 1920 engraving of the Cenotaph in Whitehall, a memorial to the war dead. The wooden structure was later replaced in stone (courtesy http://www.abbottandholder-thelist.co.uk/ via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I understand what Grey’s trying to achieve by starting with Alice, but that approach has its flaws. Though Alice’s predicament squeezes my heart, as it’s meant to, that’s not where the richest material lies. I prefer Selina’s inner struggle as a Bright Young Thing and her relationship to Lawrence, which has so many social markers, the pair might even inhale and exhale differently, for all I know. The class barrier to romance is hardly new, but Grey’s rendering takes on particularity, because she grounds it so thoroughly in active physical detail. It’s not just Lawrence’s shabby clothes or Selina’s accent that set them apart, though those matter and are what onlookers see and hear; it’s how the physical details reveal these two characters’ different worldviews.

On the minus side, the story hinges on two secrets, neither of which is particularly hard to discern, and the narrative has its melodramatic moments, especially toward the end. I wish Grey didn’t resort to telling, rather than showing, emotions in certain key moments— what a shame, for such an astute observer — and the resulting shorthand phrases sometimes go thump. Further, though Grandmama’s portrayal will curdle your blood, she’s that real, Alice’s father seems like a shirt stuffed with papier-mâché.

Even so, The Glittering Hour finds something new to say about the decade after the Great War, and Selina and Lawrence are appealing characters. It’s worth reading for that, if not for more.

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

Grey. Thomas Grey: Hold Fast

09 Monday Aug 2021

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Review: Hold Fast, by J. H. Gelernter
Norton, 2021. 238 pp. $26

Thomas Grey, late of the Royal Marines and His Majesty’s Secret Service, intends to sail to Boston and take a job with a lumber merchant. The year is 1803, the Napoleonic Wars have reached a respite, and Grey wishes to seize his chance to get out while he can. Having lost his beloved wife to a French raid on the merchantman on which the Greys were traveling, he’ll to the war no more.

Ah, but not so fast. A privateer attacks the ship on which he’s bound across the Atlantic, and news comes that Napoleon has revoked the Treaty of Amiens, resuming the war against Britain. Grey, with much derring-do, helps repel the attack, but the damaged ship must make landfall in neutral Portugal for refitting. While he’s there, circumstances hand him a great opportunity to pretend to switch sides and dupe French intelligence with disinformation. Rest assured that our hero’s game of double agent will lead him into many tight situations, as he must penetrate the inner sanctum of French military power.

Michelle de Bonneuil (1748-1829), rendered here in pastel by Rosalie Filleul, ca. 1778, was celebrated for her beauty, charm, and artistic ability–and acted as a spy for the French Revolutionary government and Napoleon (unknown provenance, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

If you’re thinking that Hold Fast sounds like Patrick O’Brian’s seafaring novels of the Napoleonic era meeting Ian Fleming’s James Bond, you’ve nailed it, and the author intends as much. In his afterword, Gelernter confirms himself an admirer of both. For reasons I’ll get to a little later, I wish he’d hewn more to O’Brian than Fleming, but as a fast-paced adventure story, Hold Fast has its charms.

First and foremost, the narrative moves like lightning, with “no—and furthermore” lurking in every nook and cranny, to say nothing of dark alleys and rooms in which two’s company and three’s a crowd—especially when the uninvited third holds a weapon. Secondly, Gelernter has a lot of fun turning Grey into a nineteenth-century Bond, equally at home at a gaming table, vineyard tasting room, or hand-to-hand combat. The in-joke will raise a chuckle, here and there; Hold Fast can be pleasingly clever, that way.

The narrative also shows a grasp of physical detail, lightly handled:

It was only the sound of seamen holystoning the Ruby’s deck that pulled him back to the present, reminded him where he was—it was that scrape-scrape, scrape-scrape of men on their knees scouring the ship with sandstone chunks the size and shape of Bibles. Grey couldn’t help but notice that the pace of the scraping was considerably slower than it was, invariably, in the navy. On this ship there was no bosun to start the men with a kick in the pants. Nevertheless, the ship was impeccably clean. Perhaps there was a lesson in that.

As this passage implies, Grey, though a naval intelligence man through and through, rejects the brutal Royal Navy discipline, so a wisp of democrat exists beneath the surface of a warrior for king and country. It’s a wrinkle, unfortunately one of few, and the others don’t appeal me—he’s a prig, vengeful, cold, with a moral code stereotypical of the stuffed-shirt Englishman. Which raises the question: Is this meant to be funny?

There’s a scene in which a young woman points a pistol at him. Since she’s neglected to cock it (it’s a flintlock, naturally), Grey has no trouble subduing her. He cracks her on the side of the head—gently, mind you—deftly grasps her body before it falls, and deposits her in a chair. Should we laugh?

