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Tag Archives: Robert Hillman

Five Years, and I Still Haven’t Read Everything

28 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Adam Ehrlich Sachs, Benjamin Black, book reviews, Daniel Mason, Diane Setterfield, historical fiction, Imogen Hermes Gowar, Jane Harris, Lissa Evans, literary fiction, Louis Bayard, Martine Fournier Watson, mystery fiction, Pat Barker, Robert Hillman, thriller, Tim Mason, Umberto Eco

Novelhistorian celebrates its fifth birthday this week with the usual retrospective of the books that have made the deepest impression on me during the past year. I’d also like to thank you, my readers, for making this blog worthwhile. I’m glad you’ve stuck with me, and I hope it’s rewarding.

There are thirteen books this year, more than normal, because I couldn’t bear to leave any out. In no particular order, they are:

The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker, retells the Trojan War from the point of view of Briseis, Achilles’ captive concubine, whom Agamemnon seizes and thereby causes rifts within the Greek camp. Tradition holds Briseis to blame, but, as the protagonist of this superb novel points out, the tellers of that tradition are male. Barker’s storytelling is so acute that you can imagine she has known these mythical figures all her life.

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason, offers an unusual romance and coming-of-age story set against harrowing, scrupulously observed scenes at a First World War field hospital in Poland. Mason not only renders his characters in full psychological depth, he explores what medicine means for the healer as well as the patient, a fresh, compelling theme.

Sugar Money, by Jane Harris, shows you late eighteenth-century slavery in the Caribbean, and what a heart-breaking, riveting picture that is. The novel succeeds as adventure, a tale of another time, sibling rivalry, and an exposé of colonialism; the prose, vivid as a poem, relies heavily on Kréyol phrases and at times reads like music.

Courting Mr. Lincoln, by Louis Bayard, recounts the courtship between an up-and-coming Illinois backwoods lawyer and a Kentucky belle, revealing the lighter side of each as well as their lonely, tortured souls. Often hilarious, this novel reminds me of Austen for its wit and social observation, but you also see the president in the making.

Once Upon a River, by Diane Setterfield, tells the mystery of how a child in late nineteenth-century Oxfordshire emerges from a river apparently dead, only to revive — and no one knows who she is. The solution involves violence, loss, conspiracy, and romance; storytelling doesn’t get more seductive than this, and though the premise sounds woo-woo, it isn’t.

Wolf on a String, by Benjamin Black (pseudonym of John Banville), tells an age-old story about a young man on the make. But the year is 1599, and the court of mad Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, is a snake pit, especially if you have to solve a murder to survive. The tension never flags, and the story has the ring of historical truth, even though the author made most of it up.

The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar, narrates the unlikely romance between a straight-laced eighteenth-century English merchant and a courtesan. The story reminds me of a modern-day tale by Henry Fielding, complete with intricate plot, ribaldry, and social commentary, much of the latter concerning how men use women as possessions.

Old Baggage, by Lissa Evans, features a once-famous English suffragist in the 1930s who, decades after her heyday, mourns the lack of passion and radical feeling among the young—and her own irrelevance. The solution to both problems propels a funny, engaging story and involves a maddening yet sympathetic heroine.

In The Dream Peddler, by Martine Fournier Watson, sometime in the early 1900s, a well-dressed salesman with courtly manners arrives in a Midwestern rural town and offers his customers the dreams they desire, with a money-back guarantee. At first, the townspeople suppose he’s a charlatan, but he’s not; and in a way, that causes more trouble.

The Darwin Affair, by Tim Mason, spins the 1859 publication of The Origin of Species into a brilliant psychological thriller involving an assassination attempt on Queen Victoria and multiple murders. I hate suspense novels whose surprise solution involves a psychopath, but here, the villain is in plain sight. So are Prince Albert, Karl Marx, Thomas Huxley, and many other figures, including three famous Charleses — Darwin, Dickens, and Field, our hero detective, a real historical figure.

The Organs of Sense, by Adam Ehrlich Sachs, tells the utterly madcap story of the seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Leibniz visiting a recluse astronomer who, alone in Europe, has predicted a total eclipse for a certain hour. Start this novel, a howlingly funny sendup of philosophy and its practitioners, and you too will want to know whether the eclipse will happen.

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman, invokes the trope du jour. This particular bookshop, vintage 1969, belongs to an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (huh?), who falls for a taciturn Australian sheep farmer who doesn’t read books and hasn’t heard of Auschwitz. Treacle? Not in the least, because nothing in this novel happens without reversals, second thoughts, mixed feelings, or a sense of dread; the author has taken his characters’ measure and renders them as mature adults.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco, narrates a series of murders in 1327 at an abbey where a conclave debates such issues as whether Christ laughed. Such a premise might seem pointless or abstract. But this discursive yet mesmerizing novel explores profound philosophical and political issues; offers a page-turning mystery; and illuminates the past by its own lights, therefore revealing the present. The latter, to me, is the highest purpose of historical fiction.

