Tag Archives: London

Bad Mother: This Lovely City

06 Monday Mar 2023

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: This Lovely City, by Louise Hare
Anansi, 2020. 384 pp. $18

Lawrence (Lawrie) Mathews, a young Jamaican whose brother died fighting with the RAF in World War II, has emigrated to London, believing the blandishments from the British government that he can make his fortune in the mother country. But he hasn’t reckoned on the racism, expressed in the most vicious, direct terms; or that most desirable material goods are still rationed in 1948; or that housing is in short supply, thanks largely to German bombs.

Nevertheless, by 1950, when the story begins, things are looking up. He plays clarinet with a jazz band, which he loves, and which brings in a little cash. As a day job, he delivers mail for the Post Office. And he’s found lodging with a kind, motherly woman who treats him with fond respect. Not just that: Lawrie digs the girl next door, who likes him back. What could go wrong?

Plenty. One day, while making a drop of black-market merchandise to help a friend (and make ends meet), he happens on a dead infant by a pond. Since the child is “coloured,” as the kindest word in common use puts it, an accusation against Lawrie fits all too neatly, especially since he can’t explain his presence at the pond without revealing he’s an accessory to illegal activity. But even a more legitimate excuse probably wouldn’t have helped Lawrie, for Detective Sergeant Rathbone hates Black people, immigrants, and most anyone else on two legs.

Worse, the case creates a sensation in the press, arousing white Londoners itching to blame outsiders for the hardships that haven’t eased much since V-E Day. Lawrie and his Jamaican friends must now watch themselves carefully on the street, while patronizing stores and—most especially—when the jazz band plays dance music for a hard-drinking crowd.

Nelson’s column, London, seen through the Great Smog, December 1952. The climatic disaster lasted five days and caused many thousands of deaths. (Courtesy N T Stobbs via Wikimedia Commons)

My favorite aspect of This Lovely City is the plot, which twists in unexpected ways, particularly in the final third. Both Lawrie and his girlfriend, Evie Coleridge, have secrets from the other. Evie also has a hard-hearted mother, an apt parallel to England. Mrs. Coleridge has suffered its whips and scorns herself, though that’s why—at least in part—she’s as tough as she is.

I also like how Hare re-creates postwar London, pinched and yearning to let loose, but also violently racist, in which what we would call micro-aggressions quickly flame into just plain aggression. The prose, though simple, occasionally rises to illumine emotional moments particular to that environment, as with this passage about Lawrie playing jazz before an audience:

The nerves would pass soon enough, but the moments before they started playing, before the music took over, always made him feel like one of the tigers at London Zoo. He’d gone there with Evie the previous autumn. She had leaned against the railing and stared in awe at the big cats, lounging lazily in their compound, but all he could think of was how sad they looked, those magnificent beasts now tamed and cowed by their conquerors. If anyone could understand the tigers it was him, trapped in a foreign land and reduced to parading himself before a paying audience. But then he’d raise his clarinet, the reed rough against his lips, and feel like a king.

I wish the characterizations worked with any consistency. Lawrie and Evie seem too good by half, and the terrible secrets they possess never credibly threaten their happiness. At times, quick resolutions—much like Lawrie merely lifting the clarinet to his lips, in the above passage—make me wonder whether Hare’s trying too hard to rescue her characters.

She also portrays Lawrie as a sexual innocent in ways I find hard to believe, particularly when a young woman invites him to take a bath at her house (in the days before he moves next door to Evie), and he has no idea she has plans other than cleanliness. At times too he seems generally clueless about his surroundings, as with his surprise that so much of London was bombed. Not much of a secret, that. What did he think his brother was doing in the RAF?

The two principals often have trouble locating their spines, to the extent that I lost patience with them and wondered what they saw in each other. Wouldn’t each lover seek out someone more forceful than themselves? They’re trying to be pleasant, sure, perhaps hiding behind that to avoid confrontations. Or maybe they confuse asking for what they want with meanness; it’s hard to tell. But whatever the explanation, I wanted more push from each of them, the lack of which might just be convenient to the plot.

