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Shelf Death: The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne

10 Monday Aug 2020

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Review: The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne, by Elsa Hart
Minotaur, 2020. 341 pp. $27

Lady Cecily Kay doesn’t quite understand why her husband, consul in Smyrna for His Majesty James II, has dispatched her back to England, where she can cause no further trouble. After all, if Cecily didn’t point out the oddities in her husband’s financial ledgers, who would? And why wouldn’t he want the benefit of her sharp eyes?

But despite her humiliating departure from the conjugal nest, Lady Kay’s about to have more adventure than she ever could in Smyrna, and in much the same fashion, asking questions that men don’t wish to answer. (Since it’s 1699, London men expect women to listen like donkeys waiting to have their hind legs talked off, but the devil with that.) So when Cecily tours the famous, coveted collection of Sir Barnaby Mayne, a cornucopia of the natural and folkloric worlds, and someone knifes the collector to death, it’s incumbent on Lady Kay to act. Not only do curiosity and scientific rigor demand no less; justice must be served.

My favorite collector, Joseph Banks, as painted by Joshua Reynolds, 1773. President of the Royal Society for more than forty years, Banks established Kew Gardens as the leading botanical collection in the world (courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the United States)

Dinley, Sir Barnaby’s assistant, has confessed to the killing and run away. But anyone with an open mind who’s met him for five minutes would believe he’s innocent. If ever there were a naturalist who cringed and blushed over the red-in-tooth-and-claw aspects of his passion, it would be Dinley—and besides, what motive could he have had? However, since Sir Barnaby was a gentleman of title and property, as are most of the visitors on the tour that day, whereas Dinley’s a nobody, a confession and flight are enough evidence to hang him.

Nobody takes kindly to Lady Kay’s inquiries as to the time of the murder, who was where in the house then, and what may be deduced from such observations. As we’ve seen, though, subtlety’s not her strong point. She does have one ally, however, a childhood friend from a lower social class, who’s temporarily residing in the Mayne manse, working as an illustrator for the collector’s intended catalog. But it takes a while for Cecily to trust Meacan, who, like Cecily, is less than forthcoming—a nice touch, there—and the two never do quite get over their competition to solve the mystery, another nice touch.

They also have different approaches, since Meacan, who’s gone through two husbands, isn’t above using flirtation to surmount an obstacle. I like that too, especially because Hart shows a light hand, not playing that too far. Unfortunately for the two sleuths, however, by the time they decide to let their hair down and join forces, Lady Mayne, the imperious, estranged widow, shows up. The investigation promptly hits a wall, namely, the prohibition to meddle in the constabulary’s business.

Hart constructs her mystery with consummate skill and, as you’ve probably guessed by now, deployed “no—and furthermore” to great advantage. There are many suspects, each with plausible secrets to protect, and the narrative openly reveals all the facts. But unless you’re a better detective than I, you won’t guess the killer’s identity or much else, which keeps the pages turning and offers a satisfying conclusion.

Along the way, Hart casts a keen eye on everything from late-seventeenth-century foppishness to attitudes toward the occult to collecting as blood sport to foodways — imagine, to eat any vegetable raw, especially a radish! Consider this description of Sir Barnaby himself:

Though age had made him frail, thinning his cheeks to translucence and carving furrows around his eyes, the authority projected over the space around him was unambiguous. His shoulders, encased in black velvet, appeared broader than they were, as if they were approaching breadth and volume from the darkness surrounding them. He wore a gray wig that rose high above his brow and fell in luxurious curls down his chest, framing the pristine lace that cascaded from his collar.

Another delight in these pages is the humor. For example, Hart offers us a would-be collector with more money than brains, a sycophant whom everyone quickly learns to avoid. Lady Mayne is a hoot, stiffer alive than her late husband dead, convinced, with barely repressed shudders, that collecting is a godless obsession. But my favorite is a Russian general, whose verbal duels with Lady Kay are hilarious, further evidence in her eyes of what blockheads men can be.

If I have one reservation about this novel, it’s the climactic scene, which invokes more than a couple tropes. But maybe it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek, which would fit. The Cabinets of Barnaby Mayne is a delight.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book through my work for Historical Novels Review.

