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Tag Archives: First World War

Commission for Relief in Belgium, Part II

09 Thursday Feb 2023

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Americans, Belgium, Commission for Relief in Belgium, CRB, First World War, Lonely Are the Brave, military occupation

In Lonely Are the Brave, my novel due out in April, a war hero warmly recalls parading through Brussels in December 1918 to celebrate the city’s liberation from four years of German occupation.

Belgians had a soft spot for Americans too. The Commission for Relief in Belgium, which fed the country throughout the war, placed American delegates in major towns and cities, mostly collegians on leave of absence.

This CRB poster, 1917-19, requested donations of clothing for Belgium and northern France, by that time also receiving relief (courtesy National Archives, College Par, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

CRB delegates were essentially glorified accountants who pored over cargo manifests and inventory sheets while having to fight their way through red tape and withstand hazing by German soldiers convinced they were spies. Berlin tolerated the CRB as a means to keep Belgium placid and for public-relations value. But in Belgium, that tolerance wore thin.

The CRB never violated its neutrality pledge, but that didn’t matter. CRB vehicles drew cheers from Belgians, which annoyed the occupiers, as did the Americans’ casual confidence. As one delegate wrote, “The German stalks about Belgium as if he owned the country and the American as if he did not care who owned it.”

I can just see those twenty-somethings excited by the power to act for a humanitarian project the like of which history had never seen—and bearing witness to a military occupation the outside world knew only by rumor.

As far as I know, the CRB story has never been told in fiction—I’m working on that now—but I’ve also got a book coming out in a couple months. It’ll be a while!

The Commission for Relief in Belgium

12 Thursday Jan 2023

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1914, Belgium, blockade, CRB, First World War, German Army, Herbert Hoover, Lonely Are the Brave, military occupation, Royal Navy

In Lonely Are the Brave, my novel due out in April, a war hero warmly recalls his most meaningful moment of service, parading through Brussels in December 1918 to celebrate the city’s liberation from four years of German occupation.

Why the Belgians chose an American regiment that had spent mere weeks fighting on their soil rather than French or British units that had fought for years, speaks to political loyalties. I suspect that Herbert Hoover’s gift had much to do with the decision.

In autumn 1914, after German forces had overrun nearly all Belgium and the British had blockaded the North Sea, Belgium was sealed off from the outside world. Famine threatened.

The young mining engineer in Perth, Western Australia, 1898, photographer unknown (courtesy State Library of Western Australia, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Hoover, a wealthy mining engineer who happened to be in London, vowed to act–and by telling Britain and German leaders that public opinion would blame them if Belgium starved, he convinced them to let him attempt to feed a nation under military occupation. His Commission for Relief in Belgium, paid for by private charity and administered in-country by young Americans as neutral citizens, captured imaginations around the world.

The CRB saw seven million Belgians through the war and, in 1916, added three million French people in German-occupied territory to the program. To feed them all, day in, day out, the CRB brought in millions of tons of wheat, corn, dried peas and beans, powdered milk, and other basics. These were rations, calories for survival, bare sustenance.

But to Belgium, the Americans’ presence brought another precious commodity: hope of liberation.

More to come.

A Story Ordained: The Yellow House

28 Monday Nov 2022

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book review, Catholic vs Protestant, characters as types, dispossession, First World War, historical fiction, Ireland, Irish Civil War, love for land, northern Ireland, Patricia Falvey, predictable plot, religious strife, romance, romantic revolutionaries, twentieth century

Review: The Yellow House, by Patricia Falvey
Center Street/Hachette, 2009. 333 pp. $18

Eight-year-old Eileen O’Neill of Glenlea, northern Ireland, feels secure, despite tense adult conversation swirling around her in summer 1905. After all, her doting father has, on a whim, brought home pots of yellow paint for their house and turns the painting into a game. Also, the house sits beneath a mountain of physical and spiritual beauty that represents her proud heritage. Eileen has so much to be thankful for. Even if Da seems to have trouble making the family farm pay, the warmth of home outweighs potential threats.

But the Catholic O’Neills live in county Armagh, dominated by Protestants, the more aggressive of whom think nothing of seizing Catholic property or chasing Catholic laborers out of jobs Protestants might want. And when personal misfortunes strike the family, life comes crashing down around their ears.