As for the villains, the cops are faceless and horrid, without a single redeeming feature, including intelligence, so it’s a surprise to discover they actually know a thing or two. The most complex character in the book—perhaps the only one with sharp edges and kind impulses, both—is Mrs. Coleridge. She’s a piece of work, yet I understand her.

For all that, though, This Lovely City provides a glimpse of London as I’ve never read of it. Despite its flaws, the novel depicts the struggle to get by and dreams of a fuller life in real, day-to-day terms. That’s worth something.

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

Avenging the King: Act of Oblivion

06 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: Act of Oblivion, by Robert Harris
Harper, 2022. 458 pp. $29

Two soldiers sail in 1660 from London to Boston under assumed names, because an act of Parliament has condemned them to death. Their crime? Former colonels in Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary army—one is even the Great Protector’s cousin—signed the death warrant of the late king, Charles I.

Now, the regal son of the same name, restored to rule, seeks revenge on the fifty-nine who signed off on his father’s execution, despite a previous promise of amnesty. The Act of Oblivion has sealed the regicides’ fate.

The future Charles II in exile, painted in 1653 by Philippe de Champaigne (courtesy Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Colonel Ned Whalley, Cromwell’s cousin, and his son-in-law, Colonel Will Goffe, hope to find sanctuary with their Puritan brethren in the New World. But they have learned to lie low, understanding that the Crown has spies everywhere, and that their families in England are likely being watched.

Ned and Will don’t know half the danger they’re in. A clerk to the Privy Council, Richard Nayler, has both royalist sentiment driving him to see all the regicides executed and a personal animosity against these two men in particular.

Nayler’s colleagues in the manhunt respect his unrelenting energy and passion for the task, though they think he’s obsessed. Even they are unnerved by his complete lack of scruple. He makes a formidable enemy to Ned and Will.

Act of Oblivion is first-rate Harris, which says something after An Officer and a Spy, Dictator, and The Second Testament. The current novel offers an elegant premise, unremitting tension (our old friend, “no—and furthermore,” thrives in these pages), and an enthralling grasp of history and the contemporary physical surroundings involved in the tale.

These include Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the wild tracts of Connecticut, re-created as they appeared in the 1660s, as well as shipboard life, Puritan meeting houses, and London—stinking, plague-ridden, and overcrowded:

The Thames flowed past sluggishly barely a hundred yards away. The tide was out, exposing black humps of oozing mud streaked with green weed. In the hot sunshine, it reeked of the sea and of decay. Figures were picking through it in the hope of finding something they could use or sell. Gulls wheeled and cried above their heads, occasionally swooping down, settling for an instant and lifting off again.

Rest assured that the characters have received excellent authorial care as well, not to say strokes of genius. The two men on the run differ greatly and have many angles and corners. The English Civil War was fought for religious causes, among others, and as high-ranking officers in Cromwell’s Puritan forces, you could expect the fugitives to think and speak of God’s will constantly.

Nevertheless, Ned has lived long enough to temper his fervor with doubt about his own character and actions. Late in the novel, he muses that “God was not to be pressed into service to suit the needs of men, however righteous they believed their cause to be . . . such presumption itself was a sin.” He also realizes that the revolutionary he once was may not have known everything, and that Cromwell was no saint but a complex figure tempted by power.

Will, however, lacks his father-in-law’s self-reflection. He tosses off biblical quotations that presumably explain and predict their circumstances, as if to demonstrate that God has decided everything, so they don’t need to alter their plans. Consequently, he can be pigheaded about the divine support he’s certain they possess, or the need to take precautions.

So there’s plenty of conflict between the fugitives, who must naturally spend much time in one another’s company. And their diverging viewpoints force the reader to reckon with what radical political action means, and whether you can ever be confident that you’re doing right. As Ned recalls the back story of his military service, you see that rightness seldom appeared in black and white, no matter what anyone thought at the time.

Then there’s Nayler, who has no use for prayer and knows only his loyalties, not the passages in Scripture that supposedly justify them. I like that contrast, which I think is inspired. He’s a terrific foil for the godly regicides, especially when his associates urge him to leave off, already—order him to, even, at points. But you know he won’t relent. And when I tell you Nayler is willing to play the long game, that’s an understatement.

