Category: Reviews

Review: I’ll Never Be Young Again by Daphne du Maurier

16 Comments

I’ll Never Be Young Again was Daphne du Maurier’s second novel, written when she was only twenty three years old. It’s different from the other books of hers that I’ve read so far. It doesn’t have the suspense or the gothic feel of some of her other works – this is more of a psychological, character-driven book. It’s the story of Richard, a young man who has grown up in the shadow of his famous father, and his struggle to find his own identity. I’m not really a fan of ‘coming-of-age’ novels, but I’m glad I chose to read this one. It certainly seems to be one of her least well known novels –  and I was concerned that this might mean it wasn’t very good. Well, I can tell you that it is good and I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting to.

The book opens with Richard – or Dick as he prefers to call himself – standing on a bridge, preparing to jump. Immediately the reader is intrigued, wondering what has happened to drive him to suicide.  At the last minute Dick feels a hand on his shoulder – this is Jake, a complete stranger who saves his life and becomes his closest friend. The first half of the book follows the adventures of Dick and Jake as they leave England and sail to Scandinavia together in search of a new life. The second half is the story of Dick’s relationship with Hesta, a girl he meets in Paris.

The whole book is written in the first person from Dick’s perspective, which is significant as it was apparently the first time Daphne du Maurier wrote from a man’s point of view – and I thought she captured the male voice perfectly. The only problem I had was that I just didn’t like Dick very much. I found his immaturity and whining very irritating – although I understood that the point of the book was to follow his development from an insecure, selfish youth into a sensible, mature adult. Eventually he does begin to grow up and want different things out of life, but this comes too late in the book for me to be able to warm to him. However, the book is so well-written I could still enjoy it even with such an unsympathetic narrator. Her writing is absolutely beautiful and quite dreamlike, as she lets us get right inside Dick’s head and share his thoughts and emotions. There are also some vivid descriptions of the mountains and fjords of Norway and the other places that the characters visit, particularly Paris with its cafés and boulevards.

This would probably not be the best Daphne du Maurier book for a newcomer to begin with, but it’s a good choice for someone who wants to venture away from Rebecca and read one of her less popular novels. A word of warning, though – if you’re going to read the Virago Modern Classics edition, leave the introduction until last as it gives away the entire plot, including the ending (this is good advice with any book – I’ve learned from experience never to read the introduction first).

This is my first book for the Daphne du Maurier Challenge hosted by Chris at Book-a-rama. I wasn’t planning to take part in this challenge until I discovered my local library had almost all of her books. I’m looking forward to reading some more of her work during the next year, as there are still a lot of her books I haven’t read yet. This book also counts towards the 1930s challenge as it was a contemporary novel published in 1932 and set in 1930s Europe – and also the Typically British challenge.

Pages: 304/Publisher: Virago Press (Virago Modern Classics 515)/Year: 2005 (originally published 1932)/Source: Library book

Review: The Unburied by Charles Palliser

2 Comments

The title of this book may suggest a horror story complete with zombies and vampires, but The Unburied is actually a scholarly murder mystery which reminded me of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco or An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears.  I wanted to read it because a few years ago I read another Charles Palliser book, The Quincunx, which I really enjoyed.  Like The Quincunx, this one is set (mostly) in Victorian England.  It begins with a mock ‘Editor’s Foreword’ in which we are told that we are about to read an account which will throw new light on the controversial Thurchester Mystery.  This account, known as The Courtine Account, forms the bulk of the book.

Dr Edward Courtine, a historian from Cambridge University, has been invited to spend the week before Christmas with Austin Fickling, an old friend from his student days who is now teaching at a school in the cathedral city of Thurchester.  He and Austin haven’t seen each other since they parted on bad terms twenty years ago, and Courtine is eager to renew their friendship.  He also has another reason for wanting to visit Thurchester – he has been studying King Alfred the Great and has learned that an ancient manuscript detailing the events of Alfred’s reign may be available in Thurchester Library.

