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~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: literary fiction

Good, Evil, and Hope: Deacon King Kong

18 Monday Jan 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1960s, 1969, Black lives, book review, Brooklyn, community, drug traffic, historical fiction, housing project, humor, James McBride, literary fiction, New York City, police, racism, religion, rich language

Review: Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Riverhead, 2020. 370 pp. $28

Few people even know his real name, because he never uses it. Even the police confuse him with someone else, because he shares a driver’s license with another man, which makes his official record almost untraceable. But to the residence of the Causeway Housing Projects (the Cause) in south Brooklyn, he’s Sportcoat, because of the colorful assortment he wears of that garment.

His finest moment came umpiring the Cause baseball team, now disbanded. These days, the former deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church spends his time high on King Kong, the popular name for a friend’s moonshine, and talks to his late wife, Hettie. Or thinks he does, and nobody can persuade him otherwise.

Except that in summer 1969, Sportcoat shoots Deems, a teenage kingpin of the Cause drug traffic, and his former baseball protégé, at point-blank range. Sportcoat claims not to have understood what he was doing, but nobody believes that, least of all, the police. But he’s the type of character who doesn’t care what anybody thinks, alternately perplexing, amusing, and horrifying everyone else.

From that shooting springs a complicated, finely woven story, involving Five Ends, cheese deliveries, storytelling as an art form, the racism that warps life in the projects, unlikely romances, what constitutes good in the face of so much evil, and how humans dare to hope.

A portion of the Red Hook Houses project, south Brooklyn, as it appeared in 2012 at Lorraine and Henry Streets (courtesy Jim Henderson via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But I’d be doing Deacon King Kong a disservice if I failed to mention what a rollicking good time the novel is. Pick almost any paragraph, and you’ll find sprawling, delicious sentences like these, oozing with spicy flavor:

Meanwhile Sister Bibb, the voluptuous church organist, who at fifty-five years old was thick-bodied, smooth and brown as a chocolate candy bar, arrived in terrible shape. She was coming off her once-a-year sin jamboree, an all-night, two-fisted, booze-guzzling, swig-faced affair of delicious tongue-in-groove licking and love-smacking with her sometimes boyfriend, Hot Sausage, until Sausage withdrew from the festivities for lack of endurance.

And for those who appreciate snappy dialogue, look no further. What in the Sixties we used to call “rank-outs” or “snaps” appear here in a poetic form guaranteed to prompt laughter. For instance: “But that idiot’s so dumb he lights up a room by leaving it.” Or: “Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare.” McBride has a superb ear and inventive pen, which makes the narrative a delightful ride.

For the first two chapters, McBride even goes a little too far, I think, unraveling so many stories within stories, and with such far-ranging flights of verbal fancy, that I worried. I thought reading Deacon King Kong would be like eating an entire tub of caramel pecan ice cream in a half-hour, past my limit. But the narrative settles down somewhat, to the extent that it does, and McBride’s storytelling skills come to the fore.

Every spoonful matters, as details you might have glossed over come back to play important roles. Characters cross paths in natural yet unexpected ways, and points of view transition gracefully from one to other. Sportcoat moves through the novel oblivious to the effect he has on others, the ultimate catalyst — and denies it, if anyone should point it out to him.

Two key themes emerge. One involves how white interpretations of Black life rest on lies that Black people need not — must not — accept, even if they can do nothing else to fulfill themselves. Dignity requires insisting on the truth. Within that, a person finds meaning and hope by taking small actions, even though they won’t change the big picture. That’s all anyone can do.

As historical fiction, the novel gets down to neighborhood level, as in how the influx or departure of certain groups changes the Cause, how the police or certain agencies function differently from the past, or how drugs have taken over, and the horrific damage that follows. That’s what 1969 means here, aside from frequent references to the New York Mets. And though I yield to no one in my love for that team, I do wish McBride had gone a little further. In particular, I’d have liked to hear more about the Vietnam War, for instance, because maybe residents of the Cause had strong feelings about fighting the white man’s war in Southeast Asia.