Such humor, if that’s what it is, sits oddly, though, and not just because a lot of bodies fall. Lacking the tongue-in-cheek bravura of the George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novels, Hold Fast conversely fails to treat the serious subject matter with depth or empathy. Grey’s flatness, though it may provoke a smile, as in the above scene, renders him an automaton, and priggishness never did much for anyone, especially without a sidekick with whom to contrast. As a shallow, even dislikable character, then, Grey offers little to bond with, if you will. This is where the narrative misses anything remotely akin to the O’Brian gift for character and relationships.

I read Hold Fast mildly curious to know how Grey would foil the threats against him. But if I’d stopped reading halfway through, I wouldn’t have felt cheated, because I didn’t find him compelling. Moreover, you can guess how he’ll proceed, relying on his preternatural aptitude for close-quarters combat, which no one else ever seems to match.

Consequently, the character in the novel lacks depth, and the character of the novel comes down mostly to cleverness. That has its points occasionally; my favorite bits concern intriguing sidelights on gambling or the making of champagne. But if these are the most interesting aspects of Hold Fast, I can’t say I’m held.

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

What Freedom Is: Washington Black

01 Monday Mar 2021

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Review: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
Random House/Vintage, 2019. 384 pp. $17

There may be more brutal, unfeeling masters than Erasmus Wilde, owner of Faith sugar plantation in Barbados in 1830, but it’s hard to imagine. For instance, when a slave commits suicide, an overseer decapitates his corpse. Why? The slaves believe that once they die, they’ll be reunited with their people in Africa. So Wilde tells them that headless corpses wander for eternity; beware, there’s no escape. If you kill yourself, you’re a thief, stealing his property.

Such crushing logic, which warps every conceivable interaction, cows nearly all the slaves into hopeless submission; most do all they can to remain inconspicuous. Consequently, when Wilde’s brother Christopher comes to stay, eleven-year-old George Washington Black (known as Wash) is terrified to discover that he’s been chosen the newcomer’s manservant.

To his amazement, however, Christopher — who insists on being called Titch — is cut from a very different cloth, as Wash quickly learns whenever he must go to the big house and wait table. Titch has no interest in slavery, except to abolish it; and Faith’s chief attractions for him are the flora and fauna and a steep hill from which he hopes to launch a balloon for exploration.

Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1848, fourteen years after Britain outlawed slavery throughout the empire (from Robert H. Schombergk, The History of Barbados; courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons)

But a suspicious death forces the two to flee — and from that moment, Wash begins to imagine the life he could never have dreamed of. Whether he gets it or not, and how he reinvents himself in the process, makes as compelling a novel as you will find. Washington Black will captivate you and make you think.

Edugyan examines, from the inside, what it means to be a slave, to have no will of your own save what little is granted, and which may be taken away at any time. That sounds obvious, but I assure you, in its moment-to-moment portrayal here, that simply stated condition has deep, insidious effects that wrap around the characters like the roots of an evil, destructive plant.

Titch may dislike slavery, yet Wash wonders what, exactly, he means to his new boss. Is Wash a real person or merely the perfect size and shape ballast for the balloon? Is his a young mind Titch respects, or does the scientist teach him what he needs to become a better assistant? As with all the characters, and I do mean all, the author depicts this pair in their fullness, so that you know their internal struggles. Even Erasmus Wilde, a truly despicable man, has his angles and quirks; no cardboard villain, he. In that way, he receives his due, even as the perpetrator of great evil.

To write a good novel about a victim is harder than it looks. (Writing any good novel is harder than it looks, but that’s another story.) Self-pity would undermine the narrative and warp the reader’s connection to Wash, while earnestness, the flip side of that coin, would demean this tale. Not here. Wash hates his enemies with a razor fierceness, no righteousness, bravado, or breast-beating allowed, just earned hostility. Whatever self-pity creeps in momentarily overtakes him in a different context — love, which is only natural and quite real. Everyone in love acts entitled once in a while, at least.

Also important, Wash never stops striving and loving, no matter what blows he takes. Suffering by itself holds only a tenuous connection for readers; but caring for someone else despite suffering always wins. If Wash becomes remarkably adept at certain pursuits, perhaps stretching credulity, his path remains difficult, often perilous, his adventures allowing for (if not demanding) a character somewhat larger than life.

Throughout, he’s a spectacular observer, the prose being another pleasure of the book, as with his first look at Bridge Town, the capital of Barbados:

Swells of dust boiled up off the roads. Horses trotted past, heads low in the heat, flies swarming. We clattered past a sailor on a street corner blowing through some bizarre knot of pipes, while beside him a second danced along to his own fiddle, his fingers flying like shadows over the strings. We stopped in the sudden traffic; through the carriage oozed the stink of overripe fruit carted in from the port, and of immense slabs of tuna starting to turn in the heat. At a passing market stall I glimpsed their fishy eyes, fissured with blood as they gawked on beds of cool leaves.