Michael Collins, the charismatic Irish nationalist, addresses a crowd in Cork on St. Patrick’s Day, 1922 (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The Yellow House follows Eileen’s checkered adolescent years and young adulthood through the First World War and the civil war that follows, including her employment at a spinning mill, and her attraction to two older men. There’s James Conlon, a passionate nationalist whose fire appeals to her; she appreciates a fighter, since her family claims warrior ancestry. Then there’s Owen Sheridan, scion to the Quaker mill owner, the opposite of James—measured, sensitive, harder to define, and steadier. He’s also out of bounds, as a Protestant and member of the industrial gentry.

Falvey does best, I think, conveying a society craving a place to belong, hence the value assigned to home and land, and the violence that’s partly a response to dispossession. I can recall only a couple historical novels published here about the Irish civil war, so The Yellow House helps fill that void. I particularly like how she portrays the hard-nosed romantic revolutionaries, who act as though the end always justifies the means, and who love a martyr’s funeral. She renders the mill workers with care as well; these people are trying to get by, thrive on gossip, and will skewer anybody who sticks out from the herd. Eileen provides a ready target.

Occasionally, the prose touches poetry, as with this description of her beloved mountain:

Her summer robe of bracken so thick now would soon be in tatters, exposing the scars and furrows on her surface. Crevasses formed millions of years ago by the ice age would be exposed, crossing her face like ancient wrinkles. But now the last of the summer flowers and grasses clothed her in a colorful robe. A rabbit darted past, and in the distance, waterfowl cried from the many lakes.

But overall, the novel disappoints. Eileen, though not a complex character, at least lives in an intriguing predicament, and you want her to find happiness. Theresa, her closest friend, comes through just enough. But the central male characters are types with fewer facets, the firebrand James especially. Perhaps that’s because the narrative often tells what qualities they have, and how Eileen feels afterward, sometimes in a list—anger, joy, etc. Maybe other readers don’t mind that approach, perhaps even find it helpful, but I feel cheated, fobbed off by a generic description. Why should I care, if the author doesn’t?

To her credit, Falvey smashes her heroine hard; Eileen suffers many painful reverses. I wish, though, they were less predictable, didn’t feel ordained. To cite a minor example, the night Da brings home the yellow paint, he’s forgotten the flour and meat his wife wanted. Fun but irresponsible, you think; and sure enough, paragraphs later, he reveals he’s sold some acreage without telling her. Since he’s a recognizable type (and never surprises), you expect the troubles that follow. He’s not strong enough to make a contingency plan or resist effectively. Besides, what drags him down has been dropped into conversation, so it’s inevitable.

At first, I wondered whether Falvey was trying to create a fatalistic universe in which tragedy is inescapable; but no. However often Eileen tells herself that as a poor, Catholic woman she has no standing, she acts differently. She’s a scrapper, never seriously embraces the chance that her circumstances might trap her forever. Nor does she reflect overmuch on her hard life, even less on choices she’s made. When things go wrong, she shouts her anger and pain—she shouts frequently—but moves on afterward in haste. She expresses shock at her reverses, but I’m not convinced; it’s as though she knows what’s in store.

This sense of life ordained bleeds into the historical background. Falvey has people anticipate general European war, not only in 1914 but years beforehand, and speak of it in terms nobody used back then and with prescience they couldn’t have possessed. But careless historical research doesn’t undo The Yellow House. What hurts this novel are the generic characters and situations, such that you don’t need tea leaves to guess where the story will go next.

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

Parenting advice, World War I era

14 Thursday Jul 2022

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First World War, L. Emmett Holt, Lonely Are the Brave, novel, parenting, parenting advice, pasteurization, regimented childrearing, United States

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

My protagonist, Rollie Birch, returns from Over There in 1919 and scandalizes the town that reveres him as a war hero by choosing to raise his infant daughter by himself. So I looked for a parenting book from those years to see what advice the experts were dishing out.

The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses, appeared in multiple editions before, during, and after the war, the most popular guide of its time. The author, L. Emmett Holt, MD, offered rigorous instructions for pasteurizing raw milk—the only kind available—at 155˚ F. for thirty minutes, in which case you had to use it within twenty-four hours, or boiled one hour, in which case the milk would keep two or three weeks.

Luther Emmett Holt, MD, eminent pediatrician, championed pasteurization, unusual for his time, and eugenics, a more mainstream position (no date; courtesy National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Either way, the stuff must have tasted mighty appetizing. Such were the days before flash heating, but you had no choice; back then, so many babies died from milk containing pathogens.