On the night of Courtine’s arrival he hears the story of a murder that took place in the cathedral two centuries earlier.  Courtine is fascinated, but as he begins to investigate he becomes involved in another murder mystery – and discovers Austin’s true motive for inviting him to Thurchester.

As the main narrator of the book, I found Courtine very irritating, but at the same time I felt slightly sorry for him.  For such an obviously intelligent person he was completely lacking in perception, constantly saying the wrong things, missing important clues and failing to notice people behaving suspiciously.  Sometimes he would tell us that he was beginning to form a theory or that an idea had occurred to him, but he didn’t let us know what it was.  This was good in one way, as it encouraged me to work things out for myself, but it also annoyed me because I was already finding it difficult enough to keep all the threads of the story straight.

Although the town of Thurchester and its community are vividly depicted, I didn’t find any of the characters particularly memorable.  The fact that some of them had similar names (Slattery, Sheldrick, Sisterton for example) didn’t help.  There is actually a character list at the back of the book but I was trying not to look at it in case I came across any spoilers.  As for the plot, it’s so intricate you really need to read this book in as few sittings as possible so you don’t forget any important details.  There seemed to be a constant stream of unexplained deaths and forged documents, with at least three separate mysteries from different eras all running parallel to each other – and different characters giving different versions of what may or may not have happened.   I wished I had been taking notes from the beginning.

This is a very atmospheric book with lots of gothic elements, from the freezing fog that accompanies Courtine’s arrival in Thurchester to the obligatory ‘ghost’ supposedly haunting the cathedral.  It would have been a good book to read in front of the fire on a cold winter’s night.  In spite of the slow pace the book was relatively quick to read and although it was certainly confusing, I did enjoy it, especially when the various mysteries began to unravel towards the end.  Not as good as The Quincunx, though – if you’ve never read a Charles Palliser book before, try that one first.

Genre: Historical Fiction/Mystery/Publisher: Phoenix/Pages: 389/Year: 1999/Source: My own copy purchased used

Review: Wild Swans by Jung Chang

15 Comments

Wild Swans is the story of three generations of women in Jung Chang’s family.  The first is her grandmother Yu-fang, who grew up in pre-communist China, a time when women had their feet bound as children and could be given to warlords as concubines.  The second is Chang’s mother, De-hong, who became a senior official in the Communist party following their victory over the Kuomintang.  The third is Jung Chang herself and the longest and most compelling section of the book is devoted to her own experiences during Mao’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

Before beginning this book I didn’t know very much at all about Chairman Mao, but I’m obviously not alone in that.  As Jung Chang says in her introduction to the 2003 edition, ‘the world knows astonishingly little about him’.  This book helped me understand why the Chinese people initally welcomed communism and how millions of children grew up viewing Mao as their hero and never dreaming of questioning his regime.   It also explained why many people eventually became disillusioned and why the system started to break down.

Reading Wild Swans made me realize how important books like this one are.  Wild Swans presents almost the entire 20th century history of China in a highly personal way that makes it so much more memorable than just reading the same information in a text book would have been.

One of the most horrible things in the book occurs within the first chapter when Chang describes her grandmother’s footbinding.  It’s so awful to think of a little girl being forced to undergo this torture just because tiny feet (or ‘three-inch golden lilies’) were thought to be the ideal.  Soon after her grandmother’s feet were bound the tradition began to disappear.  However, this is just one small part of the book and the first in a long series of shocking episodes the author relates to us.  For example, during the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communists, inflation rose so quickly that currency became worthless and people began to take desperate measures to get food, with beggars trying to sell their children in exchange for a bag of rice.

Jung Chang’s parents both worked for the Communists during and after the civil war, rising to high positions within the party.  Chang’s father was completely devoted to the Communist Party, putting it before his wife’s welfare.  Every time she found herself in trouble with the party for some trivial reason, her husband would side against her.  However, this attitude extended to the rest of his family and friends too – he refused to do anything which could be construed as showing favouritism.