Sometimes, in the early going when Wash is still a young boy, the voice slips — the narrative makes observations seemingly too knowledgeable for a lad, even one looking back from later years. But that’s a minor blemish on a superb novel, and I highly recommend Washington Black.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Rocket Terror: V2

22 Monday Feb 2021

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Review: V2, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2020. 312 pp. $29

In late November 1944, the Germans rain V2 rockets on London, killing hundreds of civilians, and destroy thousands of homes at supersonic speed. Once the rockets launch from the Dutch coast, they take mere minutes to cross the North Sea and land with no warning save for a last-second shift in air pressure. By that time, it’s too late to seek shelter. The V2, named for Vergeltung, meaning “retribution” or “payback,” is more terrifying and arbitrary than any weapon previously known.

One morning, Kay Caton-Walsh, a young officer in Britain’s women’s air service (WAAF) discovers this firsthand. Shacking up for the weekend with a high-ranking (and married) Air Ministry official, she’s lucky to survive a rocket attack, as is her lover. That gives her extra motivation, as if she needed any, to return to her work, which involves analyzing aerial photographs of potential launch sites. The RAF has tried many times to take them out but always fail. So the V2s keep coming, seemingly from nowhere, and entire blocks of London keep getting smashed. Kay would like to fight back more effectively — and when word comes of a mission to track them from Belgium, she persuades her lover to have her sent there.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rudi Graf, a rocketry expert and longtime colleague of Wernher von Braun, who runs the V2 program, prepares the missiles for launch in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen. He has little fear of the RAF, whose raids strike the town, surrounding area, or the seashore, never the launch sites. But he does fear the SS, which has strengthened its grip on every aspect of the war effort and looks over his shoulder constantly, sniffing for disloyalty or its perceived equivalent, lack of patriotic zeal.

Wernher von Braun, center, facing, wearing the Nazi Party lapel pin, talks to Fritz Todt, center, Peenemünde, March 1941. Todt’s slave laborers died by the thousands to build von Braun’s underground rocket works there (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And indeed, Graf is no zealot. He tries not to think about what the rockets he has developed actually do to London, or what that means. For the most part, he succeeds at putting action and effect in different compartments of his mind. But Braun originally recruited him to investigate the feasibility of space travel, and Graf can’t separate theory from practice or justify one to the other so easily. He wonders what he’s doing there.

The sixth Harris novel I’ve read, V2 feels the weakest. A few trademarks make their appearance, all right — a sure grasp of history, mastery of detail, physical descriptions. Wherever the narrative goes, Harris grounds you in the scene, whether a London street, a ministerial office, a launch site, or a brothel, all delivered with economy. Early on, for instance, you see how the war has completely changed Scheveningen:

Rain was gusting off the sea, funneled down the side streets between the abandoned hotels. The pier had burned down the previous year. Its blackened iron spars protruded above the running white-capped waves like the masts of the shipwreck. The beach was sown with barbed wire and tank traps. Outside the railway station a few tattered tourist posters from before the war showed a pair of elegant women in striped bathing costumes and cloche hats tossing a ball to one another.

However, unlike, say, An Officer and a Spy, The Second Sleep, or Dictator, the author focuses on public stakes almost to the exclusion of his characters, which results in a less thrilling thriller. By that, I mean plot points like a rocket launch or Kay’s analysis efforts provide most of the tension, fairly humdrum, with few “no — and furthermore” moments, because the characters’ inner lives fail to color the events or enlarge them in significance.

I really don’t care whom Kay sleeps with. Despite feminist overtones to the WAAF war contribution, she’s too much a sex object for my taste, and the love affair that gets her a much sought-after assignment feels contrived. On the other hand, I do want to know what about the rockets compels her; saying she wishes to do something important or useful doesn’t suffice. After all, the war affects every aspect of life, and there are many ways to serve.

Graf has a little more to him; you see the scientist trapped into serving weaponry, though it’s a trap he willingly entered. But, unlike the case with other Harris novels, I don’t see his deep passion or resistance. Mostly, he seems tired and wishes he could somehow take action, though in what way, he’s not sure.

If, however, you want to read a fast-moving outline of how the V2 rockets came to exist and how they worked, this book may satisfy you. You also see why Wernher von Braun deserved a war-crimes trial rather than a cushy job in America’s space program. But if you’ve never read a Robert Harris thriller, don’t start with this one.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, which shares its profits with independent bookstores.

