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A Clever Puzzle: Dancing with Death

25 Monday Sep 2017

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Review: Dancing with Death, by Amy Myers
Severn, 2017. 215 pp. $29

It’s hard to dislike a novel that begins, “‘Galloping codfish, Kitty! What the dickens do you call that?’” This exclamation comes from Nell Drury, the chef–do not call her cook–at Wychbourne Court, ancestral home of the eighth Marquess Ansley and his somewhat quarrelsome family. It’s 1925, enough time after the Great War for the love of merriment to have retaken hold, though no one has forgotten the suffering and sacrifice. Nell, a former student of the great Escoffier at the Ritz-Carlton, if you please, has much on her plate. Most immediately she’s responsible for the hors d’oeuvres and two full meals at the soirée her employers are giving.

However, the festivities also include a chummy get-together with the ghosts said to inhabit Wychbourne, and since the place goes back centuries, there are quite a few. Actually, only one person believes that there are ghosts, but she happens to be Lord Ansley’s sister,the sort of dotty eccentric that no English manse can be without, especially in fiction. Lady Clarice has many more instructions for Chef Nell, because, you know, ghosts must eat too, or, at the very least, they derive pleasure from smelling and seeing their favorite foods. As a dutiful, loyal servant, Nell keeps her opinions of this to herself; all she knows is that the evening will be complicated.

How right she is. If you’ve ever read or seen a movie in the country-house mystery genre, you need no ouija board to know that someone will die during the ghost-klatsch; that this murder will have multiple suspects; and that Nell will take it upon herself to investigate, sometimes running afoul of the police, who somehow think that solving crime is their job. But if Myers’s bow to conventions is altogether predictable, how she handles them makes all the difference.

Dancing with Death is strongest in its plot, at which Myers excels. Without introducing hidden facts that the reader couldn’t possibly have guessed–a ploy we’ve all come across, despite its lack of generosity–Myers leaves more or less everything open to view. You know the enmities, alliances, and romances running through the household; you just don’t know who’s lying to protect whom until people revise their stories. Consequently, Nell never sees more than the reader does, and since she has to balance what to tell the Scotland Yard inspector against her loyalty to Wychbourne, she’s protecting people as well, which adds another layer of tension.

The occasional wit helps. As Nell observes while visiting an aristocratic neighbor who wishes to hire her for a party:

It was a stone-built residence looking bleakly ornate compared with Wychbourne Court. I’m here for you to witness how grand I am, it seemed to be saying to her. The large reception room where she was asked to wait did nothing to contradict this assessment. Gentlemen in military uniform glared down from every wall and their long-suffering wives smiled weakly at the painters. Nell wondered whether they ever got together with the Wychbourne Court ghosts.

I wish, though, that Dancing with Death had more wit beyond Nell’s mild oaths; “blithering beets,” and the like, clever once, get tiresome after a while. And though Myers keeps the narrative percolating, she pays little attention to character. Nell’s a capable diplomat, independent, and conscious of herself as a pioneer, a woman in a field dominated by men. That’s interesting, but Myers does little with it other than to mention it, repeatedly. Very little of her past (or anyone’s) appears, and her reflections are the trite type common to the genre: “Could X be lying? That could be dangerous. Then again, Nell owed it to the Ansleys.” You get the picture.

There’s also little to define the era as the 1920s other than a few songs, dances, styles of dress, and social attitudes. The war has left its mark, we’re told, but people don’t seem to walk around with it. One Ansley daughter dabbles in socialism, and her enlightened views about class do her credit, but I’m not buying her theory that her parents don’t really care about that stuff anymore. Even to think so, without any discussion, conflict, or evidence, seems like a retrospective view of that time rather than those years from the inside.

The foreign ministers of Germany, Britain, and France try to prevent war in Europe, October 1925, Locarno. From left, Gustav Stresemann, Austen Chamberlain, and Aristide Briand (courtesy Wikimedia Commons, via Bundesarchiv)

Should historical mysteries offer a deeper perspective? I think they should; certainly, the best do. One that comes to mind, of about the same length, is Chris Nickson’s Gods of Gold. Obviously, not every writer has to be like every other, and Dancing with Death has its charms. But I know which approach I prefer.

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

A Tender Plant: The Ballroom

24 Monday Apr 2017

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Review: The Ballroom, by Anna Hope
Random House, 2016. 313 pp. $27

Ella Fay feels so oppressed by the Yorkshire textile mill at which she works that she breaks a window in a frenzied fit. For her crime, and because this is England in 1911–when the lower classes aren’t deemed to have feelings, let alone to be worth understanding–she’s bundled off to Sharston, an institution on the moors.