As for hands-on childcare, Holt counseled feeding on a strict schedule and deplored the instinct to pick up a fussing infant; no healthy baby, he averred, would cry for more than twenty minutes. (Rollie’s daughter ignores this rule.) Further, the doctor warned against playing with children younger than six months, which would make them nervous and irritable, and disliked the notion of playing with infants at all.

Perhaps not surprisingly, he cautioned against kissing infants, even on the cheek or forehead, for fear of transmitting diphtheria, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other diseases.

Rollie reads this and laughs.

Conspiracy on the Western Front: From a Dark Horizon

23 Monday May 2022

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1918, Bolshevism, book review, coming-of-age narrative, conspiracy, cover-up, faithful to history, First World War, Germany, historical fiction, home front, Luke McCallin, murder, mystery/thriller, no and furthermore, superb characterization, war-weariness

Review: From a Dark Horizon, by Luke McCallin
Berkley, 2021. 505 pp. $28

As summer parches the despoiled earth of northwestern France in 1918, young Lieutenant Gregor Reinhardt, Seventeenth Prussian Fusiliers, has fought both east and west. A blooded warrior who commands a company of men older than himself, he senses the cause is lost but fights hard because that’s what he must do, and because he’s loyal to his comrades.

Consequently, when a booby-trap explodes at a divisional staff meeting behind the lines, killing several senior officers, and a soldier he recommended for a battlefield commission is blamed for the deaths and quickly executed, Reinhardt can’t sit with this. Receiving tacit permission to investigate from a sympathetic colonel — not that he would have twiddled his thumbs otherwise — the nineteen-year-old lieutenant begins to ask questions.

No sooner has he done so than he falls into a rabbit hole of conspiracy and murder, with blood having blood to eliminate witnesses; sometimes, he’s the target. After all, he served on the Eastern Front, where he came in contact with Russian soldiers infected by defeatist, socialist ideals, and the protégé executed for the booby-trap explosion was known to be insubordinate, radical, and a malcontent. So Reinhardt’s the perfect fall guy.

Participants in the conspiracy, whose goal and breadth he can’t penetrate at first, appear to include very senior commanders, deserters, Bolsheviks, doctors treating shell-shocked soldiers, dissenters, and, pervading all, the frustration and anger at a war that continues to chew up and spit out lives, though there can be no hope of German victory. The narrative therefore makes an unusual coming-of-age story of a young man trying to live morally where few, if any, morals exist. You may also read the novel as a labyrinthine thriller or mystery, with qualities of each, which will keep you guessing until the last page. But from whatever standpoint you approach it, From a Dark Horizon is first-rate First World War fiction.

Start with Reinhardt, who, despite his experience and responsibility, is still just an adolescent, truculent and earnest, occasionally pompous when he spouts principles, a character whose actions don’t always match his good intentions. Human, in other words. Most others around him have their facets too; I particularly like his sergeant, fiercely loyal but also brutally honest, and a mercurial captain who seems wildly unpredictable and who Reinhardt thinks is on his side but can’t be sure.

McCallin also displays an impressive command of the battlefield, rest area, home front, chain of command, you name it. No detail escapes his eye, and everything feels authentic, something rare in First World War novels. Consider this passage, one of many that bring the scene alive while also conveying feeling:

There were convoys bearing food and others bearing straw and hay. There were water convoys, and convoys of medical supplies, and long trains of horses and mules being driven up as replacements for those at the front. Troops hunched forward, each man heavy with equipment, shovels and helmets or metal spikes or rolls of wire clanking on their backs. Officers rode in limousines, and huge steam-driven tractors dragged monstrous howitzers. The noise was deafening, and the air was choked with dust. Sometimes singing would intermittently drown out the neighing of the horses and the clatter of harness and the bone-deep throb of motors, but the songs were few and the men marched to a different, darker tune than they had marched to in the spring of that year.

McCallin, who follows the history faithfully, re-creates the mood of both army and home front. He conveys the weariness for sacrifice that seems to have no purpose, the grumblings of revolution, and the political maneuvering to cast blame once the war finally ends. I admire this panorama very much, both for its historical grasp and adept fictional portrayal.

