Reading the Victorians in 2012

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I love Victorian classics but seem to have been neglecting them in recent months, so I’m looking forward to taking part in the 2012 Victorian Challenge hosted by Laura of Laura’s Reviews.

Here are the challenge details:

1. The Victorian Challenge 2012 will run from January 1st to December 31st, 2012. You can post a review before this date if you wish.

2. You can read a book, watch a movie, or listen to an audiobook, anything Victorian related that you would like. Reading, watching, or listening to a favorite Victorian related item again for the second, third, or more time is also allowed. You can also share items with other challenges.

3. The goal will be to read, watch, listen, to 2 to 6 (or beyond) anything Victorian items.

Laura is planning to focus on a different Victorian author for each month in 2012 and I would have liked to have done the same, but I know from experience that scheduling my reading in advance just doesn’t work for me. Therefore I’ll be taking a less structured approach to the challenge. I’ve listed below some of the books and authors I’d like to read, but I’m not planning to read them in any particular order.

The Brontës. I still have two Brontë books to read, both of them by Charlotte – Shirley and The Professor – and I’ll try to read one or both of them in 2012. I’m hoping to spend some time re-reading old favourites next year too, so could also decide to re-read either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. I read both of Anne’s books in 2010 and although I enjoyed them, I don’t think I’ll be reading them again in the near future.

Charles Dickens. It’s Dickens’ 200th birthday in February, which makes the beginning of 2012 the perfect time to read one of his novels. I’ve only read four of his books which leaves me with plenty to choose from. I’m thinking about Great Expectations, but could change my mind.

Thomas Hardy. I’m definitely planning to read at least one Thomas Hardy book for the challenge. I loved Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and A Pair of Blue Eyes and enjoyed Under the Greenwood Tree too. I’m not sure which one I should try next but I do want to read all of his books eventually.

Wilkie Collins. I had to include my favourite Victorian somewhere on my list! I’ve read all four of Collins’ most popular novels – The Woman in White, The Moonstone, No Name and Armadale – as well as Poor Miss Finch, Man and Wife, The Law and The Lady, A Rogue’s Life, Basil, The Dead Secret and The Haunted Hotel. If anyone has read any of his other lesser-known novels, I’d love to hear which ones you’d recommend. I do have an e-reader so will be able to download anything that’s available free online.

George Eliot. So far I’ve only read Middlemarch (and Silas Marner at school, though I can’t remember very much about it). I think I’d like to read The Mill on the Floss in 2012.

Anthony Trollope. I’m still working slowly through the Barsetshire novels and hope to finish the series in 2012 by reading The Small House at Allington and The Last Chronicle of Barset. I do also have a copy of Can You Forgive Her? the first in the Palliser series, but it’s probably too ambitious to hope that I’ll have time for that one too.

Elizabeth Gaskell. Again, I have plenty of choices as I’ve only read North and South and The Moorland Cottage so far.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Aurora Floyd was on my list for 2011 but I didn’t manage to find time for it. I’ll definitely try to read it next year and hopefully I’ll enjoy it as much as I enjoyed Lady Audley’s Secret and The Doctor’s Wife.

The challenge also allows books that are set during the Victorian period and I’m sure I’ll be reading some of those too.

Are there any Victorian books you think I should definitely read in 2012? Any suggestions or recommendations are welcome! Will you be reading some Victorian literature next year too?

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

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Until I picked up The Sisters Brothers last month I had never read a western before and didn’t think I would ever want to read one. But after Patrick deWitt’s novel, with its unusual title and cover, appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist earlier this year and so many people were saying they enjoyed it, I thought I’d see what it was like.

The Sisters Brothers is set in the 1850s during the Gold Rush and has everything you would expect to find in a western – guns, horses, saloons, duels, drinking, fighting, and gold prospecting. I know this might not sound very appealing to a lot of you, but I hope you won’t let it put you off because at the heart of this novel is a wonderful story about the relationship between two brothers. They are Charlie and Eli Sisters, names that are feared throughout the wild west. Charlie and Eli are hired killers, who earn their living by taking orders from the mysterious Commodore. When the Commodore tells them that their next assignment is to find and kill the prospector Hermann Kermit Warm, the brothers set off on an eventful journey from Oregon to California.

