Nonfiction November Week 4: Reads Like Fiction

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For Week 4 of Nonfiction November, we are asked to consider the following questions:

(Nov. 19 to 23) – Reads Like Fiction (hosted by Rennie at What’s Nonfiction?): Nonfiction books often get praised for how they stack up to fiction. Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel? If it does, what gives it that fiction-like feeling? Does it depend on the topic, the writing, the use of certain literary elements and techniques? What are your favorite nonfiction recommendations that read like fiction? And if your nonfiction picks could never be mistaken for novels, what do you love about the differences?

I don’t really expect nonfiction to feel like fiction, so I tend to approach it in a different frame of mind and hoping to gain different things from it. The type of nonfiction I read most often is history and I think there does need to be a distinction between historical nonfiction and historical fiction.

When I read historical fiction I want the author to create a realistic and convincing historical setting which has been thoroughly researched and to stick to the facts as far as possible regarding things such as dates, outcomes of battles, major events, the clothes people would have worn and the food they would have eaten. However, I also want to be entertained by a good story which will take me through a range of emotions and I want the author to bring the characters to life, showing me how they thought, how they felt and what they said. When writing fiction, the author can obviously use their imagination to do these things, but with nonfiction it’s more difficult and sometimes impossible.

In Alison Weir’s biography of Elizabeth of York, for example, because there is a limit to what we can know about Elizabeth from a distance of five hundred years, there are lots of occasions where she speculates on what Elizabeth might have done or thought and uses the words ‘probably’ and ‘maybe’. This is obviously much more of a problem with nonfiction than with fiction, and although I did enjoy that book overall, I would have preferred to stick to the known facts.

Going back to the questions posed at the beginning of this post, I think there are definitely certain literary elements and techniques that can be used to give a book a more fiction-like feeling. The Plantagenets by Dan Jones is a good example: I mentioned in my review that “instead of just telling us that Henry I’s son died in a shipwreck, he describes the sails of the ship billowing in the wind, the shouts of the crew and the freezing water pouring into the ship.” This sort of detail can add life and colour and make a nonfiction book feel more like a novel.

I think it does depend on the type of nonfiction, though. Autobiographies and memoirs can often feel much more fictional than an impersonal biography of a historical figure; the author is writing about his or her own life, so they can draw on firsthand experience, they can talk about their thoughts, words and actions, and they probably don’t need to resort to imagination or speculation to fill in gaps.

One book that I think gets the fiction/nonfiction balance right and that has an element of autobiography is Wild Swans by Jung Chang. I described it in my review as “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.” Because Jung Chang is writing about her own family history – her grandmother, her mother and herself – Wild Swans has a personal feel which gives it the sort of power and emotion I love in fiction. Knowing that it is a true story makes it an even more moving and compelling read.

At the other end of the scale are books that could never be mistaken for fiction and aren’t intended to be, such as reference books and books of facts and figures. Books like The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction and The Renaissance: The Best One-Hour History feel nothing like novels and I wouldn’t expect or want them to!

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What are your opinions on this? Does it matter to you whether nonfiction reads like a novel?

Classics Club Spin #19: My List

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The Classics Club

I love taking part in the spins hosted by The Classics Club – this is the nineteenth and although I’ve missed one or two I think I’ve managed to participate in most of them. If you’re not sure what the spins involve, here’s a reminder:

The rules for Spin #19:

* List any twenty books you have left to read from your Classics Club list.
* Number them from 1 to 20.
* On Tuesday 27th November the Classics Club will announce a number.
* This is the book you need to read by 31st January 2019.

And here is my list:

1. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
3. La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas
4. Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
5. The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope
6. The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
7. In a Dark Wood Wandering by Hella S Haasse
8. Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham
9. The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott
10. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
11. Germinal by Emile Zola
12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13. Claudius the God by Robert Graves
14. The Fifth Queen by Ford Madox Ford
15. How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn
16. The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter
17. The Long Ships by Frans G Bengtsson
18. The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade
19. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
20. Fire from Heaven by Mary Renault

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We’ve been given more time than usual to read our book for this spin, so I’ve tried to include lots of long books here. I think most of them have over 400 pages, although one or two are slightly shorter. I don’t mind which one I get, as I’ll be reading them all eventually anyway.