These German sailors, among others, mutinied at Kiel in November 1918. The uprising, which ignited unrest around the country, led within days to the armistice (courtesy German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I like the thriller/mystery aspect as well, though several twists toward the end feel rather convenient, with fortuitous arrivals of powerful characters. One such character in particular, who seems to slide in and out of his ability to process what’s happening around him, is too helpful to the story as well. Even so, “no — and furthermore” bleeds through the pages, for whenever Reinhardt discovers the next link in the chain of conspiracy, that person typically winds up dead.

Enough bodies fall (more from foul play than combat) to staff a platoon, and the Byzantine links among them necessitate frequent recapitulations, usually in the form of Reinhardt explaining what he’s learned, and how. From a Dark Horizon, though its pages turn rapidly, can be talky at times.

This volume marks the last in the wartime series about Reinhardt’s exploits. But in his afterword, McCallin promises that his hero will have further adventures in the 1920s. I’m ready.

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

Lucky Seven: Another Blog Birthday

25 Monday Oct 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tormented Souls: The White Feather Killer

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1914, book review, deductive reasoning, England, feminism, First World War, great metropolis, historical fiction, London, mystery, R. N. Morris, Scotland Yard, sexism, shaming of men by women, superb characterization, war hysteria, xenophobia

Review: The White Feather Killer, by R. N. Morris
Severn, 2019. 284 pp. $29

Like many young men in London in summer 1914, Felix Simpkins feels the tug to serve king and country by enlisting in the crusade against the Germans. It would be the only individual act Felix can think of, the sole rebellious gesture against his emasculating mother (and typically self-defeating), but he can’t quite bring himself to, which flattens his self-esteem even further and risks public shame. For in these mad days when the populace has become intoxicated by jingoism and xenophobia, women of patriotic temperament press white feathers, a sign of cowardice, into the hands of physically fit men not in uniform.

Edgar J. Kealey’s 1915 recruiting poster contrasts the feminine softness within the window and the hard masculinity outside–and manipulates men and women both (courtesy British Library)

Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Silas Quinn of Scotland Yard feels unsettled too, for other reasons. He’s just returned from psychological sick leave, which has further damaged his reputation among police officers of all ranks, many of whom resent him for his brilliance as a detective, his independent methods, and his insistence on truth rather than convenience. Apparently, the resentment goes right to the top, for Quinn has been relieved from command of a special crimes unit and been relegated to a pen-pushing job in which no one need pay attention to him, except to note his lapses.

Military security now requires keen focus on enemies within. Guilt no longer matters. If a crime takes place, arrest someone of German lineage, connections, or alleged sympathies. Justice will be served, and the public, placated. Naturally, this directive rubs Quinn the wrong way. And when he hears that a minister’s daughter has been killed shortly after a patriotic meeting at her father’s church — at which women collected white feathers to hand out — he itches to solve the case. But he’s forbidden to; and the men who’ve supplanted him are watching, waiting for him to step out of line.

Morris excels at characterization, historical atmosphere, the requisite “no — and furthermore,” and the craft of whodunit, with which he keeps you guessing until the end. So many scenes in his novel start out one way and shoot off unexpectedly in another, the essence of tension, because something touches a nerve in his legion of fragile people. Some readers may find these tortured souls off-putting, and I admit, the near-universal willingness to abuse others creates a bleak mood. But the rewards here are many, not least an unvarnished portrayal of police work in 1914, and a similar depiction of a great metropolis straining at its bounds. The famous English credo of decency and fair play seldom applies; that’s an ideal, existing mostly in Quinn’s mind and nowhere else. But with one notable exception, Morris lets his flawed people strive for connection, which shows their fullness and lets you feel for them.

Exhibit A here is Quinn, who’s difficult in his way, though not cruel. He’d like to unburden himself if he could, and his impulses are decent and generous, but he can’t always express them. A psychologically minded detective among colleagues for whom perception and deduction are blunt instruments, he comes across to them as cocksure, even arrogant, yet inside, he’s anything but. Whether it’s his halting overtures to a pretty police secretary or his reluctance to return to the house of a former landlady who realizes he needs care, Quinn makes an unusual male detective, vulnerable and cerebral at once.

The White Feather Killer also conveys London in war fever, whether it’s spy mania or naked anxiety about the adventure that has just begun:

The world had suddenly become a dangerous and uncertain place. A drastic shift in perspective had brought Death into the foreground; the dim figure on the horizon, drifting in and out of sight, had become an insistent, looming presence, so close its stinking, clammy breath could be felt on the back of the neck. Sons and brothers, husbands and fathers, in answering the call to the colours, had brought this dark stranger into the family.

