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Tag Archives: psychological realism

A Fairy Tale Made Real: While Beauty Slept

05 Monday Jul 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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book review, edgy fiction, Elizabeth Blackwell, envy, fairy tale, feminism, heavy-handed portents, historical fiction, kingship, Middle Ages, psychological realism, sexual power, Sleeping Beauty, social snobbery

Review: While Beauty Slept, by Elizabeth Blackwell
Putnam, 2014. 416 pp. $16

When fourteen-year-old Elise Dalriss loses her mother and almost all her siblings to the plague that nearly kills her too, she must make a desperate choice. She sees that she has no future on her father’s farm, which has been failing for years, and he’s a cruel, bitter, hard man, whom she fears. He’s also not her real father—Elise was born out of wedlock—and she doesn’t know who is, so she has that shame to bear as well.

Given courage by her mother’s last words and finding a few precious coins sewn into the dead woman’s skirt hem, Elise seizes her chance. She flees home and throws herself on the mercy of her mother’s sister. Receiving more kindness there than expected, Elise prepares to ask for employment as a chambermaid at the castle, where her mother once worked, and where King Ranolf and Queen Lenore hold court. It’s a terrifying proposition, especially for a girl of humble birth who knows nothing of court etiquette and little of the work for which she claims to be qualified. Symbolic of Elise’s anxieties, the castle itself threatens her:

I expected it to be large and well fortified. But . . . I was overwhelmed by the sheer mass of the fortress that sprawled defiantly atop the hill before me. Thick walls of rugged stone seemed to have burst forth from the earth to encircle the towers within. Behind the battlements, turrets stabbed the sky, with a few narrow windows giving the only indication that people lived within. For a moment, the weight of it chilled my spirits, and I was seized by a sudden reluctance to enter. Raised in the open air, with land extending in every direction, I had never considered what it would mean to live enclosed within walls.

This is the premise for an ingenious retelling of Sleeping Beauty, stripped of its romance and all the more captivating for it. Gone are the homage to chivalry, the rarefied sensibility, the obsession with instant physical attraction (though it does occur), or a royal perspective. Elise’s narration, though emphasizing the king, queen, and, later, their daughter—those fixtures of the legend remain—delves deeply into unpleasant realities no fairy tale ever concerned itself with. And I don’t mean the evil witch, though here she is.

Henry Meynell Rheam’s 1899 pencil-and-watercolor rendition of Sleeping Beauty (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Rather, Blackwell tells her story through the power imbalance between men and women, the snobbery of social rank (reveled in by those who have none), and the harshness of everyday life in an era that approximates the Middle Ages without too-specific detail. Typical of that time and any seat of power, the politics of court and realm take center stage, which believably grounds the narrative and offers credible, deeper motivations than the original. When Ranolf and Lenore bemoan the lack of a child, they’re not just parents but rulers seeking an heir; foreign enemies menace the kingdom. Consequently, though Blackwell derives suspense from changing what we think we know, providing that contrast to expectations that draws us in, she’s also showing us a more plausible, harder-edged version than the original.

While Beauty Slept delivers a strong feminist message, but the novel revolves around the power of love—again, not courtly love or the powdered, happily-ever-after variety (in which you just add water and stir). She means abiding love, one that weathers years and trials without recompense asked or offered, that between parents and children, or between clear-eyed adults who’ve had enough time in life to rack up regrets.

Elise rises within the servant pecking order with perhaps too much ease—the story requires her to—though the author does her best to portray the fallout from her rivals, witness social snubs, jealousy, and backbiting. I don’t mind that so much, though I do question how a girl battered by life and a violent father could bloom so, once given the chance. That’s the downside to psychological realism versus fairy tale—once you throw down that gauntlet, you have to fulfill the challenge—and I’d have expected Elise’s losses to deduct a higher toll from her emotional resources.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t bother me as much as the moments when she announces that trouble’s a-coming, and, in retrospect (she’s retelling the story to her great-granddaughter), she wishes she’d done things differently. Such heavy-handed portents accomplish nothing except to pull the reader out of the story.

