Category: Historical Fiction

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker

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There have been a number of novels published recently which look at Greek myths and legends from a feminine perspective. In the last few months I have enjoyed reading Circe by Madeline Miller, which tells the story of the witch Circe from the Odyssey, and For the Immortal by Emily Hauser, the story of Hippolyta the Amazon queen. Pat Barker’s new novel, The Silence of the Girls is another, this time bringing to life the character of Briseis and the events of Homer’s Iliad.

When the city of Lyrnessus falls to the Greeks during the Trojan War, Briseis loses her husband, King Mynes, and her father and brothers. The surviving women are shared out amongst the Greek conquerors as prizes of war and Briseis finds that she is given to the great warrior Achilles as a slave. The events which follow, such as the quarrel which breaks out between Achilles and Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, over the possession of Briseis, and the fate of Patroclus when he impersonates Achilles on the battlefield, will already be known to anyone familiar with the Iliad. If all of this is new to you, though, don’t worry – no knowledge of Homer’s epic is necessary and Pat Barker makes it very easy to follow what is happening.

Most of the novel is narrated by Briseis herself and I found her a very engaging narrator. The nature of her story and the ordeals she faces make her an easy character to sympathise with; I was given a good understanding of how she felt about losing her freedom, becoming a slave and being at the mercy of the men responsible for murdering her family and destroying her city. This is quite a dark novel and Barker doesn’t hold back when describing the brutality of the men in the Greek army, both on and off the battlefield.

I was surprised to find that there are also some chapters written from the perspective of Achilles, who is very much the villain of the book. Although seeing Achilles’ side of the story certainly didn’t make me warm to him at all, it was good to get a different point of view, especially as it allowed us to see scenes and hear conversations that took place when Briseis was not present. However, because of the title of the book, I think it would have been nice if more female characters had been given a voice so that the silence of more than just one girl could be broken. We do meet some of the other women in the Greek camp, but only through Briseis’ eyes and Briseis is the only one we get to know in any depth.

I did really enjoy this book, though. It’s well written, very readable, and a fascinating portrayal of Ancient Greek society. If you’re interested in reading more about Briseis, you could try Hand of Fire by Judith Starkston and For the Most Beautiful by Emily Hauser. She also appears in Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, which will give you a very different view of Achilles as well!

This is book 12/20 of my 20 Books of Summer.

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

Lamentation by CJ Sansom

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When I heard the exciting news that there was a new Shardlake novel – Tombland – coming in October, I remembered that I still needed to read Lamentation, the sixth book in the series, so I put it on my 20 Books of Summer list to ensure that I would read it sooner rather than later and be up to date in time for the new one.

Lamentation is set in London in 1546, about a year after the previous novel, Heartstone, ended. Henry VIII is in poor health and although it is treason to predict the death of a king, it is obvious to everyone who sees him that he can’t have much longer to live. Having broken away from the Roman Catholic Church several years earlier, it now seems that Henry is slowly moving England back towards Rome. A power struggle is taking place at court between the religious traditionalists and the reformers, while those suspected of heresy are being hunted down, tortured and burned at the stake. Even the Queen herself – Henry’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr – is not above suspicion, and when a book she has written on the subject of her faith, titled The Lamentation of a Sinner, is stolen, she knows her life could be at risk.

Our narrator, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake, has worked for the Queen before, and it is to Shardlake that she turns again to ask for assistance in finding the missing book. Despite having vowed to stay out of politics following the events of Heartstone, Matthew can’t resist a request from his Queen, but when the first page of the manuscript is found clutched in the hand of a murdered printer, the danger involved in the mission becomes clear.

I’ve enjoyed all of the Shardlake novels, but I think this is one of the best in the series. It’s a long book, with over six hundred pages, but at no point does it ever start to feel slow or repetitive. The plot is complex and does require some concentration – it’s important to try to remember the religious and political backgrounds of various characters and which are allies and which are rivals, especially as various groups of suspects begin to emerge – but in my case I was so absorbed in the story my concentration never wavered for a moment anyway. I always find Sansom’s portrayal of Tudor England very immersive; he manages to make the history of the period easy to understand, but without simplifying things too much, and shows us how the decisions made by those in power affect the lives of ordinary people who are just trying to survive from day to day.

