Tag Archives: feminism

The Pain Will Get Better: After Lives

16 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: After Lives, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Riverhead, 2022. 309 pp. $28

In the 1890s, the German colonizers of East Africa suppress revolt after revolt with exemplary cruelty, meted out by their African askari troops. Over the course of years, the turmoil and hard times displace two people: Hamza, a teenage boy who flees domestic trouble to enlist in the askari corps; and Afiya, the young sister of another such would-be soldier, who leaves her in care of a childless businessman and his wife.

After excruciating years in military service, including the First World War, Hamza returns to the town he left and meets Afiya, now nineteen. Her physical sufferings don’t match his, but she’s paid a high price for being female. Before she settled with the businessman, her then-guardians took the money her brother had left for her upkeep, only to treat her like a slave, even beat her for knowing how to read and write.

Karl P. T. von Eckenbrecher’s 1896 painting depicting askaris under German command trading fire with rebels (courtesy bassenge.com via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Afiya’s current situation, though kinder physically, has its perils nevertheless. The businessman’s wife restricts her social activities in the name of Muslim female modesty and imposes religious devotions that the young woman performs dutifully while looking for small ways to rebel, both for respite and to hold onto a sense of self.

The mistress of the household also plans to marry Afiya off, preferably as second wife (read: plaything) to a man much older than herself. Consequently, the nascent attraction between Afiya and Hamza must pass unnoticed.

The story bears similarities to Cinderella, except that Hamza’s no handsome prince, and he’s rootless. Both lovers are. As he once observes about a war wound that troubles him greatly, “The pain will get better.” How that happens for the two of them provides the question the narrative aims to resolve.

After Lives therefore explores how cruel humans can be, and how we withstand it, or don’t. Gurnah recounts in precise detail the brutality shaping the askari existence, whether from training, the German officers’ contempt, methods of instilling discipline, or colonial philosophy. The Great War, which has no name as far as the askaris are concerned, feels like a confused, bloody mess:

The askari left the land devastated, its people starving and dying in the hundreds of thousands, while they struggled on in their blind and murderous embrace of a cause whose origins they did not know and whose ambitions were vain and ultimately intended for their domination. The [baggage] carriers died in huge numbers from malaria and dysentery and exhaustion, and no one bothered to count them. They deserted in sheer terror, to perish in the ravaged countryside.

I’m somewhat familiar with the colonial history of Africa, but I’ve never read anything about it as vivid or compelling as After Lives. By the time Hamza finally gets free, his body and soul have been punished terribly, yet he’s quietly unbowed. He’s withstood routine brutality and occasional help from unexpected quarters, but even the latter feels condescending, delivered from the pretense of moral and intellectual superiority. You have to admire a character as steadfast and dignified as Hamza, who can withstand injury and insult. But be warned: there’s no character arc to speak of, no change.

Afiya, though she copes with hardships she’s even less responsible for—she didn’t enlist in anything—travels a path less fraught, if no happier. I find her somewhat idealized, even a male fantasy in certain scenes, and, like Hamza, she doesn’t change. But she’s also appealing, and for similar reasons: she has the patience to endure until the pain gets better. A little guile also helps.

Gurnah’s storytelling style keeps its distance. This takes getting used to, but at least he shows plenty of feelings, unlike other omniscient narrations that tell them, with far less depth. The novel has much to say about colonialism, war, and, to a lesser extent, feminism, which sometimes reads like nonfiction, as with the passage quoted above. But again, it’s the story that counts, which packs a wallop.

I do find the first thirty pages confusing, full of back story I’m not sure is necessary, and the novel ends rather abruptly, with more of a political point than a personal one. But these obstacles shouldn’t deter you.

Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021. I mention that because it seems silly to glide over it; but I think that awards, even the most prestigious, often say little about an author’s true significance to literature, a judgment that changes over time, anyway. Read any Per Lägerkvist or Mikhail Sholokov recently? Rudyard Kipling’s white man’s burden sounds offensive today. Several years ago, I stumbled on a fine historical novel about the time of Charlemagne, The Days of His Grace, by a Swedish author I’d never heard of—Eyvind Johnson, who shared the Nobel in 1974 with Harry Martinson, whom I’d also never heard of.

So I won’t say that After Lives is deathless literature. But it is a good novel, about a time and place few Western readers know about, and for that, I recommend it.

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

Sold!: The Shinnery

09 Monday Jan 2023

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Shinnery, by Kate Anger
U. of Nebraska, 2022. 253 pp. $22

The year 1894 has been hard for the Campbell family, Texas farmers struggling to withstand drought, losses from sick livestock, and debt. Seventeen-year-old Jessamine (Jessa), the eldest child still at home, finds out she must leave the farm she loves to take up a position as maidservant to the Martins, owners of the mercantile in Rayner, the nearest town. Jessa can’t understand why her stern but loving father would demand this—while brooking no discussion—when she’s his right hand on the farm.

