Category: Historical Fiction

My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor

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Joseph O’Connor’s new novel My Father’s House, published in the UK today, is based on the true story of Hugh O’Flaherty, a Catholic priest who helped thousands of Jews and Allied prisoners of war to escape from Italy during World War II. This is the third book I’ve read by O’Connor (the others are Shadowplay, about the author Bram Stoker and the actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, and Ghost Light, which explores the relationship between the playwright John Millington Synge and the actress Molly Allgood) and I think it’s the best of the three.

The main part of the novel is set in 1943. Born and raised in Ireland, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is serving in Vatican City during the war – a neutral territory within Nazi-occupied Rome. As an official Vatican visitor to Italy’s prisoner of war camps, Hugh has been trying to improve conditions for the prisoners, but his actions mark him out as an Allied sympathiser and his superiors prevent him from carrying out any more visits in case he makes the Vatican a Nazi target. However, Hugh won’t be stopped that easily and soon he has set up an Escape Line, successfully smuggling Jews and escaped prisoners out of Rome right under the eyes of the Nazis.

The biggest escape mission yet – the ‘Rendimento’ – has been arranged for Christmas Eve, 1943. In the hope that the Gestapo will be less vigilant on this particular night, Hugh and his group of courageous volunteers have put elaborate plans in place to move a large number of people out of the city under the cover of darkness. As we count down the days and hours leading up to the mission, we also get to know each member of Hugh’s team and how they came to be involved in the Escape Line.

The group use the cover of meeting for ‘choir practice’ and this is where they discuss their plans and receive their instructions – carefully coded, of course, as the Nazis have eyes and ears everywhere. One Nazi in particular is getting too close for comfort; he is Obersturmbannführer Paul Hauptmann, who already has his eye on Hugh due to the camp visits and is starting to close in on the Choir and the Rendimento. But although Hauptmann is our villain, O’Connor gives him a surprising amount of depth, describing his home life and his relationship with his wife and children. This reminder that Nazi officers were often also family men leading normal domestic lives just makes Hauptmann’s behaviour feel even more chilling and shocking.

As the clock ticks down on Christmas Eve, the suspense increases as we are kept wondering whether the mission will succeed. However, the chapters describing the build-up to the Rendimento are interspersed with other chapters in which each member of the Choir introduces themselves and their background and tells us how they met Hugh and joined his group. I wasn’t very keen on this structure as I felt that it broke the flow of the story and took away some of the tension, but it was still interesting to hear their different voices (some of which I found more convincingly written than others). They included Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British envoy to the Holy See, and his butler John May, diplomat’s wife Delia Kiernan, and escaped soldier Sam Derry – all of whom were real people.

I had never read anything about Hugh O’Flaherty and his work until now, so I’m pleased to have had the chance to learn something new. I see he was the subject of a 1983 film, The Scarlet and the Black, starring Gregory Peck, which I’ve never come across either. Although My Father’s House is a complete novel in itself, it’s apparently the first in an Escape Line trilogy – I’ll be looking out for the next one and will be interested to see if it’s going to focus on a different member of the group this time.

Thanks to Harvill Secker for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 3/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

A Marriage of Fortune by Anne O’Brien

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This sequel to The Royal Game continues the story of the Paston family. The Pastons were an influential Norfolk family during the 15th century and left behind a collection of private correspondence, known as the Paston Letters, which are a valuable source of information on life in England at this time. In this novel and her previous one, Anne O’Brien brings the story of the Pastons to life, using their letters to provide the outline of the plot. You could read this book as a standalone if you wanted to, but I would recommend reading both in order if you can.

A Marriage of Fortune is again narrated by several of the Paston women. First there’s Margaret Mautby Paston, now a widow with seven children. Her eldest son, Sir John, is now head of the family following the death of his father, but Margaret still takes an active part in managing the household, arranging the marriages of her younger children and continuing the ongoing feud against the Duke of Norfolk over the ownership of Caister Castle. Margaret’s priority is seeing that the Pastons continue to rise through the ranks of society, so she is furious when her eldest daughter Margery announces that she is in love with the family bailiff, Richard Calle. She refuses to allow a marriage between the two, but is unprepared for the lengths to which Margery is prepared to go.

The relationship between Margaret and Margery is very sad to read about. Margery is another of our narrators, which means we get to know exactly how she feels about her mother’s refusal to accept her love for Richard and the family estrangement that occurs as a result. Margaret believes that a daughter’s first duty should be to her parents and that Margery has no right to consider her own happiness, but there’s always a sense that she might come to regret taking this stance and we are kept wondering whether mother and daughter will be reconciled in the end.