Meanwhile, Harris casts his keen eye on colonial New England and, especially, the various clerics who’ve led their flocks into that wilderness, hoping to be left alone. Good luck. Naturally, Ned and Will find out how long an arm the Crown has, with the older man grasping the danger first, and Will having to restrain his impulse to attend public prayer meetings with a price on his head.

Act of Oblivion is marvelous.

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

Manipulated and Discarded: The Peculiarities

18 Monday Apr 2022

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: The Peculiarities, by David Liss
Tachyon, 2021. 325 pp. $18

London, 1899. Thomas Thresher, twenty-three, nominal scion of the noted banking family of that name, should consider himself fortunate, with a bright future to look forward to. But Thomas feels no hope for anything, present or future. His cruel, tyrannical brother, Walter, the bank’s governor, insists that Thomas serve as a clerk, performing pointless tasks, from which he learns nothing, nor is he meant to, a Dickensian touch. Further, Walter demands that he marry a young woman he’s never seen — a Jewess, no less, an idea that repels him.

But Thomas finds it hard to feel sorry for himself, or to feel much of anything, because Walter has manipulated him all his life and discarded him as worthless — except to do his bidding, as with the strange marriage, for no reason Thomas can fathom. He’s allowed no will or character of his own, and you can see the effects.

What’s more, London itself has changed. Violent fogs that slither like giant, amorphous reptiles bludgeon people to death. Thomas has seen this, but there are other horrors he’s only read about:

The more lurid newspapers published stories of vampires and werewolves, of women giving birth to rabbits, and houses rendered uninhabitable by ghosts. He has read of people possessed by spirits and living men whose own spirits have become trapped in horses, in furnishings, in articles of clothing. There are horrible transformations and mutilations. Things that should not be, if these stories are to be believed, have become not quite commonplace but hardly rare.
Thomas read it all with a fair amount of skepticism until the first leaf sprouted below his right nipple.

These abnormalities and others go by the name of Peculiarities, and in stereotypical British fashion, nobody talks about them. Nobody in polite society, anyway, for the worst afflictions beset the lower classes predominantly, a concept Thomas is loath to accept when his purported fiancée, Esther Feldstein, tells him so.

But you know that Thomas must take her seriously, sooner or later, not least because the bank seems implicated in some way — the impenetrable institution, a Dickensian theme. At the same time, he can accomplish nothing unless he takes himself seriously too, a difficult task when he has been ground under his family’s heel.

His progression makes terrific reading; I’m reminded again of Dickens, say, Pip in Great Expectations. You don’t often see a thriller with such an intricate, forceful character arc, let alone a story that also has enough “no — and furthermore” energy to power a small city. Plenty happens in The Peculiarities, but this is a character-driven novel that explores every emotional transition, and that’s why you care.

Kabbala, a mystical belief system within Judaism, figures in The Peculiarities. Here, a kabbalistic representation of the Tree of Life (courtesy Thomazzo, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

The story invokes magic, as you might have guessed, and the plot revolves around the power it confers. But though characters attempt to cast spells, the magic here, as Liss states in the text and repeats in an afterword, doesn’t operate in defiance of natural laws. Rather, it depends on natural laws “previously hidden or generally unknown.” The distinction will become clearer if you read the novel, which I recommend, but I’ll give you one hint. Thomas was on the way toward becoming a first-rate mathematician at Trinity College, Cambridge, until Walter forced him to quit his studies. The skill comes in handy.

Note too the context of the so-called Peculiarities. That the London fog has become deadly violent, instead of the passive killer known to history, suggests environmental disaster writ large. That it attacks poor neighborhoods more often than others reflects a fact reckoned with today but not during the Victorian Age, and that Thomas at first refuses to accept the evidence rings all too true.

How ironic that he’s turning into a tree, as though the forests are taking vengeance for human depredation. And the births of “rabbit children” represent two themes, natal defects from industrial poisons and the attack on reproductive rights. Surely, Liss intends to criticize capitalism in its unbridled state—consider that the central institution here is Thresher’s Bank.

At once a coming-of-age story, a thriller, and historical fantasy, The Peculiarities has much to offer. The plot twists like an eel, sometimes in melodramatic fashion, with one incredible revelation after another. But the prose is beautiful and lucid, and the characters never strike attitudes, as they might in a full-fledged melodrama. Esther proves more than a match for Thomas, one of several friends with whom he never would have bothered had he not been afflicted and chosen to embark on a journey of discovery.

