Category: Historical Fiction

Treason by Meredith Whitford

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Treason is the story of Richard III, beginning with his childhood as the youngest son of the Duke of York and moving on through the various battles of the Wars of the Roses, the reign of his brother Edward IV, Richard’s own time as King and his eventual defeat by Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth. The story is narrated by Martin Robsart, one of only a few fictional characters in the book. As Richard’s cousin and closest friend, Martin is present at some of the most important moments in English history.

I thought telling the story from the perspective of Richard’s fictional cousin and best friend worked very well and I could almost believe Martin had really existed. He has his own storylines, including a romance with Innogen Shaxper (another fictional character), but his main role as narrator is to share with us his observations on Richard, Edward and the others.

In Treason, Richard is not portrayed as the evil, scheming hunchback he is often believed to be, thanks to Shakespeare’s play. Instead, he is shown as being brave, intelligent, loyal to his brother, respected by his men, and a loving husband to Anne Neville. And although his reign is so tragically cut short at Bosworth, during his brief time on the throne he proves himself to be a good king. He does have a few faults, but nothing that would make me think he was a man who was capable of murdering his own nephews or committing all the other crimes he’s been accused of. On the subject of the disappearance of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, by the way, the author offers an interesting and believable theory, though not one that I personally think is very likely.

I was impressed with the depth given to the other characters too. I thought Richard’s brother George, Duke of Clarence, was portrayed more sympathetically than in other books I’ve read. He did some terrible things, but I see him more as a person who was weak and easily led, and his eventual fate was, for me, one of the saddest moments of the story. Elizabeth Woodville (Edward IV’s wife) and her family are shown in a very negative light, but it’s worth remembering that we are seeing everybody through Martin’s eyes and as his loyalties lie firmly with Richard it’s understandable that his opinions of other characters aren’t always going to be completely unbiased.

The dialogue is quite modern – too modern at times, maybe – but I know this is something which is very difficult to get exactly right in historical fiction. I find that when an author tries to make the language sound more authentic, it can either work very well or very badly! I didn’t have a problem with the dialogue in this book and I could tell that Meredith Whitford had given a lot of attention to period detail (food, clothing etc) which made the descriptions of fifteenth century life feel very convincing. Battle scenes are an aspect of historical fiction that I sometimes find difficult to follow, but there are only a few in Treason and the author makes them easy to understand by concentrating on Martin’s emotions and personal experiences of the battle rather than giving us pages and pages of military tactics.

Reading Treason was proof, if I needed it, that it’s worth looking beyond the more popular names in historical fiction and taking a chance on a book I had never heard about before. It’s a shame this book is not better known as I’m sure many readers who enjoyed books like Sharon Kay Penman’s The Sunne in Splendour or Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time would probably enjoy this one too. And for anyone new to Wars of the Roses fiction, this would also be a good starting point – it makes a very complicated period of history both easy to understand and fun to read about. I loved it!

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

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Despite being an avid reader as a child, I somehow missed out on Michael Morpurgo. The only one of his books that I read was Twist of Gold, at an age when I was starting to consider myself ‘too old’ for the children’s section of the library, and all I can remember is that it was about two children from Ireland who go to America to find their father during the Irish potato famine, and that it made me cry. But last week I read my second Michael Morpurgo book, War Horse, because I had decided to go to see the new Steven Spielberg film and wanted to read the book first. And War Horse, like all the best children’s books, is a book that can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

War Horse has a strong anti-war message and shows us the horrors of World War I from a very unusual perspective. The story is narrated by Joey, a young thoroughbred horse, who is bought at auction by a poor farmer from Devon. The farmer soon regrets this decision but his son, Albert, forms a special bond with Joey and trains him to work on the farm, determined to prove to his father that he hasn’t wasted his money. However, the family are struggling to pay their rent and when war breaks out in 1914, Joey is sold to an army officer as a cavalry horse. The rest of the story follows Joey’s experiences in France, first with the British cavalry and then pulling ambulances and artillery for the German army, but will he survive the war and will he ever be reunited with Albert?

Being an animal lover, I’m ashamed to admit that I had never given much thought to the suffering of the horses involved in the First World War or what happened to them after the war was over. Seeing things through Joey’s eyes gave a fascinating new perspective and has helped me to learn a little bit about an aspect of the war I had never really considered. Many of the horses serving with Joey are killed in their very first battle (the thought of leading a cavalry charge into a line of machine guns is so horrible to think about) and more of them die of hunger, illness or exhaustion after being forced to pull guns that are too heavy for them up hills and through deep mud.

