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Tag Archives: Chris Cleave

Happy Birthday: This Blog Is Two Years Old

27 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Amy Greene, Andrea Molesini, Barry Unsworth, book review, Chris Cleave, historical fiction, Julian Barnes, literary fiction, Mary Renault, Patrick O'Brian, Paul Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize, Shirley Barrett, Stewart O'Nan, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Winston Graham

Once more, thank you for visiting. Whether you’re a regular reader or just dropping by, I’m glad you’ve come and hope you take away something that stays with you. You’re the reason I do this; without you, there’d be no point.

As I did last year, I’ll briefly recap my favorite books from the last twelve months. They belong to different genres within historical fiction, but from each I’ve taken away something that stays with me.

In no particular order, I particularly recommend these:

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave, tells a marvelously observed, wrenching tale of a love triangle during World War II. Think you’ve been there, done that? You haven’t, until you’ve read this one.

Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth, explores Britain’s eighteenth-century slave trade to depict the human urge that puts profit before morality, decency, or empathy. So many novels have overdrawn, flat antagonists, but this book has two utterly real, compelling villains, one of many facets to this brilliant work of literature.

Stewart O’Nan’s thriller, City of Secrets, set in Jerusalem in 1945, portrays in elegant, tense economy the struggle to liberate Palestine, both against the British and among the Jewish organizations fighting them, with a political romance at the center.

Rush Oh!, Shirley Barrett’s delicate, lovely story about whaling in Australia around the turn of the twentieth century, surprises with its humor, compassion, and home truths about selflessness and its opposite.

Long Man, Amy Greene’s elegy for a dying town in 1936, tells how the Tennessee Valley Authority’s dam building raises issues of blood, land, and power. Greene’s rugged, potent prose and deceptively simple premise deliver a haunting novel.

You don’t have to like stories of wooden ships and iron men to appreciate Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first installment of the famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Yes, O’Brian knows so much about the sea, it’s effortless, like breathing, but he shows the same touch with the English language and his main characters’ inner lives.

Andrea Molesini’s Not All Bastards Are From Vienna deals squarely with the First World War’s injustice, cruelty, and stupidity, yet is thoroughly engaging, thanks to the characters’ ingenuity, forcefulness, and mordant wit. They’re larger than life yet wholly plausible, the secret of great fiction.

Mary Renault’s classic, The Bull From the Sea, tells the story of Theseus, in such a way that the well-known myth becomes a deep, thought-provoking manifesto on the use of power and the virtue of forbearance. I wish our politicians were half as sensible.

Winston Graham’s Ross Poldark, the first of many volumes in another famous series, tells about an eighteenth-century iconoclast in Cornwall who tries to reform his life and lands–and then meets a young girl who’s an absolute firecracker.

In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes re-creates the life of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who just manages to escape’s Stalin’s purges and often wonders whether he made the right choice. A riveting, darkly funny story.

Paul Goldberg, in The Yid, also revisits the Stalin years, supposing that the Great Leader was planning a second Holocaust in the 1950s, and that his antagonist is a former actor from the state Yiddish Theater. Fiction doesn’t get any bolder–or more absurdly real–than this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen won the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, and he deserved it. A riveting-to-the-eyeballs tale about the Vietnam War, told in flawless prose from the vantage point of a Communist mole within the South Vietnamese intelligence service, this novel skewers both sides and everyone connected with them. Superb.

Anything you particularly liked during the last year?

 

As the Losses Mount: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven

29 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Blitz, book review, Britain, Chris Cleave, class prejudice, feminism, historical fiction, literary fiction, London, love triangle, Malta, no and furthermore, race prejudice, snobbery, World War II

Review: Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, by Chris Cleave
Simon & Schuster, 2016. 424 pp. $27

This novel is hardly the first about a love triangle in wartime, but if it’s not the best of the genre in recent memory, it’s pretty damn close.

Mary North, a young woman at odds with her stuffy London family, hastens home from a Swiss finishing school in September 1939, just after Britain declares war. She wants to “do something,” so she badgers the War Office, assuming that her services must be required, maybe as a secret agent. After all, her father’s an MP, perhaps destined for a cabinet post, so why not? Nobody really knows what the war will be like, but eighteen-year-old Mary is very sure that for her, it will involve duty, freedom, and a ripping lark. In other words, Mary has the makings of an absolutely insufferable, overprivileged twit–and yet she’s quite the opposite.

 

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Bomb damage in Valletta, Malta, May 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Two traits save her, in my eyes. First, she’s delightfully subversive, willing to challenge commonly held beliefs in herself and others, and does so with wit and style. Second, she tries to live by her discoveries, working around the rules whenever necessary–a free spirit who becomes increasingly aware how much her ability to be one derives from her wealth and social position.

Mary finds a job as a teacher, where her readiness to see things from the children’s point of view makes her an asset. For instance, the day they’re to be evacuated from London (a war measure), her charges exchange their name tags the moment she turns her back. Being who she is, she pretends that their new names are the correct ones, which amuses them no end. “It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.” But Mary’s superiors think she’s unfit to teach–too much levity and sympathy, flouting the rules–so they fire her.

Are we downhearted? Only for a moment. Mary lobbies Tom Shaw, an administrator who grants her the use of an abandoned school, where she plans to teach those children shunted back from the countryside, spurned because of their skin color, emotional disabilities, or neediness. Mary throws herself into rescuing these kids and, shortly afterward, into Tom’s arms as well.

Meanwhile, however, Tom’s good friend Alistair, an officer who barely survived the Battle of France and was evacuated from Dunkirk, has come home to London on leave. (Notice the recurring theme of evacuation and rescue, and who deserves it, or doesn’t.) By happenstance, the day Alistair ships out again, Mary brings him his duffel bag at the train station. Cleave, in the simple, elegant prose that makes this novel shine, describes the feeling between them:

She laughed then, brightly and without complication, and he laughed too, and for a moment the war with its lachrymose smoke was blown away on a bright, clean wind. Alistair marveled that she could do such a thing with the tiniest inflection of her mouth and the lightest look in her eye: even exhausted, in yesterday’s dress with her hair disheveled, she could make the distance between them disappear.

Consequently, it’s no secret that while enduring the terrible, grinding, years-long siege of Malta, Alistair thinks of Mary and his friend Tom in different, not always selfless, ways. What eventually happens is anything but predictable, even if it seems so at first, because Cleave is master of my favorite literary device, the “no; and furthermore.” Just when you think things are settled, they’re not–they get even worse–and no one’s off the hook. Some readers may object to the unflinching nature of the narrative, which deals out plenty of pain and leaves quite a few prejudices intact. But I urge you to read Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, precisely because these characters earn every drop of joy they get. Along the way, Cleave treats you to terrific dialogue, much of it darkly funny, and pitch-perfect descriptions of new love, intense desperation, and loss. The characterizations feel true in every respect, save one (I don’t believe that Mary’s only eighteen at the novel’s beginning, and she doesn’t act like the virgin she’s supposed to be).

I’ve heard some people call this book same-old, same-old, or too sentimental. Don’t believe them. Everyone Brave Is Forgiven is a wrenching novel, one of the finest I’ve read this year.

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

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