Nevertheless, Jessa goes to the Martins’, where her employers find fault with her about once a minute, and where she learns the humiliating reason Papa shipped her off. However, that’s not half the story, for the pianist who comes to the Martin residence to teach the elder son his scales takes a shine to Jessa. Since Will Keyes (unsubtle name) is twenty-two, good-looking, glib from experience in the world—his main gig is at his elder brother’s saloon—you know he can play Jessa any tune he likes, and she’ll think it’s beautiful. You can also guess the consequences, even if you haven’t read the overly revealing blurb on the jacket flap.

Too bad about that blurb, whose clumsy phrases fail to convey the novel’s drive and fresh aspects, the chief attractions of The Shinnery (so titled for the shin oaks on the Campbell farm). You’d never know how the author twists the predictable, makes it her own, and ratchets up the tension. “No—and furthermore” thrives here, and the pages turn. Part of that comes from how the reader can spot Will as a fake from a country mile off, but Jessa can’t.

Shinnery oak, Quercus havardii, along a west Texas highway. A shrub rather than a tree, the plant is poisonous to livestock during a phase of its growth cycle but also protects the soil from erosion and provides habitat for wild animals (courtesy Dylan W. Schwilk, 2011, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And when she does pick up currents that seem unjust or threatening, she can’t say so, as when her father tells her she’s heading to the Martins’:

She wasn’t quick with words like her sisters. Feelings and ideas would get stuck on the other side of her voice, no words to carry them across. Or she’d start talking and her words would fail, trail off, evaporate, everyone staring at her, waiting. Papa wasn’t in a waiting mood. He seemed uncomfortable, brushing dust that wasn’t there from his britches.

Unfortunately, the characterizations fall short, particularly those of the numerous villains. Martin’s wife, to name one, has another dimension behind her hectoring, social-climber facade, but her husband, though suitably threatening, has none. Other depictions feel inconsistent, even of the good guys, and the conflicts I’d expect either dissipate or never emerge. For instance, if Jessa’s that starved for warmth and affection, leaving her easy pickings for Will—perhaps too easy—I don’t see how she can connect with her parents as wholeheartedly or deeply as she does.

I can believe she’d redouble her efforts to please them, because emotionally hungry children do. But that longing—and resentment—have to go somewhere, and though Will offers an outlet, I wanted more of her feelings of betrayal kicking around.

That’s why the novel’s resolution, whose events seem mostly credible, still doesn’t quite work for me; I think the characters accept what befalls them too easily, maybe predictably. The story has ugly elements the author wishes to redeem, but that must be earned, and it shouldn’t happen simply to please the reader.

I also sense that Anger wants to explain everything, as though the reader won’t believe the words otherwise, a tic that comes through in the storytelling. Often, a character will say or do something, and the text will provide a reason, when it’s already clear.

To be fair, The Shinnery offers an utterly gripping feminist narrative: men treating women like chattels, even their own daughters. It’s hard to beat that, and to her credit, Anger keeps raising the stakes for Jessa, meanwhile conveying the social and political atmosphere in which the woman’s always to blame. As I read, I compared this university press novel with others I couldn’t finish from major commercial houses, whose mix-and-match hodgepodge of typical characters and situations seems like recombinant DNA.

That said, Anger’s editors could have helped The Shinnery in small but important ways—get rid of the pointless, one-page prologue; do justice to the story with a more enticing, smoother blurb; catch errors like a character’s name changing in the middle of a scene; and maybe deleting the explanatory passages.

Still, this novel tells a bold, original story—not for the faint of heart—and I recommend it.

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

Death in Singapore: The Frangipani Tree Mystery

19 Monday Dec 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Frangipani Tree Mystery, by Ovidia Yu
Constable, 2017. 312 pp. $14

Singapore, 1936. Chen Su Lin, only sixteen, nevertheless faces a crossroads. She has a certificate from the Mission School—first in her class—which, in theory, would entitle her to a good job, if she could find one. Her dream is to become a secretary, but she’s revealed that to nobody, because such positions are rare, whereas her relatives would object on principle to a woman working outside the home.

Sure enough, as the story opens, Su Lin’s uncle, a wealthy merchant with a finger in many pies, wants to marry her off, probably to some dutiful, boring minion whose sole virtue is his ability to earn a living. But Uncle Chen hasn’t reckoned on Miss Vanessa Palin, sister to the acting governor of Singapore and a presence at the Mission School, who tells him his niece is cut out for better things. However, the “better thing” Miss Nessa has in mind involves housekeeping or caring for children—being a servant—and Su Lin doesn’t want that.

G. R. Lambert & Co. photograph of the port of Singapore, 1890 (courtesy Leiden University Library, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Enter Chief Inspector Thomas Francis LeFroy of the CID, who needs a housekeeper—at least, that’s what everyone tells him—a most intriguing fellow who owes much of that intrigue to a famous reserve. He signs papers taking legal responsibility for Su Lin’s employment—how that works isn’t entirely clear—but, more immediately, he has a possible crime to investigate at the acting governor’s mansion.