West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, (later High Royds Psychiatric Hospital), was the model for Sharston. One of Hope’s forbears was an inmate, for a time (courtesy highroydshospital.co.uk, 2006, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sharston is a desperate place that mingles the mentally disturbed with people who only seem so or who plainly aren’t, and whose only offense is poverty. But no matter how they got there, they know that no one leaves except feet first, about which there are many terrible rumors and some hard evidence, for a few men are assigned to dig the common graves.

John Mulligan is one, a man weighed down by promises he broke and wrong turns he made. But he’s sensitive and intelligent–far more than the asylum officials who keep him locked up–and you sense that something within yearns to break out and, if necessary to break heads.

But Sharston has one redeeming activity. Though the men and women are strictly segregated, once a week, those who’ve behaved themselves are allowed into the ballroom to dance. Through John’s eyes, you see the anticipation:

The men on John’s side disappeared off to the washrooms, and when they came back they had scrubbed faces and hair spat on and smoothed down. You could taste their excitement, thick and sticky, filling the air and leaving room for little else. It disturbed the far-gone ones on the other side, who got restless in their chairs and moaned and shouted out. John sat himself in the corner and took small shallow breaths, trying not to let it in; it was a terrible dangerous contagion, hope.

John and Ella dance, and from that springs an unlikely romance. What a tender plant it is, their love, for, if discovered, it will be uprooted; and meeting outside dancing hours is strictly against the rules. But John contrives to write Ella letters and smuggle them to her. At first, he only describes the sky and trees he sees during his work, because he knows Ella’s shut inside, as are all the women, which he considers an outrage. But what he doesn’t know is that Ella can’t read, and that she must ask her friend Clem to help her. (Clem is short for Clemency, an ironic name, for she receives none.) So Clem becomes Fay’s scribe, deriving perhaps too much vicarious pleasure from her role and inevitably forgetting where the boundaries lie.

It’s a brilliant touch, but no less so the character of Charles Fuller, the assistant medical officer. Fuller believes in eugenics, and as the novel opens, he’s struggling against the main intellectual current of his scientific faith, which says that enforced sterilization is the only way to preserve England. Otherwise, the nation will be overrun by the poor, the unfit, and the mentally ill, too depraved to know better than their savage ways, or even to care. It’s blood-curdling to read this tripe–even worse to know that such luminaries as Winston Churchill actually agreed–but at first, Fuller objects, because he believes that he can “save” John Mulligan and burnish his own career by doing so. So he makes many observations about John, intending to write a paper contesting that certain promising asylum inmates may, in fact, be rehabilitated.

However, Fuller has a deeper conflict. He’s a repressed homosexual, and he believes that if he followed his desires, not quite expressed but tangible nonetheless, he’d be filthy, dangerous, and depraved. In other words, he’d be no better than Sharston’s population, whom he holds himself above with a tenacity that shows how inadequate he feels (and once you meet his parents, you know why). Consequently, since he can never follow his heart or be happy, he hates anyone who can. John and Ella, be warned.

I criticized Hope’s previous novel, Wake, for the shallowness of the male characters. Nothing could be further from the truth in The Ballroom. Fuller, John, and John’s friend, Dan Riley, are complete people, and several minor male characters come across strongly as well. I think Hope relies too heavily on coincidences, of which one’s okay, but three’s a crowd. Similarly, Fuller’s behavior doesn’t always seem consistent with his character, as if his erratic boomerangs served the author’s purpose too conveniently. And, as usual, I wonder why Hope needs her prologue, which, also as usual, compromises the tension somewhat.

Nevertheless, The Ballroom is a marvelous novel, full testimony to the power of love, and I highly recommend it.

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

Hands-on History: How to Be a Tudor

01 Monday Aug 2016

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Review: How to Be a Tudor, by Ruth Goodman
Liveright/Norton, 2015. 320 pp. $30

To paraphrase an old maxim, writing social history is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. But, as Goodman proves in her remarkable book, it helps if you’re using a hammer authentic to the period–better yet, if you’ve forged that tool yourself.

And that’s essentially what she’s done for the years from 1485, when Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, assumed the throne as Henry VII, until 1603, when Elizabeth I died. Doublets, kirtles, ruffs, and gowns? Goodman has sewn them, by the hundreds. Want to know why Tudor folk dumped rushes on castle floors and slept on them? She can tell you, and what’s more, she’s done it. Think it would be a challenge to prepare a feast in a sixteenth-century wood-fired oven? To understand exactly how challenging, she’s built them–and, by the way, if you do likewise, remember to soak the wooden door in water so that (a) it doesn’t burn, and (b) imparts steam to the heat.

A young Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, by an unknown French artist, painted between 1470 and 1480 (Courtesy Musee Calvert, Avignon, via Wikimedia Commons).

A young Henry Tudor, earl of Richmond, by an unknown French artist, a portrait believed to have been painted between 1470 and 1480 (courtesy Musée Calvert, Avignon, via Wikimedia Commons).

