• About Me
  • Contact Me
  • Policies
  • Welcome

Novelhistorian

~ What's new and old in historical fiction

Novelhistorian

Tag Archives: science

What Freedom Is: Washington Black

01 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

1830, Barbados, book review, Britain, emotional impact of slavery, Esi Edugyan, good versus evil, historical fiction, individuality, literary fiction, nineteenth century, racism, science, slavery, sugar plantation, superb characterization

Review: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan
Random House/Vintage, 2019. 384 pp. $17

There may be more brutal, unfeeling masters than Erasmus Wilde, owner of Faith sugar plantation in Barbados in 1830, but it’s hard to imagine. For instance, when a slave commits suicide, an overseer decapitates his corpse. Why? The slaves believe that once they die, they’ll be reunited with their people in Africa. So Wilde tells them that headless corpses wander for eternity; beware, there’s no escape. If you kill yourself, you’re a thief, stealing his property.

Such crushing logic, which warps every conceivable interaction, cows nearly all the slaves into hopeless submission; most do all they can to remain inconspicuous. Consequently, when Wilde’s brother Christopher comes to stay, eleven-year-old George Washington Black (known as Wash) is terrified to discover that he’s been chosen the newcomer’s manservant.

To his amazement, however, Christopher — who insists on being called Titch — is cut from a very different cloth, as Wash quickly learns whenever he must go to the big house and wait table. Titch has no interest in slavery, except to abolish it; and Faith’s chief attractions for him are the flora and fauna and a steep hill from which he hopes to launch a balloon for exploration.

Bridgetown, Barbados, in 1848, fourteen years after Britain outlawed slavery throughout the empire (from Robert H. Schombergk, The History of Barbados; courtesy British Library via Wikimedia Commons)

But a suspicious death forces the two to flee — and from that moment, Wash begins to imagine the life he could never have dreamed of. Whether he gets it or not, and how he reinvents himself in the process, makes as compelling a novel as you will find. Washington Black will captivate you and make you think.

Edugyan examines, from the inside, what it means to be a slave, to have no will of your own save what little is granted, and which may be taken away at any time. That sounds obvious, but I assure you, in its moment-to-moment portrayal here, that simply stated condition has deep, insidious effects that wrap around the characters like the roots of an evil, destructive plant.

Titch may dislike slavery, yet Wash wonders what, exactly, he means to his new boss. Is Wash a real person or merely the perfect size and shape ballast for the balloon? Is his a young mind Titch respects, or does the scientist teach him what he needs to become a better assistant? As with all the characters, and I do mean all, the author depicts this pair in their fullness, so that you know their internal struggles. Even Erasmus Wilde, a truly despicable man, has his angles and quirks; no cardboard villain, he. In that way, he receives his due, even as the perpetrator of great evil.

To write a good novel about a victim is harder than it looks. (Writing any good novel is harder than it looks, but that’s another story.) Self-pity would undermine the narrative and warp the reader’s connection to Wash, while earnestness, the flip side of that coin, would demean this tale. Not here. Wash hates his enemies with a razor fierceness, no righteousness, bravado, or breast-beating allowed, just earned hostility. Whatever self-pity creeps in momentarily overtakes him in a different context — love, which is only natural and quite real. Everyone in love acts entitled once in a while, at least.

Also important, Wash never stops striving and loving, no matter what blows he takes. Suffering by itself holds only a tenuous connection for readers; but caring for someone else despite suffering always wins. If Wash becomes remarkably adept at certain pursuits, perhaps stretching credulity, his path remains difficult, often perilous, his adventures allowing for (if not demanding) a character somewhat larger than life.

Throughout, he’s a spectacular observer, the prose being another pleasure of the book, as with his first look at Bridge Town, the capital of Barbados:

Swells of dust boiled up off the roads. Horses trotted past, heads low in the heat, flies swarming. We clattered past a sailor on a street corner blowing through some bizarre knot of pipes, while beside him a second danced along to his own fiddle, his fingers flying like shadows over the strings. We stopped in the sudden traffic; through the carriage oozed the stink of overripe fruit carted in from the port, and of immense slabs of tuna starting to turn in the heat. At a passing market stall I glimpsed their fishy eyes, fissured with blood as they gawked on beds of cool leaves.

Sometimes, in the early going when Wash is still a young boy, the voice slips — the narrative makes observations seemingly too knowledgeable for a lad, even one looking back from later years. But that’s a minor blemish on a superb novel, and I highly recommend Washington Black.

Disclaimer: I bought my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that shares its receipts with independent bookstores.

What an Annoying Book: The Signature of All Things

07 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

abolition, age of discovery, botany, characterization, Elizabeth Gilbert, historical fiction, literary fiction, maudlin characters, nineteenth century, science, sexual repression

Review: The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Penguin, 2013. 501 pp. $35

Henry Whittaker lives an eighteenth-century rags-to-riches story, rising from a gardener’s assistant at London’s Kew Botanical Gardens to become the wealthiest man in Philadelphia, trading in quinine and other tropical or unusual plants. Men from all over the world flock to his estate, White Acres, to share species or scientific information, or offer investment opportunities.

His daughter, Alma, born in 1800, is herself a hothouse flower. Speaking five languages by a ridiculously young age, she’s brought up to help entertain the stream of dinner guests with intelligent, provocative questions, and to develop a rigorously inquiring mind. What she’s not taught is how to deal with people except from an intellectual perspective, what the purpose of emotions or desire might be, or what’s that thing called love. Nor may she venture out to learn; everything and everyone are brought to White Acres, and she’s expected to react as her parents wish. In fact, her Dutch mother, Beatrix, seems to have two messages for Alma. One: Listen while I tell you about your mistakes, which you will never repeat; and two: Kill inconvenient emotions before they multiply.