Charity Byrne, the eighteen-year-old Irish nanny to the governor’s developmentally delayed daughter, has fallen off a balcony to her death beneath a frangipani tree. The Palins, who apparently had mixed feelings about the beautiful, flirtatious deceased (also of a low social class) want LeFroy to rule the death an accident. But he’s not so sure, and his insistence on conducting a proper investigation involves Su Lin as unofficial eyes and ears within the mansion.

She takes over for the late Charity in caring for seventeen-year-old Deborah Palin, called Dee-Dee, who acts like a seven-year-old, with all the difficulties that implies, and who instantly takes a liking to Su Lin. But LeFroy holds his cards so close to his chest that Su Lin doesn’t always know whether “unofficial” means useless or forgotten, and Miss Nessa Palin has begun to show a side of herself the girl never saw at the Mission School. Su Lin doesn’t want to admit it, but her mentor is gradually proving herself cold and hard, perhaps even a racist.

What’s more, Su Lin, who chafed under her traditional Chinese upbringing, finds that life among ang mohs, the Europeans, has its drawbacks. At her home growing up,

Uncles and aunts invited friends, acquaintances, and potential business partners to the table, and the guests usually stayed on after dinner to repay the hospitality with stories and gossip. . . . Full of Miss Nessa’s instructions on ladylike deportment, I had despised their raucous anecdotes, especially re-enactments of confrontations they had supposedly had with ang mohs—standing up to Europeans was considered daring and reckless, considering the law was almost always on their side. Now, the reserved, well-bred silence of my British employers left me feeling isolated and lonely.

To Su Lin, Dee-Dee, despite her often irritating behavior, seems like the most authentic person in the household.

A chief charm of The Frangipani Tree Mystery is Yu’s portrayal of the racial, ethnic, and cultural conflicts of polyglot Singapore, with the Europeans running everything in hit-and-miss fashion. You see the superstitions about bad luck among the Chinese, set against the Europeans’ social snobbery, and the notions about shame and pride, strength and weakness upheld by the different groups. I particularly like how Su Lin, though proud of her heritage, shows rather too much admiration for the colonials, and how that changes over time—accurate, I think, given her education and circumstances.

The novel takes a minute to sort out Su Lin’s place in the governor’s residence, Miss Nessa’s role, LeFroy, and the crime. But if you read The Frangipani Tree Mystery, and I suggest you do, bear with this ballet despite the step or two that might seem too convenient, and you’ll be rewarded. The mystery takes yet another minute to hit its stride, chiefly because an antagonistic character seems like a stock figure, at first, only to deepen as the narrative progresses. But in the end the story satisfies.

Yu pays close attention to cultural and social markers, which inform the narrative and enrich the background. The publisher pretends that the novel portrays the world of 1936; it doesn’t. But it does explore the barriers to women, whether European or Asian, the frequent emphasis on power or money to the exclusion of empathy, and a protagonist caught between a world she admires and the one she grew up in.

Consequently, The Frangipani Tree Mystery is one of those deceptively slight novels that offers much more than the sum of its parts. I recommend it.

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

No Possession, Only Determination: Hour of the Witch

10 Monday Oct 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Hour of the Witch, by Chris Bohjalian
Doubleday, 2021. 400 pp. $29

Mary Deerfield leads what many people in Boston in 1663 would call an enviable life—though they’d never admit it, because envy is a sin. Her father, a leading merchant, imports many useful items like furniture, cloth, and cutlery. Mary’s husband, much older than herself, is a prosperous miller, a man others look up to. However, she’s still childless at twenty-four, which arouses suspicions of possession by Satan.

But Mary’s only possessed by qualities a woman must not have—a strong will informed by intelligence and desire. She dares want a better life than the one her brute of a husband allows: he beats her mercilessly, and his idea of sexual relations is equally violent and shaming. For every insult he endures, or thinks he endures, Mary pays; and when he’s drunk, which is often, he imagines slights everywhere.

One of the many reasons I’m glad I didn’t live in seventeenth-century Boston.

Worse, he knows how to dissemble. Though familiar at the tavern, he’s never earned the constable’s reprimand for drunken behavior or punishment in the stocks. He beats Mary in private and makes up outlandish excuses when friends or family ask about the occasional bruise that shows. She wonders whether their young servant, Catherine, sees through the lies—not that she’d sympathize, because Mary suspects the girl lusts after her husband.

Mary understands lust. She feels it when she’s around her son-in-law, Jonathan, married to Thomas’s daughter by a previous marriage, and for Henry Simmons, a man who works in a merchant’s warehouse. At night, after Thomas has rolled off her and begun snoring, she touches herself and struggles to rationalize the pleasure, half-believing that the devil has, in fact, taken hold.

Nevertheless, when Thomas stabs her hand with a fork hard enough to break a bone and draw blood, Mary has had enough. Despite the odds, she decides to file for divorce, ignoring all counsel to desist. It’s not just that a woman has no chance against her husband, particularly one as clever as Thomas. It’s also the fork, which her father imported—a fork that has three tines, the extra tine suggesting, to some, an instrument of the devil.