 

I’ve never read a book like this, informed both by devoted scholarship and meticulous, hands-on experience. Even more amazing, Goodman has set her focus precisely where the written sources are thinnest, on how the common folk lived. Since few commoners could read, and even fewer could write (the skills, when taught at all, were learned separately), these people created no chronicles of themselves, and upper-class or noble commentators wouldn’t have deigned to. However, by using court records, parish registries, wills, paintings, and books of advice and commentary (a literary genre just then becoming popular), Goodman has pieced together a startling amount of information about daily life among commoners. It’s not surprising that she’s a recognized expert, a consultant for costume dramas, as with the televised version of Wolf Hall.

Among other things, I learned how details of posture and dress that we would call subtle or even meaningless spoke loudly to fifteenth-century Englishmen and -women about social class and breeding. Woe betide any who failed to observe these strictures, and who thus became suspect of trying to get above his or her station, for humiliation and punishment would soon follow. Naturally, the higher up you were, the more latitude you had. Certain young gentlemen, a classification with a specific social meaning, liked to swagger with their hips thrust forward, which caused purses, daggers, swords, or bucklers to swing about and make a clattering noise. Such was a swashbuckler, who announced his presence well before he came into view. The word is one of thousands the Tudors bequeathed to modern English; and of course, nobody coined more than Shakespeare, who left us some seventeen hundred.

Goodman has subtitled her work A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, and the way she goes about this makes sense, though it also has its drawbacks. She begins with cock crow, when people got out of bed, and describes their rituals of prayer, dress, and hygiene, and ends with nighttime, return to bed, and what went on there. In between, she recounts what people ate; how they cooked it; what they had to learn so they could function, stay out of trouble, and maybe rise in the world; what kinds of work they did; and how they amused themselves when they had the chance. You easily understand the rhythm of everyday life, and how busy people were, especially those who had no servants to tend them–indeed, Goodman accounts for every waking minute.

The downside to this approach is the lack of narrative or individual characters. Occasionally, a person emerges from the crowd, provides an example, and quickly recedes. I lay this charge gently, because more than one critic has said the same about my work, and the dearth of first-person source material dictates how this type of social history must be written. In this book, however, I found myself pouncing on these brief stories, only to feel disappointed that they melted away so soon. I suspect that I yearned ever more for them because the wealth of detail Goodman offers can be overwhelming. I confess that I skipped over parts of How to Be a Tudor; the section on dress, for instance, goes on too long for my taste. However, I devoured the rest, such as the fine points of a bow or curtsy or the manner of baking bread.

In short, there’s something for everyone in How to Be a Tudor.

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

Remembering Barry Unsworth: Sacred Hunger

06 Monday Jun 2016

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Review: Sacred Hunger, by Barry Unsworth
Norton, 1993. 630 pp. $16

Four years ago almost to the day, Barry Unsworth died, my favorite contemporary author. The New York Times obituary called him “one of the foremost historical novelists in English,” an ungenerous epitaph if ever I’ve heard one. Like any literary master, Unsworth told powerful stories that expressed timeless themes through the actions of characters whom you’d swear lived and breathed. To qualify or diminish his accomplishment simply because history pricked his imagination more than present-day life is to miss the point of literature.

I’ve just finished Sacred Hunger, the sixth Unsworth novel I’ve read, and it’s sublime. The title refers to the urge to profit no matter what morality, decency, or human sympathy might dictate. The chief business here is the mideighteenth-century English slave trade, so the moral divide is very stark, but Unsworth takes that further. Not only does he replicate forms of slavery among people who have no direct connection to the trade, he shows how men and women can enslave themselves to ideas that cause them to inflict suffering on others. This is brilliant, and what’s more, it’s subtle–you see it without Unsworth having to tell you. It’s also unbearably tense, because every human transaction in Sacred Hunger carries tremendous risks, and for every mistake, someone will pay.

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Punishment aboard a slave ship, 1792 (Courtesy Library of Congress via history.ac.uk)

Any novel exploring the nature of evil must have a compelling, fully realized villain, and Sacred Hunger has two. Saul Thurso, captain of the newly launched slave ship Liverpool Merchant, lets nothing and no one touch him. Even to look him in the eyes is an affront, which he suffers only from his employers or social betters. He tolerates no attempt to establish rapport, for in his view, there are only masters and servants, the one controlling the other through terror. If the underling objects, it’s only to grab what rightfully belongs to the master. So when Thurso whips a crew man senseless, he believes he’s acting to protect his employer’s profit and, therefore, his own.

Erasmus Kemp, son of the Liverpool Merchant’s owner, shares one trait of Thurso’s, the inability to befriend anyone. However, Kemp craves that more than anything; he just goes to great lengths to deny it, burying it under his tremendous drive to make himself rich and successful. He can banter with other men and be genial when he thinks there’s money to be made, but in pursuit of love, he’s too raw to admit what he wants. Early in the novel, he courts a young woman as if she were a valuable commodity, albeit one who fires his passion. Impressed with his ardor, she takes him seriously enough to see through him and attempt to soothe his ill nature, if he could tolerate that. But there’s the rub:

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch–even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation.