Portrait of a Gentleman: The Master

31 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: The Master, by Colm Toíbín
Scribner, 2004. 339 pp. $17

Around the turn of the twentieth century, two famous brothers, Henry and William James, converse in Henry’s seaside home in Rye, East Sussex. William, philosopher, psychologist, and lecturer (in public life and private), says, “Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean. In this crowded and hurried reading age you will remain unread and neglected as long as you continue to indulge in this style and these subjects.”

Even — especially — as an admirer of Henry James, I have to laugh. I used to share William’s criticism of his brother’s prose, as probably many readers do today. But in this biographical novel of an author perhaps more closely attuned to social nuance and unspoken truth than any other of English expression, James’s world opens up with impressive clarity, poignancy, and depth. You see how the master thinks, observes, derives his fictions, absorbs tragedy and setbacks and — always tentatively — ventures beyond himself, almost invariably to retreat.

The great writer as a boy alongside his father, Henry, Sr., whose influence loomed large. From an 1854 daguerrotype by Mathew Brady (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Consequently, The Master delivers the story of how a writer’s mind works, the stuff that anyone who writes will recognize — the bits of life that beg to be set down, impatience for tiresome guests to depart so that you can get to work, the pains of failure, the glories when a reader picks up your work for the first time and tells you how much she likes it. (Notice how long my sentences are getting; be it known that Toíbín’s aren’t, for he hasn’t tried to write James, only about him.) But there’s much more, for Toíbín focuses on how a man who observes so keenly often remains an observer, and why. James’s fear of emotional entrapment conveys a figure who feels constantly under siege, though he might not say so. He worries that the world he knows is fast disappearing.

There’s little plot in The Master, yet there’s much activity, all laden with meaning. As the novel begins in 1895, Henry tries to circumvent his anxieties about the first performance of his play in London by attending a nearby theater showing Oscar Wilde’s comic drama, An Ideal Husband. James, who could be a prig, finds Wilde’s work completely vulgar and resents his success, more so after his own play fails miserably. But months later, when Wilde sues his lover’s father for slander over accusations of homosexuality, James takes a renewed interest in Wilde. It’s not schadenfreude but the first intimation that James has homosexual attractions and desires he’s never acted on.

Throughout, Toíbín handles that theme with the delicacy befitting his protagonist. How sad that this man, whose instincts are kindly and sensitive, who has many friends who clamor for his company, who understands children and easily befriends them, suppresses the longing that might have made him happier. Granted, no one’s more keenly aware of societal disapproval and pressure than Henry James, yet you sense that tact and discretion might have permitted more leeway than he allows himself.

But Toíbín also reveals Henry’s less attractive facets, such as his selfish refusal to help a couple dear friends in dire need. Or, earlier in his life, how his parents somehow decide the Civil War has nothing to do with him—startling, considering that the Jameses are staunch New England abolitionists, as are their friends. Two of Henry’s brothers enlist and serve as officers in a famous Black regiment; one is grievously wounded.

Those failures point to how his parents have arranged Henry’s life for him (and William’s, to some extent), though it’s Henry who never escapes that confinement. As he muses over the body of his only, beloved sister, who’s just died, he realizes what a circumscribed life they have both led:

Her face changed as the light changed. She seemed young and old, exhausted and quite utterly beautiful. . . . He and his sister would die childless; what they owned was theirs only while they lived. There would be no direct heirs. They had both recoiled from engagements, deep companionship, the warmth of love. They had never wanted it. He felt they had both been banished, sent into exile, left alone, while their siblings had married and their parents had followed one another into death. Sadly and tenderly, he touched her cold, composed hands.

The Master may not be for everybody. But you don’t have to be a fan of Henry James to appreciate its breadth and poignancy.

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

Missing, Presumed: The Poppy Wife

04 Monday May 2020

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Review: The Poppy Wife, by Caroline Scott
Morrow, 2019. 423 pp. $17

It’s spring 1921, two and a half years since the Great War ended, yet for many, painful uncertainty continues. Edie Blythe of Manchester is one who lives with that burden. Coping with her husband Francis’s presumed death in October 1917 has hurt her enough; the absence of definitive proof is excruciating. But as the story opens, Edie receives a photograph of Francis, undated, unaccompanied by any letter or identification, and the French postmark is only half-legible.

Nevertheless, she’s convinced that in the photo, Francis appears significantly older than she remembers him from his final home leave in September 1917, which means he may still be alive. Naturally, she can’t account for the photograph, though she invents wild theories. In any case, she sets out for France to try to track him down.

The Menin Gate at Ieper (Ypres), Belgium, holds thousands of names of British and Commonwealth soldiers killed in action, but with no known grave. It’s one of the most moving memorials I’ve ever seen. (My photo, September 2019)

Meanwhile, Francis’s younger brother, Harry, is trying to trace him too. Since the war, he’s become a photographer-as his missing elder brother was, curiously enough. Normally employed to take studio portraits, Harry has been sent to the war cemeteries of France and Belgium — still very much under reorganization and construction — to photograph gravesites or places mentioned in soldiers’ letters home. The bereaved parents or spouses paying for these photographs want tangible images to hold onto, perhaps proof of their loss, and they can’t afford to visit the ground themselves.