Some parts of the book made me feel so angry and frustrated, such as reading about the senseless waste of food when peasants were taken away from the fields to work on increasing steel output instead, as part of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.  There are some shocking accounts of starving people being driven to eat their own babies.  The famine shook a lot of people’s faith in the Party and afterwards even Jung’s father was less inclined to put the party’s needs before his family’s as he had done in the past – in fact during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, he found himself denounced and arrested, and eventually emerges as one of the most admirable people in the book, at least in my opinion.

“I thought of my father’s life, his wasted dedication and crushed dreams…There was no place for him in Mao’s China because he had tried to be an honest man.”

The descriptions of the Cultural Revolution are horrific; it went on for years and resulted in countless deaths.  One of the most frightening things about this period was that nobody was safe – people who had been high-ranking Communist officials before the revolution suddenly found themselves branded ‘capitalist-roaders’ or ‘counter-revolutionaries’ (sometimes by their own children) and some of them were driven to suicide.

Some of the parts I found most fascinating were Jung’s accounts of how the Chinese viewed the ‘capitalist countries’ in the west.

“As a child, my idea of the West was that it was a miasma of poverty and misery, like that of the homeless ‘Little Match Girl’ in the Hans Christian Andersen story.  When I was in the boarding nursery and did not want to finish my food, the teacher would say: ‘Think of all the starving children in the capitalist world!’

The book is complete with a family tree, chronology, photographs and map of China – all of which were very useful as I found myself constantly referring to them and without them I would have had a lot more difficulty keeping track of what was going on.

As you can probably imagine, it was a very depressing book, as Jung and her family experienced very few moments of true happiness.  She only really sounds enthusiastic when she’s describing the natural beauty of some of the places she visited – and the pleasure she got from reading books and composing poetry, both of which were condemned during the Cultural Revolution.  However, it was also the most riveting non-fiction book I’ve ever read – I kept thinking “I’ll just read a few more pages” then an hour later I was still sitting there unable to put the book down.

I don’t think I need to explain why this book counts towards the Women Unbound challenge.  All three of the women featured in Wild Swans – Jung Chang herself, her mother and her grandmother – were forced to endure hardships and ordeals that are unimaginable to most of us, but remained strong and courageous throughout it all.  However, Wild Swans is not just the story of three women – it’s much broader in scope than that and is the story of an entire nation.  So much is packed into the 650 pages of this book that I’ve barely scratched the surface in this review and if you haven’t yet read the book I hope you’ll read it for yourself – no review can really do it justice.

Highly Recommended

Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir/Publisher: Harper Perennial/Pages: 650/Year: 2004 (originally published 1991)/Source: My own copy bought new

Short Story Mini-Review: An Imaginative Woman by Thomas Hardy

14 Comments

An Imaginative Woman by Thomas Hardy (1894)

This is the first of Thomas Hardy’s short stories that I’ve read but I would now like to read more. As you might expect from Hardy, An Imaginative Woman is well-written and descriptive but with a slightly dark and melancholy feel.

Ella Marchmill, the ‘imaginative woman’ of the title is an aspiring poet, writing under the male pseudonym of John Ivy because ‘nobody might believe in her inspiration’ if they knew she was a woman. Her husband, a gunmaker, is her exact opposite in temperament and interests. When the couple and their three children go on holiday to Solentsea in Upper Wessex, Ella becomes obsessed with the previous occupier of their lodgings – a fellow poet by the name of Robert Trewe. During their stay in Solentsea she convinces herself she has fallen in love with a man she has never even met and desperately tries to arrange a meeting with Trewe. As I don’t want to spoil the story for you I won’t reveal any more of the plot and will leave it to you to find out whether or not Ella succeeds in meeting Robert Trewe.

No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself, considering that he had to provide for family expenses.