Morris allows himself deeper, more rounded descriptions and motivations than many mystery writers, yet you never feel disconnected or impatient with the narrative. Quite the contrary; I wish more mystery writers trusted themselves (and their readers) to write like this. My only complaint centers on Coddington, Quinn’s nemesis within the police; he’s the notable exception to the generosity granted the other characters. The psychological portrait remains blurry, so I don’t know much about Coddington, except that he’s unreasonably jealous and pigheaded.

The White Feather Killer delivers a terrific story with fully realized characters and an authentic historical background, depicted with precise care. Bravo.

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

Looking for Meaning: The Cartographer of No Man’s Land

16 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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artist at war, book review, camaraderie at war, Canadian Expeditionary Force, fatherhood, First World War, historical fiction, home front, inner lives, literary fiction, Nova Scotia, P.S. Duffy, parallel narratives, search for oneself, Vimy Ridge

Review: The Cartographer of No Man’s Land, by P. S. Duffy
Liveright, 2013. 366 pp. $26

There’s no real reason for Angus MacGrath, a Nova Scotia coastal shipping captain, to enlist in the Canadian Expeditionary Force in 1916. Canada has no conscription; Angus, a onetime seminarian, has a wife and teenage boy; he’s an artist, so the natural beauty of his home matters to him; and there’s no pressure to join up. In fact, his father, Duncan, is a pacifist, so Angus should be primed to sit out the war.

Yet Angus’s brother-in-law, his closest friend, has been missing in action in France, and Angus wishes to search for him. An officer Angus knows assures him that his mapmaking skills will secure him a desk job in London, from which he figures to make inquiries. Nobody’s happy. Duncan’s furious, and Hettie Ellen, Angus’s withdrawn wife, gives merely tacit approval, hardly a rousing endorsement. Their son, Simon, who craves closeness from his father, tries to keep a stiff upper lip.

Turns out there’s no room in the cartography department—who could have guessed?—and Angus is made a lieutenant of infantry, a job for which he’s unprepared. However, to his surprise, he becomes a capable field leader, befriends his brother officers despite his natural aloofness, and gains the respect of his men. Gradually, his search for his brother-in-law takes on epic proportions.

Richard Jack’s painting, ca. 1918, The Taking of Vimy Ridge, Easter Monday 1917, suggests a stylized version of a nineteenth-century battlefield, too clean and romantic to represent war accurately in any era (courtesy Canadian War Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States and Canada)

Meanwhile, back in Nova Scotia, Simon tries to assert his independence, especially from his tyrannical grandfather, Duncan. Simon keeps a scrapbook of newspaper articles on the war and casts his father as a hero. He also befriends his favorite teacher, a German-born polymath, testament to the tolerance he’s learned at home and his ability to think for himself. Ominously, Simon’s friends and neighbors show neither quality.

The Cartographer of No Man’s Land is a lovely novel, the more remarkable for being Duffy’s first; and as a historian of the First World War and its fiction, I can attest to its authenticity. Duffy has researched her ground meticulously, but, as I’ve said before, spending years in libraries and archives doesn’t guarantee a gripping narrative. Still, I defy anyone to find a dull, wasted page in this extraordinary tale. And much as I salute the author’s impressive grasp of detail, it’s how she deploys her knowledge that counts. Moreover, her seductive prose takes you by the hand and shows you what she wants you to see, as in this scene at a French estaminet:

Sweat, damp wool and liquor suffused the air as talk turned to the wonder of nurses, spotted that morning in their blue capes, managing to look wholesome, healthy and entirely unapproachable. Having stayed far longer than he’d intended, Angus headed for the latrine. Jostled in line, he thought back to the upper room in London — a sanctuary of measures, grids, coordinates and intersecting lines of longitude and latitude — where the cartographers he’d hoped to join bent over their stereoscopes, transforming aerial photographs into maps. There was something elemental and pristine about it, the careful, dispassionate execution, that called up the calming effect of drawing his birds — a tamping down of emotions too deeply felt. Sorry as he’d been not to join them, he was glad now not to have been part of their remote, sterile world.

Duffy effortlessly captures the camaraderie of men at war, the search for meaning amid the violence, the tension and release of battle. Even readers who shy away from such stories may find much to keep them glued to this one. For those interested, Duffy has re-created the Battle of Vimy Ridge in Arras, a source of such national pride in Canada that she feared to tackle it, she writes. However, her authorial bravery pays off, and the novel must rank among the best from recent years about the First World War.