A worthy task, preserving memories, yet Harry aches. He’s the only Blythe brother of three to return from the war, which already causes him survivors’ guilt; witnessing so many graves lashes him to a pulp. Equally painful, he’s always loved Edie. But he’s never acted on his feelings, and he believes he did nothing wrong by harboring a yearning. However, he’s pretty sure Francis figured it out and held it against him — and maybe Edie does too.

From this elegant, emotionally rich premise comes a novel of great power and psychological complexity. Both Edie and Harry are lost, even as survivors, as they try to find a way to continue living. You can’t help feeling drawn to them, Harry especially, as they struggle to do the right thing, whatever that is, not knowing whether they dare to hope for a happy future.

As an aficionado of First World War fiction and historian of that era, I applaud Scott’s portrayal of the time and place, which feels utterly lived in, testament to her scholarship and authorial skill. Besides her lost souls, she has the battlefield, the soldiers’ banter, the trenches, the mud, the postwar French towns trying to rebuild; all of it, rendered in breathtaking simplicity. Tens of thousands of soldiers died without a known grave, a mind-boggling tragedy which Scott has conveyed from many angles. Every note rings true, with the exception of the Blythe brothers’ company officers, who seem too lenient concerning certain lapses of discipline, on which the plot more or less depends. I think that’s forgivable, but I dislike the author’s occasional misdirection to give the reader false assumptions, while the characters, you find out later, knew the truth. That creates tension, but it’s an ungenerous trick.

Those are quibbles, however, when the narrative and the writing style take wings. I could cite many passages, but active description carries the day. Here’s one from Edie’s hotel in Arras, one place she’s gone on her search:

There are prints of Madonnas and saints all around the walls of this rented room and a black wooden crucifix is suspended above the headboard. It is wound around with a string of rosary beads and crumbling sprigs of heather. When she wakes in the night she can see the beads slowly rotating above. It looks like a bed in which an elderly relative has slowly died. She has spent enough nights lying awake in this awful bed trying to match the photograph silhouette of a broken-down town to the streets through which she has spent the day walking.

With words strung together like these, a thorough sense of place, and a story so deep and moving that it won’t let you go, The Poppy Wife is a superb novel. Warning: If the title and cover strike you as awkward, clichéd, or dumbed down (as they do me), don’t be put off. For the record, the British edition is titled The Photographer of the Lost, which makes more sense, as does the UK cover. I can think of several reasons Morrow repackaged the book, not least that they’re trying to position The Poppy Wife as women’s fiction. Is it Edie’s story or Harry’s? I don’t think it matters.

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

Blood, Royal and Otherwise: The Darwin Affair

26 Monday Aug 2019

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Review: The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason
Algonquin, 2019. 373 pp. $28

The year 1859 witnesses an event that shakes England — and the Western world — to the core: the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Mason’s ingenious, exquisitely plotted, and atmospherically rich thriller supposes that the uproar over Darwin’s theory and an attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria has a nefarious connection. Further, Mason takes Charles Field, a real-life historical figure, as the detective who uncovers the connection, what it means, and who’s behind it, men in high places. Naturally, practically no one believes Field’s conspiracy theory, though one person willing to entertain the notion — however fanciful — is Prince Albert, Victoria’s consort, and, by the by, a Darwin supporter.

Charles Field, as he appeared in Illustrated News of the World, London, 1855

Charles Field was Charles Dickens’s model for Mr. Bucket of the Detective, a character in Bleak House, among the first such fictional figures. It’s a brilliant conceit to build a novel around Field, but Mason goes one better. Field hates his fame as Bucket’s alter ego, and the surest way to inflame this bad-tempered detective is to call him Bucket or taunt him by suggesting that his fictional shadow would have solved the case before now. The Darwin Affair therefore begins with both feet in the shifting sands of mythic allusion versus deadly reality, and whether a person is who he is or what others take him for. From there, things get even more complex.

Field’s nemesis styles himself the Chorister, and an evil piece of work he is. I usually avoid suspense narratives with sociopaths, because the story’s thoroughly gruesome, and I can’t stand it when an outwardly decent citizen is suddenly unmasked as a raving lunatic responsible for multiple murders. But here, you know the Chorister’s a bad one from the get-go, and the plot revolves around stopping him when so many people fail to realize the danger he poses, a classic device in thrillerdom. Once again, however, Mason goes one better. The Chorister has handlers who think themselves righteous, which shows their utter hypocrisy; and they believe they can control him, about which they’re dreadfully wrong. Rest assured, plenty of tension results. In a final stroke, the psychological source of the Chorister’s bloodlust is revealed, and plausibly, which raises him yet another notch above a mere device.