My regular readers know I avoid historical fantasy, but such is my admiration for Liss’s previous books, most notably A Conspiracy of Paper (capitalism, again), that I grabbed this novel off the shelf. The results confirm my trust, and I suspect they will earn yours.

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

Wheels Within Wheels: Gallows Court

18 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: Gallows Court, by Martin Edwards
Sourcebooks/Poisoned Pen, 2018. 349 pp. $16

Jacob Flint, a young man on the make in 1930 London, has a way of winding up at murder scenes before the police do. For an ambitious journalist, such luck can be a gold mine, the source of scoops that rock the city and make his name. However, that particular happenstance also rouses suspicions from the police, who, though unimaginative — aren’t they always? — assume it’s no coincidence at all. Further, the perpetrators of these crimes, whoever they are, seem methodical, persistent, and absolutely ruthless, so that witnesses have a way of disappearing. Consequently, Jacob’s good fortune could be hazardous to his health.

Further, as he tries to piece together the killings, which seem to multiply before his eyes in the most unlikely circumstances, he keeps crossing paths with the mysterious Rachel Savernake — or almost does. The wealthy, reclusive Miss Savernake shows her lovely face only when she wishes, for as long as she wishes, and to select few. Jacob tries frequently to get in touch with her, but he succeeds only when she grants permission, and only on her terms.

Fleet Street, London’s traditional home of the print and newspaper industries, as it appeared in 1953, decorated for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation (courtesy Anthony Harrison, geograph.org.uk, via Wikimedia Commons)

Jacob believes she’s the thread that connects the murders; she even presented the solution to one of them to the police. Her ability, intelligence, and boldness make her an object of fear, admiration, and bafflement. Rumor says that as a teenager, she had her half-sister’s parents disposed of, on a whim. So what game is she playing? And why does she take an interest in Jacob, leading him — he thinks — to the scene of the next crime?

This is the elaborate premise for one of the most ingenious, Byzantine mysteries I’ve ever read. Normally I dislike mystery narratives in which bodies fall like overripe apples from a tree, especially if I sense that the story needs another corpse to keep the tension thrumming. Not so, here. Everything fits, and Jacob’s emotional reactions matter, not just how he plans his next move. Edwards doesn’t rush through those emotional transitions, and the novel benefits greatly.

I wouldn’t call Gallows Court character-driven or deeply thoughtful, yet Jacob has an inner life, with ambition warring against a sense of morality and fair play. He has an appealing urge to connect with other humans, even if he doesn’t always know how, and his shock when people in whom he’s placed his trust wind up betraying him feels genuine. When people he knows wind up dead, some of whom he called friend, he takes stock — not for long, necessarily, but so that you see his impulses. He also struggles to put forth his better nature when self-preservation or convenience pulls in another direction, as in this passage, when he visits a dying friend and colleague:

The stench of disinfectant and the coarse noise from the bed made Jacob’s flesh crawl. Not for the first time, he felt pangs of self-disgust. A man who had, in his no-nonsense way, been generous to him was close to death. Yet here he was, averting his eyes, holding his nose, struggling in vain to overcome revulsion. He uttered a silent, selfish prayer that Betts would not die while he sat by his bedside. How could he console the widow if the worst happened? It would seem like his fault.

Rachel’s much harder to figure, and though that follows logically from the author’s need to keep certain secrets, I could better understand Jacob’s fascination with her if her character came across more clearly. As it is, Rachel risks being a trope, the beautiful mastermind whom no one can get around, let alone fathom. She has a mission, it seems — which the reader divines before Jacob does — and which explains the profusion of deaths. That the mission attempts to strike a blow for justice helps some.

More importantly, Rachel provides the overriding sense of the novel, the confusion, uncertainty, and danger infusing the very air of the story. Just when Jacob believes that he sees how the wheels turn, he realizes that there are wheels within wheels. At best, he’s a minor cog, one that may intersect with a larger, more significant mechanism, but only as long as he’s useful. When pursuing a lead based on information given him, he never knows whether his informant has hidden motives or means him ill. This atmosphere of fear and uncertainty feels pervasive, as in Hitchcock, and the ever-present “no — and furthermore” applies the framework. But the workings are entirely psychological.