The brothers encounter lots of memorable characters on their travels (including a ‘weeping man’, an orphaned boy and his horse, and a dentist who introduces Eli to the joys of the toothbrush) but the focus is always on Eli and Charlie themselves. Charlie is the more dominant and aggressive brother, while Eli is more cautious and sensitive, which causes some conflict between the two. I was pleased to find that both characters did develop and change, at least to some extent, over the course of the book. Charlie had seemed a completely unsympathetic character at first, but I later found that he had a bit more depth than I’d originally thought. And while Eli wasn’t exactly the most pleasant of people either, I couldn’t help liking him as he did at least have a conscience and wanted to be a better person – even if he didn’t always manage it.

The Sisters brothers are the type of characters we would more often read about from the opposite perspective, as the book’s villains – but in this book, with the story being narrated by Eli, we are supposed to accept them as our heroes (or anti-heroes, maybe). It’s a testament to Patrick deWitt’s writing that he makes it possible for us to care so much about a pair of murderers and I think this is due partly to Eli being such an appealing narrator. Some of the dialogue is very funny and there’s lots of dark humour, but I should probably warn you that there are also some fairly graphic scenes of violence and cruelty, though I think this is to be expected considering the setting and the profession of the two main characters.

The chapters are short and there’s always something happening: in the first fifty pages alone, Eli is bitten by a venomous spider, his horse gets attacked by a bear and a witch tries to put a curse on the brothers. It all felt slightly surreal and sometimes it was hard to see where the story was really leading but it was so much fun it didn’t matter. Later in the book, though, there were some passages that were quite sad and melancholy, which I thought gave the second half of the book a noticeably different feel to the first.

As you can probably tell by now, I loved this book, which I think proves that it doesn’t matter if something is described as a ‘western’, a ‘romance’, a ‘mystery’ or anything else: a good story is a good story and The Sisters Brothers was one of the best I’ve read this year.

The White Devil by Justin Evans

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When seventeen-year-old Andrew Taylor gets into trouble at his school in Connecticut his parents decide to send him to Britain’s prestigious Harrow School to finish his education. On Andrew’s arrival at Harrow, people begin to remark on his resemblance to the poet, Lord Byron, who also attended Harrow two centuries earlier. This makes Andrew the perfect choice for the role of Byron in the school play, which is being written by his housemaster, Piers Fawkes. But when Andrew witnesses the death of one of his new friends and starts to experience terrifying visions and ghostly sightings, he becomes convinced that Harrow is haunted and that the death is connected with something that happened during Byron’s time at the school. With the help of Persephone Vine, the only girl at Harrow, Andrew and Fawkes begin to investigate, but can they discover the truth behind the hauntings before someone else dies?

I was excited about reading The White Devil as it really sounded like a book I would enjoy. And I did enjoy it, though maybe not as much as I was hoping to. I would describe the book as part ghost story, part literary mystery (though not a particularly scary ghost story, in my opinion – while it was certainly very atmospheric and unsettling, the scenes where Andrew encountered the ghost didn’t scare me very much). The Byron element of the novel was what really interested me and the main reason why I wanted to read this book. I admit I wasn’t sure exactly how much of this story was based on historical fact and how much was pure fiction, but I did enjoy watching Andrew and the other characters researching Byron’s life and attempting to solve the mystery surrounding him.

I also loved the Harrow setting, which was very vividly portrayed, and the descriptions of the old buildings, fog and rain gave it a slightly gothic feel. Justin Evans himself spent a year at Harrow and this obviously helped to make his descriptions of the school feel authentic and believable, with insights into many aspects of life at a boys’ public school including school uniforms, traditions and slang. And in making Andrew Taylor an American, this allowed the author to draw on his own experiences to show how Andrew had to adapt not only to a new school but also to a new country and culture.