Our Natures, and That of Love: To Calais, in Ordinary Time

13 Monday Jul 2020

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Review: To Calais, in Ordinary Time, by James Meek
Canongate, 2019. 400 pp. $27

The summer of 1348, the quiet Cotswold village of Outen Green simmers with unexpected happenings. Lady Bernadine (Berna) Corbet, daughter of the manor, is due to wed a much older man she detests, while the groom’s own daughter will wed Sir Guy Corbet, Berna’s father. A loathsome arrangement, to be sure, but Sir Guy’s word is law. Berna hoped that her preferred suitor, Laurence Haket, would spirit her away — according to the chivalric Romance of the Rose, which she adores, he should have — but Laurence seems to love his dignity more than he does Berna.

Will Quate, a plowman and archer bonded to Sir Guy, has been recruited to join a troop of bowmen raised by Laurence to accompany him to Calais, where Laurence has a fiefdom. Will’s betrothed pleads with Will to stay and doesn’t understand why he refuses. She assumes that it’s because she had a stillborn child by another man, but that’s not why. Sir Guy has promised to release Will from his bond if he serves one year, and Will, no fool, has dared demand that promise in writing, even though he can’t read.

Unlettered though he is, however, he can imagine what freedom means, and not just in the sense that leaving Sir Guy’s lands without permission is a hanging offense. An unusual, fascinating character in historical fiction of the medieval era, Will dares hope for an as-yet undefined future, what his neighbors would never dream of—though when he hears the word possibility, he has to ask what it means, which is telling.

You sense that Will and Berna will drive parallel narratives, and that the nature of love will be a significant theme. As one wise character says, “Love is whatever remains once one has made an accommodation with fate.” Since the description of the plague rumored to have afflicted France (what the characters call “the qualm”) recalls the Black Death, which also fits the timing, you can guess that how people behave during a pandemic will matter here too. The novel, published last year, isn’t prescient, though it may seem so; rather, it’s that pandemics share certain qualities. But the similarities are striking and instructive, nonetheless.

The Battle of Calais, 1350, as it appeared in Jean Froissart’s chronicles, 1410 (courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons)

With that as background, Meek’s folk hash out good and evil; the nature of gender; sin and redemption; the fear of, and violence toward, women; desire and obstacles to satisfaction; what knowledge and truth mean. Throw in sidelines like anti-Semitism and whether the English archers who destroyed the French nobility at the Battle of Crécy betrayed the social order, and you begin to see how rich and complex this novel is.

I love Meek’s characters; major or minor, they come through in full. One favorite is Thomas, a scholar who joins the expedition to Calais nominally as a churchman, though he has no power to perform the sacraments, which becomes an issue. But he serves admirably as a mediator amid the constant squabbles and moral dilemmas that arise, and he unsettles his companions — especially the archers, a rough lot — by defining and clarifying issues rather than offering solutions or justifying the behavior he’s been asked to judge. He’s a moral relativist, in other words, frightening to fourteenth-century minds. A later generation might think of him also as a therapist.

Except for the educated characters’ narration, Meek tells his story in archaic English, which he apparently culled from the OED, and which appears in unfamiliar rhythms. That takes getting used to, until the usages begin to make sense: for example, neb for nose, steven for voice, lolled for hanged. Consequently, Meek creates a language barrier between high-born and low, part of his exploration of social class. But it’s also beautiful prose poetry:

The priest said man’s lot wasn’t to choose his dreams, nor win of them, and dreams fell upon us, like wild deer in darkness, while we slept. Yet there were some folk who warded their dreams, as shepherds warded sheep, and kept them as easy by day as by night, and won of them, as of their herd shepherds won wool. These folk, he said were called writers, and they were close to the Fiend.

The cheeky humor typifies To Calais, which has its uproarious, bawdy moments. But if you’re thinking Chaucer, as I did at first, this narrative only partly resembles “The Miller’s Tale.” A great deal of casual violence occurs, and the circumstances of a gang-rape, which happened in the past, figure heavily in the narrative.