Like Thurso, then, Kemp’s a prisoner of his own false dignity. Both act despicably, though I understand why, not to excuse them, but to recognize them as real.

Enter Matthew Paris, Kemp’s cousin. Kemp despises him, first, because he’s served a prison sentence, and, second, because Paris dares to hold his head up. But Kemp, Sr., takes pity on his nephew and allows him a berth on the Liverpool Merchant as a doctor. Since Paris’s crime was distributing pamphlets questioning the Creation, he’s a free thinker and loud about it, so you know he’ll run afoul of Thurso. Sure enough, he tries to tell the captain that when a slave refuses to eat, it’s because he’s humiliated and melancholy, not, as Thurso would have it, to deny his captors their profit. You can guess how that exchange goes.

You might also guess that, with the tensions between captain and crew, captain and officers, and the entire ship’s company versus their human cargo, this voyage will end differently from the way Kemp and Thurso have planned. But just how differently, and how that unfolds, I leave for you to discover.

I’m so sorry that Barry Unsworth left us.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf, where it had remained, unread, for an unconscionably long time.

What History Is (Or Isn’t): 1916

18 Thursday Feb 2016

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Review: 1916: A Global History, by Keith Jeffery
Bloomsbury, 2015. 436 pp. $32

As my regular readers may be tired of hearing by now, I care passionately about the First World War, and, like any historian, I also care about how my favorite subject is portrayed or perceived. I admit to being rabid about this, but I have my reasons, which, I like to think, go beyond the mud pie that I made with my own two hands (meaning my own book).

Rather, as the event that arguably shaped the twentieth century, the First World War still lives within myriad conflicts, as in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or the former Soviet Union, to name only three. I can’t imagine trying to understand those problems without the proper historical background, so I think historians (and novelists) who choose the First World War have a double duty. Not only should they try to dig past commonly held myths and misperceptions (because otherwise we won’t learn what we desperately need to know), writers should make the people and the era come alive (because otherwise we won’t bother to learn anything).

Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

To me, 1916 falls short on both counts, though in fairness, it’s a large task. Jeffrey starts with Gallipoli and ends with Rasputin’s assassination, also visiting Africa, Asia, Ireland, and Poland, among others. He covers the iconic battles of 1916 (Verdun, the Somme, Jutland), the Asian laborers recruited to toil in the war zone, and pays overdue homage to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought, fetched, or carried during the white man’s war. To get nerdy for three seconds, the author praises Hew Strachan, the Oxford historian whose excellent work has emphasized the war’s global breadth rather than just the Western Front, a focus Jeffery sets out to emulate, with some success. So far, so good.

Even better, Jeffery finds room for a raft of remarkable figures whom I’d never heard of. Frances Farmborough was an English governess in Russia who became a nurse on the Eastern Front; she even took photographs that enrich the historical record. Flora Sandes, born in England of Irish parents, served in Serbia as a nurse and as a soldier. John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish veteran of the Boer War and a big-game hunter, raised, equipped, and (defying orders) armed a Jewish brigade.

Jeffery’s at his best, I think, where he seems most at home, Ireland. (He teaches at Belfast and has written about Ireland before.) I like his thoughtful, persuasive chapter on the Easter Rebellion, which captures the events, heartbreak, and passions, as well as their reach abroad, especially to the United States. He finds something new to say about Gallipoli and its impact on national feelings, no easy feat. And anyone who wants to know what Verdun felt like to the soldiers who rotated in and out every couple weeks will find it here, in horrific detail.

But 1916 is an odd book. If you blink while reading the introduction, you’ll miss the author’s scheme to base each chapter on an event in a given month. (Dating the chapters would have helped some.) Moreover, I’m not sure how you can select a single year, even one so significant, because global reach or iconic battles apply just as well to, say, 1917 or 1918.

Further, the reach is hardly global. The Germans nearly vanish, the French flicker in and out of sight, and the Belgians (my mud pie) might as well be trees. The Dutch never appear, though their neutrality influenced politics, economics, and the North Sea blockade. The chapter on the United States deals rather heavily with British intelligence officers and how they misled the American government–fascinating, but a peculiar emphasis. It’s also typical of 1916, whose voices are almost exclusively English or Irish. Not surprisingly, they usually express concerns and interests common to those nations, so that the worldwide lens has a peculiar, Anglo-Irish slant. Part of that has to do with available sources and what languages they’re written in, but still.