As well as the search for Catherine’s stolen book, there is also a secondary mystery taking place in which Shardlake is representing a client who is locked in a feud with her brother over the wording of their mother’s will. Most of the Shardlake novels have multiple storylines and sometimes they feel a bit unconnected, but everything in this book comes together very effectively. The two feuding siblings are on opposite sides of the religious divide and this eventually has implications for Matthew.

Of course, Matthew doesn’t have to deal with all of this alone. His friend and legal assistant, Jack Barak, is there for him as usual and always ready for an adventure – although with Jack’s wife expecting another baby, Matthew is reluctant to let him get involved. He also has a new assistant – Nicholas Overton, a young man who has been sent to London to study law – and over the course of the novel he comes to value Nicholas’s courage and loyalty. Another old friend, the doctor and former monk, Guy, is back too, but their friendship is put under strain by Guy’s disapproval of Matthew’s mission and the very different religious views they each have. Nobody, including Shardlake, ever comes out of a Shardlake novel entirely unscathed and this is why, although it would be possible to treat the books as standalones, I still recommend reading the series in order. That way, you’ll be able to watch the characters develop and see how the things that happen in one book affect their lives in the next.

By the end of this book Henry VIII is dead, to be succeeded by his son, the young Edward VI. The change of monarch – and the consequences this will have for the country – is sure to bring new challenges for Shardlake but we will have to wait for the publication of Tombland to find out what they are.

This is book 11/20 of my 20 Books of Summer.

Rosalind Laker: Warwyck’s Wife and Claudine’s Daughter

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At the beginning of Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard sells his wife at an auction, an impulsive act which he later regrets and which haunts him for the rest of his life. This horribly cruel and barbaric custom really did take place in England between the 17th and 19th centuries. Rosalind Laker’s 1978 novel Warwyck’s Wife – the first in a trilogy – opens with a similar scene in which a farmer puts his unwanted wife Kate up for auction at a market in Brighton, parading her in front of the crowd with a halter round her neck like an animal.

Among the men who decide to bid for Kate are nineteen-year-old Harry Warwyck and his older brother Daniel. Harry has the best of motives – he has fallen in love at first sight and wants to prevent Kate from being bought by someone who will treat her badly – but Daniel has seen an opportunity to obtain the wife he needs in order to claim his inheritance, Warwyck Manor. To Harry’s disappointment, it is Daniel who is successful…but will he be happy with his new purchase? It’s not the most pleasant or uplifting start to a novel, but Rosalind Laker does a good job of conveying the shame and degradation Kate feels because of her husband’s actions combined with relief at being released from her unhappy marriage and given the chance to start a new life.

Warwyck’s Wife is described as a romance, but there’s certainly nothing very romantic, in my opinion, about the relationship between Daniel and Kate. Daniel makes it clear at the beginning that he wants Kate only because he believes she can be useful to him, and although his feelings for her do begin to change, he is too obsessed with another woman – Claudine Clayton – to appreciate what he has in Kate. Daniel is a thoroughly unlikeable character, actually: he uses and discards Kate as it suits him; he hides the truth from Claudine; and the way he behaves towards Harry is hardly very brotherly either. Not my idea of a romantic hero – not that every book really needs a hero, of course. Kate, on the other hand, is a lovely person, although her devotion to the undeserving Daniel really frustrated me and I couldn’t understand how she could possibly have preferred him to Harry!

Luckily, there is a lot more to this novel than the ‘romance’. Another major part of the plot involves Daniel’s career as a boxer and his ambition to become a champion prize-fighter. The novel is set in 1826, during the reign of George IV, and although I have no interest in boxing in its modern form, I did find it interesting to read about Daniel’s preparation for his fights (or ‘mills’ as they were called), the hours of practice he puts in with his trainer, Jem Pierce, and the spectacle of the mills themselves, which attracted large crowds and were sometimes held illegally, at risk of being stopped by the local magistrate. It seemed a much more violent and chaotic sport than its modern equivalent too, unsurprisingly with little regard for the health and safety of the participants.

