Posts filed under 'Historical Fiction'
This old house is run-down. This old house is leaky. This old house is far from town. And this old house sends them screaming ’cause it’s the scariest place around. I’m talking about Hundreds Hall, the big, spooky mansion at the center of Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger.
Have you got a thing for old houses? Manderley? Northanger Abbey? The Castle of Otranto? Hill House? If you dream of polished wood banisters leading up grand central staircases, heirloom tapestries hanging from the windows, hidden corridors and maids in costumes, then Hundreds Hall is just your place. In post World War II England the Ayres estate is beyond crumbling and well on the way to ruin. The family is broke and while still respected in the community, they’re seen as more of a curiosity than anything else. Piece by piece the grounds are being sold off to developers, but the family’s still got the house.
Enter Dr. Faraday, whose mother worked in the nursery at Hundreds when she was a girl. He is called to the house for a medical emergency and befriends the family. Then weird things start to happen. Weird things involving blood and injury and madness. Weird things that culminate in a disturbing ending that I did not see coming. I do not normally predict these things, though, so that is nothing new.
On a scary scale of one to ten, I would rate this book at about six. On my scale, a one is something easy, like the picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, where everything gets resolved and all are safe and sound at the end. A five is anything by Neil Gaiman. OK, to be honest, The Graveyard Book and Coraline are really about a seven on my scale, because they did give me nightmares. Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House are at ten. The Little Stranger is sufficiently creepy, but it’s not going to give you nightmares, and there’s more to recommend than the horror.
What I enjoyed most about this book had nothing to do with the chillers and thrillers. I liked the house. The details of the flooring and ceiling and wallpaper and ornamental carvings were amazing. And that was just the beginning. There were also chandeliers and fireplaces and fancy chairs. And libraries and billiards rooms and nurseries. And linens and silver trays and aristocratic maid-calling bells. Hundreds Hall is a fantastic setting. If you appreciate a good mansion with a touch of terror, give this book a go.
March 17th, 2010
Molly - Central
Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel in several years, The Lacuna, spans three decades in the life of Harrison Shepard, the son of a United States diplomat and a Mexican mother. Told in the form of diary entries, newspaper articles, letters and a memoir, Harrison’s life unfolds from his teenage years in Mexico to his adulthood in North Carolina.
The novel begins in 1929 when Harrison is thirteen and living in Mexico with his mother who has abandoned America in hopes of finding a better husband. Left on his own, Harrison begins reading adventure novels and books on Mexican history while developing a lifelong habit of journal writing. In Mexico Harrison also discovers a small cave - a lacuna - while living on an island off the coast.
After moving to Mexico City, Harrison is put to work in the kitchen and running errands. His life takes an unexpected turn when he’s hired to make plaster for the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and eventually joins his household. Both Rivera and his wife, artist Frida Kahlo, are committed communists and during Harrison’s years with them open their home to the exiled Russian leader Leon Trotsky. Living in constant fear of assassination by Stalins’ death squads, Trotsky’s time in the household provides a different perspective on the early years of the Russian Revolution.
The second half of the novel shifts to North Carolina where Harrison lives after Trotsky’s death. He finds himself in the surprising position of a heartthrob to million of female readers as the author of historical romances and is later investigated as a possible subversive by the House Un-American Activites Committee. It is during his years back in the United States that the reader learns the identity of the person who’s saved his many journals over the years and makes this story possible.
I especially enjoyed the first part of this book with the descriptions of the Mexican countryside with its many vivid colors as well as the interesting background information on the early years of the Russian Revolution. Harrison’s later years in North Carolina were somewhat disappointing in what was otherwise an entertaining novel from this popular author.
February 24th, 2010
Lesley - Central
The Queen’s throne is in jeopardy. Surrounded by advisors who may or may not be trustworthy, Elizabeth faces rebellion from overseas and rivals within her own court. Faced with constant challenges to her claim to royalty, Elizabeth has to rely on her wits and her special powers to ensure the crown for herself and her sons.
Sons? Philippa Gregory departs from her usual fictional intrigues of the Tudor Court to focus on the Virgin Queen’s great-grandmother: the Yorkist Queen Elizabeth. With The White Queen, Gregory finds particularly fertile ground for her imagination. The widow of a Lancastrian knight, Elizabeth Grey captures the heart of the Yorkist usurper King Edward IV. Married in secret, their marriage is defined by the feuding houses of Lancaster and York, placing Elizabeth and her children in constant danger. Like her other books, Gregory refreshes a well-worn story by bringing to life the women at the center of the upheavals. Rejected by her husband’s family and eager to consolidate her position, Elizabeth and her mother use marriage and a bit of witchcraft to put her family in high places–and insure a generation of enemies. As Elizabeth’s ambition grows, the danger to herself and her children mounts, leading her royal sons to a fate that remains unsolved to this day.