I couldn’t help comparing this book to Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, another book narrated by a horse and one of my absolute favourites from my childhood. I should point out that Joey is not a talking horse and although he does interact with other horses, including his best friend Topthorn, he never actually ‘speaks’ to them in the way Black Beauty does. And yet I found Black Beauty a much more convincing horse narrator than Joey. I kept forgetting that Joey was supposed to be a horse as I thought he sounded very much like a human narrator would. But to be fair, this is a different type of book and Joey is telling his story in a different way.

War Horse has a reputation for being very sad and emotional, and yes, I did have tears in my eyes a few times. The story never becomes too sentimental, but poor Joey does go through a lot of traumatic experiences, and of course the war itself is always distressing to read about. However, because the book is so short (it can easily be read in an hour or two) many of the characters we meet are only around for a few chapters and for one reason or another don’t appear again. This made it difficult to really form a connection with them and so the story didn’t have quite the emotional impact on me that I had been expecting. I’m sure though that if I’d been reading this book at the age of nine or ten I would probably have cried from beginning to end!

One of the things I really loved about the book was that Joey, being a horse, doesn’t ‘take sides’; he doesn’t see the British as good and the Germans bad, for example. Instead he is able to tell the story from a neutral viewpoint, something that is very rare in a novel about war. Joey meets and makes friends with soldiers in both armies and also with a French civilian and his granddaughter. And although he witnesses a lot of cruelty and destruction, he also experiences kindness and compassion from people on both sides. There’s a wonderful moment when a British soldier and a German soldier leave their trenches to meet in no man’s land. I won’t tell you why they do this, but this scene and others like it are what made this book such a powerful read.

This is my first book for the War Through the Generations challenge, which has a World War I theme this year. For anyone else participating in the challenge, I would highly recommend War Horse as a quick but very moving read.

Corrag by Susan Fletcher

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I first became aware of this book when Boof of The Book Whisperer said it was one of her favourites. I’ve been curious to see why she loved it so much and now that I’ve read it I agree that it’s a great book, although I didn’t think so at first.

In Corrag Susan Fletcher looks at one tragic moment in Scotland’s history – the Glencoe Massacre of 1692 in which thirty-eight members of the MacDonald clan were murdered by English soldiers and forty more died of exposure as they tried to escape. The story is narrated by Corrag, a young woman who has been branded a witch and sentenced to death for her involvement with the MacDonalds and the part she played in trying to prevent the massacre. As Corrag sits in her cell awaiting her death, she is visited by Charles Leslie, an Irish clergyman and Jacobite who is trying to find evidence to prove that the Protestant King William III was responsible for what happened at Glencoe.

Corrag tells Charles Leslie about her childhood in the north of England and the day her mother, who had also been accused of witchcraft, told her to ride into Scotland, where she believed she would be safe. With only her grey mare for company, Corrag rode “north and west” and made a new home for herself near the valley of Glencoe. Here she met the people of the MacDonald clan and experienced true friendship and love for the first time in her life. As Leslie listens to Corrag’s memories he begins to learn the truth about the Glencoe Massacre and at the same time is forced to change his own preconceived ideas about Corrag herself.

I wasn’t sure about this book when I first started reading. I actually put it down after the first chapter and decided it wasn’t for me. But then something made me pick it up a few days later and try again. Corrag’s narrative style is so unusual and original, it took me a few chapters to get used to it but after that I started to fall in love with the beautiful, lyrical writing. The writing style gives the book a very strong sense of time and place and I felt as if I was really listening to a voice from the past. Corrag is also very observant and appreciates the little details of life that most of us would never even notice. I loved seeing the beauty of the Highlands through her eyes as she rode through Scotland on her grey mare.

Each chapter of Corrag’s story is followed by a letter written by Charles Leslie to his wife at home in Ireland, telling her about his experiences in Scotland and how his opinions about Corrag are changing as he learns more about her life. Corrag of course has not done anything to deserve the accusations of witchcraft; she’s an innocent woman who loves the natural world and has a knowledge of herbalism and healing, like her mother before her and like many other innocent women who were burned at the stake. And yet no matter how hard things get for Corrag and how much cruelty she experiences at the hands of other people she remains a loving, kind-hearted person and never loses her faith in human nature.

Corrag is a beautiful, moving story and I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it.

Note: This book has also been published under the titles of Witch Light and The Highland Witch.

The Winter Palace by Eva Stachniak

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I was so looking forward to reading this book. I love historical fiction novels set in Russia and this one sounded wonderful (and has such a beautiful cover too). It would be the perfect book to lose myself in over the Christmas holidays, I thought. Well, unfortunately it wasn’t. Or not for me, anyway – the majority of people who have reviewed this book seem to have loved it, which makes me feel even more disappointed that I didn’t.