There is also a storyline involving Daniel’s plans to develop the little coastal village of Easthampton into a seaside resort similar to Brighton. As you can imagine, this causes a lot of conflict as the scheme meets support from some of the villagers but fierce opposition from others as new workers are brought in to carry out the construction work while existing businesses find themselves under threat. This subplot gives the author a chance to highlight social injustices and the difference in attitude between Kate and Daniel, as Kate does everything she can to improve the working conditions of the builders, masons and labourers while Daniel cares only about money and productivity.

Warwyck’s Wife is not a perfect novel but I found more to like than to dislike and went straight on to read the sequel, Claudine’s Daughter.

~

Claudine’s Daughter begins about twenty years after the previous book ends and introduces us to Lucy di Castelloni, Claudine Clayton’s daughter. Lucy has lived in Italy all her life and was married off at an early age to a much older man. Now, following her husband’s death, she has decided to come to England to see where her parents grew up and to find out whatever she can about her family and her origins. Arriving in the town of Easthampton, she quickly catches the eye of three very different men. The first is Richard Warwyck, Daniel’s son; the second is Timothy Attwood, who is distantly related to Lucy’s family; and the third is Josh Barton, who has ambitious plans that could affect the future of everyone in Easthampton.

Although this is very much the story of Lucy and the other ‘second generation’ characters, some of the characters from Warwyck’s Wife appear again too, including Daniel, Kate, and (very briefly) Harry. There’s also a new set of secondary characters: Emmie, the landlady of the house where Lucy takes lodgings; her daughter Meg; and Meg’s lover, a local fisherman. Lucy’s romantic entanglements form a large part of the novel but, like the first book, it is more than just a romance. It’s also a story about the uncovering of family secrets – and while the reader already knows what these secrets are (assuming we have read the first book in the trilogy), Lucy and most of the other characters do not. This means the plot is quite predictable, but the interest is in waiting to see how and when the truth will be revealed.

The most interesting aspect of the book, for me, was seeing how Easthampton, which was only a small village in Warwyck’s Wife, has grown into a thriving resort with piers, pavilions, hotels and theatres. A source of conflict throughout the novel is the question of whether or not the town should be connected to the railway network. Richard Warwyck is in favour as it will allow the area to develop further, but Daniel (whom I still found impossible to warm to) doesn’t like the idea of opening up access to the resort to large numbers of working class people and destroying the select atmosphere.

There is a third novel about the family – The Warwycks of Easthampton – but I don’t own a copy of that one yet and I think I’ve read enough about the Warwycks for now. Maybe I will read it at some point, but there are other books by Rosalind Laker that sound more appealing to me at the moment.

The Lady Agnès Mystery Volume 1 by Andrea Japp – #WITMonth

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I hadn’t made any plans for taking part in Women in Translation Month, but when I came across this book which had almost disappeared into the black hole of my Kindle, I decided to join in. Andrea Japp is a French crime novelist and this, the first volume of her Lady Agnès Mystery (originally published in 2006), has been translated into English by Lorenza Garcia. Japp herself is also a translator and produced the French translations of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, which I think makes her a perfect choice for Women in Translation.

There are actually two books included in this volume – The Season of the Beast and The Breath of the Rose – but they do not stand alone and although they can be bought separately, there is not much point in reading one without the other. Together, the two books tell the story of Lady Agnès de Souarcy, a young widow living in 14th century France with her eleven-year-old daughter Mathilde and ten-year-old Clément, a servant’s child whom she has raised as her own son. Left with only a small dowry to live on, Agnès is struggling financially and reliant on the support of her half-brother, Eudes de Larnay. Unfortunately she and Eudes have always had a difficult relationship and when Inquisitors arrive in the area to hunt down heretics, Eudes sees this as the perfect opportunity to rid himself of his troublesome sister.