We also hear from Margaret’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Paston Poynings, whose husband has been killed fighting on the Yorkist side at the Second Battle of St Alban’s, leaving her a widow with a young son. Like Margaret, Elizabeth has found herself facing a struggle to hold on to her late husband’s estates, which are being claimed by the powerful Percy family. A fourth narrator is Anne Haute, cousin of Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s queen. Anne is betrothed to Margaret’s son, Sir John Paston, but with the rapidly changing political situation in England – Edward IV on the throne one minute, Henry VI the next – it seems that Sir John is reluctant to either make the marriage official or release her from it. I had a lot of sympathy for poor Anne when she begins to discover that she’s wasted years of her life on a man who clearly doesn’t really love her.

I enjoyed A Marriage of Fortune; this is one of my favourite periods to read about, but I still haven’t read the original Paston Letters or Helen Castor’s non-fiction account of them, Blood and Roses, despite having had the latter on my TBR pile for several years now. This was maybe a good thing as far as this novel was concerned, as it meant that although I was familiar with the historical background – the kings and queens, the battles and rebellions – I didn’t know the personal stories of the individual Paston family members, so I never knew what was going to happen to them next. However, I do think this novel, like the first one, was slightly too long, with a lot of information packed into it. It may have been better to have focused on fewer characters; Elizabeth Poynings’ story, in particular, felt very separate from the others and could possibly have been left out.

I’m not sure whether there will be a third book on the Pastons or whether Anne O’Brien will be moving on to something else now. Either way, she always chooses interesting historical women to write about so I know it will be worth looking forward to.

Thanks to Orion for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 2/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

The Giant, O’Brien by Hilary Mantel

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Having finished Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy last year, I knew I wanted to read more of her books. A Place of Greater Safety, her novel about the French Revolution, has always sounded appealing to me but the length is off-putting, so I decided to try a shorter one first.

The Giant, O’Brien, published in 1998, is based on the true story of the 18th century Irish giant, Charles Byrne. Also known as Charles O’Brien and claiming descent from the High Kings, but usually referred to by Mantel as simply ‘the Giant’, Byrne and his friends leave Ireland in 1782, fleeing ‘cyclical deprivation, linguistic oppression and cultural decline.’ The Giant has previously been able to make a living by entertaining his neighbours with stories and songs but, sensing that things are changing, he knows he needs to find a new way to earn money. The solution seems obvious, so after arriving in London with his entourage, the Giant appoints the unscrupulous Joe Vance as his agent and agrees to exhibit himself as a freak, to be stared at, pointed at, poked and prodded, in return for money.

The story of another man unfolds in parallel with the Giant’s. His name is John Hunter, a Scottish surgeon and anatomist – like Charles Byrne, a real historical figure. Mantel describes Hunter’s early years in Long Calderwood and how he came to be in London, first as an assistant to his brother William, another famous anatomist, and then on his own, conducting autopsies in the name of scientific research. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, it was very difficult to obtain bodies for medical study in the UK, a problem which led to body snatching and the illegal digging up of graves. In one fascinating, if slightly gruesome scene, Hunter lectures a group of newly recruited body snatchers on the best ways to get hold of fresh corpses without being detected. Naturally, the bodies of most interest to Hunter are those that are unusual in some way – so when he hears news of the Giant currently being exhibited in London, he decides to make him an offer, despite the fact that the Giant is not yet dead.

Mantel portrays the Giant as a gentle, intelligent man with a natural gift for telling stories and a seemingly endless knowledge of myth, folklore and fairy tales. This, as much as his height, makes him stand out from his friends. While the others succumb to London’s temptations – alcohol, women and gambling – the Giant saves his money in the hope of one day rebuilding Mulroney’s tavern, now a ruin but once the place where ‘Courts of Poetry’ were held and he was taught the art of storytelling. John Hunter, in contrast, is much less likeable; if the Giant represents tradition and a way of life that is about to be lost forever, Hunter represents progress and advancement and is portrayed as clever, ambitious and lacking in empathy.

In her author’s note at the end of the book, Mantel explains which parts of the story are based on fact and which are purely fictional. There’s more factual information available on John Hunter than there is on the life of Charles Byrne, but what we do know about Byrne is that he suffered from gigantism caused by pituitary tumours, his height was 7ft 7 (2.31m) and his skeleton has been on display in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons for over two centuries, despite his own wishes to be buried at sea. The museum has been closed since 2017 for renovations and the future of Charles Byrne’s remains is the subject of an ethical debate.

