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Tag Archives: plot-driven narrative

Killer Jewels: Cartier’s Hope

23 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1910, book review, Cartier's, double life, feminism, historical fiction, Hope Diamond, jewelry, jewelry lore, journalists, M. J. Rose, New York City, no and furthermore, plot-driven narrative, too-perfect characters

Review: Cartier’s Hope, by M.J. Rose
Atria, 2020. 322 pp. $27

Vera Garland would be the envy of most New York women in 1910. Born to a socialite mother and a merchant father whose retail emporium is a household word, Vera has never wanted for any material possession. Nor would she lack the leisure to enjoy them, should she choose. But she doesn’t; she dreams of making her mark in journalism.

To that end, she writes a society gossip column in her gilded-set voice, while, as Vee Swann, she reports on back-alley abortions, tenement life, and corporate malfeasance. She’s got no time or interest in her mother’s plans for her, to wit, a wealthy husband and a career in society. The conflict splits the family, but Vera gets to do what she wants.

Maintaining Vera’s two different personae takes a great deal of sweat (and a little credulity on her friends’ parts, not to mention the reader’s). But it makes a great story, and getting trapped in one identity while needing to be in the other, though an old device, offers excellent possibilities, which Rose ably exploits. Vera wants revenge against the extortionist who brought about her uncle’s and father’s deaths within a week of each other. And the key to her scheme lies within Cartier’s, the world-class jewelers whose premises she may visit with ceremony and complimentary champagne as Vera Garland, but where, as Vee Swann, she’d never expect an audience.

The Hope Diamond, on display at the National Museum of Natural History, New York (courtesy David Bjorgen via Wikimedia Commons)

Her plan has to do with the Hope Diamond, whose lore of danger and ill fortune to its succession of owners furnishes grist for Pierre Cartier’s publicity mill. How that dovetails with bringing down an extortionist, I leave for you to discover.

Plot is by far the strongest aspect of Cartier’s Hope and just about the only reason to read the novel. It’s a good reason, though. In the interest of full disclosure, my taste runs toward character-driven narratives — as though you might not have guessed — because some plot-driven novels pay little or no attention to subtlety. So too here, in ways I’ll discuss further down. Yet I have to admire how Rose strings out the story, layering twist after twist, making her protagonist work, so that nothing comes easily, and the “no — and furthermore” feels genuine. Rose also keeps you guessing without tricking you. She’s a generous writer that way; if anyone falls for a misperception or misdirection, it’s Vera/Vee.

The plain prose never draws attention to itself, and Rose limits her descriptions largely to interiors, with sparse, thoughtful detail. The author loves New York, and it shows in the locales portrayed as they were, whether tenements, newsrooms, or the Plaza Hotel. I trust her research in general, though I did find one anachronism: Traffic lights didn’t exist back then.

More troublesome are the language and the characters, who speak and think like latter twentieth-century folk, or even those of the present day. I don’t just mean words or phrases like accessorize or reach out to, but the manner in which people discuss their ideas. Vee and her journalist friends, passionate about women’s rights, seem like retro creations, modern sensibilities and worldviews dropped into 1910. It doesn’t help that some of these scenes feel like information dumps.

But it’s not just the political or social milieu that strikes me wrong. Vera’s father sounds like a gifted psychotherapist as well as a brilliant retailer, a wonderfully thoughtful, considerate man. He’s made one mistake, a whopper, but seems perfect otherwise. Ditto Vera’s love interest, who could be a midcentury intellectual. He’s done one bad thing too, but there are mitigating circumstances, to be sure. These people are too good to be true.

Rose often explains what a character’s trying to do or has just done when it’s obvious. That authorial hand not only feels condescending, as if the reader can’t be trusted to get the idea, but prompts you to wonder what other manipulations are taking place. A skeptical reader (guilty, Your Honor) might suspect sleight-of-hand in the storytelling.

Still, Cartier’s Hope offers that intriguing plot, with legends about jewels thrown in. If that’s your style, you could do a lot worse.

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

Walking Dead: The Deepest Grave

15 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, fall from grace, fourteenth century, historical fiction, Jeri Westerson, London, murder, mystery fiction, plot-driven narrative, Richard II, sense of period, superstition, weak characterization

Review: The Deepest Grave, by Jeri Westerson
Severn House, 2018. 200 pp. $29

The waning years of the fourteenth century are a bloody time in London, it seems. Recently buried corpses have been seen traipsing about the cemetery at St. Modwen’s church, dragging their coffins. A seven-year-old has confessed to killing his best friend’s father, a wealthy cloth merchant, and a relic related to St. Modwen has disappeared from that same household.

Enter Crispin Guest, the so-called Tracker of London, who solves mysteries like these for sixpence a day. The Deepest Grave is the eleventh novel of the series featuring his adventures, but Westerson catches you up on his previous career as a knight serving John of Gaunt, when Crispin had a title, lands, and power. He lost them because he backed the wrong horse when Richard II ascended the throne. If the series goes another seven historical years, Crispin’s fortunes should improve when Henry Bolingbroke, Gaunt’s son, usurps Richard’s crown. Naturally, however, Westerson’s characters don’t know this, and just about everyone reminds Guest, in one way or another, that he’s a traitor lucky to be alive. One who’s kinder is his former lover, Philippa Walcote, mother of the boy who has confessed to murder — an impossibility, by all accounts, yet the child figures to hang unless Crispin can work his rational magic.