Have you read any of these books? Which number do you think I should be hoping for on Tuesday?

The Case of the Gilded Fly by Edmund Crispin

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Like many people, I first encountered Edmund Crispin’s Oxford don detective Gervase Fen in The Moving Toyshop, the third in the series and the one which is usually said to be his best. I loved it and wanted to read more, so going back to the beginning of the series and reading The Case of the Gilded Fly seemed a good idea. As it was published in 1944 I had hoped to read it for last month’s 1944 Club but didn’t have time and ended up reading it after the event was over.

The novel opens with an introduction to each of the main characters as they travel to Oxford on the train. Among them are Gervase Fen, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, and his old friend the Chief Constable, Sir Richard Freeman. Ironically, Fen’s passion is for detection, while Sir Richard’s is for literature, which leads to some interesting conversations between the two of them. Although this is the first book in the series, it is implied that Fen already has some experience of solving mysteries. He certainly has no difficulty in solving the ‘Case of the Gilded Fly’, even though everyone else finds it baffling.

Also arriving on the same train as Fen and Sir Richard are Robert Warner, a playwright who has chosen an Oxford theatre for the premiere of his new play, and several members of the cast. One of these is the aspiring young actress Yseut Haskell, a spiteful, self-obsessed person who seems to cause trouble everywhere she goes. As we get to know the characters better during their first night in Oxford, we discover that almost everyone has a reason to dislike her, so when Yseut is found dead in a room in the college the next day, there’s no shortage of people with motives. The problem is, none of them seemed to have had an opportunity to enter the room unobserved and carry out the murder. How did the killer manage it? And what is the significance of the Egyptian-style gilded ring found on Yseut’s finger?

This is a complex locked-room-style mystery with a lot of discussion of alibis, floor plans and the timings of events. I didn’t come close to solving it, although Fen works it out very early on but has no proof and keeps us waiting until the end to find out who did it and how it was done. He also faces a moral dilemma: as Yseut was such an unpleasant person and nobody is particularly sorry to see her dead, does he really want the killer to be punished – especially as the police have already decided it was suicide? In my opinion Yseut had done nothing to deserve being murdered, but I suppose this provides a reason why Fen doesn’t immediately tell the police what he knows and bring the novel to an end before it even begins!

I enjoyed this book, but I found it slightly disappointing in comparison to The Moving Toyshop. As a more conventional sort of mystery, it doesn’t have quite the same feeling of originality and novelty, and although there are still plenty of witty comments and literary allusions flying back and forth between Fen and his friends, they are not as much fun as the limericks and ‘Detestable Characters in Fiction’ game in The Moving Toyshop. It’s possible that I would have liked The Case of the Gilded Fly more if I’d read it first and had nothing to compare it with.

Have you read any of the Gervase Fen mysteries? Which ones are your favourites?

Historical Musings #44: Exploring India

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Welcome to my monthly post on all things historical fiction. Having just finished reading Before the Rains by Dinah Jefferies, in which a British photographer in the 1930s is sent to India to take pictures of the royal family of a fictional princely state, I thought it would be interesting this month to look at other historical novels set in India.

One of my all-time favourite historical fiction novels is The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye, set in 19th century British-ruled India. Last year I read one of Kaye’s other novels, Shadow of the Moon, which is also set in India, but in a slightly earlier period, covering the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. I read this as part of a readalong hosted by Cirtnecce who is from India and speaks very highly of M. M. Kaye’s writing and understanding of the country.

A similar book, and another one that I loved, is Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald, which again is set during the Mutiny. I also enjoyed In a Far Country by Linda Holeman, about the daughter of two British missionaries living in 19th century Lahore.

I can think of two dual-time period novels I’ve read which are set at least partly in India. One is The Midnight Rose by Lucinda Riley (in which the historical thread involves a girl who befriends an Indian princess in 1911) and the other is The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark, in which the action moves between 1947 and the 1850s, both important periods in India’s history.