The last two turns of the wheel feel a little contrived, the only ones that do. Nevertheless, Gallows Court delivers a tense, wild ride, and if the ending seems a bit contrived, it’s also satisfying.

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

Matchmaking and Mayhem: A Rogue’s Company

11 Monday Oct 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: A Rogue’s Company, by Allison Montclair
Minotaur, 2021. 337 pp. $27

London in 1946 is a city struggling to get on its feet again, amid perennial food shortages, all-too-slow postwar reconstruction, and grief over losses. What a perfect time and place for the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a fledgling business devoted to repopulating a bloodied world.

Iris Sparks, one of its two principals, accustomed to tight spaces and violent men, persuades her partner, (Mrs.) Gwendolyn Bainbridge, war widow, to receive martial arts training. London has mean streets, after all; men are men; and Sparks and Bainbridge have paired up on more than one amateur criminal investigation, so you never know when a well-placed karate chop may come in handy.

Royal Artillery searchlights form part of the Victory Parade, London, June 1946 (courtesy Imperial War Museum via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

No one could provide a more deserving target than Lord Bainbridge, Gwen’s bully of a father-in law, who has just returned from Africa, where he has mining interests. Technically, Gwen’s a member of the board of directors, or should be, having inherited her late husband’s shares. But Lord Bainbridge has taken custody of that inheritance, because his son’s death sent Gwen into a psychological tailspin, and, by court order, a psychiatrist must declare her competent before she may assert control over her assets. That ruling also applies to her seven-year-old son, whom her father-in-law intends to pack off to the same brutal boarding school inflicted on the boy’s father — and Gwen can do nothing to stop this.

A Rogue’s Company takes a minute to percolate the mystery, but no worries, there. Iris and Gwen are characters you’ll enjoy, with wit and verve to spare, and present a contrast in their origins and social views. Both must negotiate their class differences, not only with each other, but their respective friends, and though I would have liked to see more uncertainty in them, questioning whether their connection will last, they’re an interesting mix. Their bond feels genuine. Ironically, neither of them is married, though they have admirers. Gwen still mourns her husband, but you get the idea that she’s in no hurry to become intimate with anybody again.

They do diverge in their toleration for danger. (Hint: Iris, who seems to have been an intelligence operative, craves it.) However, neither fears to upset convention, as when an importunate board member of Bainbridge, Limited, tries to pry into Gwen’s “absence,” the time during which she received psychological treatment. To ward him off, she replies that she went to prison. Why? he asks, astonished. She killed a man, she says. Why? “For asking too many personal questions.” To his credit, the board member laughs; so did I.

Still, you know that the menace circling the Right Sort Marriage Bureau will erupt into action. And when a man’s found dead near the Livingstone Club, where colonials go to drink and disport themselves, the game’s afoot. Before they’re done, financial shenanigans, a kidnapping, and much listening-in on conversations will take place.

The narrative doesn’t take itself too seriously — one of its charms — yet there’s content alongside the entertainment. The story delves a little into race prejudice, gender roles and expectations, and the intersection of pride and violence, treading lightly, to be sure. Sparks and Bainbridge have something to them, in other words, and aren’t merely the framework for a mystery. Montclair’s not in too much of a hurry, and I like that.

I also like the writing, willing to linger on emotional moments and offer physical description with psychological resonance. Here’s one example, as when Iris is driven past Kensington High Street, Kensington Gore, and onto Kensington Road:

Streets are like spies, she thought. They passed through where you live, changing identities according to local customs, and disappear without notice. She tried to remember what a gore was. Something topographical, vaguely triangular, but she couldn’t help imagining the neighborhood steeped in blood every time she traveled through it. She wondered if anyone else made that connection, or if it had just become another name without meaning over time.

The novel (and I) could have done without the prologue — what else is new? — and a couple loose ends affix themselves with perhaps too much ease. One or two of the nastier characters soften a tad, maybe in ways they shouldn’t. I’m also skeptical that Sparks, despite her background, can be so blasé about crime scenes; I think even the hardest-boiled detective (which she isn’t) would at least wince. But A Rogue’s Company, the third installment in the Sparks and Bainbridge series, is an engrossing, delightful book, well worth your time.