If there’s a common thread here–besides the obvious upmarket/literary slant–it’s each author’s ability to show via concrete detail what another (and, in my view, lesser) writer would choose to tell. Getting closer to physical vividness has been my mantra as writer, especially in the past year, and many of these books have inspired me that way.

Thanks again for reading.

From Auschwitz to Australia: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted

08 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1968, anti-Semitism, Auschwitz, Australia, book review, bookselling, historical fiction, Holocaust, Jews, literary fiction, Robert Hillman, romance, sheep ranching, Vietnam War

Review: The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, by Robert Hillman
Putnam, 2018. 293 pp. $26

Dutiful, reliable, bewildered by life, unsure what happiness is or whether he’s ever experienced it, that’s Tom Hope — until he meets Hannah Babel. Hometown, Australia, has never seen anything like her, and even in 1968, the changes sweeping the West seem to have skipped this rural, agrarian corner of Down Under. Hannah, an effervescent Hungarian Holocaust survivor (a phrase probably seldom used, but it fits) plans to open a bookshop, of all things, and she hires Tom, a sheep rancher and orchardist, to do welding and carpentry to prepare for the opening. She’s utterly mercurial, older than he by fifteen years, speaks inflected English he can’t always fathom, and when she lets her canary, David, fly freely, the bird settles on Tom’s shoulder, further discomfiting him.

Hannah settles on him too, in a passionate rush that made me think, for a moment, that The Bookshop of the Brokenhearted derives from a male fantasy. But no; though their instant mutual attraction burns intensely, plenty of obstacles stand between them, least of which is that Tom has never read a book. A few years before, Tom married Trudy, a psychologically unstable woman who has left him, twice, and scarred him so badly that happiness is “a fugitive,” to “be roused to confidence, encouraged,” but, if grasped too strongly, might “slip back into the shadows, forever.” (Trudy’s legacy continues in other ways, but I don’t want to reveal too much.) Hannah has had two husbands, both dead, but she suffered her worst loss at Auschwitz, which stays with her, always. Metaphorically, that loss connects her to Trudy, something that neither Tom nor Hannah expected.

Poddy lambs, or orphans, drinking milk at a sheep station (ranch) in Australia (courtesy Figaro at English Wikipedia)

In lesser hands, a premise like this could easily turn sticky with treacle, melodrama, clichéd predictability, or a combination of these. Books, bookshops, and libraries are a hot thing in fiction these days, soon to be a trope, perhaps. Nevertheless, nothing happens here without second thoughts, reversals, mixed feelings, and a sense of dread, collectively the best tonic for treacle. Hillman never loses sight of his characters’ age, maturity, or makeup, and his narrative takes no adolescent flights of fancy, relying on simple prose, grounded in the everyday, again staying in character. Consider this passage early on, just after Trudy leaves, and Tom, in his workshop, wonders whether she’ll write:

With the soldering, it was the work of a good two hours. An old, demented ram he treated as a friend butted him repeatedly as he sanded and primed — not hard, just affectionately. And Beau [his dog] in turn chewed on the old ram’s leg. Tom asked himself aloud: ‘What do you expect her [Trudy] to say to you, you nong? “Hello, it’s a nice day?” For God’s sake.’ He was a practical person who never thought of fate and things that were meant to be. He could take apart an engine, stand surrounded by its thousand parts, find what was causing the problem, put the engine back together. He might daydream, but he knew that the dreams were foolish.

How can you resist a scene like that, which shows another side to a man not given to reflection?

Besides the treacle, it would be easy for a writer to adopt Hannah as a Jew of convenience, visible to a knowledgeable reader as unfamiliar with her own faith, which she’s also conveniently let slide. That’s a favorite device, as I’ve noted before in other posts. But Hillman knows his ground, rendering Hannah’s flashbacks with authority and depicting her Jewishness as well as the casual anti-Semitism of Tom’s neighbors. But their reaction is an aside; Tom has never heard of Auschwitz and has the barest notions of the Holocaust, about which Hannah refuses to tell him. So it’s the hidden past that lies between them, not what the neighbors say, about which Tom wouldn’t care anyway.

Names matter in this novel, at times too obviously. Tom Hope? Check. Does Babel refer to the tower of, given Hannah’s multilingual, sometimes chaotic persona; or Isaac, the great Russian writer murdered by Stalin? No question where Pastor Bligh comes from, a vicious, self-righteous disciplinarian who lives up to his namesake, except that he’s incompetent at his job. I have no sympathy for fundamentalist Christian cultist lunatic sadists, and I suppose that’s fair. Yet I want this man to have a three-dimensional rendering, and he doesn’t get one.

Even so, that’s the major glitch in The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, a warm, satisfying, decidedly unsticky novel, which I highly recommend.

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

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