Category: Reviews

A Laodicean by Thomas Hardy

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First published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1880-81, A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys: A Story of To-Day is one of Thomas Hardy’s lesser known novels and one that I very much enjoyed.

Architect George Somerset is exploring the countryside near the village of Sleeping-Green one evening when he stumbles upon a castle. He learns that this is Stancy Castle, the ancestral home of the De Stancy family which has recently been purchased by the wealthy railway contractor, John Power. Mr Power has since died, leaving the castle to his daughter, Paula, who is planning to carry out extensive renovations on the ancient building. When Paula is introduced to Somerset she considers commissioning him to do the work on the castle, but before the restoration even begins Somerset finds himself falling in love with her.

It seems that Somerset has a rival for Paula’s love, however – Captain De Stancy, an impoverished descendant of the aristocratic family who once owned the castle. The Captain’s son, William Dare, has seen a chance to get his hands on some of the Power fortune and is determined that his father must marry Paula, no matter what.

Paula herself is the Laodicean of the title, described by the local minister as ‘lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot’, like the people of the church of Laodicea in the Bible. Throughout the novel she vacillates between Somerset and De Stancy, attracted to both of them in different ways and unwilling to fully commit to one or the other. This reflects the way she feels about society in general. As an industrialist’s daughter who has installed a telegraph wire and a new clock at Stancy Castle, Paula represents science and progress but at the same time she likes the idea of marrying into an aristocratic family and becoming a De Stancy. The clash between tradition and a new way of life is one of the recurring themes that comes up again and again in Hardy’s novels.

Although Paula irritated me with her inability to make up her mind and give either man a definite answer, I found Somerset’s infatuation with her quite annoying as well – I wanted him to notice Paula’s friend, Charlotte, who I think would have been a much better choice for him! Irritating characters aside, I found the story very entertaining, mainly because of the machinations of William Dare, who will stop at nothing to ensure Paula chooses his father. He uses forged telegrams, fake photographs and all sorts of other devious tricks to try to get what he wants and this makes the book more of a pageturner than I’d expected at first.

A Laodicean doesn’t really have the pastoral feel of most of Hardy’s other novels; in fact, most of the second half is set in Europe where the various sets of characters wander around the casinos of Monte Carlo, the spas of Baden and the busy streets and squares of Strasbourg. Things do become a bit far-fetched in this section, with lots of coincidental meetings, but I enjoyed reading something different from Hardy after so many books set in his Wessex countryside.

Although this hasn’t become one of my favourite Hardy novels, it’s still a very good one. I think I only have three more of them to read, as well as some of his short story collections. Have you read this one? What did you think?

This is book 36/50 from my second Classics Club list.

The Shadows of London by Andrew Taylor

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A new book in Andrew Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett series is always something to look forward to. This is the sixth in the series and another one I thoroughly enjoyed. If you’re new to these books they do all work as standalones, but I would recommend reading all of them in order if possible so you can watch the relationship develop between James Marwood and Cat Lovett.

The Shadows of London is set around six years after the devastation of the Great Fire of London in 1666. The city is continuing to rebuild and Cat Lovett – now the widowed Mistress Hakesby – is working on the restoration of an ancient almshouse. Having taken over the running of her late husband’s architecture business, Cat is establishing a reputation for herself as a talented architect in her own right, and she and her partner, Brennan, have received a commission to rebuild the almshouse and construct new brick houses on the adjoining land. When a dead body is found on the site, bringing the project to a halt, Cat approaches her friend James Marwood to ask for his help in speeding up the investigations so that work can continue.

Marwood is now working as private secretary to the powerful statesman Lord Arlington. When it emerges that the dead man could be a clerk employed at the Council of Foreign Plantations, Arlington instructs Marwood to find out all he can about the murder. As he and Cat begin to investigate, however, they begin to uncover a trail that seems to be leading to the royal court and to Marwood’s old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham.