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

Rocket Terror: V2

22 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: V2, by Robert Harris
Knopf, 2020. 312 pp. $29

In late November 1944, the Germans rain V2 rockets on London, killing hundreds of civilians, and destroy thousands of homes at supersonic speed. Once the rockets launch from the Dutch coast, they take mere minutes to cross the North Sea and land with no warning save for a last-second shift in air pressure. By that time, it’s too late to seek shelter. The V2, named for Vergeltung, meaning “retribution” or “payback,” is more terrifying and arbitrary than any weapon previously known.

One morning, Kay Caton-Walsh, a young officer in Britain’s women’s air service (WAAF) discovers this firsthand. Shacking up for the weekend with a high-ranking (and married) Air Ministry official, she’s lucky to survive a rocket attack, as is her lover. That gives her extra motivation, as if she needed any, to return to her work, which involves analyzing aerial photographs of potential launch sites. The RAF has tried many times to take them out but always fail. So the V2s keep coming, seemingly from nowhere, and entire blocks of London keep getting smashed. Kay would like to fight back more effectively — and when word comes of a mission to track them from Belgium, she persuades her lover to have her sent there.

Meanwhile, Dr. Rudi Graf, a rocketry expert and longtime colleague of Wernher von Braun, who runs the V2 program, prepares the missiles for launch in the Dutch seaside town of Scheveningen. He has little fear of the RAF, whose raids strike the town, surrounding area, or the seashore, never the launch sites. But he does fear the SS, which has strengthened its grip on every aspect of the war effort and looks over his shoulder constantly, sniffing for disloyalty or its perceived equivalent, lack of patriotic zeal.

Wernher von Braun, center, facing, wearing the Nazi Party lapel pin, talks to Fritz Todt, center, Peenemünde, March 1941. Todt’s slave laborers died by the thousands to build von Braun’s underground rocket works there (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

And indeed, Graf is no zealot. He tries not to think about what the rockets he has developed actually do to London, or what that means. For the most part, he succeeds at putting action and effect in different compartments of his mind. But Braun originally recruited him to investigate the feasibility of space travel, and Graf can’t separate theory from practice or justify one to the other so easily. He wonders what he’s doing there.

The sixth Harris novel I’ve read, V2 feels the weakest. A few trademarks make their appearance, all right — a sure grasp of history, mastery of detail, physical descriptions. Wherever the narrative goes, Harris grounds you in the scene, whether a London street, a ministerial office, a launch site, or a brothel, all delivered with economy. Early on, for instance, you see how the war has completely changed Scheveningen:

Rain was gusting off the sea, funneled down the side streets between the abandoned hotels. The pier had burned down the previous year. Its blackened iron spars protruded above the running white-capped waves like the masts of the shipwreck. The beach was sown with barbed wire and tank traps. Outside the railway station a few tattered tourist posters from before the war showed a pair of elegant women in striped bathing costumes and cloche hats tossing a ball to one another.

However, unlike, say, An Officer and a Spy, The Second Sleep, or Dictator, the author focuses on public stakes almost to the exclusion of his characters, which results in a less thrilling thriller. By that, I mean plot points like a rocket launch or Kay’s analysis efforts provide most of the tension, fairly humdrum, with few “no — and furthermore” moments, because the characters’ inner lives fail to color the events or enlarge them in significance.

I really don’t care whom Kay sleeps with. Despite feminist overtones to the WAAF war contribution, she’s too much a sex object for my taste, and the love affair that gets her a much sought-after assignment feels contrived. On the other hand, I do want to know what about the rockets compels her; saying she wishes to do something important or useful doesn’t suffice. After all, the war affects every aspect of life, and there are many ways to serve.

Graf has a little more to him; you see the scientist trapped into serving weaponry, though it’s a trap he willingly entered. But, unlike the case with other Harris novels, I don’t see his deep passion or resistance. Mostly, he seems tired and wishes he could somehow take action, though in what way, he’s not sure.