Agnès may have some powerful enemies but, unknown to her, she also has some powerful friends who are prepared to do everything they can to protect her from the horrors of the Inquisition. But is there any connection with the murders that have been carried out on Agnès’s land – dead bodies which have been discovered with the letter A marked on the ground beside them – and with the poisoning of several nuns at nearby Clairets Abbey? It seems that all of these things must be linked..but how?

The Lady Agnès Mystery is a book with many layers. First, there’s the richness of the historical setting. Set in the Perche region of France in 1304, the story takes places at a time of religious conflict and of power struggles between King Philip IV the Fair, his various advisers and their rivals, and the two religious orders, the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. We meet characters who belong to each of these groups and are given a range of different views and perspectives. It’s exactly the same period of history as I’ve previously read about in Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series and I loved revisiting it here. If you’re not familiar with this period, though, it shouldn’t be a problem; everything you need to know to understand the story is clearly explained in the text – and if you do want to know more, there are several appendices at the back of the book which provide definitions, explanations and brief biographies of historical figures.

This is not a dry, heavy read, though. There’s always something happening – a clandestine meeting in a dark tavern, a coded message being deciphered or a hidden room being explored, not to mention the vivid scenes depicting Agnès’s ordeals at the hands of the Inquisitors. My favourite aspect of the book was the mystery surrounding the deaths of the nuns…I particularly enjoyed watching the apothecary nun Sister Annelette using her knowledge of plants and herbs to try to catch the murderer.

So far so good. However, there is another storyline involving the Knights Templar, a secret prophecy and a missing manuscript which didn’t really interest me at all. I thought there was already enough going on with Agnès’s personal story and the murder mystery…and I’m sure I’m not the only one who finds it difficult to read this sort of storyline without making comparisons with The Da Vinci Code.

Volume 1 ends, not on a cliffhanger exactly, but with some of the many plot threads still unresolved. I would like to know what happens next to Lady Agnès and her family, and I would love to see more of the nuns of Clairets Abbey, but I have a feeling Volume 2 will be dominated by the prophecy storyline. Will I read it? At the moment I don’t think so, but I could change my mind.

Dark Quartet by Lynne Reid Banks

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As someone who loves the work of all three Brontë sisters, I have been interested in reading Dark Quartet for a long time. I have read some more recent fictional accounts of the Brontës’ lives and work, such as Jude Morgan’s The Taste of Sorrow and Robert Edric’s Sanctuary, but this is an older book, first published in 1976, and I was curious to see what it was like.

Lynne Reid Banks’ novel tells the story of Charlotte, Emily and Anne – and their brother, Branwell, who makes the fourth of the ‘quartet’. It begins with the Brontës growing up at Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire in the care of their father, the Reverend Patrick Brontë, and their Aunt Elizabeth, who helps to raise them following the early death of their mother. The four children are very close, with particularly strong bonds between Charlotte and Branwell and between Emily and Anne, who entertain themselves by writing stories set in the fictional worlds of Angria and Gondal. There are also two elder Brontë sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, who die of tuberculosis early in the novel while attending Cowan Bridge School along with Charlotte and Emily.

As the three surviving girls reach adulthood, they find work as teachers and governesses, with varying levels of success, but they each continue to write, drawing inspiration from their experiences and surroundings. As Branwell, having suffered a series of disappointments and setbacks, descends into alcoholism and drug addiction, his sisters go on to achieve their ambition of becoming published authors, albeit under male pseudonyms.

I have given a very brief summary of the plot here, but I think that’s enough. If you’re already familiar with the Brontës’ lives and work, you won’t need me to go into any more detail; if not, and if you’re planning to read Dark Quartet, I’m sure you’ll prefer to have a few things left to discover for yourself. Banks does stick closely to the facts, but it’s important to remember two things: first, however biographical this book may feel, it is a work of fiction; and second, a lot of research into the Brontës has taken place since the book was written, so interpretations and opinions will have changed in that time. As the author says in the foreword to the novel:

…I have not let my imagination run riot. I have kept it harnessed to the truth. For the rest, I offer my answers to some of the mysteries.