As for the story, 1916 can be hard going. Despite a profusion of facts, the vivid whole seldom materializes. The Anglo-Irish cameos offer a chance to add spark or provoke wonder, but they lack depth or face. Photographs help, but in the text, these men and women are talking heads, collections of statements and attitudes. People make history; that’s why it matters. Yet Jeffery pays little attention to character, even with a singular figure like Rasputin (though we get a blow-by-blow description of how British journalists broke the story of his murder).

One figure whom Jeffrey tries to sketch is Woodrow Wilson, an attempt that illustrates the unfortunate perpetuation of myth. Taking Wilson’s words about his Scotch and Irish heritage at face value–again playing the Irish legacy card–he casts the president as he wanted to be seen, a visionary statesman. Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. But the larger truth is that Wilson’s less agreeable qualities, which included vain self-righteousness, doomed his vision from the start. Moreover, in that context, Jeffrey plays with another, related myth, that there could have been peace negotiations in 1916, had the Allies only been willing to listen. Again, the larger truth offers a more nuanced picture, and I wish Jeffrey had at least considered it.

Read Hew Strachan’s single-volume history, The First World War. It’s a terrific introduction to the subject but also a fine addition to other books.

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

Rot and Corruption: Company of Liars

11 Monday Jan 2016

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Review: Company of Liars, by Karen Maitland
Delacorte, 2008. 465 pp. $24

“All England was rotting,” observes the narrator of this daring, dark, intricate novel, and there’s no arguing with him. The year is 1348, and not only has a terrifying plague cut down humans and beasts alike, torrential rains have ruined harvests. It’s a tossup which will kill first, pestilence or famine, but either way, the air stinks of decaying corpses.

Pieter Breughel the Elder's painting of the Black Death (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, 1562 (Courtesy Museo del Prado, Madrid, via technology.org. Public domain).

A street peddler, or camelot, who makes his living selling fake religious relics, sets off toward a town where, he believes, he has a chance to outrun the plague. Hoping to move fast, he wishes to travel alone, but happenstance dictates otherwise. The traveling party keeps growing until it numbers nine. They include a young girl with pure white hair; an Italian musician and his pupil; a sadistic con man; a young couple expecting their first child; a healer; and a young man born with one arm as a stump who believes he’s descended from swans. As the journey lengthens and becomes dangerous in ways the travelers could not have foreseen, they tell symbolic, allegorical stories about themselves.

Anyone familiar with The Canterbury Tales will recognize the intentional parallel to Chaucer’s masterpiece, so already, Company of Liars is an ambitious novel. However, those looking for the ribald comedy of the Wife of Bath or the Miller will find something else entirely, for, unlike the original, the plague and famine remain central here. Moreover, those threats, though constant, endanger the travelers less than the people do each other. As the title suggests, each has a secret to protect, and what they’ll do under those circumstances leads to terrible crimes.

Maitland, a psycholinguist with a splendid grasp of history, has portrayed this plague year in frighteningly vivid words, re-creating landscape and mindset. The mud, filth, carrion, gloom, prejudice, and fatalism leap off the pages. The absence of clerics to perform church services, the hatred leveled against Jews and foreigners, the business of selling amulets, the nightmarish rituals people perform to ward off the disease–they’re all here, and more.

The author also renders her characters in fine, believable detail, with a psychological acuity that allows her to incorporate grand themes without dragging them in by the heels. She’s got good versus evil, religion, xenophobia, superstition, injustice, and, perhaps most of all, hope.

Early on the camelot remarks:

Hope may be an illusion, but it’s what keeps you from jumping in the river or swallowing hemlock. Hope is a beautiful lie and it requires talent to create it for others. And back then on that day when they say it [the plague] first began, I truly believed that the creation of hope was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies.

His antagonist, the sadistic con man, disagrees:

To hope is to put your faith in others and in things outside yourself; [in] that way lies betrayal and disappointment. . . . What a man needs is the certainty that he is right, no self-doubt, no fleeting thought that he might be wrong or misled. Absolute certainty that he is right–that’s what gives a man the confidence and power to do whatever he wants and to take whatever he wants from this world and the next.

I wonder whether Maitland was thinking of politicians when she wrote this, for it explains the bizarre lies told during our current election cycle better than anything else I’ve heard or read.

However, gripping as Company of Liars is, the novel tries for too much, adding a murder mystery to everything else. The narrative struggles to make all the pieces fit, playing a nonstop shell game between witchcraft and reality. Medieval folk believed implicitly in magic, so the confusion makes sense, sort of, but the camelot’s narrative voice derives from an accurately observed, realistic world. (I’m no fan of magical realism, and I like it even less when the two styles mix.) Further, the mystery fails to hold up, because the criminal’s identity is no surprise, despite skillful red herrings. Moreover, the guilty party is a sociopath, a solution that I’ve always found too neat.

That said, I finished Company of Liars and was glad I did. Maybe you would be too.