Like her other books, Gregory grounds her fiction in solid research (The White Queen includes a bibliography for further reading). In some ways, that is the problem: Elizabeth’s life was so eventful that plot sometimes gains the advantage over character. However, there’s enough momentum in the plot to keep readers’ interest, and the hope that future books in the trilogy will flesh out intriguing characters that might not get their full due in this installment. The real treat here, like Gregory’s other court novels, is experiencing history through the eyes of England’s powerful and often fiercely ambitious women.
For those who want to explore more about this especially tumultous and addictive period in English history (or need some help sorting out the tangled threads of loyalty), check out some of the fiction or nonfiction titles on the subject. Mystery lovers might try Josephine Tey’s classic The Daughter of Time, while those who like a little romance with their history might pick up Anne Easter Smith’s new trilogy on the era, starting with A Rose for the Crown. Gregory’s next installment, tentatively titled The Red Queen, hits shelves this August.
February 6th, 2010
Katie H.
Betsy Carter’s latest novel, The Puzzle King, is based on her great aunt and uncle’s lives in America in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Simon Phelps and Flora Grossman are both sent to America by their families in hopes of a better life. Simon arrives in 1892 as a young boy from Lithuania to avoid the army and grows up poor in New York’s Lower East Side. Flora leaves Germany as a teenager to join her older sister and lives with relatives north of the city. She eventually meets Simon at a dance and they marry in 1909. Simon’s talent as an artist leads him to a successful career in window dressing and later advertising where he becomes known as the “Puzzle King” for the many jigsaw puzzles he creates as promotional products.
Meanwhile Flora’s older sister Seema renounces her Jewish faith and becomes a mistress to a married non-Jewish man while living in New York City. In 1928 both Flora and Seema return to Europe after their mother dies to be with their sister Margot and reconnect with their young niece Edith. Seema surprises herself and others with an unexpected connection to her homeland and decides to remain in Germany. She falls in love with a journalist and converts to Catholicism. In 1936 Simon and Flora return to Germany, this time with money and documents to help as many people as possible leave the country.
Even though this is the first book by Betsy Carter that I’ve read, I did attend the library’s Book Club Cafe a couple of years ago where she was the featured speaker. She’s successfully combined her family’s history with events in post World War I America and Germany in interesting ways in this historical novel.
January 21st, 2010
Lesley - Central
Wolf Hall is not to be taken lightly. This year’s winner of the Man Booker Prize is not the sort of Tudor pageant most fiction treatments make of Henry VIII’s reign, nor does it dwell on the clandestine couplings that Philippa Gregory has built her reputation on. A reader picking up Wolf Hall will be first confronted with several pages of names (an inordinate amount being either Thomas or Anne) and a couple of tangled royal lineages, all preceeding 500 plus pages of dense, detailed prose. But even though some commentators sighed resignedly at the thought of another Tudor tome on the market, be assured that Hilary Mantel has created a suprisingly modern character study, richly deserving the accolades and recognition as one of the best novels of the year.
At the center of Henry’s court is Thomas Cromwell, a man of mysterious and humble origins, whose brilliance comes from years of surviving Europe’s wars and its banking houses. Mantel reimagines Henry’s court from Cromwell’s point of view, and under his Machiavellian gaze the court seethes with intrigue. Beginning as Cardinal Wosley’s right hand man, Cromwell senses the Cardinal’s declining status and slowly maneuvers into the King’s good graces. Before long, he is Henry’s head minister, uncannily capable of gauging the king’s moods and other’s rising (or falling) fortunes. Henry’s desire to wed Anne Boleyn becomes Cromwell’s mission, and his targets, be it Queen Katherine or Thomas More, create a power struggle against the Catholic Chruch that could place everyone connected with Cromwell in danger of burning.
Although Mantel has plenty of plot to work with, her characterization of Cromwell is what really makes Wolf Hall worthy of praise. His powers of observation–a glance at a glove tells him a family’s financial status–pegs each individual and what they might do for the Crown. Growing up in the harsh realities of Renaissance Europe, Cromwell’s shrewd methods masks a need to protect those close to him, even as his rise exposes everyone to greater risk. Still, the promise of a new Europe–one ruled not by old families and the Church, but by those with the largest coffers–relentlessly drives Cromwell and makes him a character who would be as much as ease in modern Washington as in Tudor London.
