Category: Reviews

The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price – #Dewithon24

19 Comments

Translated by Lloyd Jones

I’m aiming to read more books in translation this year so when I started considering possible options for Reading Wales, also known as #Dewithon, hosted this month by Paula at Book Jotter, it seemed like a good opportunity to read something translated from the Welsh language. Eventually I decided on The Life of Rebecca Jones by Angharad Price, first published as O! Tyn y Gorchudd (“oh, pull aside the veil”), in 2002 and translated into English by Lloyd Jones in 2010. It has been listed as one of the top 25 Greatest Welsh Novels by the Wales Art Review (a good resource if you’re looking for Welsh reading ideas).

The novel is a fictional biography, spanning almost the whole of the twentieth century, and is narrated by Rebecca Jones, who looks back on her life in the small rural community of Maesglasau. Beginning with the arrival of her newly wed parents at Tynybraich farm, followed quickly by the birth of Rebecca herself in 1905, she takes us through her entire life, comparing the twists and turns it takes to the path of the stream that flows through the Maesglasau Valley:

“Memories of my childhood reach me in a continuous flow: smells and tastes converging in a surging current. And just like the stream at Maesglasau, these recollections are a product of the landscape in our part of rural mid-Wales at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its familiar bubbling comforts me.
It was not really like that, of course. The flow was halted frequently. Indeed a stream is not the best metaphor for life’s regular flow between one dam and the next.”

Rebecca’s story is not a particularly dramatic or exciting one and is structured as a simple, linear chronicling of events, yet I found it very moving and compelling. As the novel progresses, Rebecca tells us about her daily life on the farm and the different roles performed by men and women, she describes the beautiful landscape and the changing seasons, and looks at some of the customs and traditions of the Maesglasau people. All of this is interspersed with the poetry of Hugh Jones, who was born in Dinas Mawddwy in the 18th century and wrote the hymn that inspired the Welsh title of the novel.

Rebecca is not the only child in the Tynybraich household; she has several younger brothers and sisters, some of whom die in infancy. Three of the brothers – Gruffudd, William and Lewis – are either born blind or become blind later in childhood (is it worse to have never seen the beauty of the world or to have glimpsed it and had it taken away?) and are all sent away to a boarding school for blind children. The education they receive leads to opportunities they would never have had at home in their Welsh valley and while Rebecca is proud of their remarkable achievements she also feels that her brothers’ ties to their own history, culture and language have been broken. This is a pattern she sees repeated in the wider community as the years go by and more and more young people are choosing to leave Maesglasau and make their homes elsewhere. Meanwhile, for those who remain, further changes are brought by modern technology, new ideas, and a greater movement of English people crossing the border into Wales.

When I first started to read, I wasn’t quite sure whether Rebecca and her family were real people or fictional ones, although the book does include photographs and feels historically authentic. I was quickly able to discover that the family at Tynybraich did indeed exist and are ancestors of Angharad Price. There was even a documentary filmed in the 1960s about the three blind brothers. However, not everything Price tells us about Rebecca’s life is the truth, for reasons only explained once we reach the end of the book. That ending was both surprising and perfect.

Have you read this book or are there any others written in the Welsh language that you can recommend?

Book 9/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

12 Comments

I loved Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy, set in medieval Russia and drawing on elements of Russian history, folklore and fairytales. I’ve been waiting for her to write another adult novel for five years and my patience has finally been rewarded with The Warm Hands of Ghosts. Taking us to the battlefields of the First World War, this is very different in terms of setting, atmosphere and scope, but I’m pleased to say that it’s another great book.

Laura Iven has been serving as a military nurse in Belgium but in January 1918, when the novel begins, she is back at home in Halifax, Canada, having been wounded and discharged. It has not been a happy homecoming for her, as not only has she left behind a brother, Freddie, still fighting on the front line, but soon after her return to Halifax a ship exploded in the harbour, destroying part of the city and killing her parents. When Laura receives a box containing Freddie’s belongings and a note telling her that he is missing in action, she is reluctant to believe that he has also died and decides to return to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital where she can search for more information on his disappearance.