“He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said.

The theme of this story was actually very similar to the Mary Elizabeth Braddon novel The Doctor’s Wife which I reviewed a few weeks ago, in which a woman becomes bored with her marriage and develops an obsession with another life that exists only in her fantasies. The outcome of the two stories, however, is very different. There’s a clever plot twist at the end of An Imaginative Woman but I found the final few paragraphs a bit too harsh and cruel.

If you’d like to read this story yourself, you can find it online here.

The illustration by Arthur J. Goodman shown at the top of this post originally appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine in April 1894 and depicts Robert Trewe and Ella Marchmill – Picture courtesy of Philip V. Allingham

Have you read any of Thomas Hardy’s short stories? Which one do you think I should read next?

Review: The Warden by Anthony Trollope

6 Comments

Being a lover of Victorian fiction, I have wanted to read something by Anthony Trollope for a long time but didn’t know which of his books to begin with. I’ve heard a lot about The Way We Live Now and Can You Forgive Her? but I decided to go with The Warden because it’s relatively short and I thought that if I wasn’t enjoying it I’d be more likely to finish a book with 200 pages than one with 800. Luckily, this wasn’t a problem – I enjoyed the book and wouldn’t have minded if it had been longer.

In the year 1434 John Hiram established a hospital (or almshouse) in the town of Barchester where for centuries to come, twelve elderly, infirm men could live under the care of a warden. At the time when the story takes place, Septimus Harding is the current warden and whilst the amount of money given to the old men has barely changed at all over time, the warden’s income has increased to eight hundred pounds a year. When reformer John Bold decides to investigate, Harding finds himself facing a moral dilemma.

The book really made me stop and think, because none of the characters seemed to be either completely in the wrong or completely in the right.  Although it was clearly unfair that Mr. Harding was receiving so much money, I sympathised with him because as soon as the unfairness of his position was brought to his attention he became determined to do the right thing.  As for the other main characters – John Bold and Harding’s son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly – although they are on opposite sides of the debate and have very different opinions regarding the warden’s situation, Trollope presents them both as well-intentioned people with normal human flaws.  The female characters don’t play a very big role in this book, but I loved the relationship between Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor.

I really liked Trollope’s writing style which is elegant, insightful and witty in a gentle way.  There are a few chapters where he departs from the main storyline to spend several pages talking about politics or the media but this is a common trait of Victorian writers.  Although it was slow moving in places, Trollope managed to keep me interested from beginning to end.  I’m sure some of his other books will be better, but this one was good enough to make me want to read more of his work.

Recommended

Publisher: Penguin Classics/Year: 1984 (first published 1855)/Pages: 240/Source: My own copy bought used

Review and Giveaway: Our Promised Land by Michael T. Darkow

14 Comments

Our Promised Land by Michael T. Darkow is a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the Holy Land. Keep reading for your chance to win a copy.

My review:

Our Promised Land follows the lives of two families, each on different sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The story begins during World War II when we see Ellie Liebowisc, who is a Jew, being herded onto a train with his mother and a group of other Jews from their town, having been told that they were going to be ‘resettled’ (‘resettlement’ being a euphemism for the concentration camp and gas chamber). However, Ellie is one of the lucky ones who survives the war and makes his way to the newly created Israel, determined that his people shouldn’t have suffered for nothing.

Next we are introduced to Yasif, a Palestinian boy whose family and neighbours are growing increasingly unhappy about the arrival of the Jews. Yasif is given the chance to go and study in America, but even there he can’t escape from what is going on – and a mysterious voice refuses to let him forget…

Before I started to read this book I thought I might have difficulty understanding it, as the Palestinian-Israeli situation is a subject I know very little about. However, I felt I came away from the book with a better knowledge of the origins of the conflict and why the people involved feel the way they do.