Oddly, though, her home-front narrative feels somewhat less compelling. It belongs, because Duffy links the parallel journeys of father and son, as each strives to understand who he is. But Duffy’s soldiers steal the show, hands down. Hettie Ellen’s inner life never comes through (perhaps Angus might agree), and none of the women leave an echo behind them, except one in a cameo role. They’re not stick figures, by any means, just less full than the fighters. The home-front men do better than the women, but few have much scope, and though the Canada story has its moments, it doesn’t reach as high.

Nevertheless, The Cartographer of No Man’s Land is a very fine novel and an excellent addition to First World War literature.

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

Sixth Census: Another Blog Birthday

26 Monday Oct 2020

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Andrew Miller, Angie Cruz, book reviews, Caroline Scott, England, First World War, France, Hilary Mantel, historical fiction, Holocaust, Iain Pears, immigrants, inner lives, Ireland, Isabella Hammad, Italy, James Meek, Jennifer Rosner, literary fiction, London, Mariah Fredericks, Mary Doria Russell, mystery fiction, New York, Niall Williams, Oxford, Palestine, Poland, Robert Harris, thrillers, Tudors

Today, Novelhistorian is six years old, and as I do every anniversary, I recap my dozen or so favorites from the past twelve months.

Start with Dominicana, by Angie Cruz, which brings you to a time and place seldom seen in mainstream historical fiction, an upper Manhattan barrio in 1965. A child-bride essentially sold off by a scheming mother as the family’s ticket out of Dominican Republic must cope with a strange, hostile city; a tight-fisted, abusive husband; and the knowledge that the country in which she now lives is abusing her homeland too. She’s a compelling heroine of a heart-rending story, but it’s her toughness and ingenuity that raise this immigrant’s narrative several notches.

Isabella Hammad, in The Parisian, tells of a young medical student from Palestine who travels to France for his education in 1914 (and to escape conscription by the Ottoman authorities). Abroad, he loses himself in freedoms he never dreamed of, and his return to Palestine causes shock waves within him, echoing the nationalist politics in which he’s involved. Both he and his country are looking for liberation, but neither knows how to go about it. Hammad tells her story in a florid, languorous style reminiscent of Flaubert and Stendhal in its fixation on small moments and one person’s biography as a window on a time and place. The book nearly founders in its first 150 pages, but stay with it, and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Robert Harris never stops dreaming up new ways to recount history through fiction, and A Second Sleep is no exception. Genre-bending, yet steeped in his bold narrative approach, in spare yet evocative prose, this thriller brings you to what seems like fifteenth-century England. But the struggle between free thought and religious teaching, human frailty and temptation will work in any time period—and if I sound vague, it’s deliberate, because this novel works best if you let it creep up on you, with little foreknowledge. The pages exhale history like a subtle, authoritative scent; prepare to be intoxicated.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free takes place in 1809, and Andrew Miller’s thriller differs from the ordinary too, but in an unusual way: It’s delicate. Few books in this genre indulge in lush, patient description, yet these pages turn quickly, thanks to Miller’s active prose, brilliant storytelling, and ingenious concept, a manhunt for a man who’s also searching for himself. Inner life matters here, for heroes and villains both, a refreshing change, when cardboard bad guys abound in fiction. The romance between a traumatized soldier with blood on his conscience and a freethinking woman who sees through him but is losing her eyesight will make you marvel, not least because the reader perceives them more clearly than they do one another.

For a different mood entirely, I propose This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, a love song to the rural Ireland of 1957. The narrative hinges, among other things, on chronic rain stopping for no apparent reason, the arrival of electricity, the character of the new priest in town, and the power of storytelling, all seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old who’s just quit the seminary. Warmth, humor, and melodic prose turn a long series of small events into a large story. I almost put this book down several times but always went back—it will seduce you, if you let it. As the narrator observes, “Sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration,” and everyone in town has their own approach to it. Worth the price of admission: a description of a first love, hilarious and painful, practically on a physiological level.