But Deacon King Kong is a terrific book and a testament to the author’s range and vision.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, a bookseller that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

Who Are We, and Where Do We Come From?: The Great Unknown

23 Monday Nov 2020

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Austen, book review, Darwin, Edinburgh, evolution, historical fiction, human origins, literary fiction, nineteenth century, Peg Kingman, philosophical novel, random chance, science vs. religion, wit

Review: The Great Unknown, by Peg Kingman
Norton, 2020. 324 pp. $27

In 1845, Constantia MacAdam, just delivered of twins (one of whom died), serves as wet nurse to the large, ever-growing Chambers family, temporarily residing outside Edinburgh while their city home undergoes renovation. Constantia, unable to be with her beloved husband, makes the best of her grief over her lost son and her struggle to make ends meet, but she has lucked out. Not only has she landed among the kindest people in Scotland, who treat her like a family member rather than a servant, she’s never found such intellectual stimulation in her life, and she thrives on it.

Mr. Chambers, a newspaper publisher, takes a keen interest in the natural world and urges his immense brood to do likewise, even (if not especially) the girls. He impresses Constantia, who also loves natural science, because of the breadth of his knowledge and the liberality of his mind. A sensational book has appeared, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, and its unorthodox views receive a warm welcome in the Chambers household. The reader will guess that Vestiges anticipates Darwin’s influential book almost fifteen years later.

Figures such as David Hume and Adam Smith, depicted here at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, were part of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, often presumed to be an eighteenth-century phenomenon. But their nineteenth-century counterparts included such scientific and cultural luminaries as Thomas Carlyle, Mary Somerville, Charles Lyell, and James Clerk Maxwell (courtesy Kim Traynor, via Wikimedia Commons)

While this is happening, the Chambers’ gardener, who has been at this residence all his life, has derived similar revolutionary ideas from observing the randomness of life and death, thriving and deformity, among his beloved plants. And on a Scottish island reasonably near in mileage yet isolated and hard to reach by even the fastest transport, a quarryman seeks to split apart a limestone ledge, in which, he believes, important fossils lie.

To say, therefore, that The Great Unknown is a philosophical novel about the origins of life restates the obvious. The story, at first glance, may seem thin. Constantia longs to rejoin her husband. She also strives to learn who her father was, which the Chambers family, being the soul of tact, infer is a troublesome matter, a secret best left unprobed. Her good character is plain; what more need anyone know?

That doesn’t satisfy Lady Janet, a distant relative of theirs who possesses neither tact nor sensitivity, though she does express much righteous superiority. (When Constantia finally gets the courage to talk back to Lady Janet, it’s delicious.) Lady Janet is the foil for the good-hearted spirit of inquiry that reigns chez Chambers, and a reminder of how different they are from most Britons.

But there’s much more besides the evocation of a country on the brink of a moral upending through scientific discovery, or the excellent, personal portrayal of the conflict between religion and science. We have 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. (Note the name Constantia in this regard.) Add to that what makes a person human, and how we differ (or don’t) from other species; or is it just our vanity that we do?

In sentences that have a Victorian ring, Kingman has crafted a plot that often turns on Dickensian coincidences, perhaps too fortuitously, at times. But she’s also created a family as a perfect test case for her themes, and not just because of their scientific curiosity. The male species of Chambers are born with a sixth finger on each hand and a sixth toe on each foot. Random chance, indeed, as with the success of surgeries necessary for these digits’ removal. As for Mr. Chambers, imagine a Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice as a witty, urbane man of science who’s more immediately concerned with his daughters’ grasp of Linnaean nomenclature than how to attract a husband—though, rest assured, they have dancing and music lessons too.

Further, when anyone in the household has a musical idea that grabs them at any time, they are encouraged to try it out immediately:

It was understood by all that musical ideas were so fragile, so evanescent, and so precious that they were to be snatched from the thin air upon the very moment of their wafting into existence; they might otherwise as evaporate as quickly as they had precipitated, never again to be recovered. No chances could be taken with them; it was a duty to bring them into the world. Constantia became accustomed to seeing an inward distracted stillness fall over the faces of the girls; any of them might, even in the midst of nursery-supper noise, fall silent for a moment; then spring from her chair, to run to the pianoforte—the harp—the violin.

Not everyone will gravitate toward a quiet, reflective story like this, a daguerreotype of the moment when brave thinkers began to ask the most earthshaking questions without fear of divine retribution. But readers who take The Great Unknown for what it is will be greatly rewarded.

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

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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!