The investigation also has implications for another young lady, Louise de Kéroualle, formerly a maid of honour to Charles II’s sister, Minette. The King has his eye on Louise and she has been brought to England to serve as lady-in-waiting to his queen, Catherine of Braganza. It will suit certain people in both England and France to have a Frenchwoman in the King’s bed, but Louise has other things on her mind. Her lover, a French tutor, has gone missing – could he be involved in the almshouse murder?

As with the other five books in this series, Andrew Taylor blends fact and fiction together perfectly. Although the story of the dead man on the building site is fictional, it weaves in and out of the government intrigues and court conspiracies in a way that almost convinces you it could really have happened. While it was good to meet Cat and Marwood again, as well as some of the recurring characters I’ve become quite fond of, such as Marwood’s servants Sam and Margaret Witherdine, I also enjoyed getting to know Louise de Kéroualle. It was interesting to read Taylor’s author’s note where he discusses the politics behind Louise’s seduction by Charles II – with letters from the period as evidence – and why his interpretation of her story is more sympathetic than some.

Long-term readers of the series will be wondering whether this is the book where Cat and Marwood finally get together after what has been a bit of a love-hate relationship. Well, I’m not going to tell you that, but I do think you’ll be pleased to know that, unlike in some of the previous novels, there are plenty of interactions between the two of them and they work closely with each other to solve the mystery. I found the ending of the book quite satisfying, but I’m hoping there will be a book seven as I would love to see what’s in store next for Marwood and Lovett!

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

This is book 8/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

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There are so many Greek mythology retellings around at the moment I thought this one might be too similar to others I’ve read recently (particularly Jennifer Saint’s Elektra) – but I needn’t have worried. With Clytemnestra, Costanza Casati makes a familiar story feel fresh and different, and as a debut novel it’s quite impressive.

Clytemnestra, Helen of Troy’s sister, is most often remembered as the wife of Agamemnon, the King of Mycenae who sacrifices their daughter Iphigenia to summon a wind so he can sail off to join the Trojan War. The heartbroken Clytemnestra takes her revenge on Agamemnon, which in turn provokes their other children, Electra and Orestes, to plot a revenge of their own. Casati’s novel does cover all of this, but a large part of the book is actually devoted to Clytemnestra’s early life as a princess of Sparta, daughter of Tyndareus and Leda, the King and Queen.

Like other Spartan women, Clytemnestra and her sisters are taught to fight, run and wrestle as children and grow up enjoying more independence and freedom than women elsewhere in Ancient Greece. This means that whenever life doesn’t go quite the way they hoped it would, they have the determination and the inner strength to take steps to change things. Early in the novel, a priestess delivers a prophecy that ‘the daughters of Leda will be twice and thrice wed…and they will all be deserters of their lawful husbands’ and over the course of the story we see this prediction begin to come true.

The thing I particularly enjoyed about this novel – and the thing that makes it different from others I’ve read – is that it focuses not just on Clytemnestra and Helen, whose stories are well known, but also on their other siblings. We get to know Castor and Polydeuces (sometimes called Pollux), their twin brothers who go in search of the Golden Fleece with Jason and the Argonauts, their sister Timandra, who marries King Echemus of Arcadia, and the two youngest sisters, Phoebe and Philonoe, who don’t have large parts to play but are not left out of the story either. By spending so much time on Clytemnestra’s childhood and her relationships with her family members, her character is given more depth, so that by the time she is married off to Agamemnon and the familiar, tragic part of her story is set into motion, we have come to know Clytemnestra well and to understand how her environment and upbringing have made her into the person she is.

Something else I found interesting was the portrayal of Clytemnestra’s first marriage to Tantalus, King of Maeonia, shown here to be a marriage made for love, in contrast to her later forced marriage to Agamemnon. Some versions of the Clytemnestra myth don’t make any reference to Tantalus at all, but including him here and showing how Clytemnestra’s life could have followed an entirely different course if he had lived adds another layer to the story.