I admire so many aspects of this brilliant novel that it’s hard to know what to name first. So I’ll start with the voice opening, which establishes the Puritan mindset and beliefs about sin. Few authors, particularly thriller authors, display the confidence to pull this off—where’s the action? Won’t I bore the reader?—but Bohjalian delivers.

These few pages wax terrified at the temptation lurking everywhere, implying that terror will recur in the following narrative. Most important to historical fiction, the author shows how people think in seventeenth-century Boston, and how that contrasts with today’s mores—or does it? Aren’t people still scared of their desires, and doesn’t the tremendous shame they carry prompt them to behave their worst?

Whoops; I’ve just praised a prologue. In my defense, I’ll point out that this one reveals no forward action.

But it does prepare us to see Mary as decent, mostly kind person struggling with being a vessel of desire and, though she wouldn’t recognize the word, a feminist. An early description of her down by the wharf shows how she tries to cast herself:

The men were tanned and young, and though it was autumn and there was wind in the air, the sun was still high and the crates and casks were heavy, and so she could see the sweat on their faces and bare arms. She knew she had come here to watch them; this was the reason she had walked this far. But she didn’t believe this was a sin or the men had been placed there as a temptation. Visiting the wharf was rather, she decided, like watching a hummingbird or a hawk or savoring the roses that grew through the stone wall at the edge of her vegetable garden. These men—the fellow with the blond, wild eyebrows or the one with the shoulders as broad as a barrel and a back that she just knew under his shirt was sleek and muscled and hairless—were made by God, too, and in her mind they were mere objects of beauty on which she might gaze for a moment before resuming her chores.

But Boston’s a place where every move is watched and judged, and this is how Hour of the Witch turns the screws. It’s not just that the threat may emerge anytime, anywhere, and often does. Nor is it only that “no—and furthermore” blooms here like dandelions (Mary’s image for envy), or that Bohjalian pushes his heroine to the absolute limit. With Thomas, he creates an antagonist who’s truly despicable yet apparently normal, which makes him that much more dangerous. While reading this book, I often thought of my favorite Hitchcock films, for the natural relentlessness of his villains and the manner in which ordinary objects, like the three-tined fork, become charged.

Hour of the Witch is a sterling example of a literary thriller, unafraid to dwell in emotional moments and use them to connect to the reader. I leave it to you to read this gripping narrative and ponder to what extent the Puritan scourge has marked our country to this day.

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

An account of one’s own

29 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by in Comment

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Here’s another nugget I uncovered while researching my forthcoming novel, Lonely Are the Brave.

In an early draft, I had one of my main characters, Kay Sorensen, open a bank account in 1917 while her husband’s away serving in the army. I thought it only natural, since she’s working for her father’s timber company and dreams of a business career.

Then I happened on an appalling historical fact: almost every state in the Union required a man’s cosignature before a woman could open a bank account. In 1919, when my story unfolds, Tennessee may have been the only exception.

Clarksville, TN, where this late nineteenth-century building serves as a visitor center, was home to the first American bank run by women, 1919 (courtesy Jugarum, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

My research discovery supports a feminist theme of the novel and handed me a point of conflict when Kay’s husband returns from Over There; so much the better. But I was shocked to learn that the laws remained on the books until the 1960s.

The Company and the Soviet Writer: The Secrets We Kept

29 Monday Aug 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Secrets We Kept, by Lara Prescott
Knopf, 2019. 344 pp. $27

The most destructive war in history is four years past, yet in 1949, the world feels no safer. In Washington, the infant CIA watches every move the Soviets make—or appear to make—certain that the Cold War adversary is doing the same. In Moscow, the KGB arrests Olga Ivinskaya, the muse and mistress of renowned poet Boris Pasternak; she’s carrying his child.

Unattributed press photo of Boris Pasternak, 1959, the year after he won the Nobel Prize (courtesy https://www.ebay.com/itm/1969-Press-Photo-Boris-Pasternak-dfpd41533/303830392954, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Having heard that Pasternak is writing a novel critical of the Soviet past, the secret police demand to know what’s in it. (Why they don’t grill the author instead is never satisfactorily explained.) Olga claims not to know, but of course they don’t believe her and, once she miscarries, ship her to the gulag.

Meanwhile, Irina, a young American woman of Russian parentage, is hired for the CIA typing pool, a coveted job, though she has middling secretarial skills. The other typists, underemployed graduates of Radcliffe, Smith, and Vassar, wonder why. But the bosses have plans for Irina, who’s given lessons on how to make a dead drop and other tricks of tradecraft. Gradually, Irina understands that she’s being groomed for a mission involving Pasternak’s novel, which the CIA would like to see distributed.