One of the things I really liked about the book was that it is told from both the Israeli and the Palestinian viewpoint, so that the reader is able to see things from two different perspectives. Whilst I was reading Ellie’s sections of the book I felt saddened and angered by the treatment the Jews had received and I could understand his feelings. The opening scenes when he and his mother arrived at the concentration camp were very moving and stayed in my mind even after finishing the book. On the other hand, during Yasif’s part of the story I could sympathise with the Palestinians. This was a good approach for a neutral reader like myself who has no personal involvement in the conflict. The only characters I didn’t sympathise with were those who unfortunately thought the way to solve things was through violence and terrorism.

The book has an unusual structure being told in a series of vignettes, or snapshots of particular moments, moods and ideas. This means it’s sometimes necessary for the story to jump forward in time quite abruptly, but overall I think it was an effective structure. The author also provides a time line at the front of the book to help clarify the historical background.

I would recommend this book to readers who want to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Publisher: Synergy Books/Year: 2010/Pages: 192/Source: I received a review copy of this book from the author.

Giveaway (Open worldwide)

Would you like the chance to win a copy of Our Promised Land? Michael T. Darkow is kindly offering 5 copies of the book to readers of this blog.

To enter, all you need to do is leave a comment on this post, including a valid email address. Only one entry per person please.

This is an international giveaway and will end on Thursday April 29th.  Good luck!

Review: The Doctor’s Wife by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

4 Comments

Isabel Sleaford lives in a dream world filled with characters from novels by Dickens, Scott and Thackeray. She longs to break away from her boring existence as a children’s governess and live the exciting life of one of the heroines in her favourite books. When parish doctor George Gilbert proposes to her, she accepts but quickly finds that her marriage isn’t providing the drama and adventure she’s been dreaming of. George is a good man, but he’s practical, down to earth – and boring, at least in Isabel’s opinion. After meeting Roland Lansdell, the squire of Mordred Priory, she becomes even more discontented. Roland is romantic, poetic and imaginative – in other words, he’s everything that George isn’t…

This is the second Mary Elizabeth Braddon book I’ve read – the first was the book that she’s best known for today, the sensation novel Lady Audley’s Secret. Apparently The Doctor’s Wife was Braddon’s attempt at writing a more serious, literary novel, with a plot inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The Doctor’s Wife is not very ‘sensational’ – apart from maybe the final few chapters – and although it’s interesting and compelling in a different way, if you’re expecting something similar to Lady Audley you might be slightly disappointed. At one point in the book, Braddon even tells us “this is not a sensation novel!”

The focus of The Doctor’s Wife is the development of Isabel Gilbert from a sentimental girl with her head permanently in the clouds into a sensible and mature woman. I didn’t like Isabel much at all, though I’m not really sure if I was supposed to. Throughout most of the book she was just so silly and immature – wishing that she would catch a terrible illness or some other tragedy would befall her, just so she could have some excitement in her life – although as several of the other characters pointed out, she wasn’t a bad person, just childish and foolish. It was sad that her own romantic notions and ideals were preventing her from having any chance of happiness.

I thought some of the minor characters were much more interesting and I would have liked them to have played a bigger part in the story. I particularly loved Sigismund Smith, who was a friend of both George and Isabel, and a ‘sensation author’ – probably a parody of Mary Elizabeth Braddon herself. Sigismund (whose real name is Sam) is a writer of ‘penny numbers’ – cheap, serialised adventure stories. His enthusiasm for his work and his unusual methods of researching his novels provide most of the humour in the book.

Due to Isabel’s reading, almost every page contains allusions to characters and events from various novels, plays and poems – most of which I haven’t read – so I found myself constantly having to turn to the notes at the back of the book (until I decided I could follow the story well enough without understanding all the references to Edith Dombey and Ernest Maltravers).

Overall, this was another great book from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, although not quite what I was expecting.

Highly Recommended

Genre: Classics/Pages: 431/Publisher: Oxford University Press/Year: 2008 – originally published 1864/Source: My own copy purchased new