When it comes to First World War fiction, I’m a stickler for accuracy, whether we’re talking about events, attitudes, or characters true to their time. Come the week of Armistice Day, I’ll be writing a column on my all-time faves, but for now, consider The Poppy Wife, by Caroline Scott. She gets everything right, partly a function of her PhD in history but also how she treats that discipline as a living, breathing entity. She offers a superb premise, in which a woman sets out in 1921 to search for a husband presumed dead in battle but never found. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law, who served alongside the missing man, tries not to reveal that he loves her, just as he tried not to let his brother know. Not an ounce of sentimentality taints this narrative, which deploys power and psychological complexity, showing how survivors can be lost as well as the dead, and how perception and memory can twist even what we’re sure of.

Mariah Fredericks captures the upper-crust social world of 1912 New York (and the gritty life of the less fortunate) in Death of a New American. A lady’s maid, enraged by the senseless murder of an Italian immigrant nanny, whose only fault was to love the children she tended, sets her sights on justice. The sleuth’s quest naturally puts her at odds with the posh family she works for, one of the Four Hundred. However, she’s clever and indefatigable, and she’s seen too much of life to be earnest, which is even better. This splendid mystery, which will keep you guessing, deals with xenophobia, gang violence, the disparities of social class, and the workings of the yellow press—Fredericks knows New York of that era inside out. I wish I’d discovered this series sooner.

Hilary Mantel needs no introduction, nor does The Mirror & the Light, the final volume of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s counselor of common birth. Fiction at its finest, the novel explores the pitfalls and attractions of power while recounting how a gifted politician attempts to keep a childish, make-the-earth-stand-still monarch from destroying himself and his kingdom. There’s plenty of intrigue and backstabbing—we’re talking about Tudor England—but, as usual, Mantel raises the bar. Cromwell’s a master psychologist and political strategist, and, through his eyes, you see a nation grappling with how to escape medieval mayhem and derive a more fitting social template for an increasingly modern age. A timeless story, in other words.

The Yellow Bird Sings an enthralling, heart-breaking song of the Holocaust, and Jennifer Rosner, making an impressive debut here, is an author to watch. The premise is almost a trope by now—in 1941 Poland, a Jewish widow, who has sacrificed so much for her very young daughter just to keep them both alive, faces a terrible choice. She must decide whether to flee alone into the forest, handing her child over to a Catholic orphanage, or to travel with the little girl, who’s too young to have a sense of danger or the stamina to confront it. But Rosner convincingly makes this premise her own; her prose, active descriptions, and sense of her characters’ inner lives make a riveting, moving tale. The little girl possesses no flaws other than those typical of her age, but that idealized portrayal is the only real blemish in a novel that protects no one and whitewashes nothing. Throughout, the author uses music as the means by which the oppressed and hunted may find beauty, though the world at large couldn’t be uglier.

Perhaps the most original novel on this list, which is saying something, To Calais, in Ordinary Time, is James Meek’s plague narrative of fourteenth-century England. His portrayal sounds almost prophetic, published a few months before the pandemic. But that’s just for starters. As one wise character says, “Love is whatever remains once one has made an accommodation with fate”—and accommodation is precisely what nobody’s looking for. The central female character, the daughter of the manor, flees home to escape a forced marriage, seeking her less-than-chivalric lover, whom she expects to behave like the hero of a book she’s read. The central male character, a young peasant, has abandoned the same manor to serve as an archer at Calais, expecting to gain the right to live anywhere he likes—and learns the word freedom, which he’s never heard before. Speaking of words, Meek recounts much of his narrative in archaic language, rhythm, and syntax, with loving artistry and much humor, an impressive re-creation of the period.

A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell’s sprawling Holocaust novel about northwestern Italy from 1943 onward, is a gripping narrative of escape, resistance, and reprisal. The characters, who have known hardship in this hardscrabble region, possess infinite patience and resourcefulness and have learned to expect reversals and the unexpected. My favorite is a former pilot who pickles himself in alcohol and masterminds the local resistance, passing as a German businessman one day, and a tradesman or a priest the next—pretty neat, because he’s Jewish. But many characters win laurels here, and how they manage to live and sometimes love despite terror and hardship will leave a lasting impression. At the same time, Russell pulls no punches—she never does—so this is the war as it really was, not how Hollywood would have it.