Irina’s trainer is Sally Forrester, a holdover from the CIA’s wartime predecessor, the OSS. Sally, though a gifted operative, has been shunted aside—note the recurring feminism—until now, which hurts. Sally never feels as though she’s living fully unless she has an assignment, and she’s been waiting to make her mark in the Company, as insiders call the CIA. Sure enough, she’s sent to Milan to suss out Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher believed to have dealings with Pasternak:

Feltrinelli’s nickname was the Jaguar, and indeed, he moved with the confidence and elegance of a jungle cat. The majority of the party guests were in black tie, but Feltrinelli wore white trousers and a navy blue sweater, the corner of his striped shirt beneath untucked. The trick to pinpointing the man with the biggest bank account in the room is not to look to the man in the nicest tux, but to the man not trying to impress. Feltrinelli pulled out a cigarette, and someone in his orbit reached to light it.

As the passage suggests, Prescott knows how to set a scene, has a keen eye, and an able pen. Yet The Secrets We Kept is the sort of novel whose pages turn readily, but which feels lightweight. Whether or not you’ve heard of Boris Pasternak or the history surrounding the publication of his most famous work, the narrative offers few surprises, and what it builds to peters out rather than reach a crescendo.

Four narrators tell the story: Pasternak’s mistress; Sally; Irina, the neophyte typist/operative; and The Typists, an unnamed, collective voice. Only one of this quartet comes through as a full-fledged character, though details of time, place, and profession at times carry the narrative.

I sympathize with The Typists, whose inside view provides an intriguing perspective on the nation’s spy organization. But they add little to the story, and they’re largely featureless and indistinguishable. And even with a relatively small part to play, they undermine a crucial theme: sexual and intellectual freedom.

The typists are warned not to discuss the documents they type. But these women, who wish they earned respect for their minds, could at least have an opinion about the world around them or a book or an idea. Instead, when they socialize, as they do often, they gossip about who’s wearing what, who’s sleeping with whom, and office politics. No doubt, Prescott intends no disrespect; yet doesn’t this portrayal match how their male bosses likely think of them?

Olga, Pasternak’s mistress, has a harrowing story of arrest and persecution to tell, yet I’m not persuaded that his magnetism has earned her loyalty, come what may. She revels in his celebrity and the influence that lends her, but that can’t be enough. Likewise, with Irina, I don’t know what she wants from life, or why she does what she does.

That leaves Sally, who comes across most vividly. Yet the subplot of her private life, though thematically relevant, has little or no bearing on the story. Prescott, who knows her ground (and even bears the same first name as Pasternak’s heroine), is a capable author, but she’s written her narrative as though she senses that the main plot doesn’t fill the novel and carries less impact than it promises.

As a result, at times, Sally and The Typists feel like add-ons. Partly, this is the limitation of history, because the story can’t invent drama that didn’t happen. Her point seems to be how women take the blame for men’s mistakes, and I agree. Nevertheless, The Secrets We Kept amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

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

Unusual Friendship: A Net for Small Fishes

09 Monday May 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: A Net for Small Fishes, by Lucy Jago
Flatiron, 2021. 331 pp. $27

London, 1609. Anne Turner, mother of six with a much older husband and heavy debts, looks to increase her income from “fashioning” for wealthy ladies, her sideline in medicinal concoctions being less lucrative. Indeed, it is as a fashion consultant that Katherine, countess of Suffolk, has summoned her to dress her daughter Frances, countess of Essex. Anne’s task: to get Frances out of bed, ready to please her husband, Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex.

But the earl is not easily pleased, even by the most beautiful, vivacious young wife in England. Only an empty-headed bully, coward, and brute with multiple axes to grind could treat Frances Howard so badly she’d refuse to leave her bedchamber. But Essex is all that, and more: He’s impotent and can’t consummate the marriage, which only adds to his shame, prompting him to abuse his nineteen-year-old bride even further.

Moreover, there are politics involved, as always among English aristocrats. Frances Howard is one of those Howards, the family with which Tudor monarchs had to reckon, as do the Stuarts now, in the court of James I. And Essex’s family is the Howard faction’s sworn enemy.

So Mistress Turner, seamstress and herbalist, is sailing in deep, choppy waters, but she’s ambitious. She has claim to social respectability, through this or that marriage or cousin, and she’s always liked finer things, of which she’s had a taste. Consequently, though she resents being ordered about by Frances’s mother, as if she were a servant, the young countess draws her in, and not just as a means for advancement.

Anne Turner, artist unknown, 1615 (courtesy http://www.kateemersonhistoricals.com/TudorWomen5.htm via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

A most unusual friendship develops, as Frankie, as she’s known to intimates, relies heavily on Anne’s guidance. Impulsive, passionate, and unguarded in tongue, the neophyte noblewoman requires a steadying hand, whereas Anne sees in her protégée a kindly soul craving warmth and protection. To be sure, the commoner also revels in court intrigue and the display of wealth and pomp to which she has access through Frankie.

But Frankie’s no easy charge to look after, and she has dangerous tastes, in particular a deep, powerful attraction to Robert Carr, the king’s favorite. All eyes, and not just those of Frankie’s boorish husband, are watching — and Anne is dragooned into acting as go-between.