Clytemnestra is written in present tense, which is never going to be a style I particularly like, but otherwise I found this book very enjoyable. I hope Costanza Casati will write more like this – if so, I think I’ll be adding her to my list of favourite modern Greek mythology authors, along with Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller and Jennifer Saint.

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

Lady MacBethad by Isabelle Schuler

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The character of Lady Macbeth is known to many of us through Shakespeare’s play, but who was she really? What kind of person was she and what were the events that led to her marriage to Macbeth and the beginning of the story we think we know? These are the questions Isabelle Schuler attempts to answer in her new novel, Lady MacBethad.

The book is set in the first half of the 11th century and is narrated by Gruoch, the woman who will become Lady Macbeth. With royal blood in her veins, Gruoch has grown up listening to her Picti grandmother’s prophecies that one day she will be Queen of Alba. When she is betrothed to Duncan, heir to the throne, it seems that the prophecy is going to come true and although she is sorry to leave behind her family and her close childhood friend MacBethad, she heads for Scone to join Duncan’s court. However, she is unprepared for the hostility of Duncan’s mother, Bethoc, the scheming of her pagan friend, Ardith, and the arrival of another young woman, Suthen of Northumberland, who also catches Duncan’s eye.

When a dramatic turn of events leads to her having to flee Scone before the marriage can take place, Gruoch falls into the hands of Mael Colum of Moray and his brother, Gillecomghain. Her chances of becoming queen seem out of reach again, but Gruoch refuses to give up on her dream.

Lady MacBethad ends before Shakespeare’s Macbeth begins, so is not a retelling of the play but more of a prequel to it. Also, the characters in Schuler’s novel are based on the real historical figures rather than on Shakespeare’s interpretation of them, which of course can’t be taken as being particularly accurate! I was pleased to find that she tries to use language appropriate to the period and authentic medieval Gaelic naming, such as MacBethad mac Findlaich rather than the anglicised Macbeth. This was a relief after reading Joanna Courtney’s Blood Queen a few years ago, which renamed Gruoch as Cora and Gillecomghain as Gillespie, just in case the original names were too difficult for modern readers.

Schuler works some quotes from Shakespeare into the conversations between her characters – “Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent beneath it” is advice given to Gruoch by her grandmother, for example – but no knowledge of the play is necessary to be able to understand and enjoy this book. It can be read as a straightforward work of historical fiction, bringing to life a fascinating and complex period of Scotland’s (or Alba’s) history. It explores the conflict between Christianity and the old pagan beliefs, the fading culture of the Picts and the warring factions trying to gain control of the throne.

Gruoch (or Groa, as her pagan friends call her) is portrayed as ambitious, determined and driven by her desire to become queen no matter what. Yet her narrative voice feels slightly too young and immature for me to find her completely convincing. I think having read Dorothy Dunnett’s wonderful King Hereafter, it was just too difficult for me to put Dunnett’s Groa out of my mind and fully embrace a different version of the character.

The way the book ends sets things up perfectly for a sequel, maybe incorporating some of the more familiar events of Macbeth. I wonder whether there will be one or whether Isabelle Schuler is moving on to other subjects now.

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

This is book 7/50 read for the 2023 Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry – #ReadingIrelandMonth23

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Sebastian Barry is one of my favourite Irish authors; he writes beautifully and I’ve loved some of his previous books – in fact, the only one I’ve read that I didn’t like much was Days Without End, mainly because the subject (army life in the American West during the Indian Wars) didn’t really appeal to me. His new novel, Old God’s Time, has a very different setting – Ireland in the 1990s – and I hoped it would be another good one.

Old God’s Time is the story of Tom Kettle, a recently retired police detective who lives in the annex of a castle in Dalkey, a coastal resort to the southeast of Dublin. The castle overlooks the Irish Sea and Tom is finding some contentment in the quietness and solitude of his retirement…until, one day, two younger policeman arrive at his door. They are reopening an historic case Tom worked on in the 1960s and they want to hear his thoughts on it.

