The Beacon by Susan Hill

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The Beacon Until I read The Beacon last weekend, the only Susan Hill book I had read was one of her ghost stories, The Small Hand, which, for me, was probably not the best introduction to her work. I loved the atmosphere she created but I didn’t find it very original and was disappointed by it. The Beacon is a very different type of book. It’s not a ghost story – I would describe it as a family drama – but it’s still very dark and haunting and I enjoyed it much more than The Small Hand, so I wish I had started with this one instead.

The Beacon is the name of the Prime family’s farmhouse, located somewhere in the north of England. A dark, lonely path leads from the village up to The Beacon, high on a hill, and in stormy weather the house is battered by howling winds. May Prime, now fifty years old, has lived here for her entire life, apart from one year when she went away to university in London. May has never married and since her father’s death has been caring for her elderly mother, Bertha. When Bertha dies too, May is left alone to reflect on her own life and the lives of her brother, Colin, and sister, Berenice. There’s another brother too – his name is Frank – but May has not seen him for many years, since he betrayed his family and destroyed their childhood memories. Now that both of their parents are dead, will May and her siblings ever be able to forgive Frank for what he has done?

The Beacon is a short novella and can easily be read in an hour or two, but despite only being 160 pages long it’s a very powerful story. At first it appears to be just a simple tale of a farmer’s daughter, her family and friends and her experiences of university, but it soon becomes infused with a sense of mystery and suspense. From the beginning May gives us hints that her brother Frank has done something terrible – so bad that May and her other siblings don’t even want to tell him about their mother’s death – but we have to wait until halfway through the story before we find out exactly what it was that alienated him from the rest of the family. I wish I could tell you what he did, but the revelation is the pivotal point of the story and may not be as effective if you know what it is in advance!

As with The Small Hand, my favourite thing about this book was the atmosphere. It’s so bleak and unsettling, and there’s a real feeling of isolation, claustrophobia and loneliness. I thought the portrayal of May’s mental state and the terrors she experienced while trying to start a new life in London was particularly well done, as were her earlier memories of the joy she felt as a child learning to read and write. There’s less focus on the lives of Colin and Berenice, but Frank comes to the forefront of the story in the second half of the book and we learn more about his character and what may have caused him to behave the way he did.

Although The Beacon is one of those books where ‘nothing really happens’, I still found it surprisingly gripping. The ending is very ambiguous and made me question everything I had just read and wonder what was true and what wasn’t. It could be interpreted in several different ways and I was left with plenty to think about even after finishing the final sentence.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

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The Handmaid's Tale This is the first book I’ve read by Margaret Atwood. I was starting to feel slightly embarrassed about never having read any of her work, so when Yvann, Iris, Ana and Alex announced that they were hosting an Advent with Atwood event this December it seemed a perfect opportunity to finally read one. I decided to start with The Handmaid’s Tale because it’s a modern classic and the most well known of her novels.

Our narrator Offred lives in the Republic of Gilead, which was once the USA until the president was assassinated, the government overthrown and a totalitarian religious group took control. In this new dystopian society, women no longer have any of the rights or freedoms they had before; they’re not allowed to work, not allowed to have their own bank accounts, not even allowed to read in case reading leads them into temptation. Reproduction is a problem in Gilead; for some unspecified reason, possibly a nuclear disaster, the birth rate is now very low. Offred belongs to a group of fertile women known as ‘Handmaids’ whose job it is to provide children for the Commanders – the leaders of the new community – whose wives have not been able to conceive. If a Handmaid repeatedly fails to do this, she will be declared an Unwoman and banished to the Colonies to clean up radioactive waste.

The Handmaids are part of a new hierarchy and supposedly less powerful than the Wives; however, we soon discover that life is not easy for the Wives either. They have no real freedom and resent sharing their husbands with the Handmaids. The Handmaids themselves have been deprived of many of the most basic human rights and are valued only for their bodies and for the role they play in bearing children. Their individuality has been stripped away; they all wear the same long red dresses and even their own names have been taken away from them as they are now considered to be the property of their Commander, hence Offred’s new name (Of Fred).

At first I assumed I was reading about a society far into the distant future but it quickly became obvious that was not the case, because Offred remembers living a normal 20th century life with a job, a family and friends, just a few years earlier. We only gradually learn how the Republic of Gilead came into existence and how in such a short period of time everything changed and people were forced to adapt to an entirely different way of life. What makes this book so disturbing is that the type of community Atwood is writing about is not completely far-fetched or implausible. Many of the things she describes are things that have actually happened in some part of the world at some time in the past, or that might even still be happening at this moment, and so the depiction of Gilead is terrifyingly believable.