The narrative therefore intersects with that of The Poison Bed, Elizabeth Fremantle’s take on the Howard-Carr intrigue. But where Fremantle fixed on the cut-and-thrust of court politics and the tempestuous romance, Jago, though she pays attention to those facets of the story, concentrates on the friendship between the two women. She casts her narrative as a feminist tale, a woman wronged by her beast of a husband; has she really no recourse?

Jago’s authorial hand is remarkably sure, especially in a first novel. From the beginning, the reader will admire the prose, descriptive and emotionally evocative at once, as with this early passage, in which Anne contrives to dress Frances appropriately, yet with an eye to the young woman’s own advantage and image to portray:

My hands darted like a bird pecking seed, working needles and pins, laces and points, circling Frances like a whole flock of maids though I was but one woman. My deftness pleased me, as if the pins and laces grew from my own body as silk comes from the spider. I enjoyed the feel of the sharp metal broaching cloth made on looms in foreign lands, by hands as quick and sure as my own. It pleased me to sculpt fine materials into the shapes in my mind’s eye. To the bodice I tied sleeves, pulling them into sharp peaks above her shoulders. From the shambles of this whipped child rose a castle, every swag and buttress a testament to her worth.

With such keen observation, the novel renders the manner in which the court honors or breaks reputations, and what happens as a result. There are a few decent people about, but they must be watchful, for no one falls faster or harder than the lucky person elevated in esteem, then dropped; and courtiers take delight in revenge, whenever they can. Though court life is a standard in historical fiction portraying this era, I nevertheless note Jago’s persistent eye to the human cost, as with the innocent offspring of the figures cast down.

I’m not sure I find as much meaning in the feminist aspect of Frances Howard’s predicament as Jago intends, maybe because, as the daughter of one earl and wife of another, our countess is hardly representative. (I find more of that thematic substance in Anne’s story.) I see the issues involved with Frances — it’s hard not to — just not the claim of deep significance. I’m also not persuaded of Anne Turner’s venal side, because we’re told it rather than shown.

But all the same, A Net for Small Fishes is a splendid novel, evocative and moving, and I highly recommend it. Few authors can bring off literary thrillers, but Jago does. She’s an author to watch.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher through my work for Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.

Washington, 1942: Louise’s War

11 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Louise’s War, by Sarah B. Shaber
Severn, 2011. 194 pp. $28

American involvement in World War II is six months old, and everybody and her sister flocks to the nation’s capital to find a job. Louise Pearlie, whose husband has died years before and can’t bear to remain in rural North Carolina, has brought her excellent secretarial skills and work experience to the Office of Strategic Services, the intelligence organization. Gossip has it that the Allies will invade North Africa within months, hence the OSS search for maps of the coastline and experts who understand the beaches.

A 1943 poster for the Office of War Information by George Rapp (OWI poster 55, courtesy Library of Congress; public domain)

One such authority is Gerald Bloch, a French Jew married to a school friend of Louise’s. From what little news she’s received, Louise gathers that Gerald and Rachel are stuck in Marseilles, while reports say that the Vichy government has made sure that no Jews will receive exit visas. Deportation looms, and Louise, who owes Rachel a huge debt, wishes she could help.

Theoretically, the OSS could claim that Gerald Bloch would provide necessary information concerning the upcoming invasion. But the file on him goes missing during the confusion ensuing from the fatal heart attack suffered by the director of Louise’s section. At first, she thinks nothing of this, but soon, at tremendous risk, she sets out to discover how and why a sensitive dossier could simply vanish, and whether recovering it would save the Blochs.

It’s an excellent premise, if a mite dependent on coincidence, but Shaber’s narrative has a lot going for it. For starters, I like how she’s drawn Louise. Growing up poor and churchy, Louise doesn’t quite know what to make of the big city, where old values get shunted aside in the business of making war. The tremendous crush of people in a hurry and under pressure, with ambition and money to spend, offers temptations she’s not used to, but which attract her. Her parents want her to remarry, but she enjoys her independence, even if she wonders what it would feel like to have the financial security and creature comforts she’d never afford on her own.

That said, Louise also knows that many, if not most, men expect women to keep quiet and use their brains only to help solve male problems, for which, of course, they’ll receive no credit. But her common sense doesn’t prevent her from wanting what might not be good for her. I like that complexity.

The other winning facet of Louise’s War is the atmosphere. Whether it’s fabric shortages, the bus company’s refusal to hire Black drivers, people trying to get around the sugar ration, or the habit of traveling GIs tossing letters out train windows, knowing that someone will stamp and mail them, Shaber knows her ground and deploys details with skill. Here, Louise rolls her eyes at the portrayal of women in a popular magazine:

In its cheerful stories women skipped off to work in full make-up with neatly coiffed hair pulled back in colorful do-rags, carrying lunch pails full of healthy home-made food. Their overalls didn’t get dirty no matter how filthy the job. If they weren’t married with an obliging mother at home caring for their children, they were engaged to a shop foreman or a military officer. None of them were war widows or lived in boarding houses or had to park their children in crowded day nurseries.