Life As Theater: Morality Play

12 Monday Oct 2020

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Barry Unsworth, blasphemy, book review, Catholicism, fourteenth century, historical fiction, justice, literary fiction, morality plays, mystery (criminal), mystery (religious), plague, role playing, sedition, superstition, theater, traveling players

Review: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 1995. 206 pp. $16

On a cold December day during the second half of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Barber steals upon a group of traveling players who stand away from a dying man, one of their number. Fascinated by the players’ wordless empathy, Nicholas watches too long, and they spot him and demand that he come forward. It’s a dangerous time in England, where the plague rides again, and suspicion and fear influence every interaction, not least with vagabonds.

But Nicholas is a vagabond himself, a priest who has left his diocese without permission. He has abandoned his good cloak in a house where he was committing adultery, and knows his way with a pair of dice in his hand. And when the actors move on toward Durham, where they are to perform Nativity plays for the lord’s court, Nicholas accompanies them.

He could have said that they’d just lost a man they need to replace. But Nicholas is also burning a bridge. The bishop of Lincoln, his patron, might take him back if he turned around right then and honestly repented his lapses. But appearing on stage violates the law. And though that scares him, Nicholas can’t resist — something about playing a part, belonging to the small, tightly knit troupe, has touched him.

However, the next village they happen on has recently witnessed a murder; a young boy has been killed, and a deaf-mute young woman sentenced to hang for it. Martin, the leader of the troupe, convinces the others to perform a play based on the killing, as it has been recounted in rumor and disputation around the village. To do so risks severe punishment, for, on stage as in life, truth comes only from God, and the players, already at society’s margin, will overstep if they pretend to interpret their world — and a profane event, no less. Nicholas, understanding the religious proscription intuitively, is appalled. But the show, as always, must go on.

Frontispiece to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1522 edition of the morality play Mundus et Infans (courtesy G. A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, via Wikimedia Commons)

What a premise, as elegant as you could want. And what a title, literally evoking the medieval mystery play while figuratively showing the changeable nature of moral choices. Further, what the medieval mind called a mystery had to do with Scripture and God’s actions, ever inscrutable. But here we have that framework and an actual mystery alongside, which the performance of the play helps to solve.

I have read this novel several times over the past decade or two, and it remains among my favorites. Most people, if they’ve read Unsworth, will point to Sacred Hunger as his masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet Morality Play has so much to say about the role that subsumes the player, not just the other way around, involving so many aspects of private, political, and social life, that I’m in awe.

Success here hinges on the characters, and you’d have to look hard and long before you found a more finely drawn ensemble, literally and figuratively. Besides Nicholas, whose desires outstrip his common sense (which makes him human), you have Martin, teacher, leader, and group conscience; Straw, the outwardly fragile, gifted mime; Stephen, the brooding drunk with a commanding presence; and others, each sustained in-depth without more than a line or two of backstory. Together, they create an amazing performance.

Then there’s Unsworth’s prose, simple, highly physical, conveying the time and place from the inside out. Among other things, the medieval theater comes to life in full panoply, as with a performance of the play of Adam, in which Nicholas changes roles between the Devil’s Fool and a normal one:

I shook my bells and struck the tambourine as I went back through the people. I was a different person now, they did not hate me. They knew me for a japer, not a demon. I understood then, as I passed through the people and shook my bells and saw them smile, what all players come to know very well, how quickly shifting are our loves and hates, how they depend on mocks and disguises. With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool’s cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter. I was discovering also the danger of disguise for the player. A mask confers the terror of freedom, it is very easy to forget who you are. I felt it now, this slipping of the soul…

Morality Play is a work of genius, a mirror on human nature in the fourteenth century and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book for my bookshelf, where it has pride of place.

Love’s Pretty Confusing: The Blue Star

05 Monday Oct 2020

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1941, book review, high school, historical fiction, literary fiction, love, North Carolina, Pearl Harbor, poverty, race prejudice, romance, rural life, sex, social prejudice, Tony Earley

Review: The Blue Star, by Tony Earley
Little, Brown, 2008. 304 pp. $15

Autumn 1941 sees Jim Glass begin his senior year of high school in Aliceville, a tiny town in rural North Carolina. Though aware of war that has yet to involve the United States, and therefore him, he’s more focused on his love life. Having recently broken up with Norma Harris, the prettiest girl in the school, because she’s a know-it-all and won’t kiss him, Jim falls hard for Chrissie Steppe, part Cherokee and wholly mature for her age, which Jim isn’t.