I also loved The Strangler Vine by M. J. Carter, a fascinating historical mystery set in 1837 during the rule of the British East India Company. Then there’s Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, a fictional biography of E. M. Forster, focusing on the time when Forster was working on the novel A Passage to India. A completely different sort of book is Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran, about Rani Lakshmibai who rules the state of Jhansi along with her husband, Raja Gangadhar Rao.

It seems that most of the historical novels I’ve read set in India have been from a non-Indian (usually British) perspective, but I have also read a few by Indian authors. One of these is The Twentieth Wife by Indu Sundaresan, the story of Mehrunissa, the future Empress Nur Jahan. This book is set much earlier than any of the others I’ve mentioned so far – in 17th century Mughal India. There’s also Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, which begins with Sea of Poppies, although the trilogy is set in China as much as in India and tells the story of the First Opium War.

A God in Every Stone is a novel by Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie, set in 1930s Peshawar where the Khudai Khidmatgar movement are attempting to bring an end to British rule in India. Finally, The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie is a magical realism novel which takes us to a 16th century India populated with giants and witches, where emperors have imaginary wives and artists hide inside paintings.

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Now it’s your turn. Have you read any of these books? Which other historical fiction novels set in India can you recommend?

The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley

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After reading Alan Bradley’s Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d last month, I decided to move quickly on to the next in the Flavia de Luce mystery series, The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place. This is the ninth Flavia novel and brings me completely up to date with the series (for now; another book is due early next year).

In this book, our twelve-year-old detective is coming to terms with the terrible news she received at the end of the previous novel. Along with her two elder sisters, Feely and Daffy (Ophelia and Daphne), and her father’s old friend and servant, Dogger, Flavia is taking a boating trip to try to relax and recover from the shock. Trailing her hands in the water as they sail down the river, Flavia suddenly feels her fingers get caught between teeth – it seems that she has discovered yet another dead body. Being Flavia, she is more excited than repulsed, and when the corpse of a young man is pulled to the shore she can’t wait to find out how and why he died.

The dead man is Orlando Whitbread, an aspiring actor with a local theatre company. As Flavia delves more deeply into Orlando’s background, she discovers links with a murder that took place several years earlier. In her usual way, she sets about searching for clues and speaking to suspects – but this time she has some help. It seems that Dogger has been carrying out some investigations of his own and is proving to be Flavia’s equal as a detective, while Daffy, who is never to be found without her nose in a book, offers her assistance in solving some literary clues. This is something new for Flavia, for whom crime-solving has always been a very solitary activity.

We see more of Dogger in this book than ever before and he and Flavia are working together almost as equals, but I was particularly happy with the improvement in her relationship with Daffy. She is getting on better with her other sister too, and for the first time seems to be appreciating that there’s more to Feely than meets the eye. Maybe it has taken some family tragedies to make them overcome their differences – or maybe they are all just growing up. There have certainly been some changes in Flavia and she has come a long way from the tantrum-throwing eleven-year-old she was at the beginning of the series. On the other hand, I think she’s less fun as a character and maybe that’s why I can’t help feeling that the last few books in the series have lacked the charm of the earlier ones. That charm was important because it was what kept me reading and loving the Flavia books, even when the mysteries weren’t particularly strong.

The mystery in this one is slightly more complex than some of the others and I enjoyed meeting the characters who are drawn into it, such as Hob Nightingale, the undertaker’s son, and Mrs Palmer, a published poet who befriends Daffy. I found the final solution a bit unconvincing, however – the reasons for both the original murder and Orlando’s death seemed quite weak. Back to Flavia’s personal story, though, and this book has a much happier ending than the previous one! There were hints that the series might be about to go in an intriguing new direction, but I will have to wait for book 10, The Golden Tresses of the Dead, to find out.

Nonfiction November Week 3: Be (and ask) the Expert

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For Week 3 of Nonfiction November, the topic is as follows:

(Nov. 12 to 16) – Be The Expert/Ask the Expert/Become the Expert (hosted by Julie at JulzReads): Three ways to join in this week! You can either share three or more books on a single topic that you have read and can recommend (be the expert), you can put the call out for good nonfiction on a specific topic that you have been dying to read (ask the expert), or you can create your own list of books on a topic that you’d like to read (become the expert).