Given that keen eye and grasp of psychology, I’m surprised to stumble across a cardinal error. Louise’s first-person narration works just fine, but, for some reason, Shaber shoehorns brief, usually first-person, sections belonging to minor characters, ostensibly to reveal information Louise couldn’t know. Since these look as clumsy as they sound, you have to ask, Does the reader need to know? I doubt it.

Pretty much everything would have kept until Louise manages to discover it, and her ignorance could have heightened the tension, complicating her attempts to parse conflicting evidence. As it is, the story telegraphs answers to a couple major questions when, with little effort, the author might have shaded the account of events to create doubt and keep the reader guessing along with Louise.

Less glaring to the general reader, though unfortunately common in fiction, the Jewish characters don’t feel genuine, which turns them into a narrative convenience. I also object to how certain authors consistently say “Nazis” to identify those who invaded other countries and committed mass murder and expropriation, as though “ordinary” Germans distanced themselves from those crimes.

I can’t help think that the author, or her publisher, wants to separate people we like from those we can hate with abandon. Too bad. Similarly, the novel presents a likable, admirable protagonist, born and raised in North Carolina, who befriends the Black women servants in her boardinghouse without a second thought. That seems a little easy.

Nevertheless, in other ways Louise’s War brilliantly presents a city during conflict, a heroine whose voice draws you in, and a mystery that will keep you turning the pages.

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

Coping with a Tyrant: A Room Made of Leaves

03 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: A Room Made of Leaves, by Kate Grenville
Text, 2020. 317 pp. $33AU

During Sydney’s colonial infancy in the late eighteenth century, there lived John Macarthur, a man credited with introducing the sheep breed that would make Australian wool famous, and himself, a fortune. But what if he wasn’t the innovator he claimed to be, nor a gifted leader and businessman, but merely a bully on the make who got lucky? Indeed, let’s suppose that his luckiest break, though he wouldn’t have called it that, was to marry Elizabeth Veale, who left behind a diary telling what may or may not be the real story?

Portrait of Elizabeth Macarthur, artist unknown, 1794-1796, State Library of New South Wales, presented by Sir William Dixson, 1935 (via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Such is the premise Grenville spins, and what a compelling story she derives from this tight space between truth and fiction. There was no such diary, but turning Elizabeth’s letters to England on their head, Grenville imagines the meaning between the lines as opposite to their literal sense, for, after all, husband John reads them before they cross the ocean — yes, he’s that controlling, and worse.

Through the Macarthurs’ marriage, Grenville retells the story of English colonialism in Sydney, because John is a schemer, and Elizabeth, the often appalled onlooker. The author could have overplayed this and made her protagonist a progressive thinker who rails, in her head, against the maltreatment of the indigenous populations. Rather, as a feeling person, Elizabeth has the capacity to put herself in someone else’s viewpoint, but she has few illusions that she’s any more compassionate than her countrymen, because she takes no action. That criticism may exaggerate, but it’s not far-fetched, for Elizabeth, as a victim of brutality, can surely recognize that in others.

However, relations between husband and wife drive the story. Elizabeth has wit, spirit, and excellent diplomatic survival skills, but she’s had to learn them, on the fly. Her girlhood is a series of abandonments and disappointments, leavened by her beloved grandfather, who, though inflexible in his religious and moral code, encourages his granddaughter to have an inner life and to love nature. Unbeknownst to her, these are two essential weapons in her war of self-defense against her future brute of a husband.

I won’t reveal how she becomes shackled to such a blight on the human race, but I will tell you that the key pleasure in A Room Made of Leaves comes from Elizabeth’s slow but steady education. Catering to his view of her, and of women in general, she pretends to be incapable of serious thought, by which she learns to placate, flatter, outwit, and soothe John, who’s half as smart as he thinks he is. His greatest talent consists of hatching conspiracies to ruin men who haven’t treated him like “a gentleman.” As is often the case with malicious snobs, he knows he has no real claim to that status, and he takes pleasure in his successful cabals, the more vicious, the better.

He’s just as dangerous at home, where he expects complete fealty. Elizabeth takes steps not to change him — heavens, no — but to protect herself as best she can, enough to create a place in her mind where she views herself as worthy, capable, and by no means powerless. That the power largely exists in thought and outlook may not seem like much, at first glance. But Elizabeth’s triumph is that no matter how Macarthur imprisons her in his iron fist, she’s free to think what she likes. And, once in a while, to do more than that.

That’s the inner life her grandfather fostered in her. As for the nature, that’s Australia itself. Interestingly, among the few English residents of Sydney who aren’t convicts, such as the Macarthurs (he’s a military officer), practically no one besides Elizabeth even seems to notice how beautiful the land is. In one of her favorite spots, the room named in the title, she realizes how the scenery can help her spirit:

Each step [down] revealed a new marvel: a view through the bushes of a slice of harbour rough and blue like lapis, a tree with bark of such a smooth pink fleshiness that you could expect it to be warm, an overhang of rock with a fraying underside, soft as cake, that glowed yellow. The wind brought with it the salt of the ocean and the strange spicy astringency given off by the shrubs and flowers. There was an almost frightening breadth and depth and height to the place, alive with openness and the wild energy of breeze and trees and the crying gulls and the brilliant water. Alone, a speck of human in a place big enough to swallow me, I looked about with eyes that seemed open for the first time.