Probably the most controversial area of the book is the portrayal of Branwell, particularly a scene, which was presumably invented, in which he meets a group of Irish labourers in a tavern. I saw this scene, and what happens in it, as the author’s way of providing an additional explanation for Branwell’s sense of hopelessness and disillusionment with himself and his life, so I accepted this as her ‘answer to one of the mysteries’, but I suppose it depends on how far you think a biographical novel should deviate from historical fact. For the rest of her treatment of Branwell, Banks acknowledges Daphne du Maurier, who wrote The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, as one of her sources and, like du Maurier, she clearly has some sympathy for Branwell. He is a frustrating and infuriating character who wastes every opportunity he is given, but he is often his own worst enemy, and his story, as it is told here, is quite sad.

Of the three sisters, Charlotte is given far more attention than either Emily or Anne, but this is usually the case in books about the Brontës and I can understand why. Charlotte lived longer than the others, she had more of her writing published (four novels as opposed to Anne’s two and Emily’s one), and her life was more closely documented – she was the subject of a biography by Elizabeth Gaskell in the 19th century. However, I find Emily – solitary, independent and intensely private – a much more intriguing personality and I would have preferred to have spent more time with her and with Anne rather than Charlotte.

Lynne Reid Banks doesn’t explore the Brontës’ novels in much depth, but I think she does a good job of showing how the sisters’ work was influenced by people, places and events from their personal lives. Cowan Bridge School, with its damp, unhealthy location, inadequate food and strict discipline, was the model for Lowood School in Jane Eyre; the badly behaved children in the households where Anne serves as governess find their way into Agnes Grey; and Emily’s beloved Yorkshire moors become the setting for Wuthering Heights. There are also several chapters devoted to Charlotte’s time as a teacher in Brussels, which will be familiar to anyone who has read Villette or The Professor.

Dark Quartet has recently been made available in a new ebook edition from Sapere Books and I was delighted to receive a copy for review through NetGalley a few weeks ago. I really enjoyed reading it and, although my favourite Brontës are no longer living by the end of the novel, I am still tempted to read the sequel, Path to the Silent Country, about Charlotte’s final years.

The King’s Witch by Tracy Borman

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This is the first novel by historian Tracy Borman, although she has previously written several non-fiction books, none of which I have read. The King’s Witch is set in England in the early 17th century, during the reign of James I (who was also James VI of Scotland), and from the title I was expecting something similar to The Witchfinder’s Sister or Widdershins – a story of witch trials and burnings, and of innocent women persecuted because of a gift for healing. Well, The King’s Witch does cover those topics, but there is much more to the book than that and I wasn’t surprised to learn that this is the first in a trilogy and another two novels will be needed to finish the storylines begun in this one.

Our heroine – the ‘witch’ of the title – is Frances Gorges, a young noblewoman whom we first meet in 1603 at the bedside of Elizabeth I, helping her mother to nurse the dying queen through her final days. Frances knows how to use herbs to treat illness and provide comfort, but when Elizabeth is succeeded by James, her skills are no longer appreciated. The new king is determined to stamp out witchcraft in his kingdom and women like Frances could become a target. It is decided that she will be safer away from court, so she is sent home to the peace and quiet of Longford, her family’s manor house in Wiltshire.

It’s not long, however, before Frances is summoned back to court where her ambitious uncle, the Earl of Northampton, has secured her a position as maid to the king’s daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth. But court has become a very dangerous place and Frances almost immediately finds herself in conflict with the king’s Lord Privy Seal, Robert Cecil, who is hoping to please the king by hunting down a witch. It’s not just women healers who are under suspicion, though; James also sees Catholics as possible conspirators – and he is right, because a secret plot is taking shape that could bring his reign to an early end.