But I highly recommend While Beauty Slept, which adds realistic flesh to legendary bones in a thought-provoking way that speaks to the modern reader without compromising the time and place.

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

Internal Medicine: The Winter Soldier

05 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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amputations, Austria-Hungary, battle stress, book review, coming of age, Daniel Mason, First World War, historical fiction, literary fiction, military incompetence, Poland, psychological realism, romance, Vienna, wartime medicine

Review: The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
Little, Brown, 2018. 319 pp. $28

In 1915, war sends Lucius Krzelewski, a third-year Polish medical student, to a regimental hospital somewhere on the Polish front. But what that sounds like bears no relation to what he finds there — he’s the only doctor, aided by a single nurse and three orderlies, and they toil inside a dark, dank, freezing church whose roof has a large hole in it. They have no x-ray machine, laboratory, or hospital beds, and though they have fairly steady supplies of dressings, carbolic, morphine, and chloral, the emergency medicine is far from anything Lucius has ever heard of. In fact, he’s hardly ever touched a patient, his training having consisted of rote memory and recitations. He does possess an extraordinary internalized representation of what the human body looks like beneath the skin, and his diagnostic instincts are very sharp. Unfortunately, what matters now is how quickly and effectively he can perform amputations.

However, Sister Margarete, the nurse, is there to teach him, and he proves a quick study. Not always quick enough for her taste, to be sure — she has a sardonic way of observing formalities that tells him she knows more about his inexperience than she’s letting on. She also senses his social unease, though not its cause, a stuffy, aristocratic upbringing:

He wondered if he had grown up in another time or place — among a different, silent people, his unease would never have been noticed. But in Vienna, among the eloquent, where frivolity had been cultivated into a faith, he knew that others saw him falter. Lucius: the name, chosen by his father after the legendary kings of Rome, itself was mockery; he was anything but light. By his thirteenth birthday, so terrified by his mother’s disapproval, so increasingly uncertain of anything to say at all, his unease began to appear in a quiver of his lip, a nervous twisting of his fingers, and at last, a stutter.

Ever since then, Lucius has seldom been able to talk to anyone easily, unless it’s about medicine, for which he has that preternatural, internal feel. It is his life raft, his hope, his balm for what ails him, a malady he cannot diagnose. Yet he can talk to sister Margarete. That in itself is astonishing, for she belongs to the Order of Saint Catherine of Siena, speaks about lice in biblical phrases, and has been known to withhold painkillers from patients who try to trespass certain boundaries, a mistake they don’t make twice.

Yet this formidable, utterly correct angel of mercy isn’t all she seems, any more than Lucius is, which may explain the growing, unspoken attraction between them. The jacket cover typically tells too much, so I advise against reading it, but this much I’ll say: The arrival of a soldier suffering acute shell shock provides a defining moment in the narrative.

And those hospital scenes are terrific. Mason is not only an exceptionally accomplished novelist, he teaches psychiatry. You sense that his portrayal of psychological battle trauma, terse and stripped-down as it is, is all the more authentic, without a trace of the theatrical. Likewise, his depictions of incompetence, class-consciousness, bitter ethnic rivalry, and utter disarray within the Austro-Hungarian Army ring absolutely true. There’s a brief battle scene (which, though vivid, seems a bit contrived), but Mason’s more concerned with suffering behind the lines and what people can and will do when they are pushed far enough. Only in those circumstances can Lucius see his shortcomings and capacities, which is why, despite the intense cruelty, pain, and heartache, his experience transforms him. Internal medicine, indeed.

Where The Winter Soldier troubles me is toward the beginning and the end. Once Lucius sets eyes on his so-called regimental hospital, the forward narrative pauses for forty or so pages to recount his upbringing and education. It’s interesting, mostly, beautifully written, and often darkly funny, yet I found myself saying, Oh, come on, already. Does the novel need all of this material, and must it come right there? I invite you to decide, as with the ending, not all of which seems entirely credible to me.

But The Winter Soldier is an excellent novel, an unusual tale of romance and coming of age, set against an equally unusual portrayal of war.

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

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