I really liked Atwood’s writing, I loved the book and I know I haven’t been able to do it justice in this post. Some books are much easier to write about than others and this, for me, is not one of the easy ones. I’ve found it very difficult to say what I wanted to say about it without giving too much away to anyone who hasn’t read it yet. While I was reading the book I was making notes of all the things I wanted to mention but when I started to type them up I decided it would be fairer to leave future readers to discover all the little details of the plot for themselves. And so I hope I’ve said enough to convince you to give this book a try if you haven’t already! I will definitely be reading more of Atwood’s work, not during Advent but certainly in 2013.

Envious Casca by Georgette Heyer

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Envious Casca “Joseph, having lived for so many years abroad, hankered wistfully after a real English Christmas. Nathaniel, regarding him with a contemptuous eye, said that a real English Christmas meant, in his experience, a series of quarrels between inimical persons bound to one another only by the accident of relationship, and thrown together by a worn-out convention which decreed that at Christmas families should forgather.”

It’s Christmas Eve and at Lexham Manor the family and friends of Nathaniel Herriard are gathering for a Christmas party arranged by the old man’s brother, Joseph. The guests include Nat’s nephew Stephen and his fiancée Valerie, his niece Paula and her playwright friend Willoughby Roydon, a distant cousin, Mathilda Clare, and a business partner, Edgar Mottisfont. Putting up decorations as the snow falls outside, Joseph is looking forward to a good old-fashioned family Christmas. Unfortunately Nat doesn’t like the festive season, doesn’t want to have a party, and finds himself arguing with almost everyone present – which means that when he is found stabbed to death in his room later that evening there are plenty of suspects, all with motives for wanting him dead. The problem, as Inspector Hemingway quickly discovers, is that Nat’s door was locked from the inside. How could the murderer have entered a locked room? What happened to the murder weapon? And where could Aunt Maud’s library book, The Life of the Empress of Austria, have disappeared to?

I have read some of Heyer’s historical novels and loved most of them, but this is the first of her contemporary mysteries I’ve read (contemporary for the time in which they were published, that is – 1941 in this case). I had no idea which one to start with, but when I came across Envious Casca in the library and saw that it was set at Christmas, it seemed the perfect choice for a December read.

I wasn’t sure I was going to like this book at first. It took me a while to really get into the story and it didn’t help that most of the characters were completely unsympathetic. I have rarely read a novel with so many nasty, rude, unpleasant characters and I couldn’t think of anything worse than being a guest at the Herriards’ party, even without a murder taking place! From the obnoxious, sarcastic Stephen and the haughty butler Sturry to the cantankerous, bad-tempered Nathaniel, they were all so annoying I was surprised only one murder was committed. I did understand, though, that it was vital to the plot that the group of people gathered at the house disliked each other and that there had been so much friction and conflict directly before the murder. The clashing personalities did lead to some very funny conversations and situations too – the scene where everyone assembles in the drawing room to listen to Roydon read his play, for example.

The story really picked up for me after Inspector Hemingway was called in from Scotland Yard. I didn’t find Hemingway a very interesting character in comparison to other fictional detectives and I felt I never really got to know him or anything about his background, but I still enjoyed following his investigations and his discussions with his assistant, Sergeant Ware. I was quite proud of myself because I worked out how the murder was committed long before Hemingway did and my suspicion as to the identity of the murderer was proved to be right too. Luckily this didn’t take away any of the pleasure of reading the book and it was still fun looking out for more clues that might confirm I had the right solution. As a classic locked-room mystery with lots of suspects, red herrings and an English country house setting, it was maybe not a very original novel but the plot was well constructed and interesting. I liked the way the title of the book cleverly relates to the story too (if you don’t know what it means, wait until you’ve read the book before looking it up).

As my first introduction to Heyer’s mysteries, I enjoyed this one and am looking forward to reading the others.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

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Wolf Hall The year is 1500 and in the London suburb of Putney, young Thomas Cromwell lies on the ground being kicked by his father, who is drunk. Thomas recovers from the beating this time, but he knows he needs to get away from Putney before it happens again and so he runs away to sea. After returning to England several years later, Cromwell enters the service of the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, and begins to play an increasingly important political role. Wolf Hall follows Cromwell as he rises in power to become Henry VIII’s chief minister and helps to negotiate the King’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn.

This is one of those books I have thought about reading many times over the last few years but have never got around to actually doing it despite its popularity and Booker Prize success. Joining a readalong in the summer gave me the motivation to read it at last and although I didn’t keep up with the readalong schedule after the first couple of weeks I did still finish the book and am pleased to be able to say that I enjoyed it.