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

Eighteenth-Century Iconoclast: Ross Poldark

07 Monday Dec 2015

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Review: Ross Poldark, a Novel of Cornwall, 1783-1787, by Winston Graham
Sourcebooks, 2009 [1945]. 314 pp. $17

Captain Ross Poldark returns to Cornwall from the American war to find that everything has gone to pieces. His father has died, leaving behind debts. The two servants tasked with keeping up the modest ancestral home and surrounding farmlands have let them go to ruin and sold off the livestock to keep themselves soused. Worst of all, though, Ross’s sweetheart, the beautiful Elizabeth, is shortly to marry his friend and cousin, Francis.

Beach in Cornwall (Courtesy Mike Coates, publicdomainpictures.net)

Beach in Cornwall (Courtesy Mike Coates, publicdomainpictures.net)

To say that this novel is about a man who overcomes pain and disappointment to put his life back together is like saying that Huckleberry Finn is about a boy on a raft. Ross indeed has plenty of reconstruction to do and ways of submerging (but not drowning) his sorrows. However, it’s how and why he goes about rebuilding his life, who helps or hinders him, and how everyone else feels about it that make Ross Poldark a marvelously entertaining story. Further, the novel also offers a finely detailed picture of eighteenth-century England, warts and all.

That’s because Ross, though a man of his time, has no use for conventions, institutions, or prejudices that unjustly protect his social class at others’ expense. Whether his years among American revolutionaries influenced his views, or his youthful, independent cast of mind has flowered in adulthood, Ross repeatedly dares gossip and ostracism to do what he thinks is right. He has his limits, of course, believing in social distinctions. And to avoid making enemies, he sometimes takes the middle road, only to learn that he can’t please anybody.

Nevertheless, seemingly with every action he takes, problems occur, and he rises to meet them, revealing conflicts within himself and with the society in which he lives. Even so simple an exercise as dancing with a young girl to let her feel that she’s not a wallflower has far-reaching complications because of the way girls are treated like marriageable chattel. Defending a cottager from poaching charges sets Ross against the local magistracy while putting class and social inequities on hideous display. Restarting an old copper mine touches on ills of the Industrial Revolution and the constant struggle for a living wage.

But nothing arouses as much gossip or spite from the community, or ambivalence within Ross himself, as his rescue of Demelza Carne. Ross first sees the twelve-year-old Demelza at a fair, where she tries to rescue her dog from being tortured by a pack of boys, only to be set upon herself. Ross wonders why she’d go to that length for a mere animal–another common eighteenth-century English attitude–but when he sees the welts and bruises that her father has inflicted on her, he resolves to hire her as a live-in maid. He knows what people will say, but the more they say it, the less he’s willing to listen.

Wise choice. Once Demelza emerges from beneath her miserable childhood and realizes she can be a real person, she seizes the chance with both hands, changing the Poldark residence in the process. Over time, her vivacity, directness, and ability to see to the heart of things make her formidable indeed, and her way of putting things can only be described as delicious. She’s no prodigy–in this, Graham has wielded a lighter hand than many novelists I could name–but she has considerable resources that not even she’s aware of. In brief, she’s a firecracker, if a subservient one–for now.

Ross Poldark is the first of eleven volumes, which, I’m told, became a British television series, aired on PBS. I consider myself lucky that I never saw it, because I can appreciate this wonderful novel with fresh eyes.

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

The End of an Era: The Passing Bells

02 Monday Nov 2015

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Review: The Passing Bells, by Phillip Rock
Morrow, 1978. 516 pp. $16

As my regular readers have probably figured out by now, I seldom pick up a family saga. Normally, when I scan the library shelves for historical fiction, I avoid those novels whose jacket illustration shows a beautiful woman standing in front of a magnificent ancestral home. Not that I have anything against such novels; I simply sense that they weren’t written with me in mind.

However, The Passing Bells is about the First World War, my historical specialty and favorite subject as a novelist. I’ve also read that the late Phillip Rock knew his stuff, and that he chose his title from the first line of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” suggests as much. So I gave the book a shot.

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy PublicDomainPictures.net).

Heaton Hall, Manchester, England (Courtesy Public DomainPictures.net).

There’s a lot to like about The Passing Bells, the first novel of a trilogy. Rock indeed portrays the England of 1914 and after with a keen grasp of history, issues, and, most visibly in this book, social prejudices. The Grevilles of Abingdon Pryory, an earldom created in Tudor times, wear their superiority like their perfectly tailored formal clothes and need not reflect on their values, outlook, way of life, or how they treat others. In other words, they’re absolutely insufferable and likely to remain so.