A second thread of the novel is set several months earlier and follows Freddie, who awakens on the battlefield to find himself wounded and alone with an enemy soldier – a German, Hans Winter, who is also badly injured. Lost in no man’s land, together they try to make their way to a place of safety, knowing that depending on whom they encounter first, one or both of them could be shot as either an enemy or deserter. It’s here that they first meet Faland, a fiddler who seems to offer them a way of escape. When Laura arrives at the hospital a few months later and hears tales of the mysterious musician who can give soldiers the gift of oblivion – if they are prepared to pay a price for it – she begins to wonder whether this is what has happened to her brother.

As I said above, this book is quite different from the Winternight Trilogy and I wouldn’t really describe it as fantasy – although it does contain some elements of the supernatural, mainly surrounding the appearances of Faland the fiddler. I don’t want to say too much about him but as Katherine Arden explains in her author’s note, if he reminds you of Woland from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita it’s not a coincidence! Faland is one representation of evil in the novel; the vast horror of the battlefield is another and the tired, desperate soldiers face a difficult choice between the two.

I found the opening chapters set in Halifax very interesting as I previously knew so little about life on the Canadian homefront during the First World War. This is the first time I’ve read about the explosion of the Mont Blanc and the massive loss of life it caused (nearly two thousand people were killed and thousands more injured). In Flanders, meanwhile, the details of the Battle of Passchendaele and its aftermath and the conditions faced by nurses and patients in the field hospitals are equally interesting to read about.

This is not my favourite Katherine Arden book – I preferred the characters in the Russian trilogy and the more magical setting – but I still enjoyed it very much.

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

Book 8/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Deadly Duo by Margery Allingham

9 Comments

Deadly Duo (also published as Take Two at Bedtime) is a 1949 collection of two novellas by Margery Allingham, neither of which feature her famous detective, Albert Campion. I’ve discovered over the years that I tend to prefer Allingham’s stories without Campion to the ones with him, so I thought I would probably enjoy this book – and I was right, although I found one of the novellas much stronger than the other.

The first of the two novellas is Wanted: Someone Innocent. Twenty-year-old Gillian Brayton is attending a school reunion when she is approached by an older woman, Rita Fayre, whom she barely remembers from her school days. To her surprise, Rita greets her like a close friend and offers her a job in her household. Gillian has been completely alone in the world since the death of her beloved uncle and is struggling financially, so despite her misgivings she finds herself accepting. On arriving at Rita’s house, she learns that her job will involve taking care of Rita’s husband, who was injured in the war – but why do all the other servants seem so suspicious of Gillian? Is there another reason for Rita’s invitation?

I really enjoyed this story and thought it could easily have been developed into a longer novel. Allingham creates a lot of suspense and atmosphere and although we see everything through the eyes of Gillian, who is rather naive and gullible – the ‘someone innocent’ of the title – it’s obvious to the reader from early on that she is going to be used as a pawn in a crime. I guessed some of the solution but not all of it and anyway, part of the fun was in getting to know the various members of the household, as well as the police officer, Superintendent McNaught, who is brought in to investigate. McNaught is a character I particularly liked; I’m sure he could have been the star of his own series!

The second novella, Last Act, is the longer of the two and it didn’t interest me as much as the first. It’s written from the point of view of Margot Robert, a young French actress who has fallen in love with Denis, one of the grandsons of her guardian, Mathilde Zoffany (known as Zoff). Unfortunately for Margot, Zoff doesn’t like or trust her grandson and has accused him of trying to kill her. When Zoff is indeed found dead under unusual circumstances, suspicion naturally falls upon Denis – but there are other people in the house who all have motives for wanting her dead.

This story has a more complex plot than the other one and a larger cast of characters, but it didn’t have the same atmospheric feel to it and I felt that the characters were less well developed. I disliked almost all of them, particularly Zoff, who was so unpleasant I couldn’t understand why everyone seemed to be in thrall to her. The solution is clever and quite surprising, but as I didn’t really care how or why Zoff had died, the revelation was less impactful than it probably should have been. Still, these two novellas together made a light, quick and entertaining read!