The Winter Palace is described as ‘a novel of Catherine the Great’, which is slightly misleading as Catherine is not the main character and the book only covers her early years. Beginning with her arrival at court as the Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a prospective bride for the Empress Elizabeth’s heir, Grand Duke Peter, Catherine’s rise to power is described by her friend, Varvara Nikolayevna. Varvara is a young Polish girl, the daughter of a bookbinder, who is employed as a spy, or ‘tongue’, at the court of Empress Elizabeth. The Winter Palace is really Varvara’s story rather than Catherine’s.

This is a period of Russian history I knew almost nothing about, so I can’t comment on how accurate any of the novel is. I found some of it confusing at first, due to my unfamiliarity with the people and events of the era, though there is a useful character list at the back of the book to help with this. It’s always good to finish a historical fiction novel feeling that you were at least able to learn something about the period and by the time I reached the end of this book I did feel that I had a better knowledge of the subject.

The setting of the book – the Russian Imperial court – was as fascinating as I’d expected it to be. I did enjoy the first few chapters of the book, where Varvara first arrives at the Winter Palace and becomes a spy for the Chancellor, Count Bestuzhev. The atmosphere of claustrophobia and danger was very convincing and showed what it must have been like to live in a world where everything you said or did was being spied on and reported. Reading about all the plotting, scheming, betrayal and changing allegiances made me feel relieved that I didn’t have to experience life at the Russian court myself!

I think the book might have worked better for me if it had been narrated by Catherine herself instead of her story being secondary to Varvara’s, who was not even present at court for long sections of the novel. I didn’t feel enough connection to Varvara and her personal storyline to stay interested throughout the chapters where she was away from the Winter Palace and I thought it was a bad decision to remove her character from the Empress’s household for such a long period of time as this was what led to me becoming bored with the story.

Really, this wasn’t a bad novel; it just didn’t have the depth I was hoping for, especially considering the length of the book. I don’t think I’ll be reading the sequel, though it would be interesting to see how Eva Stachniak continues the story.

Shakespeare’s Mistress by Karen Harper

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It’s a well-known fact that William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway in November 1582. What fewer people know, however, is that just days earlier a marriage licence had been issued to William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley of the village of Temple Grafton. Historians are divided over whether Shakespeare was actually involved with two separate women or whether the first entry in the parish register was a simple clerical error. In Shakespeare’s Mistress Karen Harper takes this as a starting point to explore Anne Whateley’s life and the influence she may have had on Shakespeare’s work. Anne is portrayed as the woman Shakespeare truly loved while the other Anne, Anne Hathaway, is the one who is recognised as his legal wife.

The novel is narrated by Anne Whateley and divided into five ‘Acts’, like one of Shakespeare’s plays, and it really is a fascinating, entertaining story. As well as following the turbulent romance between Anne and Will (as he is referred to throughout the book) we also meet a host of other figures from the Elizabethan period including Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe, Henry Wriothesley, John Dee, Richard Burbage, Sir Walter Raleigh and Lord Strange. The story is played out against a backdrop of historical events: an outbreak of the plague, Christopher Marlowe’s death, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the funeral of Elizabeth I and the building of the Globe Theatre.

The book appears to have been very well-researched and I appreciated the author’s notes at the end as it’s always helpful to have an idea of which parts of a novel are based on historical fact and which are completely fictional. I enjoyed reading all the scenes in which Will and Anne are going through the creative process of writing and staging his famous plays – a knowledge of Shakespeare and his writing is not essential, by the way, but would probably help. Karen Harper has also done a good job of attempting to show how Anne could have been the inspiration behind some of Shakespeare’s work but I was less convinced by the way the characters were constantly dropping lines from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets into their conversations. It seemed forced and unnatural, particularly when Anne and Will kept speaking to each other in rhyming couplets!

The dialogue, in general, has a modern feel, though it’s interspersed with words like ’twas and ’tis, in an attempt to make it more authentic. The language wasn’t always quite right but it didn’t feel ridiculous (which is always a danger with dialogue in historical novels) and I didn’t have a problem with it.

I did enjoy both this book and also Karen Harper’s The Queen’s Governess, which I read a couple of months ago. I really like the fact that with both novels she has found a way to approach the Tudor period from a fresh and unusual perspective. I think I would put her books on the same level as Philippa Gregory’s, so if you like Gregory’s historical fiction I would recommend trying Harper’s too.

For anyone interested in learning more about Anne Whateley, this website discusses the various arguments for and against her existence.

Note: This book has previously been published in the US under the title Mistress Shakespeare

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

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Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls which I read in October. When I reached the end of Shanghai Girls and found that it finished with a big cliffhanger, I was desperate to find out what happened next. Luckily my library had a copy of the sequel available so I didn’t have long to wait. And this one, in my opinion, is the better of the two books. It certainly has a more satisfying ending!