I found both the Giant and John Hunter interesting to read about, particularly as I previously knew nothing at all about either of them, but I thought the book seemed slightly disjointed because of the way it kept switching between the two narratives. Until they began to converge very near the end, the two storylines felt completely separate and unconnected; I suppose Mantel’s aim was to show the contrast between the main characters and the different paths they followed through life, but I felt it didn’t flow very well as a novel. I also didn’t find the eighteenth century London setting as immersive as the Tudor world she creates in the Wolf Hall books. Still, there are some fascinating ideas in this novel and the Giant O’Brien himself is a character I won’t forget in a hurry!

This is book 1/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Shadows and Strongholds by Elizabeth Chadwick

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I had intended to read this book for last year’s 20 Books of Summer but when it became clear I wouldn’t be able to finish it before the deadline I decided to save it to read later. With nearly 600 pages in my paperback edition it wasn’t a book that could be rushed!

Shadows and Strongholds, published in 2004, is a prequel to Lords of the White Castle, which I haven’t read yet, and tells the story of Fulke FitzWarin, known as Brunin due to his brown eyes, and Hawise de Dinan, youngest daughter of Joscelin de Dinan of Ludlow Castle. As the events of this book come first chronologically, I hoped it wouldn’t matter that I was reading the books out of order and that it might actually make things easier.

The novel opens in 1148 with ten-year-old Brunin attending a fair in Shrewsbury with his father, also Fulke FitzWarin, the lord of Whittington. That day, two things happen that will change the course of Brunin’s life. First, he is attacked by Ernalt de Lysle, a young squire who takes pleasure in bullying younger children, and this marks the beginning of a lifelong rivalry between Brunin and Ernalt. Then, Brunin discovers that his father has arranged for him to join the household of his friend Joscelin de Dinan to begin his own training as a squire.

Arriving at Ludlow Castle, the sensitive, awkward Brunin finds his new duties challenging but learns quickly and is soon accepted as part of the family, befriending de Dinan’s daughters Hawise and Sibbi and his young ward, Marion de la Bruere. As the years go by and the children grow into adults, de Dinan and FitzWarin begin to arrange a marriage between Brunin and Hawise – but this is not the time to lead a peaceful married life, as both Whittington and Ludlow are about to come under attack.

As always, Elizabeth Chadwick brings the medieval world vividly to life, from her descriptions of the duties of a squire and the running of a 12th century castle to the risks of childbirth and how to buy a horse at a fair. This novel is set during the Anarchy, the period of civil war that followed the death of Henry I, with his daughter, the Empress Matilda, and nephew, Stephen of Blois, battling for the English throne. Our protagonists and their enemies are forced to choose one side or the other – and some switch sides at least once – but their loyalties seem to count for very little after the war ends and Matilda’s son takes the throne as Henry II. While the changes in the monarchy and the wider issues affecting England as a whole play out in the background, the FitzWarins and de Dinans are understandably more concerned with the threat to their own castles – particularly as there seems to be a traitor within the de Dinan household.

The main characters are all loosely based on people who really existed, although not much is known about some of them and in her author’s note Elizabeth Chadwick explains that a major source for her novel was a rhyming romance written by a 13th century chronicler. There’s obviously a lot of focus on the relationship between Brunin and Hawise, but I have to admit I didn’t find them particularly appealing as the hero and heroine and some of the secondary characters interested me more. I loved Joscelin de Dinan, who remains a good and honourable man during this time of brutal war and shifting loyalties and to whom Fulke FitzWarin entrusts the care of his son, and I was intrigued by the story of Marion de la Bruere, whose ghost is said to haunt the ruins of Ludlow Castle to this day.

Because I wasn’t fully invested in the central romance, this hasn’t become a favourite Elizabeth Chadwick novel but I did enjoy it. I will read Lords of the White Castle soon, but I also have two more of her books on my shelf, The Love Knot and The Marsh King’s Daughter.

The Witch and the Tsar by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

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I was drawn to this book by the pretty cover, but also because it sounded similar to Katherine Arden’s Winternight trilogy, which I loved. Set in 16th century Russia, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, The Witch and the Tsar is a blend of history, fantasy and folklore featuring as its heroine the legendary Baba Yaga. Unlike the traditional idea of Baba Yaga as a ferocious old witch who eats children, however, Moscow-born author Olesya Salnikova Gilmore’s portrayal is something very different.