Rock’s narrative argues that the Greville mindset typifies what holds England back from political, social, or scientific progress. Come the war, this thinking is particularly disastrous, for its aristocratic purveyors see nothing wrong with sending legions of Britons to the ugliest deaths imaginable so long as the enemy pays a commensurate price. The old trope that the men who fought that war were lions led by donkeys is on display here, to potent effect. You see it not only at Gallipoli and the Somme, but among staff officers safely in England or behind the lines in France. Rock’s war is that of self-inflicted wounds, hopeless attacks, and overwhelmed aid stations; the nursing scenes are particularly gripping and true to life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. As the novel opens in the late spring of 1914, Martin Rilke, Lady Greville’s journalist nephew from Chicago, visits Abingdon Pryory before setting out on a brief Continental tour, reporter’s notebook in hand. He’s warm, open, loud, and very badly dressed, just what you’d expect an American to be, swimming in a sea of blue-bloods. Martin’s also got more on his mind than the subject that transfixes everyone else: who’s going to marry which spoiled, gorgeous, young woman, and whether the stuffy, old earl will allow the match. (It’s telling, though, that Martin’s eye immediately falls on a pretty housemaid, newly hired and worried about losing her job; apparently, she’s got too much character to transform herself into the liveried robot her station requires.)

Over the coming weeks, war draws closer, and life as the Grevilles know it is about to end. Nobody can say exactly what’s in the air, but in London, Martin senses it:

It appeared to Martin that the streets of the city never emptied. . . .Perhaps it was no more than the unusually hot weather that drove people, mainly young men, from their rooms and set them to wandering in restless bands through the West End. The groups were orderly–excessively polite, as a matter of fact–and the police were not concerned. It was almost Bank Holiday time and a certain anticipatory excitement was normal. And yet, somehow, this behavior could not be explained that easily.

What I don’t like about The Passing Bells is the two-dimensional characterizations. Only a handful of a large cast show any depth, and only two or three can be said to have inner lives. Martin’s a very nice guy, but once he corrects his wardrobe, he’s got no flaws to speak of. The earl’s attitudes ring shudderingly true, but there’s little humanity to him, even when he knows nobody’s watching. His daughter, Alexandra, remains a ravishingly beautiful twit until she becomes a nurse, but that takes half the book; ditto the dashing Coldstream Guards captain who acquires substance (and a conscience) only after he sees combat.

As a consequence, it’s hard to care about these people. But The Passing Bells does depict the time very well.

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

A Very Odd Couple: Crooked Hearts

24 Monday Aug 2015

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Review: Crooked Hearts, by Lissa Evans
HarperCollins, 2015. 282 pp. $25

Vera Sedge’s life is a painfully funny mess. It’s 1940, and London’s getting pounded by the Blitz, but to her, that’s not the worst; the war seems just “out there” someplace. Rather, Vee, as she’s called, runs herself ragged caring for her lazy, selfish nineteen-year-old son, excused from military service because of a heart murmur and running around somewhere, doing things he refuses to talk about. Her dotty mother, also living with them in a northwest suburb, expects to be waited on too, while she writes long, chatty letters to Mr. Chamberlain (and then Mr. Churchill) to complain, in a pen-pally way, about shortages and shoddy goods and refugees who must certainly be spies.

A London house bombed in 1940 (Courtesy Imperial War Museum, public domain).

A London house bombed in 1940 (Courtesy Imperial War Museum, public domain).

Vee would dearly love to latch onto a paying scam; it’s the only way she knows how to earn her meager living. But as a con artist, she’s inept, partly because she rushes headlong into whatever looks good right that second, only to find that the string of lies she’s told don’t hold water, and she’s trapped. She tries passing herself off as a door-to-door fund raiser for the wartime charity du jour but earns more suspicion than income.

Meanwhile, Noel Bostock, a brainy ten-year-old with no friends or social skills (“hobbies are for people who don’t read books”), lives with his demented godmother, Mattie. His tender love for her is all he has in the world, and when she wanders out one night and dies of exposure, Noel’s bereft and alone. The law says that, like all other children living near bombing targets, he should have been evacuated. But, as resistance is his godmother’s legacy–in her heyday, she fought for woman suffrage, chaining herself to fences and serving a prison term–legal authority means nothing to him.

Vee takes Noel in, thinking to pocket the government allowance for harboring an evacuee child, and her first impression is that he’s simple and pliable. Wrong. What she’s found is a partner in crime–a senior partner, the brains behind the operation. Noel, ever organized, quickly figures out which charity they should target, in which neighborhoods, using whatever script he’s concocted for her. Immediately, their efforts bear fruit.

I have to admit, I felt uncomfortable reading about this dynamic duo bilking credulous, good-hearted folk for money that would never reach the widows, orphans, or wounded soldiers it was meant for. Granted, judged against the venal behavior they see around them, they’re small fry. In Evans’s world, nobody has time to be a hero, because being on the take requires every spare minute. If this is England’s finest hour, as Churchill proclaimed, you have to wonder what the brave, doomed pilots in the RAF were fighting for. (Vee, of course, evokes the Churchillian two-finger salute for victory.) Crooked Hearts is a sendup on a small, yet potent scale, a wartime theater of the absurd.