Forced to confront moments from his past that he would have preferred to forget, Tom begins to remember. He remembers his beloved wife June and his two children Joseph and Winnie, all now dead, in separate tragic incidents. He remembers his career as a detective and his time in the army. And he remembers that terrible, disturbing thirty-year-old case, linked to one of the darkest episodes in Ireland’s recent history.

When I first read the blurb for this book, it sounded like a crime novel, but being familiar with Sebastian Barry’s work, I knew it would probably be something quite different! In fact, the crime element is pushed into the background until much later in the book, and instead we spend time inside Tom’s head, watching him go about his daily business while memories fleet in and out of his mind, almost at random. The memories don’t come to him chronologically, but in a haphazard, disordered way and sometimes it is unclear whether he is even remembering things accurately. This doesn’t make for easy reading and I spent the first half of the novel feeling very confused. ‘Stream-of-consciousness’ writing is not my favourite style at the best of times and although it does usually work for me in Barry’s novels, I wasn’t won over until the second half of the book. From that point, I was gripped.

The story that does eventually unfold in Old God’s Time is very sad and very grim. It’s a subject that is painful and difficult to read about, but it’s one that needs to be discussed and not ignored. My heart broke for Tom, June and the other characters, but at the same time it’s not a completely miserable book and the beautiful descriptions of the Irish landscape provide a bit of respite from the sadness of the story. I didn’t like this book as much as The Secret Scripture or On Canaan’s Side, but it’s a powerful novel and one I’m pleased I read.

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

I’m counting this towards Reading Ireland Month 2023, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.

Hickory Dickory Dock by Agatha Christie

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February’s prompt for the Read Christie 2023 challenge is a murder method – the use of a blunt object. A lot of Christie’s novels involve murders carried out in this way and there were plenty of suggestions on the official challenge page this month. I chose a book I hadn’t read, Hickory Dickory Dock, which is a Poirot mystery first published in 1955.

The novel begins with the unthinkable – Poirot’s very efficient secretary, Miss Lemon, has made a mistake! Several mistakes, in fact, in a letter she has been typing. When Poirot asks her if something is wrong, she confesses that she’s worried about her sister, Mrs Hubbard, who has recently begun working at a student hostel on Hickory Road. Strange things have been happening at the hostel, Miss Lemon explains – a number of items have been stolen, but there seems to be no logic behind the thefts. A diamond ring, light bulbs, a stethoscope, lipstick, one shoe…what can be the connection? Finding an excuse to visit Hickory Road for himself, Poirot begins to investigate. At first it seems that there could be a fairly innocent explanation, but as these little incidents begin to take a more malicious turn, Poirot needs to discover the truth before somebody is killed.

This is one of several Christie novels that uses part of a children’s rhyme as its title, but apart from the name of the street, it doesn’t have any significance to the plot this time – unlike, for example, A Pocket Full of Rye or Five Little Pigs. That was a bit disappointing (surely a mouse or a clock could have been worked into the plot somehow!) but otherwise I enjoyed this book. I don’t think it’s one of the very best Poirot novels, but even a slightly weaker one is still fun to read. Although the crimes being committed seem quite trivial at the beginning, it gradually becomes clear that something more serious is going on in the background and once the murder takes place, the plot becomes much more compelling.

Setting the novel in a house full of students gives it a busy, bustling feel and means there’s a large cast of characters to provide both victims and suspects. The students are of all nationalities, some British, some French, with others from Africa, Jamaica, India and a whole range of other places. As the book was written in the 1950s, you can probably guess that the way these characters are portrayed is not always politically correct; there’s some racist language and some attitudes that aren’t considered acceptable today. However, for the most part, the students seem to mix together across racial and class boundaries, forming the usual friendships and rivalries you would find in any large group of young people.