We first meet Yaga, as she is known, living alone in a forest with her wolf Dyen, owl Noch, and Little Hen, a living hut who stands on chicken legs and has a mind of her own. Half-mortal and half-goddess, Yaga has been badly treated in the past so has chosen a life of solitude, interacting with other people only when they come and seek out her knowledge of healing and potions. She is reluctantly drawn back into society when an old friend, the Tsaritsa Anastasia – wife of Tsar Ivan IV – comes to her to ask for help. Convinced that Anastasia is being poisoned by someone at court, Yaga decides to accompany her friend on the journey back to Moscow to keep her safe.

Returning to the world from which she has hidden away for so long, Yaga is dismayed by the evil she senses all around her. Unsettled by an encounter with a former adversary, Koshey Bessmertny (usually known in Slavic myth as Koschei the Deathless), she is then introduced to Ivan Vasilyevich, the man who will later become Ivan the Terrible, and is struck by his power and volatility. When tragedy strikes the Russian court, Ivan becomes more unstable and launches a campaign of terror with his band of oprichniki burning, raiding and pillaging Russia’s towns and cities. It seems that Yaga is the only one who can stop him, but to do so she will have to learn things about herself and her family that she would prefer not to uncover.

I enjoyed some aspects of The Witch and the Tsar, but others not so much. I wasn’t sure what to think of Yaga herself. On the one hand, it’s good to see a much-maligned character given a more sympathetic interpretation; on the other, Gilmore’s Yaga has so little in common with the mythical Baba Yaga she’s really not the same character at all. Also, we are told that although she has the appearance of a young woman, she has actually lived for hundreds of years – yet she never sounds, thinks or behaves the way I would expect someone with centuries of wisdom and experience to sound, think and behave. She just feels like the young woman she appears to be.

It was interesting to see how Gilmore works characters from other Russian and Slavic myths into the story. As well as Koschei the Deathless, we meet Marya Morevna, Morozko the frost demon, the god Volos, the house spirit Kikimora and others. The fantasy/mythology element becomes very dominant in the second half of the book, more than I would have preferred, but Gilmore does a good job of tying it together with the historical storyline, showing how the actions of the gods and demons are linked to the actions of Ivan and his oprichniki. I was particularly intrigued by the character of Ivanushka, the Tsar’s son and heir; Yaga promises Anastasia she will protect him, but we know from history that his story will take a tragic turn.

I think The Witch and the Tsar is worth reading if you’re interested in Russian history and mythology, but naturally I couldn’t help comparing it to Katherine Arden’s trilogy (beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale) which I found much more enjoyable.

Thanks to HarperVoyager for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Nights of Plague by Orhan Pamuk (tr. Ekin Oklap)

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This is the first book I’ve read by Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. It sounded fascinating – a murder mystery set on a fictional Mediterranean island during an outbreak of plague at the turn of the 20th century. However, it wasn’t quite what I was expecting!

It would be easy to assume that this was a book written in response to the Covid pandemic (I certainly did), but it seems that Pamuk actually started work on Nights of Plague in 2016. Obviously now that we’ve all had experience of living through a pandemic, that element of the novel has taken on new relevance, but it’s made clear that the illness described in the book is a form of bubonic plague rather than a respiratory virus like Covid, so the causes, symptoms, methods of transmission and outcomes are very different. On the other hand, there are also lots of parallels – in 1901, just like in 2020, with no vaccine available the only way to really tackle the progress of the disease is through quarantine and isolation. People protest against the restrictions, members of government break their own rules, and while the crisis brings some communities together it creates division in others.

The fictional island at the heart of all of this is Mingheria, an outpost of the Ottoman Empire with a population made up of both Turkish Muslims and Greek Christians. The governor, Sami Pasha, is doing his best to implement quarantine measures on the island but they are having little effect and he is being held back by having to wait for official orders from the Sultan in Istanbul. As the novel opens, a ship is on its way to Mingheria from Istanbul carrying the Sultan’s niece Princess Pakize, her husband Doctor Nuri, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Bonkowski’s job is to investigate the outbreak of plague, but before he is able to draw any conclusions he is murdered.

With Bonkowski Pasha dead, it’s now up to Doctor Nuri to give advice on quarantine arrangements, while also looking into the circumstances of the chemist’s murder. The Sultan, who has become a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, sends instructions that he must use ‘the methods of Sherlock Holmes’. There’s the basis of an exciting story here – yet the mystery element is virtually abandoned until much later in the novel and even when we return to it, it turns out not to be all that exciting after all. Much more time is spent describing the plague and the attempts to get the outbreak under control. With Covid in mind, I found this quite interesting to read about, but the book is written in such a factual and impersonal style it might as well have been non-fiction. There’s a reason for the dry style – we are told at the beginning that the whole book is supposed to be a history of Mingheria compiled by a modern day historian based on letters sent by Princess Pakize to her sister – but it means the book isn’t much fun to read, there’s not a lot of dialogue and there are pages and pages of exposition.