At times, I find Thomas the scholar’s moral reasoning too modern, satisfying though it is. There’s also a deathbed epiphany that strikes me as implausible. But To Calais, in Ordinary Time offers so many pleasures that flaws like these don’t get in the way. I highly recommend this novel.

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

Lost, and Found: The Redeemed

07 Monday Oct 2019

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Review: The Redeemed, by Tim Pears
Bloomsbury, 2019. 382 pp. $29

Sixteen-year-old Leo Sercombe, a native of North Devon and a skilled horseman with a deep love of the natural world, sails with the Royal Navy from Scapa Flow in late May 1916 to do battle against the Germans. That alone would be a peculiar irony, but, even worse, Leo’s encased in a steel-plated gun turret on the heavy cruiser Queen Mary, without fresh air or a window to the exterior. I probably don’t need to tell you that the Queen Mary will fare poorly in the imminent Battle of Jutland. But I should note that Pears suggests how British complacency and pride in an outdated warship brings disaster, and that the sailors pay the price.

HMS Queen Mary leaving the River Tyne, 1913. Almost 1,300 men went down with her when she sank at the Battle of Jutland (courtesy Tyne & Wear Archives and Museum, via Wikimedia Commons)

Meanwhile, Charlotte (Lottie) Prideaux, an earl’s daughter roughly Leo’s age and a childhood companion (their illicit friendship having caused great trouble in an earlier volume), studies veterinary medicine on the sly. Lottie watches, pained, as her father’s estate transforms under the pressures of war and modernity. But she’s determined to follow this career denied young women, especially the well-born, and in her zeal, she trusts the wrong party, enduring violence and betrayal. There are no protections in this world.

The Redeemed is the final installment of Pears’s West Country Trilogy and makes a fitting sequel to The Wanderers, a mesmerizing novel of grace and beauty. As with the previous work, in The Redeemed, the prose remains luminous and fixed on the physical world, especially through Leo’s part of the narrative. Many writers try to do this, but Pears has the particular knack of rendering Leo through the natural and metaphysical at once, whether he’s in his gun turret or at anchor at Scapa Flow:

The Flow was a bleak immensity of water, surrounded by low, barren hills. The spanking wind gave an edge to a long summer’s day, and turned into gales in winter. They blew in carrying salt from the sea, and men on deck had to yell to each other to be heard. Though snow was rare, when it did fall the wind blew it into drifts against the gun turrets. The winter days were short and mostly wet. But Leo did not mind the changing weather. With few companions on the ship, he looked outward and felt less imprisoned by their confinement than most. There were frequent, vivid rainbows, and clear nights when the aurora borealis flooded the sky. The first time Leo saw it he thought that the powers of the heavens had been made manifest. That he would see the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

Lottie’s world involves going on rounds as a veterinarian’s assistant, pretending to be male; learning how to help a mare get through a breech birth; getting angry when a farmer mistreats his animals, all rendered in painstaking detail. But she’s also the daughter of the manor, with a stepmother not much older than herself, and the precarious emotional territory that entails. Through her and the constraints she faces, the reader sees England of the past fade forever, a touching elegy to what once was.

I like both narratives very much, though I think Leo’s succeeds more fully, portraying his social skittishness and fierce desire for independence, much like the horses he loves, and his fear to ask for friendship, which he subsumes in a remarkably disciplined dedication for work. You also see how the machine has come to dominate — the gun turret, the tractor that replaces farm horses, the people he once knew who’ve changed their rural ways of life to accommodate the trend — and what gets lost in the exchange.

Throughout, whether from the narrative, the title, or the jacket cover, you sense that Lottie and Leo are meant to find one another again, but you know the path won’t be easy. Pears strings out the tension to the utmost. Along the way, both characters blunder, especially Leo, who trusts very little and has trouble claiming his own.

Compared to The Wanderers, The Redeemed doesn’t hang together as tightly, and though the story unfolds with riveting detail, it’s not always clear why and how the pieces belong or fit together. Though Pears doesn’t waste words, his discursive style may not be for everyone, though I find it enthralling.

