Bellman & Black by Diane Setterfield

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Bellman and Black William Bellman is ten years old when he hits a rook with his catapult and kills it. He and his friends had expected the bird to fly away before the stone hit it and are surprised to see it die. Just a small incident and William quickly moves on with his life, but as he grows older it seems that this brief moment of cruelty was much more significant than it seemed at the time.

William joins the family mill and through hard work and dedication he begins to rise in the world. As a rich, successful businessman with a wife and children he loves, life is perfect – but not for long. Soon, a series of tragic deaths start to destroy William’s happiness and he finds himself entering into partnership with a mysterious stranger dressed in black…

I found plenty of things to like about Bellman & Black but compared to Diane Setterfield’s first book, The Thirteenth Tale, it was disappointing. Although I didn’t love The Thirteenth Tale the way a lot of other readers did and consequently my expectations for this one weren’t too high, I definitely found her first book much more enjoyable than the second. Bellman & Black is packed with great, original ideas but I don’t think she was quite as successful at bringing all of these ideas together to form a satisfying story as she was with The Thirteenth Tale.

I think part of my problem with this book may have been that I just didn’t like William and felt somehow detached from him, so that even when he was going through times of tragedy and disaster I didn’t really care. And being able to care about William would have been a big advantage in a book where William was the only character who felt fully developed. Other characters come and go without the reader having a chance to get to know them properly; I thought William’s daughter, Dora, had potential but her character was never fleshed out enough for me to be able to warm to her.

Anyway, let’s move on to the things that I loved in Bellman & Black. Diane Setterfield has chosen to write about some fascinating aspects of Victorian culture and society! The first half of the book revolves around the running of a mill and we have the chance to learn about all the different areas of the textile industry, from the processes of producing and dyeing cloth to the benefits Bellman introduces to improve the welfare of his workers. In the second half of the book we explore the mourning business and the emporium William establishes in London as part of his deal with Mr Black (I kept being reminded here of Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise).

Interspersed with William’s story are some shorter passages which discuss rooks and ravens – their appearance and behaviour, their roles in history and mythology, and every other aspect of rooks and ravens that you could possibly imagine. I’m not sure if these sections really added anything to the plot, but I liked the concept and enjoyed reading them.

Bellman & Black is described as a ghost story, though despite the Gothic touches and the foreboding atmosphere, I don’t really think I would agree with that description. William Bellman is certainly haunted, but it’s more of a psychological haunting than a physical one, so if you’re looking for a traditional ghost story you won’t find one here. This is the sort of book that will make you think and look below the surface for hidden meanings – and when you reach the final page you’ll be left to draw your own conclusions from what you’ve read.

I received a copy of this book for review via Netgalley.

Tudors by Peter Ackroyd

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Tudors Peter Ackroyd has written over thirty non-fiction books, but Tudors is the first one I have read. I read a lot of historical fiction set in the Tudor period, so I thought it would be a good idea to read some factual information about the period and fill in some gaps in my knowledge. Tudors is the second volume in Ackroyd’s new The History of England series and while I would have liked to have started at the beginning with the first book, Foundation, the fact that I started with this one wasn’t a problem.

I was surprised to find that this book does not begin with the life of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Instead, it starts with his death and the accession to the throne of his son, Henry VIII in 1509. Ackroyd then takes us through the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, ending with Elizabeth’s death in 1603 – a whole century of history. Throughout the book, his focus is on the subjects of religious change and reform and once I knew that this was the main theme of the book, the decision to include Henry VII in the previous volume rather than this one made more sense as the reformation of the English church only really began with Henry VIII’s break away from Rome.

As this was my first experience of Peter Ackroyd’s work and I wasn’t sure what to expect, I was pleased to find that Tudors was both well written and well researched, while not being too academic, which makes it a good choice for the general reader with an interest in English history. With so much history to cover, I thought Ackroyd did a good job of selecting which historical events to concentrate on and how long to spend discussing each one. He keeps everything in chronological order, rather than jumping around in time, which makes the book easy to follow and if you’re left wanting to know more about a particular person or topic, an extensive list of further reading is included at the end of the book.