Renold Elstracke’s posthumous 1617 print of Dick Whittington, fourteenth-century London’s famous lord mayor, and his equally famous cat (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons)

I like Guest’s comedown, which forces our hero to earn an honest living and abide in humble conditions, with his apprentice, Jack, and Jack’s pregnant wife. This unusual ménage makes for an intriguing setup and offers opportunities that, unfortunately, Westerson fails to exploit. For instance, the narrative never delves past the surface of its disgraced protagonist’s feelings, whether as a once-favored somebody who has lost everything, or a middle-aged man who has never married. The narrative tells you straight out that he has regrets, but I wanted to see them in action, especially his struggle with them, and how others might view them. Further, he’s too decent to chafe at his reduced circumstances, which I find unrealistic and a shame. Anyone of any era would have strong feelings about falling from grace, and this is the fourteenth century, when venality’s the rule rather than the exception.

But Westerson has a different agenda. Character doesn’t drive The Deepest Grave, which is fine, but I wish it were harder to tell the good guys from the bad, or that her people showed more than a single, overriding trait. Also, a few interactions Crispin has when he’s not solving crimes feel predictable and pat; I’d like this book a whole lot better if his private life were messier.

What all this adds up to is a generic feel, which I see echoed in the prose:

He was able to enjoy the night, the stars peeking in and out of the cloud cover, wisping across the night sky between the tall buildings. The glittering stars marched ahead of them on a cloudy trail. The shops and houses were blue in the falling light. Only the wealthier houses had gleaming candles shining through glass windows. The rest were barred with shutters, with only a stripe or two of light.

To me, paragraphs like these—the only exterior descriptions in the novel–give little sense of London or fourteenth-century English life. I get that the sky is cloudy, but I don’t really visualize it, or what Guest thinks about it; and that sky could have been there yesterday as well as five hundred years ago. How tall were the buildings? What did the glass look like? The streets?

I’m also skeptical that Guest’s belief in reason rather than Scripture meets so little surprise or opposition, when such thinking was a burning offense. Does Jack, who grew up a thief as a young child, really quote Aristotle, as Guest does? Would a fourteenth-century man, no matter how erudite or educated, link the heart to the pumping of blood? (Westerson could have made that point a different way, but the phrasing jumped out at me.)

Nevertheless, The Deepest Grave has its charms. Westerson integrates the two stories, the churchyard walks and the merchant’s murder, with skill and economy. She deftly employs “no — and furthermore,” so that nothing comes too easily for Crispin, who makes mistakes. Unlike Crispin the man, the Tracker of London follows a less predictable path, and the puzzles will keep you guessing.

The Deepest Grave makes thinner, less satisfying fare than other historical mysteries from Severn House, but it’s entertaining and clever in its way.

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

Every Commandment Broken: Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army

08 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, churchmen, commercial fiction, Danish raiders, Edoardo Albert, England, historical fiction, humor, ninth century, picaresque, plot-driven narrative, venality

Review: Conrad Monk and the Great Heathen Army, by Edoardo Albert
Endeavour Quill, 2018. 215 pp. £8

The narrator of this clever, funny picaresque set in ninth-century England tells you what’s what right away. A “vain dissimulator and crafty poltroon,” as he describes himself, Conrad has no use for compassion, empathy, selflessness, altruism, or physical discomfort and believes that bad luck immediately descends if he ever does anything remotely involving them. As it happens, though, Conrad is also a monk — don’t ask — which makes him a little different. Especially from his companion, Brother Odo, who actually takes his vows seriously and seems not to notice that Conrad has broken every commandment and a lot else.

The story begins in a pigsty, appropriately enough, where Conrad and Odo hide from Danish raiders sacking their monastery. In plotting how to escape imminent death or, at best, enslavement, Conrad persuades the credulous, trusting Odo that he has a plan, and no matter what it looks like, it’s for the best and hews strictly to Christian principles. As a consequence, though Odo has moments of doubt, he generally construes Conrad’s most craven acts as noble self-sacrifice, berating himself for not having done as well or for not having realized their true significance. Conrad, he believes, is a paragon of Christian virtue. This is often hilarious, and no matter how many times Conrad lies, appears to ally himself with the Danish invaders, or conspires to enrich himself at others’ expense, Odo sticks by him.

In less inventive hands, Conrad Monk could have been a one-joke story, growing tiresome quickly. Not here. Albert has created a protagonist infinitely skilled at falsehood, flattery, skulduggery, and shameless self-aggrandizement, who cheerfully admits to himself, nay, revels, in his character. And he needs to be that slippery, because “no-and furthermore” happens every other page. How does he escape the Danish warriors approaching the pigsty? Or the mad Saxon king who insists on dying a religious martyr, with Conrad alongside? I won’t tell you — and don’t read the jacket flap — but trust me, these evasions, like many others to follow, are ingenious.

The flap also pretends that Conrad Monk offers a “highly informative trip through the Anglo-Saxon world,” “painstakingly accurate depictions of history,” and “character-driven fiction.” I think even Conrad would blush at those claims. Albert has researched his ground thoroughly — no argument, there — and his descriptions, like the following of a feast, are very evocative:

But of course it dragged on and on, as these things do, with maudlin warriors staring into their cups and telling tearful tales of comrades lost and battles won, while the king’s scop went from telling the tale of Edmund’s heroic forebears through songs of war and dragon-haunted peace to drunken riddles and, finally, blessed incoherence, as his fingers missed the strings of the lyre and his tongue fought a losing battle with his ale-addled wits; he sank into a snoring heap by the fire, a sleep from which not even a volley of thrown bones could wake him.

But come on. Conrad Monk is about as plot-driven as it gets, and nobody will read it to learn about Anglo-Saxon culture, very little of which emerges in its pages anyway. Albert explains that he’s tried to follow historical sources when possible, and that’s commendable. But Conrad’s voice sounds indelibly modern, which is part of the fun, and if you ever ask, “Could his exploits really happen?,” you’re missing the point. Conrad Monk is a funny book. Humor as a theme or approach needs no defense, and dressing it up as something more serious only undermines the joke.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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