Clairmont by Lesley McDowell

13 Comments

I have read several novels about the Romantic poets and their social circle, including Jude Morgan’s Passion and Guinevere Glasfurd’s The Year Without Summer, but Claire Clairmont has always seemed a shadowy character, who hasn’t come to life as strongly as other women such as Mary Shelley or Lady Caroline Lamb. This new novel by Lesley McDowell changes that by giving Claire a voice and placing her at the forefront of her own story.

Clairmont follows Claire throughout three different periods of her life, beginning in 1816 when she accompanies her stepsister Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) to Geneva. Claire, Mary and Mary’s married lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she already has a baby son, are renting a house by the lake, while Shelley’s friend Lord Byron is staying at the nearby Villa Diodati with his doctor, John Polidori. Claire is pregnant with Byron’s child, but it’s becoming clear that he now views her as an inconvenience and would prefer it if the child was never born.

The Geneva episode taking place in 1816, the ‘year without a summer’ which followed a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, is the part of Claire’s life most people will be familiar with (if they’re familiar with her at all). It was during their stay at the Villa Diodati that Mary began to write her famous novel Frankenstein, and it’s through her own relationships with Byron and the Shelleys that Claire has gained historical significance. In addition, this novel also follows Claire during her time working as a governess in Russia in 1825 and later when she settles in Paris in the 1840s, and we gradually begin to see how those events of 1816 have impacted the rest of her life.

There were things that I liked about this book and things that I didn’t (more of the latter than the former, unfortunately). To start with a positive, I appreciated having the opportunity to learn more about Claire Clairmont, having previously known very little about her beyond her involvement with the Romantic poets. I had no idea what she did or where she went later in life, so I found that interesting. The story is not told in chronological order, but moves back and forth in time, with a Russia chapter followed by a Paris one then back to Geneva again, which I thought was quite confusing, particularly as the gaps between the timelines aren’t adequately filled in and no backstory is given for the characters prior to 1816. It felt as though half of the story was missing and it made it difficult to become fully immersed.

The writing is beautiful and dreamlike and at times reminded me of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (especially since, like the O’Farrell novel where Shakespeare is never referred to by name, here Byron is always referred to by his nickname, Albe, and never Byron). However, sometimes beautiful writing isn’t enough and I didn’t get on very well with Hamnet so maybe it’s not surprising that I didn’t get on with this book either. The constant jumping around in time and the vagueness of the plot made it hard for me to really get to know Claire and understand her actions. Although I had a lot of sympathy for her because of the terrible way Byron treated her during and after her pregnancy (which has been well documented, including in his own letters), I had no idea what attracted her to him in the first place or how their relationship had reached this point, because none of that is explained or touched upon. Throughout the book, we are continually being dropped into situations that don’t make much sense without being given the full context.

Don’t let me put you off this book if you want to try it – there are plenty of other books I didn’t care for that other people have loved! This will probably be a good read for the right reader; it just wasn’t for me.

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

Book 7/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love edited by Joanne Ella Parsons – #ReadIndies

6 Comments

This new short story collection, Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love, is part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series. These books have been around for a few years now but I’ve let them pass me by as I’ve had enough to read with their Crime Classics series! I’m glad I’ve finally found time to try one as although this collection is a bit uneven I did find it entertaining.

The book contains twelve stories by different authors and includes an introduction by the editor, Joanne Ella Parsons. The stories were originally published between 1833 and 2022 and appear here in chronological order. All have a ‘doomed romance’ theme, with some being much darker than others. There are two that I’ve actually read before – one of them is Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire novella, Carmilla, and the other is Angela Carter’s The Lady of the House of Love, also a vampire story, first published in The Bloody Chamber. I didn’t read Carmilla again as I just read it fairly recently, but I did re-read the Carter and was impressed again by the beautiful imagery and the atmospheric Gothic setting she creates.