Alfred T. Palmer’s May 1942 photo of a U.S. Marine Corps motor detachment, New River, North Carolina (courtesy Farm Security Administration or Office of War Information, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

She’s also the girlfriend of Bucky, a boy who graduated the previous year and joined the Navy. Bucky’s father employs Chrissie’s family, which, in his case, also means he controls them. By all accounts, Bucky takes after his father, though with a little more polish. Jim knows him as a selfish former baseball teammate, and rumor has it Bucky assumes Chrissie to be his property; her feelings don’t matter.

The Blue Star is a sequel to the delightful, warm-hearted Jim the Boy, which depicts the protagonist at age ten, trying to understand the father who died the week before he was born. The boy’s three unmarried uncles do their best to teach him life lessons and spring him, when they can, from the shackles of his overprotective, widowed mother.

In The Blue Star, they’re much the same, not taking themselves too seriously and attempting to pass that attitude onto Jim, with mixed success. Love is one thing a mentor can talk about all he likes; it’s the boy himself who’s got to get a grip on that slippery, elusive dynamite. Mama doesn’t make it any easier. She was certain that her beloved only child would marry Norma — apparently, in these parts, teenage romance is an immediate prelude to marriage — and can’t stop meddling to save her life.

As he did in Jim the Boy, Earley sets his scenes and emotional challenges in effortless, evocative prose. Consider this moment in history class, where Jim, who sits right behind Chrissie, ignores what their teacher’s saying about the explorations of the conquistadors:

He studied instead, with a scholar’s single-minded intensity, the way the light reflected off Chrissie’s black hair. The day before, Jim had noticed that when the sun hit it just right, it sparkled with the deep colors of a prism hanging in the window of a science class. . . . He studied it so closely that his eyes slipped out of focus and the scale of the room swelled in an instant and became immense around him; he felt suddenly microscopic, a tiny creature swimming in a drop of pond water. At that moment Chrissie’s hair seemed to take on an infinite depth; it became a warm, rich space into which it suddenly seemed possible to fall and become lost.

Physical attraction becomes scientific and heroic at the same time, a search for unheard- of riches.

Jim worries about Bucky and his nasty, irascible father, but makes his pitch anyway. He has the sense to ask questions rather than blather about himself or preen, but he often blunders. He doesn’t always know which questions can hurt, or why, or how they sound to a girl who’s shunned for her race and her poverty. Earley’s approach to race in both novels bears a subtle touch; social barriers are so obvious, they need no explanation. Consequently, Jim, from a comfortable white family that insists on outward respect for all (yet still obeys societal rules without question), has never encountered the pressures Chrissie faces daily, nor has he even imagined them.

To his credit, however, when someone points out that if he married Chrissie, his children would be one-quarter Cherokee, he retorts that it doesn’t matter — they’d be half Chrissie’s. And when Chrissie and Jim click in funny, poignant flights of fancy, he’s subsequently bewildered to find their connection appears to have indelible limits. He believes with all his heart that Chrissie cares for him; why isn’t that enough?

Early captures youthful love in all its pains and awkwardness. Reading it, I winced in recognition several times, and I imagine others would too. Earley doesn’t protect his hero — Jim can be pigheaded, jealous, and selfish — but he has a good heart. True to life, he learns most when he can see past his self-regard, which, among other instances, makes him realize there’s more to Norma than he knew.

Bucky’s posting to Hawaii, this place called Pearl Harbor, feels portentous. Even so, Earley redeems the clunky plot device, for the emotional effects move his characters in unexpected ways, further proof that “no — and furthermore” need not rest on a plot point. The inner journeys of these characters, major or minor, count for everything.

The Blue Star is a marvelously colorful yet understated exploration of love, duty, sex, social prejudice, and what it means for a boy to become a man. I heartily recommend it, as with its predecessor, Jim the Boy.

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

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.