My only problem with this book was that I don’t personally find the subject of religious reform particularly interesting so, for me, some sections were slightly dry and boring. Obviously the English Reformation was of huge importance and I can understand why Ackroyd chose to give it so much attention, but I would have preferred more detail on how these religious changes affected the daily lives of the English people as well as those of the monarchs and nobility. I would also have liked to delve deeper into the characters of some of the fascinating historical figures who lived during the Tudor period, but I felt that Ackroyd was more concerned with chronicling the events of the period rather than looking at character.

Six volumes are planned in this series and Tudors is only the second, so there’s a lot of history still to come!

I received a copy of this book for review from Netgalley.

Colossus: The Four Emperors by David Blixt

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Colossus - The Four Emperors This historical fiction novel by David Blixt is set in Rome in the 1st century AD and follows the story of one ambitious but honourable man, Titus Flavius Sabinus, and his family. This is actually the second in the Colossus series and I haven’t read the first, but fortunately it doesn’t seem to be essential to read them in order. Rather than being a conventional sequel to the first book, Stone and Steel, this one adds another layer to the same story, choosing to focus on some different characters and events.

The Four Emperors begins near the end of Nero’s reign. An unpredictable and eccentric emperor, Nero is capable of acts of great cruelty, and Rome under his rule is a dangerous place to live. When Nero commits suicide to avoid assassination, a power struggle begins with four different claimants becoming emperor in the space of a year. We see the events of this turbulent period from the perspective of Sabinus and the other members of his family, including his elderly father, his two sons, Tertius and Clemens, and a cousin, Domitian. Domitian’s father, Vespasian, has been sent to Judea to put down a Jewish rebellion there, and Sabinus hopes this will be a chance for the family to rise in the world – but when he visits the Oracle of Delphi, he learns that he may be fated to be forgotten by history…

Ancient Rome is not one of my favourite periods for historical fiction, but having enjoyed another of David Blixt’s books (The Master of Verona, set in 14th century Italy) I was happy to try this one. Because I don’t read about the Romans very often, I was fascinated by Blixt’s portrayal of their daily lives, their beliefs and customs. I thought his descriptions of the Oracle’s prophecies and the wildness of the Saturnalia celebrations were particularly vivid. The book also explores the politics of the period, the military campaigns, and how Jews and Christians were treated by the Romans.

Another storyline I found interesting involved a young Greek shepherd boy called Spiros, who was forced to marry Nero because his face reminded Nero of his dead wife Poppaea Sabina’s. This and many other incidents showed how dangerous and uncertain life could be during this period and how everyone had to obey the Emperor’s every whim, however cruel or outlandish. Life under the other rulers who succeeded Nero during the Year of the Four Emperors was no less precarious and unpredictable. Of all the time periods in history, this is not one that I would like to have lived in!

At first I thought it would be hard to remember who all the characters were, as so many of them had very similar names thanks to the complicated Roman naming system, but it was actually a lot easier to understand than I thought it would be. Sometimes when I read fiction set in Ancient Rome I find it difficult to connect with and relate to the characters. I’m not sure why it should really be any different from reading about the Tudor or medieval periods but for some reason, for me, it is. I didn’t have that problem with The Four Emperors; every character came alive on the page. I’ve only really mentioned the men so far, but there were some interesting female characters too, including Vespasian’s mistress, Caenis, and two slaves, Abigail and Perel.

My only problem with this book was that, after such a great start, in the second half of the novel there are some long battle sequences which, although they were well written, I didn’t really enjoy reading. I just don’t find battle scenes very interesting and my attention often starts to wander so much that I struggle to follow what’s happening. That was the case again here and it meant that I didn’t love the book quite as much as I had expected to at the beginning, but this is just due to my personal taste and not the author’s fault. Apart from this, I did enjoy The Four Emperors and although I didn’t feel at any disadvantage as a result of starting with the second book in the series, I would now like to go back and read the first one, Stone and Steel, which is told from a Judean perspective.

The Four Emperors tour

I read The Four Emperors as part of the Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tour. There’s only one more stop on the tour, but if you’d like to read more about the book and the author you can find a list of previous reviews, guest posts and interviews here.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

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Frankenstein I’ve had this book on my list for the RIP challenge for the last four years and finally, this year, I found time to read it! This was technically a re-read for me as I know I read it in when I was in my teens, but I had almost completely forgotten the story so it did feel as though I was reading it for the first time again. I also think I was maybe a bit too young to fully appreciate it the first time (I remember skipping through the ‘boring’ parts at the beginning to get to the parts with the monster).