If, however, you want to read a fast-moving outline of how the V2 rockets came to exist and how they worked, this book may satisfy you. You also see why Wernher von Braun deserved a war-crimes trial rather than a cushy job in America’s space program. But if you’ve never read a Robert Harris thriller, don’t start with this one.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, which shares its profits with independent bookstores.

Murder Among the Four Hundred: An Extravagant Death

01 Monday Feb 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

Review: An Extravagant Death, by Charles Finch
Minotaur, 2021. 304 pp. $28

London, 1878. For political reasons, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli asks the most famous detective in Britain, Charles Lenox, to leave the country for a few weeks. But Charles would rather refuse, for his wife has just given birth to their second daughter, and his work has taken him away from home too often. However, he’s always dreamed of travel, and Disraeli is nothing if not persuasive. With his family’s blessing, Charles sets sail.

New York captures his fancy, but it’s on a train to Boston that an importunate, extremely wealthy man named Schermerhorn, of old Knickerbocker lineage, has sent an equally importunate bodyguard to request Charles’s presence in Newport, Rhode Island. A murder has taken place, and Schermerhorn requires his help; Lenox may name his price.

You need not have read any of the prior thirteen installments in the Lenox series to understand that such a peremptory request — delivered at an unscheduled stop on the train, arranged by Schermerhorn — would irritate any English gentleman of breeding. Charles, though liberal-minded about many aspects of life, might have turned away on principle, except that the brightest spot in his trip so far has been Teddy Blaine, a young, would-be detective who’s followed Charles’s cases with keen interest and an even keener mind. Teddy pleads with Lenox to ignore Schermerhorn’s manner and look into the case.

“The” Mrs. Astor, leader of the Four Hundred, née Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. Artist unknown, portrait said to date from 1860, which seems improbably late (source unknown; courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

So Charles investigates the death of a beautiful, nineteen-year-old debutante, Lily Allingham, who took a fatal blow to the head. Lily had many suitors, but the two most serious were Schermerhorn’s son and his rival, a Vanderbilt, if you please. Given the immediate circumstances Charles observes in Newport, such as the timing of the death, position of the body, and so forth, he suspects both young men.

Naturally there are lies, other suspects, and inconvenient facts that cloud the picture. But, as with all Lenox novels, Finch has social commentary in mind as well as mystery, and he has a field day here. Even a moderately wealthy English aristocrat can’t fathom the opulence on display in Newport, or square it with the way most people live. For instance, he hears of the “cottages” that front the ocean along a cliff, only to discover that they are thirty-bedroom mansions, decorated with English treasures sold by impecunious dukes.

When he enters Schermerhorn’s “cottage,” he finds it

plain by the palatial standards of this town, but sturdy down to its last nail. The floors of the broad, airy hallways never once creaked; the alabaster walls, hung with portraits of sober old New Yorkers of a different epoch, seemed to whisper a quiet word of demonstration against all things modern, all things adorned, anything but plain wood and white paint.

Yet the plainness is a sham; witness the hundreds of servants on staff, from gardeners to kitchen maids, who make the house run — a summer house, be it known. It’s this world within a world that Lenox must navigate, and though Teddy Blaine helps him (coming from a wealthy family himself), many social or cultural cues go over his head.

For the most part, I like the mystery, cleverly conceived, with plenty of “no — and furthermore,” though I find the political reasons for Charles’s departure from America a bit contrived. More significantly, the surprise resolution devolves into psychological territory I usually think of as a copout, though I will say that Finch comes close to making up for it with a nuanced approach. I can’t recall another Lenox novel with even the whiff of copout, and I’ve read at least a half-dozen.

An Extravagant Death offers many pleasures, however, especially the social scenes, all rendered with authority, whether a meeting with Disraeli or a Caroline Astor soirée, complete in fascinating detail. Regular Lenox readers will wonder, in the first third or so of the book, what happened to the quaint facts that Finch loves to explain; never fear, they’ll come in time. If you’ve ever wondered how such idioms as backlog, grapevine, or white elephant entered the language, or what a calling card with one corner folded down signified, wonder no more. Equally characteristic of the series, each book explores a different, relatively untouched aspect of Charles’s life, in this case, fatherhood. The narrative doesn’t dwell long on this subject, but I like what appears very much, and these scenes also give an idea of how an upper-classic Victorian family viewed children.