I did bump up against one contrivance. The story implies that Leo enlists in the navy at sixteen to avoid the trenches; but if so, why didn’t he wait a couple years to see whether the war would end first? Had he done so, however, I suspect that those two years would have posed a serious problem for the novelist. What would Leo do in all that time, and might he seek out Lottie too soon? Not only that, Jutland was the only major naval battle of the war, and you can see why Pears wants to include it, for he does a magnificent job of rendering it and linking it to Leo’s character.

But that’s a minor point and in no way detracts from The Redeemed. I think I enjoyed the book more for having read its predecessor, but it’s not essential.

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

Class Conflict: The Summer Before the War

28 Monday Aug 2017

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Review: The Summer Before the War, by Helen Simonson
Random House, 2017. 479 pp. $28

That last, idyllic English summer of 1914, Hugh Grange, a young medical student, has come to rural Sussex to visit his beloved Aunt Agatha and Uncle John. As the protegé of a famous surgeon who has all but invited him to marry his pretty daughter, Hugh may be forgiven for thinking he has the world on a string. However, two obstacles emerge to his plans.

Obviously, one is the coming conflict, of which just about everyone remains blithely ignorant in this lovely town of Rye. The other is Beatrice Nash, a young woman hired to teach Latin at the Rye grammar school, a subject traditionally a male preserve. She owes her job to Aunt Agatha, a closet feminist but no “suffragette,” who has politicked, plotted, and flattered to get the old-boy network to accept her protegée. Beatrice is intellectual, serious, and a freethinker–much like Hugh–whereas the surgeon’s daughter is a flirt, a twit, and a social climber. So there’s even less doubt whom he’ll prefer than what’s about to happen to Europe.

That predictability plagues much of The Summer Before the War. Simonson sets her battle lines right away, so that you can tell the good guys from the bad guys, or, when there’s less question of good versus bad, who’ll survive and who won’t. Her upper-class characters are completely detestable, but they’re stick figures, mere attitudes on two legs, and therefore easy targets. To cast doubt on what seems ordained, Simonson employs the “no–and futhermore,” often with skill, but toward the end especially, the story feels contrived and resolutions too neat. It doesn’t help that the novel has one or two superfluous subplots.

But to give The Summer Before the War the credit it deserves, Simonson has a knack for social conflict, and she portrays the pecking order of Rye with wit and verve. The never-ending battle against small-mindedness, gossips, sexism, and class snobbery consumes much energy in these pages, and the repartée between Hugh and his rakish cousin, Daniel, makes fun reading. (It’s a bit surprising how neither young man seems to have a home other than that of their aunt and uncle, but I’m glad they don’t.)

Rye Grammar School, which last held classes in 1907, as it appeared in 2010 (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Beatrice’s struggles are more compelling. She has to play the upright spinster so that the school worthies will hire her, because only a young woman of irreproachable character may come in contact with impressionable youth. Meanwhile, of course, said worthies have nothing but contempt for these lower-class children and would never lift a finger to help them, whereas Beatrice actually believes she can bring light into their lives. Further, having catered to a domineering, scholarly father who has recently died, Beatrice should, in theory, have her meager inheritance, but (male) trustees prevent her from touching it. They, and others, assume that a “girl” of twenty-three can’t be independent without losing her virtue, a criticism that extends to her desire to write books. These are the parts of The Summer Before the War that I like best.

But I like the humor too. Consider this description of an oak-paneled anteroom:

. . . between two large windows, an imposing, green malachite bust of Cromwell on a matching plinth so floridly carved with vines and flowers that Cromwell himself would surely have had it destroyed. Hugh was not familiar with any connection of the Earl North family to Cromwell. Perhaps, he thought, there was none and that was why the ugly heirloom had been consigned to oaken purgatory to intimidate unwanted guests.

The Summer Before the War unfolds at a leisurely pace, for the most part. I don’t mind that, and I regret that so few authors these days tell stories that way; they probably figure their readers won’t have the patience. They may be right, but I don’t think length is the problem. It’s depth. We That Are Left and A Gentleman in Moscow, for instance, succeed by showing their characters’ inner lives so thoroughly that I don’t care how many pages go by. Conversely, when Simonson narrates an intricate story with half-full characters whose inner lives she tells in shorthand (“he felt such-and-such”), that’s when I become conscious of page numbers.