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus was written while Mary Shelley and her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, were staying at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and John Polidori in the summer of 1816. Shelley’s novel is said to have come about as a result of a challenge from Byron that also led to Polidori’s The Vampyre (a story that influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and the beginnings of Byron’s own unfinished vampire story.

Frankenstein begins with some letters written by Arctic explorer Robert Walton to his sister in which he describes his voyage to the North Pole and how he saw a huge figure crossing the ice in a sledge pulled by dogs. Soon after this, Walton and his companions rescue another man, who is frozen and exhausted. His name is Victor Frankenstein and he tells Walton that he was trying to catch up with the giant figure they saw earlier. What follows is Victor’s story, beginning with his childhood in Geneva and his early interest in chemistry and other sciences. At university, his study of science continues and he secretly begins the construction of a human-like being which he plans to bring to life.

Victor’s experiment is a success, but after his creature is brought to life he panics and runs away, leaving the monster alone to fend for itself. The rest of the book follows Frankenstein’s nameless monster, abandoned and rejected by his creator, as he searches for acceptance and friendship. Meanwhile, Victor is convinced that he has unleashed a terrible evil upon the world and that he will have to destroy the monster before it destroys him.

Like Dracula, Frankenstein has become a part of popular culture, but most film versions of Frankenstein have very little in common with this book, so it’s still worth reading even if you think you already know the story. We probably all have an image in our mind of what Frankenstein’s monster looks like (green skin, bolt through the neck etc) but in the book, there are only a few descriptions of the monster’s physical appearance. We are told that he’s hideously ugly and much bigger than ordinary men, but he is also agile, intelligent and sensitive. The monster is also never given a name (his name is not Frankenstein, which is another common misconception) and Shelley refers to him most often as ‘the wretch’.

It’s the chapters that are told from the monster’s perspective that are the most interesting and also the most moving. Despite some of the horrific acts the monster commits, it would be difficult not to feel sympathy for him and anger towards Victor, who has created a living being and then abandoned it. The clear message of the book is that we need to think before we act and be prepared to accept responsibility for our actions. I think another thing Shelley is trying to show us is that rather than being born a monster we can become a monster because of the way we are treated by others. When we first meet Victor’s creature he is gentle and compassionate but after he is repeatedly rejected by society he begins to carry out violent, monstrous actions.

To the modern day reader there are some aspects of Frankenstein that are maybe not very satisfying or believable, such as the way the monster teaches himself to speak and to read. I would also have liked more details of the scientific methods Victor uses to create the monster and bring him to life, but I suppose that would have been beyond the scope of someone writing in the 1800s. As an early nineteenth century gothic novel, though, this is a true classic and I’m glad I took the time to re-read it.

Mrs Poe by Lynn Cullen

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Mrs Poe About ten years ago I was given a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works for Christmas and spent the next few months slowly working through his stories and poems. I was already familiar with the more famous ones, but I hadn’t realised what a diverse writer he actually was and I enjoyed discovering the rest of his work, from the wonderful creepiness of Ligeia and the mystery of The Gold Bug to the satire of The Angel of the Odd and the eerie beauty of Silence: A Fable. By all accounts Poe’s private life was almost as interesting as his fiction, so I was naturally drawn to this new novel by Lynn Cullen with the title Mrs Poe.

I had assumed that the Mrs Poe of the title was Poe’s cousin Virginia Clemm who became his wife at the age of thirteen, but while Virginia does play a big part in the story, the title also refers to another woman – the poet Frances Sargent Osgood, with whom Poe may have had an affair. As the story begins in 1845, Frances is separated from her husband, the portrait painter Samuel Stillman Osgood, and is struggling to earn enough money through her writing to support herself and her young children. Her editor suggests that perhaps the type of poems and stories she writes (children’s stories like Puss in Boots and poetry about love and flowers) are not what people want to read and she should try something darker, becoming “a sort of Mrs Poe”.