I didn’t know much about Cromwell before reading this book, but he has appeared as a secondary character in other historical novels I’ve read and he has always been portrayed very negatively – ruthless, cold and calculating. The famous portrait by Hans Holbein (shown below) does nothing to dispel this image! And so it was good to read a novel that showed Cromwell not as a villain (if anyone is portrayed as a villain in this book it’s actually Thomas More) but as an intelligent, charismatic, complex human being with both positive and negative qualities. Something that really comes across strongly is how well Cromwell has done to rise above his unhappy childhood and humble origins as the son of a blacksmith to become a confident, accomplished man people turn to for advice and leadership – one of the most powerful men in England. But while it was fascinating to read about the important historical events of the period and the political machinations that were going on behind the scenes, I also loved reading about Cromwell’s life at home. As well as his wife and children, Cromwell’s household expands over the years to include an assortment of other family members, servants, wards and employees and in Cromwell’s interactions with all of these people we see another side of his character: a kinder, more compassionate side.

Thomas CromwellMantel’s writing is descriptive without being flowery and she really brings her Tudor world to life. Every little piece of information she gives us, however trivial it may seem, helps to slowly build a full and vivid picture of daily 16th century life – what people ate, how they dressed, the books they read and the games they played. To say the book was well-researched would be an understatement – I couldn’t believe how incredibly detailed it was! As someone who has read a lot of Tudor novels I’m already familiar with this period and many of the historical figures who appear in Wolf Hall and I found this to be an advantage, as Mantel assumes the reader has at least some knowledge of the period. If it’s been a while since you’ve read anything about the Tudors, it might be a good idea to remind yourself of some of the historical facts surrounding Henry VIII’s divorce, marriage to Anne Boleyn and the resulting separation from Rome before you start reading.

Before I read this book I had heard a lot about Mantel’s excessive use of pronouns – specifically, the word ‘he’ being used without making it clear who ‘he’ was. I quickly discovered that it was usually safe to assume that ‘he’ was Cromwell but ‘he’ was also frequently used to refer to two or three other people who were taking part in the same conversation, which could sometimes cause confusion. The dialogue itself is modern enough to be easy to understand without feeling too inappropriate, though sometimes Mantel uses quotation marks to indicate speech and sometimes she doesn’t, leaving you to decide whether a character is speaking or just thinking. As I’m not usually a fan of experimental or quirky writing styles this was one of the reasons I had resisted reading this book for such a long time, but it actually didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might. It didn’t stop me from enjoying the book and I wish I hadn’t let it put me off.

I’m now looking forward to reading Bring up the Bodies, hopefully before the final book in the trilogy is released!

A Long Fatal Love Chase by Louisa May Alcott

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Until recently I hadn’t realised what a diverse writer Louisa May Alcott was. Like many people I read Little Women and its sequels as a child – and Little Women is still one of my favourite books – but I never thought about exploring her other fiction until now. A Long Fatal Love Chase is a suspense novel, written in 1866 but never published in Alcott’s lifetime (it was eventually published in 1995). I didn’t even know Alcott had written books like this, so I’m glad I have now been enlightened!

Rosamond Vivian, eighteen years old at the beginning of the novel, lives with her cold-hearted grandfather in a mansion on a remote island. Bored and lonely, feeling unloved by her grandfather, Rosamond longs for some adventure in her life. When she loses her temper with the old man one day and tells him she would gladly sell her soul to Satan for a year of freedom, it seems that her wishes are about to come true.

That same day, Phillip Tempest arrives (during a storm, of course) to do some business with Rosamond’s grandfather. Tempest, who we are told resembles a painting of the demon Mephistopheles, is handsome, charming and surrounded by an aura of mystery. Rosamond is instantly attracted to him and soon Tempest sweeps her away with him on his yacht. But Rosamond’s happiness doesn’t last for long. When she makes some shocking discoveries about Tempest she decides to leave him…but it seems Tempest is not prepared to let her go.

The rest of the story is, as the title suggests, a long and fatal love chase in which Rosamond flees across France, Germany and Italy from chateau to convent to asylum with Tempest never far behind. The tension builds and builds; almost every chapter ends on a cliffhanger as Rosamond finds herself in danger yet again. With Tempest growing more and more obsessed and increasingly devious in the methods he uses to track down her hiding places, will Rosamond ever be able to escape?

As you’ll be able to tell by now, A Long Fatal Love Chase is not like Little Women at all, but that shouldn’t be a problem as long as you’re not expecting it to be (which I wasn’t). Just be aware of its sensational nature and be prepared for something over-the-top and melodramatic. There’s a lot of symbolism too and as well as the Mephistopheles reference I mentioned earlier there are many other allusions to mythology, art and literature, particularly Shakespeare – with a character whose name is Tempest, I suppose that’s not surprising!