But when there’s no time for heroism, that leaves love, which takes no extra effort or splendid opportunities. You get the sense that Vee and Noel will somehow soften each other’s carefully sheltered heart, and it’s worth finding out how. There’s a dollop of comeuppance for those who really need it, which is satisfying too.

I loved the humor in Crooked Hearts–the letters to the prime minister, the ridiculous scrapes Vee gets into, the ten-year-old who talks over his guardian’s head, the satire on British attitudes. Most of the characters are merely that, a collection of attitudes. But the novel works because Vee and Noel are fragile humans whose desires have been thwarted so long–as in forever–they can’t even name them. Theirs is a fine tale.
Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Other End of the Telescope: Mr. Mac and Me

18 Monday May 2015

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Review: Mr. Mac and Me, by Esther Freud
Bloomsbury, 2014. 296 pp. $26

Most novels about the First World War, even those of the home front, portray the emotional and physical carnage, which warp everything they touch. But Mr. Mac and Me takes a gentler approach, setting a coming-of-age story within an unusual friendship between a thirteen-year-old boy and the Scottish artist and architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and his wife, Margaret. The war still penetrates daily life, of course, but remains a thing outside, like a beast scratching at the door. The setup feels vaguely threatening, all to the good, yet misshapen in its odd proportions, which ultimately undermines the novel.

Dunwich seafront, 2007 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Dunwich seafront, 2007 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

The beginning plods, as Freud introduces the Maggs family, which runs a struggling pub in Dunwich, a fishing village on the Sussex coast. But eventually, the story gets going. It’s early summer 1914, and Thomas, the young teenager, has two older sisters and six dead brothers, whose loss he feels keenly. The dead are practically his only company, since his brute drunk of a father is best avoided, and his mother carries too many burdens to pay attention to Tom, unless to cuff him for his misdemeanors. Tom befriends his dead siblings by visiting their graves and adopting a family of starlings as though they represented his brothers alive once more, an example of the sensitive, warm touch that Freud shows throughout.

However, he soon has someone else to occupy his vivid imagination. Mackintosh and his wife have taken up residence, and Mac casts a strange figure, striding about the headland and beaches, turning a spyglass on the seascape. At first, Tom thinks Mac must be a detective, for he reminds the boy of Sherlock Holmes. It’s not clear who befriends whom, but the reclusive, troubled architect takes to Tom and encourages his love of drawing–ships, because Tom dreams of going to sea. Margaret, a gifted artist herself, encourages him too and feeds him, having sensed, without ever putting words to it, that he’s neglected. As surrogate parents, they’re a godsend.

But come the war, Mac’s behavior creates suspicion in the village. His tramps around the headland, his spyglass, that he’s an outsider, an artist–a “foreigner,” in other words–all count against him. The coastal folk naturally assume that their plot of earth is the first place the Germans would invade, a fear they embrace with the inflated desire to feel important. Is Mac signaling to enemy ships? Tom himself isn’t so sure, because he’s seen Mac and Margaret’s pamphlets describing exhibitions of their works at Vienna, and the German words he can’t read sound ominous. He soon sees his mistake, though, only nobody else does, and his father is among those most strident in slandering Mac.

Meanwhile, the more compelling story is about Tom’s growing up. Freud’s Suffolk coast is a place where old ways are dying out, and even Tom’s job with a rope maker may fall to progress. His naivete about certain subjects yields to knowledge, though Freud is careful not to let him see too much. I like the skill with which she handles this, as with the village atmosphere and small moments. The passage of soldiers, billeting in town before shipping to France, teaches Tom a little, and his sister Ann even more, unfortunately. Tom has his first love and catches a glimpse of what the war means, beyond uniforms and patriotic back-slapping.

But Mr. Mac and Me never takes flight, mostly because Mac has no voice of his own and never fully emerges. Since he’s not about to tell a thirteen-year-old why he’s depressed–money troubles, career frustrations–Tom has to find this out by steaming open his letters, a betrayal that, disturbingly, hardly registers with the boy. It’s a clumsy authorial device, as with the expository dialogue that Mac spews when he’s particularly angry at the wrongs he’s suffered. The village suspicions, though they have consequences, neither drive the narrative nor resolve it, and the last twenty pages summarize events that deserve a more careful unraveling. Finally, I understand that Freud wanted to focus on the village, but when news comes that a Suffolk regiment has been decimated in battle, the tragedy hardly penetrates, a startling lapse.

Mac and Me was nominated for the Walter Scott Prize in historical fiction. The short list includes three books I’ve covered already: The Lie, by Helen Dunmore (October 27, 2014); The Thousand Things, by John Spurling (March 16); and The Wolf’s Mouth, by Adam Foulds (March 12). I’d be happy if Dunmore or Spurling won, but I still think The Lie–my first review on this site–is better.

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