I felt that what Orhan Pamuk was really trying to do was tell the story of the final years of the Ottoman Empire through the lens of Mingheria’s plague response and the political change that follows on the island as a result. He has a lot to say about national identity, the reclaiming of the Mingherian language (almost forgotten as those who once spoke it grow old and die), the challenges of breaking away from rule by a larger power and the tensions between different religious groups who share the same small island.

So, lots of interesting ideas and themes in this book, but I can’t say that I particularly enjoyed reading it. It was far too long and slow and needed some editing, in my opinion. Ekin Oklap’s translation seemed fine – I think my problems were due to the overall style and pace of the book. I did become quite immersed in it after a while, but I was pleased to reach the end and I think a non-fiction book about the fall of the Ottoman Empire might have been a better use of my time! I don’t know whether this novel is typical of Orhan Pamuk’s work but I’m not really tempted to read any more just yet.

Thanks to Faber and Faber Ltd for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Book #62 read for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2022.

The Ladies of Missalonghi by Colleen McCullough

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I acquired a copy of this book when it was published in a new edition in 2015 following Colleen McCullough’s death that year. For some reason, despite loving The Thorn Birds (which I read long before I started blogging so have no review to link to here), I had never read any of her other books and was looking forward to this one. Then I read that there had been accusations of plagiarism when the book was originally published in 1987 due to it apparently being so similar to LM Montgomery’s 1926 novel, The Blue Castle, and that put me off for a while. However, I was looking for something to read for Aus Reading Month (hosted by Brona of This Reading Life and thought I would give it a try. I was unsure whether I could also count it towards Novellas in November as there were 224 pages in my edition (more than the upper limit of 200 for a novella) but several of those pages turned out to be an excerpt from another McCullough book, so I think it counts!

The Ladies of Missalonghi is set in the early 1900s in the small town of Byron in Australia’s Blue Mountains. For generations the Hurlingford family, descendants of the town’s founder, the first Sir William Hurlingford, have held all the power in Byron, owning most of the land and running almost all of the businesses. Only the male Hurlingfords are able to inherit financially, so any unmarried or widowed women find themselves impoverished and relying on the charity of their relatives. Thirty-three-year-old Missy Wright is one of these women; she has never married and lives with her widowed mother, Drusilla Wright (formerly Hurlingford), and spinster aunt, Octavia, in a house known as Missalonghi after the Greek town where the poet Lord Byron died in 1824.

Plain and dark-haired in a clan of tall, blonde Hurlingfords and always dressed in brown to save money, it is now looking likely that Missy will remain single, but she has never given up hope of one day owning a red dress and escaping from her humdrum existence. The romance novels provided by her librarian friend Una are her ‘only solace and sole luxury’ – until one day a stranger arrives in Byron. His name is John Smith and he has bought land in the valley nearby. Has Missy found a way to escape at last?

The Ladies of Missalonghi is in many ways a typical romance novel but it’s an enjoyable one and has a few elements that I found particularly interesting. First, there’s the portrayal of the fate of unmarried women in the years just before World War I, women like Missy, Drusilla and Octavia who lack financial independence and have limited options for improving their position in life. The women of Missalonghi have been treated badly by the men they are forced to rely on for support and scorned by the wealthier, more privileged Hurlingford women. Missy is determined to see these people get their comeuppance, but I won’t tell you how she goes about it as that’s part of the fun of the story!

There’s also a supernatural element that I wasn’t expecting – quite a subtle one, but it’s there and I’m not really sure that it was necessary, particularly as it only emerges at the end and there weren’t any clues to suggest that it was going to happen. On the other hand, it fits with the whole fairy-tale feel of the plot (with Missy as Cinderella). It was actually the romantic thread of the novel that I found least interesting as there didn’t appear to be any chemistry between hero and heroine and their relationship seemed to be based on lies and deceit.

As for the plagiarism issue, I have never read The Blue Castle so can’t comment. McCullough denied the allegations, saying the similarities were unintentional – she had read the book as a child and the details must have stayed with her subconsciously. Whether that’s the truth or not, I can’t see why an already successful author would do something like that deliberately, knowing she would be found out. I’ll have to read The Blue Castle one day to see what I think.