However, Frances’ work has already brought her to the attention of Poe himself and when the two are introduced, a friendship begins to form. After this, Cullen’s novel starts to deviate away from the known facts. Poe and Osgood certainly had a relationship of some sort and exchanged romantic poems but it is not known whether they were any more than just platonic friends. In Mrs Poe there’s no doubt that Frances is in love with Edgar, so when she is befriended by his young wife Virginia, who is suffering from tuberculosis, Frances doesn’t know what to think – especially when she starts to experience a series of accidents and misfortunes whenever she’s with Virginia. Does Virginia really want to be her friend or does she have a more sinister reason for wanting to spend so much time with Frances?

The story of the two Mrs Poes is set within the world of nineteenth century American literature, which means there are lots of descriptions of meetings with publishers, salons attended by authors and literary critics, and even some brief mentions and appearances from Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers and poets. This does help to give us a feel for what life was like in the literary world of 1800s New York, but when P.T. Barnum, Samuel Morse and other historical characters began to appear as well, I thought it started to feel too overwhelming.

I have tried two of Lynn Cullen’s books now – this one and The Creation of Eve, the story of female Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola – and while they are both entertaining enough, I’m not sure she is really an author for me. I love the fact that she chooses such interesting subjects for her novels, but neither of the two I’ve read have the depth I look for in historical fiction. This one had the potential to be a great story but the focus on gossip, scandal and the social lives of the characters started to bore me. I think with a title like Mrs Poe I had also expected something more gothic and mysterious and was a bit disappointed that it wasn’t – although the story did become a lot more compelling halfway through when Frances began to feel threatened by Virginia.

This book wasn’t a great success for me, but I would still recommend it to other readers who are interested in the lives of Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Osgood.

I received a copy of this book for review via Netgalley

Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas

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Twenty Years After At last! I’ve been meaning to read the sequel to The Three Musketeers for about five years now and I regret not having read it earlier as I loved it every bit as much as I expected to. I’ve done my best to avoid any big spoilers here but if you haven’t read The Three Musketeers yet you might prefer not to read the rest of this post until you have.

Twenty Years After, as you might have guessed, is set twenty years after The Three Musketeers. The political situation in France has changed during this time period: Cardinal Richelieu is dead and has been succeeded by the Italian Cardinal Mazarin, who is in league with the widowed Anne of Austria, mother of the young King Louis XIV of France. The French people are divided between Mazarin’s supporters and his opponents, the Frondeurs, who are unhappy with the way the country is being run. As Twenty Years After begins, France is close to civil war and when Mazarin meets our old friend d’Artagnan and hears of the brave exploits he has performed in the past, he asks him for help, along with his companions, the three musketeers – Athos, Porthos and Aramis.

D’Artagnan and his three friends have drifted apart over the years but he sets out to find them and invite them to join him in the Cardinal’s service. But while Porthos (hoping that Mazarin will reward him with a barony) is happy to go along with d’Artagnan, the other two have already taken the opposite side in the conflict. The story that follows is the story of how the friendship between d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis is tested by their differing political views and loyalties. Their work takes them to England, where King Charles I is facing capture and execution, and again they find themselves in opposition – but ultimately their loyalty is still to each other, especially when faced with a new enemy in the form of Mordaunt, the son of Milady, the previous book’s villain.

I found Twenty Years After a much more complex book than The Three Musketeers; I’m completely unfamiliar with this period of French history and even after finishing the book I’m not sure I really understood all of the historical background or exactly which of the various princes and dukes was on which side of the conflict. It’s a more mature book too – the characters are twenty years older and have different motivations and priorities, which allows Dumas to explore some different ideas and themes. But there’s still plenty of swashbuckling adventure and I definitely thought this book was just as much fun to read as the first one. As in The Three Musketeers there are some great and memorable scenes and set pieces – the scene on the scaffold during the execution of Charles I is one of the best – and I also loved the sequence of chapters describing the imprisonment of the Duc de Beaufort and his attempts to escape (which involved a trained dog, lobsters, some tennis balls and a giant pie).