The oldest story in the book is Mary Shelley’s The Invisible Girl, in which the narrator, out walking along the coast of Wales, finds a painting of a beautiful woman hanging on the wall inside a ruined tower. It was good to have the opportunity to try more of Shelley’s work, having only read Frankenstein so far, but I didn’t find this a particularly strong story. Two that I did enjoy were The Little Woman in Black by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and One Remained Behind by Marjorie Bowen. These are also authors I’ve read before; Braddon is a favourite Victorian author of mine and has a very readable writing style. Her story seemed as if it was heading in one direction, but then surprised me with an ending I wasn’t expecting at all! Bowen was a very prolific author of historical novels and supernatural tales – the story in this collection is a ghost story from 1936 and one of the highlights of the book for me.

Joanne Ella Parsons has clearly tried to include stories with a wide range of geographical settings, exploring different cultures, rather than just sticking with more traditional Gothic stories. Wilkie Collins, another Victorian author I usually enjoy, is represented here with Mr Captain and the Nymph, in which a ship’s captain lost on an unidentified Pacific island falls in love with the daughter of a local priest. It’s an interesting story, although not a good example of his best work. Alice Perrin’s The Tiger-Charm is set on safari in India, while Nalo Hopkinson’s The Glass Bottle Trick transposes the famous Bluebeard folktale to a Caribbean setting. The latter are two new authors for me and I found both stories entertaining, but I’m not sure if I would search out more of their work based on these.

Another highlight was Could You Wear My Eyes? by Kalamu ya Salaam, where a man whose wife has died agrees to have her eyes inserted into his face after her death, allowing him to see life from her perspective. It’s a strange story but a fascinating one! The collection is completed with another 19th century story, Ella D’Arcy’s White Magic, and two contemporary ones, I’ll Be Your Mirror by Tracy Fahey and Dancehall Devil by V. Castro.

Doomed Romances is a real mixed bag, then – there are some very strong stories and some much weaker ones, and including Carmilla seemed an odd decision to me, as it’s so much longer than any of the other stories and made the book feel unbalanced. I enjoyed the collection overall, though, and will probably consider reading more of them.

British Library Publishing publish a range of fiction and non-fiction including the Tales of the Weird, Crime Classics and Women Writers series. They are an independent publisher, so I’m counting this book towards #ReadIndies month, hosted by Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings and Lizzy’s Literary Life.

Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens

16 Comments

Nicholas Nickleby was the book chosen for me to read in the Classics Club Spin back in October 2023. It has taken me until now to finish it, partly because it’s a book with over 800 pages and also because I started to find it a bit tedious halfway through and kept putting it aside to read something else. I’m sorry to have to say that, as I know a lot of people consider it a favourite and I really did want to love it, but I just couldn’t. However, I did still find a lot to like, so I certainly don’t feel that I wasted my time reading it!

Originally published as a serial from 1838 to 1839, this is one of Dickens’ earliest novels and is very episodic, lacking any real overarching plot, (which I think is probably one of the reasons I had problems staying engaged with it – and the reason I have so far been avoiding The Pickwick Papers!). Therefore it’s difficult to give a summary, but I think all you really need to know is that at the beginning of the book Nicholas Nickleby’s father dies, leaving Nicholas, his mother and his sister Kate penniless and dependent on Uncle Ralph for support. Ralph is a rich but cold, uncaring man who has little compassion for his late brother’s wife and children. He finds Nicholas a low-paid position as an assistant at Dotheboys Hall, a grim and unpleasant school in Yorkshire, while Kate remains under his own ‘protection’ in London…

The most compelling part of the novel, I thought, was the section set at Dotheboys Hall, where Nicholas finds himself working for the evil Wackford Squeers, who claims to be a ‘schoolmaster’, although it quickly becomes obvious that the establishment he is running is not so much a school as a home for unwanted, neglected boys and that Squeers treats them harshly, starving and beating them. Dickens always includes a lot of social commentary in his novels and here he is clearly drawing attention to the terrible conditions found in 19th century boarding schools; apparently he personally visited Yorkshire in early 1838 to do some background research. It’s interesting to compare his portrayal of Dotheboys to Charlotte Brontë’s Lowood School in Jane Eyre. I was sorry that this only formed a relatively small portion of the novel, although it’s important not only for the social history, but also because it introduces Smike, a frail, badly abused young man whom Nicholas rescues from the school and who becomes his loyal friend and the heart of the most emotional scenes in the book.