I admire how Mason imbues his narrative with history as inhabited background. I don’t mean the presence of historical figures like the royals, Darwin, Dickens, Thomas Huxley, or Karl Marx, though Mason handles them all beautifully. (Field’s confrontation with Marx is a real hoot.) Rather, I mean going beyond the People magazine fascination with name recognition to grapple with the era’s ethics, passions, and preoccupations, and to render the everyday, even at the palace. Albert’s perpetually cold because the queen hates central heating, and candles and oil lamps are the order of the day because she finds gaslight too modern. The author can’t resist a witticism, and I’m glad of that, because otherwise, we’d have done without this gem from Albert about his better half: “And, to be frank, Victoria would not approve of any assassination attempt in which she was not the target.”

Fittingly, Darwin’s theory takes center stage in this rendering of midcentury Victoriana. As everyone knows, the church objects, but the conflict feels broader than that. Evolution has subversive implications for the social hierarchy, which also seems obvious in retrospect, but has somehow faded from sight. If we share a common ancestry, and random chance happeneth to us all, who’s to say that the peer deserves his peerage, and the laundress her bleached, burning fingers? That question will never go out of style.

Interestingly, Field himself reads The Origin of Species, a struggle because he hasn’t had much education, yet he derives a great deal from it.

If I understand what Mr. Darwin is saying, a creature will do anything at all in order to survive. And every creature that does make it does so because some other creature don’t. Everything and everyone at war all the time, just to keep the show going, and it’s been a very long-running show indeed. Look at it that way, nothing matters, really.… Look at it another way, of course, it makes every second we got desperate precious.

Make no mistake, The Darwin Affair is a gory book. But it’s also the most gripping thriller I’ve read in years, so if you don’t mind the blood and mutilation, you’ll be well rewarded.

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

Why Prologues (Almost) Never Work: After the Party

27 Monday May 2019

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Not Exactly a Review: After the Party, by Cressida Connolly
Pegasus, 2019. 272 pp. $26

Phyllis Forrester enjoys a sheltered life in 1938 Sussex, frightened only of her priggish, domineering husband, Hugh, and her two grasping, manipulative sisters, who live nearby. At a fancy-dress ball, the party of the title, Phyllis fails to protect a friend and suffers for it ever afterward — or so she says.

But the novel really concerns the Forresters’ support for a political movement that preaches “England first,” rejection of foreigners, and nonintervention in the European war that threatens. Students of that era will guess that it’s Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union, but Connolly, a subtle storyteller, doesn’t reveal that identifier right away. I suspect that before she pastes the Fascist label on her characters, she wants you to realize that they’re little different from people everyone has met, if perhaps more selfish or snobbish than most. Likewise, Phyllis’s refusal to examine or even admit to her spouse’s and siblings’ condescension and cruelty toward her evokes her inability to read fascism for what it is.

As political observation, After the Party has much to recommend it, especially the spare yet vivid portrayal of attitudes. As a novel, however, it frustrates me; and because explaining why involves spoilers, I suggest that anyone who plans to read the book should stop here.

The narrative actually begins in 1979, in Phyllis’s internal monologue looking back at the terrible event after the party and her subsequent imprisonment. When I read historical fiction, I like to lose myself in the past, so I avoid novels that feature a parallel, contemporary narrative (this one got in under my radar). But that’s not my beef here.

For those of you who don’t write novels, let me plead for those who do. One of the hardest decisions is where and how to begin, and if you choose wrongly, you can doom your narrative from the get-go. It sounds easy to fix or recognize, but it isn’t; just think of how many novels burden the narrative with too much backstory, too soon. In this case, Connolly’s prologue, which precedes a very long backstory, suggests that the party and Phyllis’s imprisonment are connected. In fact, they occur two years apart, and Phyllis later backs off her belief that she regards her prison time as just punishment for her mistake. Consequently, when you reach the party scene and realize there’s no connection, if you’re like me, you feel a letdown and wonder why the author thought she had to manipulate you with that prologue.

I think Connolly hopes to tie together disparate elements that don’t fit in the order they appear. If she does this to save her description of what makes a Fascist, that’s an idea, a theme, not a story, however interesting or cogent it might be. But two-thirds of the way through the book, after the war starts, Phyllis and Hugh are arrested and interned without trial or even legal counsel for having supported the British Union. That’s a story, especially because one of her sisters, active in the movement far longer, somehow remains free. Should the novel begin there, then? Maybe.