Overall, I’d judge An Extravagant Death of lesser note than a couple others in the series, including the previous volume, The Last Passenger. But even a less-than-stellar Lenox tale is very good and well worth your time.

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

Tormented Souls: The White Feather Killer

30 Monday Nov 2020

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

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

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.

Sixth Census: Another Blog Birthday

26 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

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!

Past Lives: Old Baggage

09 Monday Sep 2019

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans
Harper, 2018. 310 pp. $16

Matilda Simpkin lives in a glorious, thrilling past as an activist for women’s suffrage, who, before the First World War, rubbed elbows with the Pankhursts and threw elbows at policemen trying to subdue her. But it’s now 1928, and London life has dulled for Mattie. She lectures from time to time on the old days, for she has priceless lantern slides of the movement and can talk about what it was like to be imprisoned at Holloway, the infamous jail where suffragists were tortured, out of the public eye. An elegant, passionate, witty speaker, she’s quick on her feet and quicker to remind her audiences that women under thirty still can’t vote in Britain, nor those of age who lack the property qualifications. So Mattie still has her cause, her sisters in need, and the energy to lend a hand.

Annie Kenney, left, and Christabel Pankhurst, founders of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Manchester, ca. 1908 (photo courtesy Hastings Press via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

But nobody’s paying attention, really, and that’s Mattie’s problem. Not only has her generation lost its fire; she needs to feel listened to, be the center of attention, to mentor others. However, she can be too quick to offer solutions to their problems and too slow to hear their silent plea simply for an understanding ear; and her urge to fix people, whom she sees as acolytes, can make her impossible. She assumes that those who turn away must be complacent or scared of risk, never dreaming that she herself scares them, or that the way she comes across subverts her efforts. In other words, Mattie Simpkin is a good-hearted, committed narcissist, and though such people often make waves, they don’t always pay attention to those who fear drowning in them.

Picture, then, her attempt to teach the younger generation. She forms a girls’ club called the Amazons, which meets weekly near her home on Hampstead Heath, for intellectual and physical exercise, learning and cooperative games. Who’d bother to join a club run by a windbag feminist of yesteryear? Dozens, as it turns out, a victory that Mattie accepts as a matter of course, and she thrives in her role. Despite her pedantry and occasional lack of sensitivity, both of which can be hilarious, she has much to teach, as relevant now as it was then: As a girl, you’re a real person, and you can make a difference. Her students aren’t always sure what this means, but most like the sound of it, and things go fine until a particular girl shows up, one who evokes the past. On such small incidents, worlds turn.

As you find out only at the end, Evans’s previous novel, Crooked Hearts, has a tangential connection to Old Baggage. I liked Crooked Hearts, but I like the current book better. It’s more serious yet funnier at once, which sounds odd until you notice that the tone here lacks all consciousness of satire, and the characters feel deeper. They have no sense that anyone should laugh at them, because they believe what they’re doing is utterly important. But our heroine needs a sidekick, one who’s more tuned in, and Florrie Lee (called The Flea), fills the role perfectly. The women are sparring partners in both heart and in politics, and though there’s social commentary aplenty, I never think it’s over the top or pasted on. It’s part of the action.

But it’s Mattie who drives the book, eccentric, principled, and flawed. As one of her less enthusiastic charges in the Amazons observes:

Miss Simpkin… had a face as readable as a penny newspaper, enthusiasm and exasperation, encouragement and the odd gust of rage chasing across her features. ‘Thar she blows!’ some of the bolder girls would whisper, as Mattie sounded off about Mussolini, or dogs with docked tails, or vegetarians.… Miss Simpkin was peculiar. Normal people stayed indoors when it rained, and thought that nice stockings were important; they didn’t sing in public, they didn’t pick up frogs and tell you about Greek plays.

Besides the sense of humor visible on almost every page, Evans has a knack for capturing historical ages and scraping the sepia off them. She understands politics and social movements from the inside and how they look from the outside. Likewise, the difficulties Mattie faces in her quest to educate the young reveal obstacles inside her and in others, so that her inner narrative connects to the outer, seamlessly accomplished.

Old Baggage is a delightful, moving book, and I recommend it.

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