It’s unlikely that everyone who picks up Wolf Hall will stick with it to the end. In some ways, it reminds me of The Name of the Rose, another book that had me disoriented at first and completely hooked by the end. For those who stick with Mantel, the payoff is worth it. With so much material to work with, Mantel is already at work at a sequel–and as those familiar with Henry’s reign know, it promises to hold as much tension as Wolf Hall.
January 7th, 2010
Katie H.
I don’t usually like historical novels, but I just finished reading one I could NOT put down. The House at Riverton by Kate Morton, a runaway bestseller in England (published there as The Shifting Fog), and a debut novel written by an Australian author, kept me up WAY past my bedtime.
Vaguely reminiscent of Atonement by Ian McEwan, Riverton is set in England between the World Wars and focuses on an aristocratic family. The story is narrated by Grace Bradley, now 98, who was a house servant at the mansion from the age of 14. Prompted by interviews she’s giving to Ursula, an American who is producing a movie about the family, Grace decides to reveal a secret she’s held her entire life. In 1924, Grace was witness to a scandalous suicide that took place during a lavish party at the estate. Though she doesn’t tell Ursula, she tapes her story for her grandson Marcus who is suffering a heartbreak.
Sent to Riverton by her mother who once worked there, Grace soon loves her position as it brings her into close contact with the nephew and nieces of Lord Ashbury, the owner of the mansion. Just about her age, David, Hannah and Emmeline occupy themselves chiefly with The Game, a fantasy amusement they record in books similar to the tiny books the Bronte siblings wrote. An only child of a distant mother, Grace is enchanted by them. But soon WWI changes everything. David, against his father’s wishes, follows his friend Robert to war. In short time David, along with Lord Ashbury and his son, are killed in France. Albert, Grace’s favorite fellow servant, returns shell shocked. The family is devastated.
As a result of Lord Asbury’s death, Hannah’s father Frederick inherits Riverton, and the family moves in. An automobile pioneer, he soon loses his shirt to American bankers as the transition from autos to war planes back to autos ruins him. And Hannah, manipulated into believing that marriage to someone with money would provide her with freedom to adventure, marries the American banker’s son, ripping her family apart. Hannah takes Grace to London with her, promoting her to a personal maid, and soon relying on her for everything.
Robert resurfaces in Hannah’s life after several years of her boring, passion-less marriage. Once she learns he’s an up and coming poet, her curiousity about her brother’s old friend is piqued and soon his artistic, restless soul is just the thing she’s looking for. They begin a torrid affair and fantasize and plot an escape; but an erroneous assumption about Grace on Hannah’s part results in a tragic mistake.
I won’t reveal more about this book. It is so rich in plot details, from Grace’s tender feelings for Albert, the mystery of her parentage, Hannah’s longing for independence, her romantic love affair, Emmeline’s wild ways, Grace’s eventual future career, even Ursula’s background, that it keeps you turning the pages. Grace is one of those characters you can’t help but love. Morton creates a suspenseful, almost gothic atmosphere in her story. Be prepared for a few sleepless nights.
January 4th, 2010
Lisa - Central
Sweeping up Glass by Carolyn Wall is a remarkable first novel, the story of a long suffering woman named Olivia Harker Cross living during the Depression in rural Kentucky. Although her life has been full of hardship and tragedy, Olivia is a survivor. She has suffered through many things: poverty, hunger, the mental illness of her mother, the early death of her father, and widowhood.
The book starts with wolves being killed on Olivia’s Kentucky mountain property. She keeps finding the dead animals with their ears cut off, and is concerned that the entire population will be wiped out. Olivia and her grandson W’llm attempt a rescue and try to keep two cubs alive. Olivia’s search for the reasons behind the killings force her to relive her past and that of her family and community. Long kept secrets come to light, with many consequences.
Olivia’s story is told through flashbacks; we learn the backstory of her childhood with her cruel, and mentally ill mother, who is still living on Olivia’s property. The one constant positive in Olivia’s life is her grandson, whose care was given to her when he was an infant, by her now absent daughter. In a particularily moving scene, her daughter returns to reclaim her child and Olivia refuses to let him go.
Carolyn Wall is a good writer, and is able to draw the reader quickly into the story and to make her characters come alive. That being said and without giving anything away, I have to say that I disliked the ending, which is complicated and not too credible. I’ll still say that Wall is an author to watch and she should have a good future especially if she doesn’t rely on melodramatic endings.
December 31st, 2009
Mary K. - Central
Best-selling author Edward Rutherfurd’s latest historical novel, New York, is a biography of the city from its origins as an Indian fishing village, settled by the Dutch in the 17th Century, to the aftermath of 9/11. Even though it’s an 800+ page book and longer than I usually read, I thought I’d give it a try being a fan of historical fiction as well as American history. This saga held my attention right from the beginning and continued throughout the many centuries and events described by the author in his book.