I can’t presume to know whether Connolly fell in love with her backstory and tries to save it through Phyllis’s occasional latter-day observations (which, incidentally, interrupt the forward narrative with privileged information). All I can say is that, as a writer, I’ve messed up enough novels by falling in love with backstory that either doesn’t belong or should go somewhere else. If I’ve learned my lesson, it’s because of the more than three hundred novels I’ve read so as to write in these pages. Many have prologues, yet only once do I recall an instance where that technique works — Andrew Hilleman’s World, Chase Me Down. And he succeeds not because he shows a crime, a high-wire act, a steamy love scene, or a courtroom verdict, teasing the reader with the mystery or romance to come. Rather, within the first lines, he establishes the sense of urgency that all compelling stories have — and if a novel lacks that, it doesn’t matter what the author dangles in your face to keep your interest.

Test this for yourself. The next time you start a novel, see whether you feel connected to the protagonist’s urgency about what makes this moment different, special, even earthshaking. I’m willing to bet that if you don’t feel this within the first five pages, you’re not likely to make it to page 50. And if you do read that far, it’s not because of a prologue.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this commentary appears in a different, shorter form.

Blood and Money: House of Gold

18 Monday Feb 2019

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Review: House of Gold, by Natasha Solomons
Putnam, 2018. 433 pp. $26

Greta Goldbaum, a spirited young woman in 1911 Vienna who thinks nothing of going barefoot when her shoes pinch or contesting conventions that make no sense to her, dreams of choosing her own life. Alas, Vienna’s no place for free spirits, nor is the Goldbaum family the type to tolerate them. As international bankers (patterned after the Rothschilds), the Goldbaums have branches in various European capitals, connected by blood ties, common interests, and a remarkable network of couriers. So it is that distant Goldbaum cousins traditionally intermarry, which is why Greta has been betrothed to her kinsman Albert, in London, whom she’s never met. Neither of them has any say in the match.

But that doesn’t mean Greta has to like her bridegroom, or vice versa, and from her point of view, there’s much to dislike. Pedantic, dull, and as straight-laced as they come, Albert has one great passion, collecting butterflies. Greta finds that utterly appalling and cruel. For his part, Albert fears that his stubborn, immodest wife is always seconds away from attracting the wrong kind of attention and creating a scandal.

Passing of the Parliament Bill of 1911 in the House of Lords, Samuel Begg (courtesy Gutenberg Project via Wikimedia Commons)

I seldom read sagas because, fairly or not, I assume them to involve melodrama, contrivance, and an obsession with the surfaces of wealth and power that don’t interest me. But I made an exception for House of Gold, and I’m glad I did. Solomons needs no melodrama or contrivance to tell her tale, because she adeptly introduces the unexpected without resorting to plot twists. A passing sight or ordinary occurrence, unremarkable in itself, becomes a focal point for the characters to seek meaning. Consequently, Greta and Albert reveal their many facets naturally, as does most of the rather large cast of characters. Toward the end, the narrative veers toward contrivance, but even there, Solomons reclaims these moments somewhat by having her characters grapple with their humility.

Also, Solomons has tackled a thorny subject, the bigoted canard about Jews and money, and done so with surehanded brio. If anyone or anything purely represents anti-Semitic delusions, it’s the Rothschilds, which demands that an author conduct a deep, consequential examination of wealth and power. House of Gold delivers. It portrays the delicate balance the Goldbaums must strike, aware that however wealthy and/or ennobled they are, they’re outsiders and always will be. Their family name may permit a demarche in the halls of government, even to the palace or the prime minister’s office, but they know what’s said about them and how precarious their reputations are. Moreover, none can ever be sure that outsiders deal with them candidly; something’s always in play, even in the wedding presents lavished on Greta and Albert:

Two saloons had been set aside for this purpose, and yet still they were not large enough. Clients of the Goldbaums from all over Europe had sent tokens expressing felicity and gratitude, and the silent hope of generous terms in future negotiations. Tables heaved with silver dinner services from President Fallières, and Persian rugs from Emperor Franz Joseph himself. The British empire was expressed in miniature: hand-painted wallpaper from China, a carved chest from the maharajas of Rajasthan filled with finely colored rugs, an ivory jewelry box from Ceylon.… Greta escaped the minute she could, wishing that so many strangers had not been quite so generous, requiring so many hundreds of thank-you letters. If she had remained a moment longer she might have overheard Albert remark that he found the habit of ingratiating gift-giving obsequious and excessive.

Solomons means to recount history, and to some extent, she manages. Against the Goldbaum backdrop, she portrays the Liberal reform of 1911, which diminished the power of the House of Lords; the rise of feminism; and, most significantly to the plot, the First World War, which threatens to destroy the banking house and the family. I like how she conveys the home front, in its shortages and prejudices, the latter of which keep Greta from venturing out where people will hear her Austrian accent. Less successful or convincing is the narrative conceit that America entered the war to protect the extensive loans made to the Allies, a notion that serves the plot but not history and involves an information dump or three.