As I’ve said, the title of this book is slightly misleading. Frances’s knowledge of the properties of herbs and plants and the danger this puts her in with Cecil is certainly an important part of the story, but this is not really a book about witches and witchcraft. I would describe it more as a book about a young woman trying to make her way in a world full of treachery, lies and conspiracies. Most of the second half of the novel is devoted to one of these conspiracies – the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – and Frances’s own involvement in it. This is what I will remember about this book rather than the witch-hunting aspect, which doesn’t really come to anything.

Although I enjoyed the book overall, the pacing seemed to be a problem for me. The story gets off to a slow start and I felt that I’d been reading for a long time with very little happening; somewhere around the middle of the book when the Gunpowder Plot begins to take shape, I started to find it much more compelling. There is also a romance for Frances with the lawyer Thomas Wintour and I thought this was handled well, especially as Frances – and the reader – begins to have doubts as to whether he can or cannot be trusted.

Frances Gorges was a real historical figure, but she and her family are not characters I have come across before in historical fiction. It seems that very little factual information is available about Frances – I could only find a few basic details online – although more is known about her parents, Thomas Gorges and Helena Snakenborg. The lack of information on Frances must have given Tracy Borman the freedom to use her imagination in building a story around her, without being too restricted by historical fact.

By the end of the novel, there is a lot going on in Frances’s life and I will be interested to see how her story continues in the next two books in the trilogy.

Thanks to Hodder & Stoughton for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

This is book 7/20 for my 20 Books of Summer challenge.

My Beautiful Imperial by Rhiannon Lewis

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When the Walter Scott Prize Academy published their list of twenty recommended historical fiction novels earlier this year, My Beautiful Imperial was one of the titles that sounded particularly appealing to me, so I was delighted to be offered a copy for review. I love books set in times and places I know nothing about and which are educational as well as entertaining – and this is one of those books.

It begins in 19th century Wales, where young Davy Davies is dreaming of following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a sailor. Beginning navigation classes with the remarkable Sarah Jane Rees brings him closer to achieving his ambition, but it is not until tragedy strikes the Davies family that Davy must leave his home in Cardigan behind and embark on his career at sea. The years go by and Davy eventually becomes captain of the Imperial – and as luck would have it he is sailing up and down the coast of South America just as civil war breaks out in Chile.

President Balmaceda retains control of the Chilean Army but his Navy rebel and side against him and Davy finds that the Imperial is commandeered by the President’s forces, who are desperate for ships. Davy agrees to continue in his role as captain, but soon instead of carrying passengers, cargo and mail, the Imperial is transporting troops, supplies and ammunition. These are dangerous times, but Davy is sustained by his love for Estella, whom he meets while the ship is in harbour in Valparaiso. The only problem is, Estella is already married…

I really enjoyed reading My Beautiful Imperial. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book set in Chile before and I certainly knew nothing about the Chilean Civil War of 1891. Although the main focus of the novel is on Davy’s own involvement in the war, there are also scenes written from the perspectives of several other characters, ranging from President Balmaceda himself to a reporter sent to Chile to cover the story for his newspaper, and in this way we are able to learn about the political situation in Chile, the causes of the conflict and some of the key events that take place before, during and after the war.

I sometimes struggle with books in which large sections of the story are set at sea, but that was not a problem here. The nautical terminology is kept to a level that I could understand and the descriptions of sea chases and manoeuvres are easy enough to follow. There are plenty of land-based sections too, giving us some glimpses of life in Valparaiso and other parts of Chile, as well as the opening chapters depicting Davy’s childhood in Wales. Davy’s path crosses with Estella’s several times throughout the novel, but their romance is only one small element of the story and I thought it was all the more moving because their meetings were few and far between.

I was interested to learn that Rhiannon Lewis had based this novel on the life of her great-great-uncle – he really was a Welsh sailor who became caught up in the Chilean Civil War. You can find pictures and more information on the author’s website. With such a strong personal connection, it must have been a fascinating book to research. It is certainly a fascinating one to read!

Thanks to the author for providing a copy of My Beautiful Imperial for review.

This is book 6/20 for my 20 Books of Summer challenge.