What made this story especially readable to me was the inclusion of several interesting characters and their descendants from the 17th through the 21st centuries and their involvement in many leading events of the time. Occasionally there were almost too many coincidences among the families to be completely believable but for the most part this tactic worked and made an otherwise long novel into an engrossing tale.
Rutherfurd’s story includes New York’s participation in the American Revolutionary war, the draft riots of the Civil War, the excesses of the Gilded Age, New York’s emergence as a leading financial center, several waves of immigration, and the two world wars. Rutherfurd continues his biography with the city’s recovery from its near financial ruin of the 1970’s to a rebirth in the 1990’s and concludes with the events of 9/11.
Beverly Swerling’s excellent series on the history of New York includes similar material and along with this book provides a fascinating view of a truly American City.
December 28th, 2009
Lesley - Central
If I were studying literature, I would have read Toni Morrison’s A Mercy at least one more time to mine all the kernels that most definitely are buried in her small, powerful story. If you’ve ever read Morrison, you know what I’m talking about. Her language is gorgeous, poetic, sparse and dense. There is much to uncover in each paragraph. I read it only once, so I know I’ve missed a lot. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate* this novel.
The story is a collage of the experiences of four women, all abandoned or orphaned, in Pre-Revolutionary America. These women also have in common that they are “owned” in some way by Jacob Vaark, a trader who acquired each of them in a different fashion. Fortunately for the women, Jacob is a decent man.
Lina, an Indian woman, was bought by Jacob after her tribe was decimated by smallpox, and manages the household. Rebekka, he marries; her family fled religious intolerance in England. Sorrow was found alone in a shipwreck. And Florens, poor Florens, was the daughter of a slave whose Portuguese owner owed Jacob a huge debt. In a Sophie’s Choice trade off, her mother begs Jacob to take Florens when her owner offers Florens’ brother in trade. (She knows Florens would soon be raped by the owner.) So Jacob has these four women; they’re not really slaves, more like servants, and they live in a sort of harmony with each other, working side by side and making allowances for each one’s idiosyncracies.
But then Jacob dies. He worked himself hard chasing the early American dream, accumulating enough money to build himself an estate much like the Portuguese’s. And then he dies of smallpox before he could move in. Soon Rebekka has the disease. Ensuing events upset the harmony of the household.
Morrison takes on so much in this novel: the role of women in a patriarchal society, slavery and racial understanding in its inception in America, social roles in a society and country in its infancy. It’s not an easy read either. Each character has her/his own chapter, and for the first few pages of each, I wasn’t sure who is doing the talking. I had to re-read many paragraphs to figure out what was going on. But at the end of it all, I couldn’t help feel that I had read a rich extraordinary story.
*Enjoy is just not the right word for a TM novel.
December 23rd, 2009
Lisa - Central
How can you really like a character in a novel, but not really enjoy the book? I found myself with that dilemma while reading Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell. I loved the main character/narrator of the story, but had a lot of trouble with the book itself.
Agnes Shanklin is a not very pretty woman raised in Ohio by her disapproving, domineering mother to doubt everything about herself. Her favorite saying to Agnes was ‘you don’t like that.’ She forced Agnes to go to Oberlin College with her sister to get herself a career as a teacher (she wanted to do settlement work). Her brother and sister did manage to escape - Ernest joined the service, and Lillie married a missionary - but the farthest Agnes got was Cleveland, where she taught in elementary school. Her biggest act of resistance was to adopt a deformed dachshund named Rosie.
Then the Great Influenza hits. Agnes loses her entire family but inherits so much money she becomes independently wealthy. After she emerges from her grief and disposes of her relatives’ estates, she decides to go to Egypt. Lillie had been there with her missionary husband and two children - all gone - and had written many letters regaling Agnes with tales of the places and people she encountered - including ‘Neddy’ Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia to you and me. Agnes takes Rosie and boards a ship to discover the area Lillie loved.
And this is where it all falls apart for me. Almost as soon as she arrives, Agnes bumps into Lawrence, and she gets invited to join in peripherally with the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference - which is attended by Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell, among others. The conference is where the current disastrous boundaries of the countries we now know as Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Palestine and Syria are to be determined and with that the ownership of the all-important oil rights. Russell finds it necessary to instruct the reader on the politics of the region (which I doubtless needed, but did I want it?) through the conversations Agnes has with Lawrence, Churchill and others. While interesting, it felt too lecture-y and the conversations were stilted and bogged down the story.