The novel begins with an introduction to Cardinal Mazarin, but we don’t have to wait too long until we meet d’Artagnan again, still a lieutenant in the musketeers and dreaming of a captaincy. The other three musketeers and their servants are then reintroduced gradually one by one: first d’Artagnan’s old valet, Planchet, then Aramis with Bazin, Porthos and Mousqueton, Athos and finally Grimaud. I was a bit disappointed, though, that I had read more than 200 pages before all four of our heroes were reunited and together again in the same scene. And that was really the only problem I had with this book – the fact that throughout most of the story the four are divided into two pairs working towards different goals, with Porthos and d’Artagnan on one side and Athos and Aramis on the other.

The basic personality traits of the musketeers are the same, but they have also changed in many ways since the previous book, which is what you would expect after a gap of twenty years. D’Artagnan has matured from the naïve, passionate, brave young man we met in The Three Musketeers into a clever, cunning, quick-thinking man of forty who is now the natural leader of the group. Aramis has fulfilled his ambition of entering the church but isn’t fully committed, still being too interested in women and fighting. As d’Artagnan tells him, “when you were a musketeer you were forever becoming the abbé, and now you are an abbé you appear to me to have a strong leaning to the musketeers.”

Athos was my favourite character in The Three Musketeers but in this book he has become so honourable and saintly that I found him very frustrating at times. I still liked him but I much preferred the younger Athos of the wine cellar and the Bastion Saint-Gervais! In contrast, Porthos, who was never the brightest of the four, seems to have become even less intelligent. I’m sure he wasn’t quite as stupid in the first book! It does result in some great comedy moments though, and I do admire Dumas for making changes rather than leaving his characters static and undeveloped. It was also good to see that the musketeers’ four servants are given more personality in this book, particularly Grimaud and Mousqueton who even have some separate adventures of their own.

As I expected, Twenty Years After has definitely been one of my most enjoyable reads of the year! The Vicomte de Bragelonne awaits…

This House is Haunted by John Boyne

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A lonely mansion, a young governess, two young children in white nightgowns, servants who seem to vanish into thin air, villagers who refuse to answer any questions, gusts of wind that blow up out of nowhere and disappear as suddenly as they came…

“You are not there, Father,” I cried. “I wake up at Gaudlin Hall, I spend most of my day there, I sleep there at night. And throughout it all there is but one thought running through my mind.”

“And that is?”

“This house is haunted.”

This House is Haunted This House is Haunted is a wonderful Victorian-style ghost story and a perfect October read.

It begins in London with a public reading by Charles Dickens, attended by young schoolteacher Eliza Caine and her invalid father, a big admirer of Dickens. As they walk home in the cold after the reading, her father’s health worsens and he dies shortly after, leaving Eliza blaming Dickens for his death. Alone in the world, Eliza decides to answer an advertisement in the newspaper and finds herself being offered the position of governess at Gaudlin Hall in Norfolk.

Arriving at the train station, she experiences what will be the first in a series of unexplained and increasingly sinister incidents when she feels a pair of ghostly hands try to push her under a moving train. Eliza survives this attack and continues to her destination where she meets her two young charges, twelve-year-old Isabella and eight-year-old Eustace Westerley, but it soon becomes obvious that something is wrong. Isabella and Eustace appear to be alone in the house and won’t tell Eliza where their parents are or when she will be able to speak to them. As she slowly pieces together the truth about Gaudlin Hall and learns the fates of the previous governesses, Eliza begins to fear for her own life.

I loved this book. It reminded me of The Séance by John Harwood, though there were shades of lots of other novels too, from Jane Eyre to The Turn of the Screw. Dickens is another big influence; as well as the author himself appearing in the book’s opening scenes, the characters also have suitably Dickensian names, such as Mr Raisin the lawyer, who has a clerk called Mr Cratchett. I really liked the narrator, Eliza, and it was a pleasure to spend 300 pages in her company. The author has obviously made an effort to create an authentic Victorian narrative voice and it worked well, though I did notice a few inaccuracies and words that felt too modern.

Although this is a very atmospheric book, I didn’t find it a very scary one – it’s too predictable and the ghostly manifestations are a bit too ridiculous (the tone of the novel seemed to be somewhere between serious ghost story and parody). But this didn’t make the book any less enjoyable, entertaining and fun to read and once I got past the first few chapters I didn’t want to put it down.

I highly recommend This House is Haunted if you’re looking for something ghostly and Victorian to read as we approach Halloween – I enjoyed this much more than The Woman in Black!

I received a copy of this book for review via Netgalley.