I also enjoyed the episode where Nicholas, having fled Yorkshire, travels to Portsmouth and joins an acting troupe, run by the actor-manager Vincent Crummles. A lot of time is devoted to introducing the other members of the company – including Crummles’ daughter, the ‘Infant Phenomenon’, who has been acting in child roles for so long she can’t possibly still be an infant! – and although none of this really has much relevance to the rest of the book, I always like theatrical settings so I found it entertaining. Unfortunately, there were other subplots and characters that didn’t interest me at all, such as the Kenwigs family, Mr Lillyvick and Miss Petowker, and the implausibly saintly Cheeryble brothers. This is a book where the good characters are very good and the bad ones are very bad – although Uncle Ralph at least does have some nuance. I liked both Kate and Nicholas (who definitely fall into the ‘good’ category) and while Dickens isn’t really known for writing strong female characters, Kate is more sensible than some of his others.

This hasn’t become a favourite Dickens, then, but I’m still pleased to have read it! Now I can move on to my next Classics Club Spin book, The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy.

This is book 42/50 read from my second Classics Club list.

The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie

19 Comments

The theme for the 2024 Read Christie challenge is Agatha Christie: Through the Decades and for the first quarter of the year we are reading books from the 1920s. In January I read The Secret of Chimneys (1925), so this month it made sense to read The Seven Dials Mystery, which was published four years later in 1929 and is loosely a sequel. I say ‘loosely’ because although this book features some of the same characters and is set at the same country house – Chimneys – it’s a completely separate mystery.

The Seven Dials Mystery begins with a house party being held at Chimneys while the house is being rented out to Sir Oswald and Lady Coote. The guests include a group of young people, one of whom, Gerry Wade, has a habit of sleeping very late in the mornings. As a joke, his friends hide eight alarm clocks in his room during the night, timed to go off one after another in the morning. However, things don’t go according to plan and the clocks fail to wake Wade…because he is already dead. The cause of death is thought to be an accidental overdose of a sedative, but how does that explain why there are now only seven alarm clocks in the bedroom instead of eight?

When Lord Caterham, the owner of Chimneys, returns home and hears the news, he is not at all pleased. “I don’t like anyone who comes and dies in my house on purpose to annoy me,” he says. His daughter, Lady Eileen, on the other hand, is more sympathetic, particularly when she discovers that she knows some of the people involved – and it’s not long before she has become involved herself. Lady Eileen – known as ‘Bundle’ to her friends and family – is on her way to London the next day when a man jumps into the road in front of her car. He has time to utter the words Seven Dials before dying of a gunshot wound. What or where is Seven Dials and is there some connection with the seven clocks found in Gerry Wade’s bedroom? Bundle is determined to find out!

This book has a very similar feel to The Secret of Chimneys and although it had seemed like a good idea to read them in consecutive months for the challenge, in hindsight I think I should have left a bigger gap and chosen something different for this month. Still, it was nice to meet Bundle again, who only played a small part in Chimneys but was much more prominent in this book. Superintendent Battle is also back again, but it’s really Bundle who is the ‘detective’ in this novel and she’s a very likeable one!

I didn’t manage to solve the mystery – if there were any clues pointing towards the culprit I must have missed them – but this is really more of a thriller than a conventional mystery novel anyway and I was content just to follow the twists and turns of the plot. There’s a secret society element that reminded me very much of GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which I’m sure Christie must have read and been inspired by. It’s an entertaining novel but I think my next Read Christie book will be a mystery rather than another thriller.