Since A Room Made of Leaves purports to be a diary, the chapters are very short, sometimes only a page. I’ve never liked that style of narrative, which can easily become fragmented, offering undeveloped, shallow bits. But here, Grenville creates a cohesive whole, and though the individual scenes may feel cut short, the ensemble achieves a profound depth. I recommend this novel.

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

An Island of Women: Matrix

08 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Matrix, by Lauren Groff
Riverhead, 2021. 257 pp. $28

In 1158, Queen Eleanor of England removes seventeen-year-old Marie from her court at Westminster and dispatches her as prioress to a struggling abbey. Having managed a family estate in Maine, a French province bordering Normandy and Brittany, Marie is judged to be just the person to turn the abbey into a moneymaker. Besides, the queen says, with Marie’s deep voice, huge hands, and taste for disputation, she has no feminine charm or art whatsoever, so who’d marry her?

History knows little of Marie de France, as she called herself, aside from her narrative poems set in Brittany with chivalric and fairy-tale themes, and her fables about animals. But Groff, in what must rank among the most original and vivid novels I have ever read, has reimagined Marie’s life as a feminist heroine who turns her painful banishment into unheard-of success. Deploying considerable political and social gifts, Marie attempts not only to put the abbey on sound financial footing, creating a beehive of productive activity, she aims for nothing less than making the place an island unto itself, not just free of men but of male influence altogether.

Marie de France, from an illuminated manuscript attributed to Richard of Verdun (courtesy Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Talk about a fairytale! These are the Middle Ages, when women have no say in anything, and even to suggest otherwise invites accusations of witchcraft or heresy. But Groff knows exactly what she’s doing, and she establishes this threat alongside Marie’s campaigns for freedom; as the abbey grows wealthy, enemies gather. I particularly admire how the narrative subtly employs a historical parallel between the real queen and the fictive yet plausible prioress. Eleanor, as duchess of Aquitaine, bride to two kings, mother of two others, and a political force into her dotage makes an excellent foil for Marie, whose aspirations are both greater and lesser.

Marie, who loves Eleanor and aches from her dismissal, hopes to impress her mentor and regain her favor, hence both the poems and the efforts to increase income for the crown. Marie therefore has one eye on the temporal world, the other on matters of the soul, yet carries an intense desire for approval, a depiction allowing for compelling personal and public stakes. The setup also permits Marie to receive Eleanor’s half-admiring warnings about the dangers she’s running in a world controlled by men.

Further, Groff expertly fleshes out Marie’s biography, casting her as an illegitimate child of royal rape, which has repercussions throughout the story. (The text implies that the rapist was Stephen, the Plantagenet king eventually succeeded by Henry II, Eleanor’s future second husband.) As an infant, Marie accompanied her mother on Crusade, which gives her needed cachet at the abbey — you can imagine the nuns wonder how a seventeen-year-old can presume lead them. They don’t wonder long.

But the real genius of Matrix involves the re-creation of medieval thought and belief regarding the use and abuse of power, the difference between human goodness and a leader’s greatness, how civilizations rise and fall, and a woman’s place in making history. Marie has visions, ornate religious dramas whose recounting conveniently allow her to promote schemes otherwise considered heretical. But she also explores the emotional and moral spaces where no one else even thinks to go. For instance, when she comforts a bellowing cow whose calf has been taken from her, her physical bond with the beast makes her wonder if that’s the closest she’s come to seeing God.

From the first line, the prose will spirit you away. Take any passage you like — any — but for argument’s sake, consider this one, when Marie intends to send her poems to Eleanor:

She will send her manuscript as a blazing arrow toward her love, and when it strikes, it will set that cruel heart on fire. Eleanor will relent. Marie will be allowed back to the court, to the place where none ever starve, and there is always music and dogs and birds and life, when at dusk the gardens are full of lovers and flowers and intrigue, where Marie can practice her languages and hear in the halls the fiery tails of new ideas shooting through conversations. Not just the tripartite god of parent and child and ghost who is talked about here, not all this endless work and prayer and hunger.

How Marie surrenders this fantasy to adopt the daily task of tending the women around her so that they realize their true natures and abilities makes stirring fiction. (She struggles hard but subtly against what men have said about women; note that in this narrative, the word god is never capitalized.) The title, a clever play on words, suggests what Groff is after. At the abbey, the healer, for instance, is the infirmatrix, and the scribe, the scriptorix. So it follows that the mother is the matrix, which also means “originator.” You may take that figuratively or literally.

Matrix is a finalist for the National Book Award. Next week, we’ll find out whether it’s the winner, but either way, read this novel.

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