In the midst of all of this, Agnes also meets Karl Weilbacher, a German spy who had been trailing Lawrence during WWI. A handsome, charming man who loved dachshunds, Karl was upfront with Agnes about being a spy and being married. Agnes, acting on her own for the first time in her life, does not care about either. She is happy to share what information she overhears with Karl, and becomes his mistress.
So, the lecturing, the insertion of a fictional character in the action of real events, and the lackluster but frankly bizarre (I won’t spoil it) ending ruined the book for me. I would have much preferred if Agnes went on her travels and discovered Egypt as a country of interesting local people and mysterious history on her own. While I enjoy learning about history in historical novels, I don’t appreciate an Introductory History Course with my fiction. Having said that, I loved Agnes. She just had a way about her that I enjoyed. So, a mixed bag for me but if you don’t mind too much history with your fiction, this may work better for you.
November 30th, 2009
Lisa - Central
E.L. Doctorow returns to New York City in his latest book Homer and Langley. The title characters are based on New York’s eccentric siblings Homer and Langley Collyer who lived in their parent’s Fifth Avenue mansion for years while collecting and storing enough items to fill the several floors of the building.
Doctorow’s Homer and Langley started life as the privileged children of a physician and his socialite wife. However several profound events occurred in both brother’s lives as young men. Langley, a Columbia University student, joined the military during World War I and became a victim of mustard gas and shell shock. Meanwhile Homer, who had been gradually losing his sight for years, eventually became completely blind. Adding to the brothers’ misfortune, was the death of both their parents during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in 1918.
Soon after returning to his Fifth Avenue residence following the war, Langley began roaming the city streets daily looking for items to collect. In the meantime Homer, the narrator of the story, spent most of his time playing the family piano. Eventually their home contained a Model T Ford set up in the dining room, a Chinese bronze horse, machinery of all types and sizes as well as stacks of the many daily newspapers published in New York City. All that hoarding aside, Homer and Langley become witnesses to the changes in American society over the course of their lives.
While I enjoyed reading this book that was on my “don’t miss” list for the fall, I had problems with its basic structure. Homer (1881-1947) and Langley Collyer (1885-1947) were real brothers who did live in a Fifth Avenue mansion and became known as eccentric hoarders by the time of their deaths. While Doctorow’s novel used their real names and several basic facts, he moved their lives ahead almost 15 years and made other changes which I found distracting and difficult to reconcile with the real lives of his characters.
As a reader of historical novels, I would have preferred different names for the brothers while still following the general outline of their lives. That way, the author could have told the story and describe events during the 20th century without confusing the reader. In Doctorow’s book this confusion distracted from what was otherwise an interesting and entertaining view of two unique characters in history.
October 16th, 2009
Lesley - Central
If you like historical mysteries, I have two to recommend. The first, A Trace of Smoke by Rebecca Cantrell, is set in 1931 Berlin, Germany. Hannah Vogel is a single woman in a man’s world. She is a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt and writes under a pseudonym. Crime is her beat. The mystery begins when Hannah gets the shock of her life while following leads at the police station. There in black and white she recognizes the identity of one of the photographs in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead. The nude dead man on the river bank is her beloved brother, Ernst, a gay transvestite cabaret singer. But she can’t tell anyone because her and her brother’s identity papers are being used to help Jewish friends escape Germany. So she decides to investigate on her own.
As she digs into her brother’s life Hannah discovers that Ernst was involved with some pretty powerful and decadent Nazis. As the investigation proceeds she must walk a fine line if she wants to stay alive and protect those close to her. This bittersweet mystery gives us a look into the life of an ordinary German trying to navigate the dangerous times as the Nazis were coming to power.
My second recommendation is set in fifth century Britain. It has Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere, and introduces the one-armed man, Malgwyn. In The Killing Way by Tony Hays, Malgwyn is asked by a young Lord Arthur to investigate the brutal death of a young woman - who just happens to be Malgwyn’s sister-in-law. Since he lost his arm in battle and his wife to a brutal death by the Saxons, Malgwyn has been drowning his sorrows in alcohol. Despite that fact he cannot resist Arthur’s request for help. Soon enough the investigation has him off the bottle and using his detective skills to find out who killed the young girl. In saving the accused Merlin, finding justice for the young woman and helping Arthur defeat those who would challenge his ascension to the throne Malgwyn once again begins to feel like he has a purpose and a life. I enjoyed watching Malgwyn change from an angry, old drunk to a sober, brave detective. I hope to read more of his adventures.
October 10th, 2009
Kathy K. - Central
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