My other serious complaint involves Otto, Greta’s beloved brother, who needs a flaw or two and more depth in general. I understand the forces that restrain him, but though he appears to have dreams as wide as the heavens — he’s a brilliant astronomer — I don’t know what they are.

Still, I like House of Gold and think it’s worth reading for the central issues explored, the two principal characters, and the myriad details of everyday life that emerge from the narrative.

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

Between Two Fires: Sugar Money

29 Monday Oct 2018

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Review: Sugar Money, by Jane Harris
Arcade, 2018. 387 pp. $25

No more callous, lunatic scheme was ever devised. It’s 1765, and Father Cléophas of the Frères de la Charité in St. Pierre, Martinique, is plotting to recapture slaves left behind when his brethren and he fled Grenada from British forces. Cléophas has a paper that, he claims, grants him power of attorney over his lost property. But that sounds dubious even to the two slave brothers he orders to sail to Grenada, Emile and Lucien, so the British are unlikely to listen. The only hope of success, Emile believes, lies with persuasion and stealth, treating directly with the fellow slaves his brother and he grew up with. Cléophas is a brute, and several of his colleagues are worse, but the British slave masters outdo them. Will the slaves on Grenada leave one island for another, if Emile can convince them that servitude on Martinique will be better?

St.-Pierre, Martinique, as it appeared in 2008. In 1902, the eruption of Mt. Pelée (in the background) killed 28,000 people and destroyed the entire town (courtesy Zinneke via Wikimedia Commons)

Much hinges on the relationship between Emile, twenty-eight, and Lucien, thirteen. The elder, who grasps the danger, tries to leave the younger behind. But perhaps because of pride, Emile fails to explain how vulnerable they’ll be — an admission he can’t easily make — while Lucien, who idealizes his brother, lacks the maturity to see outside his own concerns. Rather, he assumes that Emile is swatting him away, as always, and since he wants people to take him as a man and earn big brother’s respect, he insists on going. Besides, since he can read a little and speak some English, neither of which Emile can do, Cléophas decides that Lucien must go.

What a breathtaking premise, laden with potential for heartbreak and transcendence. Harris delivers, on all counts. Sugar Money is a compelling, unusual story, riveting from start to finish. “No — and furthermore” lives in these pages, and the moral stakes are enormous, the secret to extraordinary fiction. Vivid as a prose poem seasoned with kréyol phrases, the novel succeeds on many levels — as adventure, a tale of another time, a narrative of sibling rivalry, and an exposé of colonialism.

It’s the prose that takes you first, though, Lucien’s narration, lush and rhythmic:

Some masters are swift to get to the point when they give instruction; you might say they go directly to the main door, cross the threshold, no hesitation. Father Cléophas was not one of these. He would walk around the property first, try the windows, then wander off into the garden to gaze at the roof before eventually he retrace his steps to the front of the dwelling and give a tentative knock and — whiles he went on this bumbling circumbendibus — you oblige to go with him. . . .With this rigmarole and in other ways, Cléophas like to cultivate the impression of being an absent-minded, kindly fellow and he would beguile you with that bilge awhile until you became better acquainted and began to cognise just how sly he could be, for true.

Much of the story revolves around Lucien’s refusal to follow directions, and Emile’s belief in his considerable skills at diplomacy and leadership, which play out between the brothers as well as in their mission. With the odds so great against them, there’s no room for error, and the narrative feels unbearably tense.

My only criticism of Sugar Money is that, at times, Harris employs physical clichés for Lucien’s emotional transitions — heartbeat, guts, etc. — when she’s otherwise careful to render those moments more specifically and genuinely. But that’s an intermittent, minor, complaint.

Instead, my biggest quarrel is with the publicist who decided that the first thing to mention on the jacket flap is how a true story inspired the novel. Does that matter? Is that why people read fiction, and would they move over to the nonfiction shelf if Harris had made everything up? Just as historical truth can’t rescue a narrative that seems implausible, the ability to weave human truth into historical fiction makes it irrelevant whether events happened exactly as written. Is the publisher underestimating the reading public, or is that lack of confidence warranted?

But if we’re talking history, recall that by the Treaty of Paris in 1763 ending the Seven Years’ War (aka the French and Indian War), Britain, which had conquered several Caribbean islands, kept Grenada, among others, while returning Martinique and still others to France. That’s the geopolitical outline behind Sugar Money, but, in reading how these slaves suffer, I couldn’t help take the timeline further. Britain’s attempt to pay for that long, expensive conflict led to taxes on tea and newspapers in North America and cries of “no taxation without representation.” But the slaves on Martinique and Grenada, caught between French and British fires, had much more to complain about.

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