It’s difficult to know how much to say about the plot of a sequel because I know there may be people reading this who haven’t yet read Shanghai Girls and I would hate to spoil things for anyone. All I will tell you then is that Dreams of Joy is set in China during the 1950s and is the story of nineteen-year-old Joy Louie, the daughter of one of the characters in the previous novel. Joy has recently made a discovery that has thrown her life into turmoil and she decides to leave her home in Los Angeles and travel to Shanghai in search of answers. She’s also looking forward to becoming part of Chairman Mao’s new communist China…but the longer she spends there the more she begins to think that maybe communism isn’t quite as wonderful as it seemed at first.

The story is told in the form of alternating narratives by Joy and another character from Shanghai Girls, Pearl. Although I didn’t think there was a lot of difference in the style of Pearl’s narrative voice and Joy’s, there are some big differences in attitude with Pearl being more cautious and cynical about communism and Joy full of enthusiasm, at least at first. It was good to have the chance to see things from two opposing viewpoints. Joy could be frustratingly naïve at times, but that’s only because we have the benefit of knowing what would happen during Mao’s regime.

The only other book I’ve read about communism in China was Wild Swans by Jung Chang (one of the best books I read last year, by the way, and one I highly recommend you read if you haven’t already). I had forgotten just how horrible some of the things that happened during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were. The Great Leap Forward included Mao’s campaign to increase the country’s steel production, at the expense of agriculture, which resulted in a severe famine. Lisa See goes into quite a lot of detail about what happened during this period, so there are some horrific descriptions of cruelty, starvation and suffering, particularly in the sections where Joy is living in Green Dragon Village, a commune in the countryside. Lisa See really likes to put her characters through some terrible ordeals, but the book isn’t completely bleak and depressing – it’s also a story about the relationship between sisters Pearl and May and the special bond each of them has with Joy.

So is it necessary to have read Shanghai Girls first? I would say it’s not completely essential, as I’m sure this book could easily be understood and enjoyed on its own, but my personal recommendation would be to read both of them in the correct order beginning with Shanghai Girls.

Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers by Mari Strachan

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Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers has been sitting patiently on my shelf for a few months waiting until I felt it was the right time to read it. It sounded interesting and I’d heard some positive things about it, but it didn’t seem like a book that was calling out to be read immediately. Looking at the first couple of pages I noticed that it was written in third person present tense, something I often have a problem with, and this was another reason I wasn’t in any hurry to start reading. Well, it seems I was doing this book an injustice because Blow on a Dead Man’s Embers turned out to be a very moving, atmospheric novel and one I loved from beginning to end.

The book is set in a small community in Wales in the 1920s, just a few years after the end of World War I. The war has left many women grieving for a husband, a son or a brother and Non (Rhiannon) Davies is one of the lucky ones whose husband Davey has come home. But although Davey is physically unharmed he is still haunted by his experiences in the trenches. When Non finds him hiding under the kitchen table one morning she grows concerned for his mental health, but she knows that before she can help him she needs to find out exactly what happened to him during the war. Could a letter from a woman called Angela in London hold the answers?

As well as being a story about the aftermath of the Great War, this is also the story of Non and her relationships with the various members of her family. She has two teenage stepchildren to take care of, in addition to seven-year-old Osian who appears to be autistic (although this condition would not have been understood in the 1920s). Then there’s Non’s nephew, Gwydion, whose parents disapprove of his politics and his Irish girlfriend, and her mother-in-law, Catherine Davies, who makes no secret of her dislike for Non. Even the book’s minor characters are well-drawn and believable, from the Davies’ interfering neighbour, Maggie Ellis, to their tame crow, Herman.

One of the things I loved about this book was the way it looks at so many different aspects of World War I and what it was like in the years immediately afterwards. As well as Davey’s shell shock (what we would now call post traumatic stress disorder) we also meet other former soldiers with various physical or mental problems caused by the war. There are also a lot of men who are struggling to find work now that the war is over and are wandering the Welsh countryside in search of food and shelter. And we also see how the women are trying to cope with the loss of their loved ones and how some of them are in denial, unable to accept what has happened.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a novel set in Wales during this period and Mari Strachan’s descriptions of life in 1920s Wales are just how I would have imagined it. The book does use some Welsh terms which, unless you’re Welsh, may seem unfamiliar at first (the children call their grandparents Nain and Taid and their father Tada, for example) but I soon got used to them.

For a book where nothing very dramatic happens this was still a very absorbing story and after a slow start I found that I really cared about the Davies family and I wanted to read on and find out what would happen to them. At first I thought this was going to be a bleak, depressing book but it actually wasn’t because it’s told with a lot of warmth and even some humour.

Have you read any books about World War I? Which ones can you recommend?