Who’s a Reliable Narrator?: An Instance of the Fingerpost

21 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1663, book review, Cromwell, England, feminism, historical fiction, humor, hypocrisy, Iain Pears, literary fiction, mystery, Oxford, Rashomon, religious strife, Robert Boyle, scientific method, sexism, Stuarts, theocracy, Umberto Eco, unreliable narrator

Review: An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears
Berkeley, 1998. 704 pp. $20

As this captivating novel begins, Marco da Cola, a self-described “gentleman of Venice,” offers his account of his visit to England in 1663. Sent by his merchant father to see to business affairs that have gone wrong, da Cola also carries a letter of introduction to notable English scientists, for our Venetian gentleman has interests there too. Accordingly, he travels to Oxford, where he meets Robert Boyle, the famed physicist, among others, and discusses the proper approach to observation and reasoning concerning both accuracy and conformity to God’s laws. Right away, these principles are tested, through an unheard-of medical treatment, a murder, an investigation, and a punishment, in all of which da Cola plays an important role.

Robert Boyle, physicist, chemist, and philosopher, as painted in 1689 (courtesy Science History Institute, Philadelphia, via Wikimedia Commons)

What sounds simple is anything but. These are religious times, dangerous to those who pray or think in unapproved ways; and with Cromwell’s protectorate recently ended, and the Stuarts restored to the throne, suspicion and conspiracy abound. Heed ye these controversies well, gentle reader, for they shape not only what Signor da Cola witnesses, but how others view him, his manuscript, and the events he describes.

An Instance of the Fingerpost is a strongly feminist novel, but by demonstration, not by soapbox. The woman most central to the story possesses a breadth of mind and character surpassing those of anyone else, to which Pears never calls undue attention. Yet how she behaves arouses suspicion, which raises a crucial theme, how men perceive women through the lens of their own weaknesses.

During his sojourn in England, da Cola shows his kind heart, good-natured disposition, ready laugh, and — within the bounds of seventeenth-century attitudes — tolerant outlook. All that makes him a perfect foil for the disagreeable, smug, hidebound, and cruel Englishmen he meets (many of whom are historical figures). His narrative provides an often cheeky commentary, as when he sums up what he sees and judges it freely:

I discovered that, in only a brief space of time, the atmosphere of Oxford has settled on me, rendering me as melancholic as most of its inhabitants. There is something about the place; a dampness which is oppressive to the spirits, which bears down powerfully on the soul. I have for long had a theory about the weather which, if God spares me, I would like to develop one day. I do believe that the weather and grayness of the climate will forever preclude the English for making much of a stir in the world, unless they abandon their island for more sunny climes. Transport them to the Americas or the Indies, and their character is such that they could rule the world; leave them where they are, and they are doomed to sink in lassitude.

However, when da Cola’s narrative breaks off, other witnesses to the same events narrate their view and take great exception to his manuscript. I don’t mean their counterattacks on his character, which confirm their hatred of foreigners, their gloominess, and much else he remarked on. Rather, the Venetian gentleman seems not to have told the truth. The question is why.

The other voices respond to that and much else, recasting the murder by their own lights, as they justify themselves, often with a semblance of truth, but perhaps not. You don’t know whom to believe, or about what. Not only does the narrative framework recall the great Kurosawa film Rashomon, in which a presumably clear-cut criminal act becomes murky when viewed from different perspectives, Pears raises “no — and furthermore” to its most psychologically penetrating form. Just when you think you might grasp how the murder and investigation unfolded, you don’t — though maybe there’s a piece of evidence, viewed differently, that makes sense. And that one piece won’t go away.

Readers of Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose will recognize similarities here (as reviewers noted when Fingerpost came out). Crime and its repercussions become inseparable from the way people perceive good and evil, or what it means to think and observe, not to mention how ready they are to detest each other for petty differences in religious doctrine. Like Eco too, Pears renders political, social, and intellectual attitudes with such sureness that you don’t doubt him for a second.

An Instance of the Fingerpost is an enthralling mystery and a chilling exploration of the vicious potential of the human mind.

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

Hiding, Sometimes in Plain Sight: A Thread of Grace

14 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1943, book review, characterization, Germans, historical detail, historical fiction, Holocaust, impeccable research, Jews, Liguria, literary fiction, Mary Doria Russell, northwest Italy, reprisals, rescue, sprawling narrative, Waffen SS

Review: A Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell
Random House, 2005. 442 pp. $17

It’s September 1943, and Italy has just surrendered to the Allies. Though that brings the war’s end one step closer, it puts in jeopardy thousands of Jews from all over Europe who’ve somehow eluded the executioners and migrated to southern France, where Italian troops have protected them. Since the surrender has destroyed that protection, most of the fugitives attempt to flee, and, for tens of thousands, northwest Italy becomes the next stage of their clandestine existence.