I don’t mean to blame Simonson or single her out; I happened to read her at a moment when I’m redefining my standards. Many, if not most, novelists follow some version of what she does, which for me these days means that I can borrow a stack of promising books from the library and find only one or two that intrigue me past the opening pages. The Summer Before the War would have pleased me more had the author plumbed her main subject and characters to the greater depth.

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

Trial by Fire: The Ashes of London

22 Monday May 2017

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Review: The Ashes of London, by Andrew Taylor
HarperCollins, 2016. 482 pp. $27

Given its numerical sequence, the year 1666 evokes portents of deviltry in many superstitious people who lived then, so the Great Fire that ravages London can only have a malign explanation. The cause isn’t hard to figure, for within living memory, Oliver Cromwell had a king’s head struck off, an act that still divides the country, and which many assume has invited divine vengeance.

But the heavens have no monopoly on violent expression, for the dead monarch’s spendthrift, wastrel son has regained his throne, fixated on eliminating anyone connected with his father’s execution. Suffice to say that English folk have myriad motives for killing or extorting one another, as if they believed the fire hasn’t gone far enough, and further destruction requires their assistance.

The Great Fire of London, by an unknown painter, presumed seventeenth century (courtesy Museum of London via Wikimedia Commons)

James Marwood, a young clerk of quick wit but poor prospects, must negotiate this political and social maelstrom against terrific odds. In the ashes of St. Paul’s Cathedral, a man’s body has been found, stabbed expertly in the neck, with his thumbs bound together. James must investigate while maintaining his clerkship to an irascible, suspicious newspaper publisher who hobnobs with the great. Naturally, the great take a keen interest in the murder case. Naturally too, their number keeps growing, their interests conflict, and they each take James aside to enlist his aid, bargains in which he has no choice. Not only must he please them to remain employed, what little income he has must support his ailing father, who served five years in prison for his association to the regicide faction, a fact no one has forgotten.

Should James disappoint any of his taskmasters, Marwood père will likely dangle from a rope, and James may follow after him. Further–and what a brilliant stroke–James dislikes his father, a difficult, selfish man who cares only for his apocalyptic visions, and who, in his half-demented state, is liable to wander off, preaching seditious monologues that will bring the king’s soldiers running. So James has absolutely no freedom in which to move; he’s caught between many fires, not just the one burning the city.

Meanwhile, there’s Catherine Lovett, a young woman whose father also belonged to the regicide faction and has spent years on the run. Catherine, or Cat, as she’s called, lives with her aunt, uncle, and lecherous cousin, but through a trusted servant, has been trying to find her father. Like James, she has mixed feelings about her paternal relative, but she’s miserable where she is, and he’s her only surviving family, so she hopes that by reuniting, life will improve for both of them.

Fat chance. As the novel begins, Cat and James cross paths as the flames engulf St. Paul’s, into which she tries to run, and from which he restrains her, receiving a nasty bite on the hand for his pains. But he gets off easy, compared with others who cross her, and though you could say they mostly deserve it, she’s not someone to trifle with. And you can bet that as James penetrates the mystery of the corpse at St. Paul’s, and of others to follow, their paths will converge again.

How that narrative unfolds is one of many pleasures The Ashes of London offers. Another is the prose, which conveys the place and time so completely that you feel you’re in it.

St. Paul’s had given up a number of its dead because of the Fire, for tombs had burst open in the heat and flagstones cracked apart. Some corpses were little more than skeletons. Others were clothed in dried flesh in various stages of decay. . . . The souvenir hunters had been at work, and there were bodies that had lost fingers, toes, hands or feet; one lacked a skull.

Taylor pays particular attention to social class, one way the novel feels alive. Cat, who grew up in a comfortable home and who flees her wealthy aunt and uncle’s house, must become a servant and go into hiding. For the first time, she walks alone in London and becomes a target for any man who cares to touch her or make lewd remarks, which underlines one difference between rich and poor. (That said, when Cat was with her aunt and uncle, she was betrothed to a titled suitor who seemed little better.) Similarly, James’s investigation would be complicated enough without having to bow and scrape before people who don’t condescend to notice his presence unless they wish to bully him–or, conversely, people of lower station than himself who act servile but may be untrustworthy. All this, Taylor handles deftly.