I haven’t really read enough non-fiction on any subject to be able to call myself an expert, but here are three books I have read about one of my favourite periods of history, the Wars of the Roses:

The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of the Tudors by Dan Jones

This is a sequel to Dan Jones’ previous book, The Plantagenets. The book covers the whole of the Wars of the Roses period, beginning with the marriage of Henry V and Catherine of Valois and ending with the reign of Henry VII. It’s both factual and entertaining, although I found it slightly biased towards the Lancastrian/Tudor side.

The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen and the King’s Mother by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones

A companion book to Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War series of novels. The book contains essays on three of the most important female historical figures of the period – one by Philippa Gregory on Jacquetta of Luxembourg, another by David Baldwin on Elizabeth Woodville and the final one by Michael Jones on Margaret Beaufort. It’s not necessary to have read the novels first.

Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses by Sarah Gristwood

Another non-fiction book that looks at the period from a female perspective. The seven women whose lives are covered in this book are: Margaret of Anjou, Cecily Neville, Elizabeth Woodville, Margaret of Burgundy, Anne Neville, Margaret Beaufort and Elizabeth of York.

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Now I’m going to ‘Ask the Expert’…

Have you read any good nonfiction about the Wars of the Roses or any of the historical figures who lived during that time? I would love some recommendations!

The Witches of St Petersburg by Imogen Edwards-Jones

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I love reading about Russia, so the title of this novel alone was enough to attract my attention. When I discovered that it was set in the final years of the Romanov dynasty I was even more interested in reading it – it’s such an eventful period of history, yet most of my Russian reading has been set either earlier than that or later.

The novel opens in 1889 with the arrival in St Petersburg of two Montenegrin princesses. Militza and her younger sister Stana (Anastasia) are the daughters of the King of Montenegro and are being married off to members of Russia’s Imperial Court. Despite the high positions they now hold as a result of their marriages, the sisters are not fully accepted by the Russian courtiers who look down on them because of the smallness and perceived insignificance of their home country. They do make some friends, however, including the Tsarina Alexandra who, having given birth to four daughters, is now desperate to provide the Tsar with a son and heir.

Militza and Stana believe they may be able to help. With their knowledge of magic, their ability with spells and charms, and their skill at channelling spirits, they are what many people would call witches, but despite all of their efforts they are still unable to produce a son for the Tsarina and turn at last to a monk from Siberia by the name of Rasputin. Rasputin proves to be a sensation and the princesses are proud to have been responsible for his introduction to court – but when his influence with the Tsar and Tsarina begins to surpass their own, they start to wonder what they have done.

There were things that I liked about The Witches of St Petersburg and things that I didn’t like. I loved the setting as I’d hoped I would, and as I had never read about Militza and Stana before, I enjoyed getting to know them. Stana’s role in the novel is mainly confined to her marital problems – her husband Prince George Maximilianovich spends most of his time in Biarritz with his mistress and Stana longs for a divorce – but Militza is an interesting character and the one who drives the story forward, working to raise the sisters’ profile at court and to get close to the Tsarina. As a ‘witch’, she is also the more powerful of the two, conducting séances and speaking to the dead. The magical aspects of the book confused me, though; I wasn’t sure whether we were supposed to believe that Militza really did have magical powers and really was a witch or whether it was all just a pretence.

The first half of the novel felt too long and repetitive – there were only so many times I wanted to read about the sisters being snubbed at parties and taunted for their provincial background and ‘smelling of goat’ – and I wondered when Rasputin was going to arrive on the scene and liven things up. His first appearance doesn’t come until halfway through the book and the story does become more compelling after that, as Militza and Stana begin to regret their role in bringing him to St Petersburg and wonder how they can get rid of him. However, this is a particularly repulsive portrayal of Rasputin! Some of it may be realistic, but I wished there wasn’t so much graphic detail on how dirty and revolting he was. This is not really a book for the squeamish.

I had a mixture of feelings about The Witches of St Petersburg, then, but overall my interest in the Russian history and in two women I had previously known nothing about was enough to make me keep reading.

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