If you have read Little Women and remember Jo writing her novels, it’s easy to imagine Jo sitting in her garret writing a story like this and persuading Meg, Beth and Amy to act out some of the scenes with her! It wasn’t the best book of this type that I’ve read, especially in comparison to the more complex sensation novels written during the same period by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon or Ellen Wood, but it was still exciting, entertaining and also quite daring for its time, with its themes of obsession and stalking. It has a lot in common with early gothic novels by authors such as Ann Radcliffe too, though with the advantages that this one is easier to read and Rosamond is a stronger character than the heroines of Radcliffe’s books.

Apart from Rosamond, the other characters in the novel are less well-developed and tend to represent either the good side of human nature (the priest who becomes Rosamond’s friend and confidant) or the bad (Tempest). From the moment he first appears in the novel, Tempest is such an obvious villain and there are so many hints and so much foreshadowing, that it’s easy for us, as the reader, to know that he is not to be trusted. Rosamond is a young, naïve girl (though not without a lot of courage and spirit) being taken advantage of by a ruthless and manipulative older man, and it takes her a lot longer than it takes the reader to discover that something is not right. But despite so much of the plot being predictable, some of the twists did still take me by surprise and the ending was not quite what I had expected either!

If you’ve enjoyed this book, I would also recommend Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart – although they were written almost 100 years apart I thought they had a very similar feel.

Signing up for the 2013 Historical Fiction Challenge

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It’s that time of year again when plans are being made for 2013 and next year’s reading challenges are being announced! I prefer not to sign up for too many challenges as in the past I’ve been so bad at actually completing them, but there are one or two I can never resist – and the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge is one of them.

The Historical Fiction Challenge is again being hosted by the wonderful Historical Tapestry and runs from 1 January to 31 December 2013. There are five different levels of participation to choose from:

20th century reader – 2 books
Victorian reader – 5 books
Renaissance Reader – 10 books
Medieval – 15 books
Ancient History – 25+ books

This is one challenge I never have any trouble completing, so I will be signing up at the Ancient History level, which means reading at least 25 historical fiction books next year. As historical fiction is my favourite genre and forms such a large percentage of my reading every year anyway, it’s not too ‘challenging’ for me, but I still love taking part as I enjoy discovering new historical fiction blogs and seeing what everyone else has been reading each month.

If you’re interested in joining too, see this post at Historical Tapestry.

Classics Challenge November Prompt

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This year I have been taking part in a Classics Challenge hosted by Katherine of November’s Autumn. Every month Katherine has posted a prompt to help us discuss the classic novels we are reading.

I have enjoyed taking part in the challenge and although I haven’t managed to answer all of the prompts, I did want to respond to this one as it provides a sort of summary of the year’s reading, encouraging us to look back at all the classics we have read in 2012.

Here are this month’s questions and my answers:

Of all the Classics you’ve read this year is there an author or movement that has become your new favorite? Which book did you enjoy the most? Or were baffled by?

It’s not exactly a movement, but it seems that a lot of the classics I’ve been drawn to this year have been what I would describe as swashbuckling adventure novels: Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope and Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. I would like to read more books by all of these authors, especially Sabatini and Scott.

I also enjoyed Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel (though not as much as one of my favourite books from last year, Three Men in a Boat) and my two Austen re-reads (Mansfield Park and Emma).

I can’t say I’ve been baffled by any of the classics I’ve read this year, but the one I found the most challenging to read was A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, purely because I didn’t like the style of his writing.

Who’s the best character? The most exasperating?

My favourite character from the classics I’ve read this year is definitely Andre-Louis Moreau, the hero of Scaramouche. I also liked Joe Gargery in Great Expectations – Dickens’ novels are always filled with memorable characters and I remember writing about Joe in response to one of the first Classic Challenge posts of the year.

The most exasperating has to be Sylvia from Sylvia’s Lovers by Elizabeth Gaskell. I was irritated by her silliness in the first half of the book and although she did start to mature after that, she still continued to frustrate me with some of the decisions she made.

From reading other participants’ posts which book do you plan to read and are most intrigued by?

The Mill on the Floss seems to have been a popular choice for the Classics Challenge and I definitely want to read that one soon. Vanity Fair, The House of Mirth, The Heir of Redclyffe and East of Eden are other books I’ve added to my list for 2013 after reading other participants’ posts.

Have you read any of the books I’ve mentioned in this post? Are there any more classics you think I really need to read next year?