Sant’Andrea, a town in Liguria, scrambles to hide those who seek shelter there, a task that couldn’t be more dangerous. Not only have the Germans invaded Italy, they’ve sent crack troops to hold the line, the Waffen SS, who’ve terrorized much of Europe. Anyone who aids or harbors “rebels,” “terrorists,” or Jews will be executed, and the neighboring area will suffer reprisals.

The Memoriale della Shoah in the Milan train station of Jews deported during the Holocaust (2014 photo courtesy fcarbonara via Wikimedia Commons)

To recount the story further would be pointless and misleading, for it’s simply one “no — and furthermore” after another, a big, sprawling narrative from many perspectives, exploring as many themes. Like Italy, A Thread of Grace is warm, dramatic, good company, passionate, and a bumpy, sometimes uneven, ride, not that I care. Among other issues, Russell sifts through shades of good versus those of evil, demonstrating how telling them apart is always difficult. Her narrative discourses on killing, and whether it’s ever justifiable; what true religious faith demands; how to live, not merely exist, when you must hide; and what courage is.

But above all, Russell’s characters propel this novel. My favorite is Renzo Leoni, former pilot who fought in Ethiopia and lives in liquor because of it. He’s Jewish, yet he hides in plain sight, adopting different personae, testament to his bravery, quick thinking, and ingenuity. Sometimes he’s a German-speaking businessman who chats up the sister of the local Gestapo chief to obtain information. Other times, he’s a tradesman or a priest, whichever guise seems safest at the moment to let him visit resistance contacts. He’s also a cantankerous, exceptionally witty son who has legendary fights with his mother, dialogue that is often howlingly funny. Perhaps Renzo’s greatest gift is his ability to befriend anyone, even a Waffen SS doctor who seeks an exit from the war so he can die in relative peace from TB.

Other notables include Suora Marta, a nun so imperious that a priest of her acquaintance jokes to himself that she outranks the pope. There’s Iacopo, the rabbi for Sant’Andrea, who’s so busy helping everyone else, he neglects his own family. There’s another priest, missing part of his leg from the First World War, who makes sure Jews are welcome and cared for, though he slyly hopes to bring one or two of the ebrei into the Church.

A Thread of Grace is the fourth of Russell’s novels I’ve reviewed, and this one bears her trademark grasp of historical detail. All descriptions show activity, even of a supposedly static landscape, which livens the narrative and makes admirable storytelling:

Wrung out by five minutes’ effort fueled by a diet of poor-quality starch, spring chard, and not much else, Suora Corniglia leans against a terrace wall to muster strength and catch her breath. Beside her, tiny brown lizards dart into crevices between stones. Fig trees bake in the basil-scented warmth above meticulously attended vineyards that crisscross the hillside. The Mediterranean is a stripe of silver between gray-green foothills, and when the wind shifts, the astringency of pine from nearby mountains is replaced by the barest hint of salt and seaweed.

If you’re like me, you may wonder, here and there, whether no Italian Christian ever turned in a Jew. But in her afterword, the author insists her depiction is true to life, having found no instances of any such betrayals in her six years of research. (That may be true of northwest Italy, but elsewhere presents a mixed picture.) Regardless, I appreciate her portrayal of Jewish characters, who seem genuine, down to the refusal to eat a biscuit during Passover, and their outlook on the world, schooled by hard experience. Once or twice, they may break character in small ways, but A Thread of Grace sets the bar very high for Holocaust fiction, both in that regard, and others.

One way in which it does concerns how the author hews closely to reality. The novel encompasses almost two years of war, and if the Italian populace does its best to protect those in hiding, the Germans do their best to find the fugitives, kill them, and take revenge. Murder and torture mark this story, not just kindness and generosity.

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

Portrait of a Gentleman: The Master

31 Monday Aug 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1895, book review, Britain, Colm Toíbín, Henry James, historical fiction, homosexuality, how a writer thinks, literary fiction, Oscar Wilde, overdependent children, social nuance, societal pressure, United States, William James

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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