Finally, An Instance of the Fingerpost depicts the combat between science and superstition in seventeenth-century England, and what a yarn Iain Pears spins. The same crime visited from several different perspectives, each narrator accusing the others of being unreliable, reveals the punishments inflicted by the self-styled righteous, thanks to their unshakable belief in faulty logic. A brilliant thriller about the nature of truth, this novel has much to say, and says it with insight, high drama, and humor, not least to skewer the disagreeable, smug, hidebound, and cruel behavior rampant in England. As a dead-on satire, the book carries a strongly feminist message, but by demonstration, not soapbox (an approach I wish other authors imitated). In Pears’s world, as in ours, men perceive women through the lens of their own weaknesses, and it’s no secret who suffers most.

I call these books the cream of this year’s harvest. I invite you to the reading feast!

Metaphor for England: The Shooting Party

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1913, book review, characterization, elegant premise, England, First World War, historical fiction, hunting as metaphor, Isabel Colegate, literary fiction, mechanized killing, Oxfordshire, snobbery, social class

Review: The Shooting Party, by Isabel Colegate
Viking, 1980. 195 pp.

As he does every October, in 1913, Sir Randolph Nettleby, Bart., invites some of the best shots in England to his Oxfordshire estate to shoot pheasant. The activity has a particular meaning here, for we don’t expect tweed-coated gentlemen to trample through the underbrush in their wellingtons, bagging a few birds for supper. Rather, we have the spectacle of “beaters,” local men and boys recruited to flush the pheasant so that the frightened birds take brief flight — the only type they are capable of — toward the tweed-coated gentlemen, waiting with their loaders and dogs. Not that the participants would agree, but this is more mechanized killing than sport. The shooters take hundreds of birds, and the loaders are there to make sure the gentlemen never even have to turn their heads to receive a ready weapon, restocked with cartridges.

Snowden Slights, a Yorkshire huntsman, sometime between 1900 and 1912, by Sydney Harold Smith (or collaborators). A very different picture from the organized shoots on estates at the time. (courtesy Yorkshire Museum, York, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The novel’s opening paragraph notes that an infamous incident will take place, “an error of judgment which resulted in a death.” And since the timing is the autumn before the Great War, Colegate intends The Shooting Party as a metaphor for England on the eve of that tragic struggle.

What a metaphor it is, slaughter for its own sake, by the so-called best people in the country, no less. That the death referred to is a mistake, and that the author reveals it up front, properly removes any sense of whodunit, though the narrative does build suspense as to who will be the victim, how, and why. Instead, Colegate focuses on the characters, who represent various social classes and attitudes.

In lesser hands, this premise and approach could have devolved into a talky, theme-driven tract, populated by two-dimensional ideas rather than characters. But Colegate writes well-drawn people whose private concerns merge beautifully in a single, cohesive picture, and whose opinions often seem contradictory, which makes them more human.

For example, Sir Randolph, courteous to all despite his oft-injured sensibilities, worries that the stewards of the land, as he views himself, are a vanishing breed. Outwardly almost diffident, he nevertheless carries himself as the aristocrat born to rule, and his confusion as to how the world has changed lends him depth. Stolid Bob Lilburn, who believes in form above all, astonishes his gorgeous wife, Olivia, by doubting that there could exist in England any people worth knowing whom he doesn’t already know. Lionel Stephens, a lawyer who seems perfect to everyone, believes he’s passionately in love with Olivia and would be willing to die for her if the fraught international situation brought war. A footman repeats this sentiment to the young parlor maid he fancies, who has the sense to think it’s twaddle.

Throughout, Colegate’s description of the shoot evokes the future conflict, often involving the manner in which the birds, fed and catered to before their destruction, are driven toward the guns. Again, a lesser author might have overplayed the symbolism, but Colegate’s hand remains deft. That’s because she’s careful to keep her descriptions active as well as physically and visually precise. Consider, for instance, how she portrays a poacher waiting to enter the woods once the gentry have finished their initial shoot of the weekend:

Tom waited until they were nearly all out of sight, and until the gold of the late afternoon had been succeeded by the soft pinkish-grey of the early dusk before he moved. The mist was now rising much more noticeably from the ground, still low but thickening, beginning to spread a layer of damp haze which in the morning would linger on the lower ground like spilt milk, while the sky above it became the pale clear blue of another late October day.

Though published forty years ago, The Shooting Party still keeps its edge. It’s one of those elegant novels I admire, in which the central action is itself an arresting metaphor. I must warn you that other than from a library (or sources in the UK), the book may be hard to find. But it is well worth your time and effort, a classic tale.

Disclaimer: I pulled this book off my shelf because it deserves a revisit, as does the feeling these days of holding printed pages in my hands.

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