Moss growing in the Allegheny National Forest, near Tionesta (Courtesy Ivo Shandor, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Moss growing in the Allegheny National Forest, near Tionesta, Pennsylvania (Courtesy Ivo Shandor, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

When this regime gets too much for Alma, she seeks comfort in Hanneke, Beatrix’s longtime servant, who keeps White Acres humming. But Hanneke’s cut from much the same cloth, so Alma gets no sympathy from anyone. Even when the household adopts Prudence, a girl her own age, Alma finds no company, for her half-sister is about as emotive and flexible as a porcelain plate. Not that Alma herself is psychologically supple or anything but tightly contained. But at least she struggles to understand desire, which, over time, she realizes may often be sexual.

If this description reminds you of a nineteenth-century novel (told from a more modern perspective), I believe that’s Gilbert’s plan. Her narrative and prose feel discursive and authorial, much like those of Dickens, Thackeray, or their contemporaries, though her writing style falls closer to our own sensibilities. Her theme also fits the era (and ours): What’s survival all about, and where does altruism fit in? Fittingly, Alma becomes a botanist, a brilliant woman in a field dominated by men. Gilbert splendidly captures the excitement of discovery in an era during which so many sciences began–indeed, as she informs us, the word scientist was coined. Alma makes her most significant advances in bryology, the study of mosses, and my favorite moment is when she first turns her magnifying glass on a boulder full of them:

This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. . . Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled.
Just across this ocean–which was half the size of Alma’s shawl–she found another continent of moss altogether. On this continent, everything was different.

From that moment, Anna realizes her life’s work, which fits her mission: to make sense of the world. And by the world, she means this one, having little grasp of, or patience for, talk of the next.

To my dismay, however, Gilbert takes this in directions I have little grasp of or patience for. The first third of The Signature of All Things, I mostly felt sympathy for these repressed, suffering people, even Henry, Beatrix, and Hanneke, the most rigid and controlling of the lot. But I quickly began to feel irritated with how the novel develops.

For one thing, everyone’s forever lecturing Alma on how to behave, what she’s done wrong, and to whom. Not only does she listen and adopt whatever she hears as complete truth, however baffling or painful; she immediately careens off to correct her errors. It’s as if she suddenly lost the independent mind she’s honed her entire life and given herself over to a constant string of improbable epiphanies, because of which she makes even less probable decisions.

Worse, these moments of supposed clarity lead her to reverse her appraisals of people who’ve done her harm. Her sister, Prudence, has become a holier-than-thou abolitionist who rubs her self-sacrifice in everybody’s faces, a pretty poor advertisement for a movement that needed all the help it could get. Nevertheless, after one of Hanneke’s drill-sergeant sessions, Prudence, the maudlin half-sibling who never gave Alma the time of day, somehow becomes a saint. Similarly, Ambrose Pike, a gifted plant illustrator, attracts Alma, at first. But he expects her–a convinced scientist who needs to see something to give it any credit–to accompany him in the spirit world. Is he a self-indulgent, deceptive twit? Noooo. After much trouble, Alma learns he’s a saint too.

In the end, The Signature of All Things both delighted and exhausted me. Take that for what you will.

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

Recent Posts

  • The Women Behind the Legend: Traces
  • Music, Death, Grief: The Great Passion
  • The Pain Will Get Better: After Lives
  • The Commission for Relief in Belgium
  • Sold!: The Shinnery

Recent Comments

Craig Baker on The Luckiest Man in Russia: A…
His Last Duchess: Th… on The Shakespeares, at Home:…
Year of the Thriller… on An Island of Women: Matri…
Year of the Thriller… on Royal Assassin: M, King’s…
Year of the Thriller… on Deception’s Toll: An Unlikely…

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Categories

  • Comment
  • Reviews and Columns
  • Uncategorized

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blogs I Follow

  • Roxana Arama
  • Damyanti Biswas
  • madame bibi lophile recommends
  • History Imagined: For Readers, Writers, & Lovers of Historical Fiction
  • Suzy Henderson
  • Flashlight Commentary
  • Diary of an Eccentric

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 175 other subscribers
Follow Novelhistorian on WordPress.com

Recent Posts

  • The Women Behind the Legend: Traces
  • Music, Death, Grief: The Great Passion
  • The Pain Will Get Better: After Lives
  • The Commission for Relief in Belgium
  • Sold!: The Shinnery

Recent Comments

Craig Baker on The Luckiest Man in Russia: A…
His Last Duchess: Th… on The Shakespeares, at Home:…
Year of the Thriller… on An Island of Women: Matri…
Year of the Thriller… on Royal Assassin: M, King’s…
Year of the Thriller… on Deception’s Toll: An Unlikely…

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014

Contents

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Roxana Arama

storyteller from a foreign land

Damyanti Biswas

For lovers of reading, crime writing, crime fiction

madame bibi lophile recommends

Reading: it's personal

History Imagined: For Readers, Writers, & Lovers of Historical Fiction

Suzy Henderson

What's new and old in historical fiction

Flashlight Commentary

What's new and old in historical fiction

Diary of an Eccentric

writings of an eccentric bookworm

  • Follow Following
    • Novelhistorian
    • Join 175 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Novelhistorian
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...