For all that, I wish he’d expunged the clichés that occasionally mar his narrative. (“Cat could not speak. Her happiness was sponged away. Fear made it hard to breathe.”) He’s a much better writer than that, and for the most part–the vastly greater part–it shows in The Ashes of London.

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

Always Ask for More: The History of a Pleasure Seeker

26 Monday Oct 2015

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Review: History of a Pleasure Seeker, by Richard Mason
Knopf, 2012. 277 pp. $26

Piet Barol, a young man from Leiden who appreciates the fine things he can’t afford, has everything and nothing going for him. He has no accomplishments or talents, save an ability to draw and a decent singing voice; no bloodlines to boast of; and his meager wardrobe consists of more-or-less presentable finery he’s bought second-hand (from university students in hock up to their eyeballs). These are rickety assets on which to build one’s fortune in 1907, but Piet won’t settle for less than the life to which he plans to become accustomed. And he figures that he’ll win the day through charm, manners, good looks and, most important, his conceit that he can get anyone to like him.

Photocrom print of Nieuwmarkt en Waag, Amsterdam, between 1890 and 1905 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Photocrom print of Nieuwmarkt en Waag, Amsterdam, between 1890 and 1905 (Courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons).

Accordingly, when Mr. and Mrs. Vermeulen-Sickerts, pillars of Amsterdam merchant wealth, interview Piet in their sumptuous home as a prospective tutor for their young son, Piet boldly (but with proper deference and discretion) acts as if he belongs. He has no other prospects, and if he’s turned down, has no idea what he’ll do. On the other hand, he has no experience dealing with children, was himself a mediocre scholar, and, what’s more, the Vermeulen-Sickerts are deliberately vague when describing Egbert, their son. Through tactful questioning, Piet learns that the boy never goes outside and has a particular way of relating to others. Nevertheless, the Vermeulen-Sickerts expect that Piet will “cure” Egbert, which the young man from Leiden promises to do. So they hire him–upon which he asks for, and receives, a raise.

Naturally, the situation presents other perils. The Vermeulen-Sickerts have two beautiful, marriageable daughters, spoiled young women who immediately set upon Piet’s destruction. The younger, Louisa, cold and devious, suspects him as a fake and invents ways to trip him up, starting with the first meal he shares with the family:

Piet took in the handwritten menu in front of him, the four crystal vases of orange roses that decorated the table, the two silver dishes piled high with blood oranges on the sideboard, and felt wonderfully proud of himself. If Louisa had expected him to be confounded by the oysters or the langoustines or the quail à la minute, she was disappointed–because [his mother] had foreseen just this eventuality and twice a year had served Piet the delicacies of her youth so that he might dine in sophisticated company one day, without shame.

The elder daughter, Constance, flirts with him for the pleasure of rousing an attraction that she can then reject (and for which he’d be fired, should he pursue her in any way). The butler and footman would like to cozy up to him too–his looks attract both men and women–and the lady of the house seems available as well. What’s a fellow to do? Win them all over, but without compromising himself or his ambitions.

Rest assured that in this picaresque, often hilarious tale, our hero has plenty of erotic adventures, all graphically described, and sexual tension hums in the background, even–especially–when everybody’s fully clothed. But if Piet Barol were merely a hedonist on the make, The History of a Pleasure Seeker would be far less interesting than it is. Rather, Mason has thought about how being surrounded by exquisite sculptures, eating foie gras off Sèvres china, and soaking in a hot bath for the first time can change a person’s outlook.

In doing so, he’s underlined a forgotten point about the modern age: It wasn’t so long ago that the simplest luxuries were beyond any but the very rich. We take that for granted, because today, they’re commonplace. But have we deadened ourselves to the real pleasure they give, and does that mean we have to seek greater and greater novelty to arouse our senses?

Moreover, Piet’s presence changes his employers’ lives too, because he’s a reminder of the physical and emotional intimacy they’ve cast away in exchange for creature comforts. As such, The History of a Pleasure Seeker examines social class and how the need to be superior exacts a price from those who fall victim to it, a theme reminiscent of novels by Edith Wharton and Henry James.

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