I can’t really claim to have solved the mystery, as I worked out part of it but not all of it, but I don’t think it was one of Christie’s cleverest plots and the solution wasn’t as surprising as some of her others. Still, it was entertaining, as all of her books are, and I’m looking forward to reading more as Read Christie 2023 progresses. The March prompt is a motive – anger. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be joining in with that one, but will see if I can fit it into my March reading.

Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb

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It’s been almost nine years since I decided to read Assassin’s Apprentice, the first book in Robin Hobb’s sixteen-volume fantasy sequence following the adventures of FitzChivalry Farseer, his friend the Fool, and the people of Bingtown and the Rain Wilds. Not being a big reader of fantasy, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I trusted the opinions of the fellow bloggers who had recommended it – and I loved it! I went on to read the other books in the individual trilogies and quartets that make up the sequence: the Farseer Trilogy, the Liveship Traders Trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, the Rain Wild Chronicles and, finally, the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy. Assassin’s Fate is the final book in this final trilogy, bringing the entire series to a close.

Naturally, I can’t really discuss the last of sixteen books without spoiling certain aspects of the fifteen previous ones, so be warned! If you haven’t read any of these books yet, I strongly recommend starting at the beginning, with Assassin’s Apprentice – and I hope you’ll enjoy your journey through Robin Hobb’s world as much as I did. This particular novel, though, hasn’t become a favourite and even now, more than a week after I finished it I can’t really decide how I felt about it.

Assassin’s Fate picks up the story from the previous book, Fool’s Quest, with Fitz and his companions heading for the distant city of Clerres in pursuit of the people who have captured his young daughter, Bee. As well as Fitz, the party consists of the Fool, in his female guise of Amber, the trainee assassin Spark, Chade’s illegitimate son Lant, and the stableboy, Per. Fitz is convinced that Bee is dead and their mission is one of vengeance only, but Amber senses that she is still alive. Either way, now that they have embarked on their journey, they need to reach Clerres as quickly as possible and passage has been arranged on the liveship Paragon.

The story of Fitz’s journey alternates with chapters narrated by Bee as she describes her ordeal at the hands of her captors, led by the evil Dwalia. I’ve had mixed feelings about Bee throughout this trilogy – on the one hand, I like her as a character and I can see that her viewpoint allows us to witness things that Fitz does not and so fills in the gaps in the story; on the other, having spent the Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies solely inside Fitz’s head, I would have preferred to continue like that. I often find that I start to lose interest slightly when a long series or saga begins to move on to the next generation and the older characters I have grown to love start to take a back seat. In this book, the earlier Bee chapters felt drawn out and repetitive, although later on, when she and her captors arrived in Clerres, I found her story much more compelling.

A bigger problem for me was the amount of time spent on characters from the Liveship Traders and Rain Wilds novels. As this is the book that wraps up the whole sequence, it’s understandable that Hobb would want to give us a chance to say our farewells to the characters from those books as well as the Farseer ones, but I felt that they came to dominate the story too much. I was happy to see Paragon again and his captains Althea and Brashen, but I had no interest in their son Boy-O or in Kennitson of the Pirate Isles. Instead, I would have preferred more interactions between Fitz and the Fool (not Amber, as I shared Fitz’s dislike of her), more communication with Verity, which was hinted at in the previous book but not followed through, and while we were saying our goodbyes to various characters, I would have liked a better send-off for Chade.

I probably sound as though I didn’t enjoy this book much at all, but that’s not true! I did find plenty of things to like, such as the dramatic scenes within the walls of Clerres, the roles of Nighteyes and Motley the crow, and the final few chapters which, despite not being quite the ending to Fitz’s story I would have chosen, still made me cry. I’m just slightly disappointed that so much of this final novel was devoted to characters and storylines I didn’t feel very invested in. I’m sure people who loved the Liveship and Rain Wilds books more than I did will feel much more satisfied with it.

I’m not sure whether any of Robin Hobb’s other books appeal to me (she has also written as Megan Lindholm) but I’m pleased to have read these ones as overall, apart from a few that have been less successful, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them.