The one thing that disappointed me about The White Devil was the lack of strong, well-developed characters. The only character I really liked was Piers Fawkes, who had once been a famous poet and now suffering from alcoholism and at risk of losing his job at Harrow. Persephone, as the book’s main female character, never really came to life for me – and apart from Andrew himself, none of the other boys at Harrow had any depth either. If the characters had been stronger I think I would have enjoyed this book more than I did, but it was still a good, atmospheric read.

Two from Mary Stewart: Rose Cottage and Touch Not the Cat

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After reading the wonderful Nine Coaches Waiting last month, I was desperate to read more Mary Stewart novels. The one I picked up next, Rose Cottage, probably wasn’t the best choice to follow up such a great book as Nine Coaches Waiting, but I was limited by what was available in my library at the time.

Rose Cottage is set in 1947 at Todhall, a large estate in the north east of England, and is narrated by Kate Herrick. Kate grew up in a cottage on the estate and was raised by her grandmother, a servant working for Todhall’s owners, the Brandons. The end of World War II has brought many changes: Todhall is being converted into a hotel and Kate’s grandmother has moved to Scotland with the Brandon family, leaving Rose Cottage unoccupied. Kate, who has been left a widow following the war, agrees to spend a few days at the cottage, going through some private papers that her grandmother had left behind. When she arrives there, however, she discovers that someone else has been there before her – and as she begins to investigate, she starts to uncover some surprising secrets about her own past.

If I had to describe Rose Cottage in one word, I think that word would be ‘pleasant’. The setting is certainly very pleasant, with some lovely, vivid descriptions of the countryside, with birds singing in the trees and flowers blooming in the meadows. The characters are pleasant too. It would be difficult not to love Kate and in fact, almost all of the characters are very easy to like – there are no villains in this book. Sometimes, though, ‘pleasant’ isn’t enough for me. I did find Rose Cottage quite enjoyable but there was nothing very special or memorable about it. The plot was a simple one, and although there was just enough suspense to keep me interested until the end, it wasn’t hard to predict what was going to happen. If this had been my first experience of Mary Stewart I probably wouldn’t have wanted to read any more of her books, so if you’re new to her work I think it might be best to leave this one until you’ve read some of her other novels first.

Since finishing Rose Cottage a couple of weeks ago I have now read a third Mary Stewart book, Touch Not the Cat, which was more to my taste and, in my opinion, a much better book. This story is set on another country estate in England – Ashley Court, complete with a moat and a maze. When Bryony Ashley’s father is involved in a fatal road accident in Bavaria, he lives long enough to leave her a cryptic message, warning her that she could be in danger. After his death Bryony returns to Ashley Court where she begins to investigate the meaning of his dying words. However, she also has another mystery to solve – for as long as she can remember, Bryony has had a secret ‘lover’ who she communicates with using telepathy. Her lover has never identified himself, but she suspects it must be one of her three cousins, Emory, James or Francis. Will she ever discover his true identity?

I really enjoyed this book. After a slow start the pace soon picked up and the story had the page turning qualities that Rose Cottage lacked. As the various threads of the story came together and secrets were revealed, things started to get quite exciting. The telepathy aspect of the story gave it a touch of the supernatural, but this was never overused and as a result it didn’t feel unbelievable. And it wasn’t immediately obvious to me who Bryony’s mysterious lover would be, so I was kept guessing for a while. I also liked the Romeo and Juliet references at the beginning of each chapter, which gave a hint as to what was going to happen in the pages that followed.

So, Rose Cottage and Touch Not the Cat – two books by the same author and two very different reading experiences for me!

The Women of the Cousins’ War by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones

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The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen and the King’s Mother is a non-fiction companion book to Philippa Gregory’s Cousins’ War series of historical fiction novels. The series tells the story of the Wars of the Roses from the viewpoints of some of the women who were involved, including Jacquetta of Luxembourg, her daughter Elizabeth Woodville, who was married to Edward IV, and Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII. Their stories were told in The Lady of the Rivers, The White Queen and The Red Queen respectively. The Women of the Cousins’ War features an essay on all three of these women, each written by a different historian, and in addition to the essays we are given some family trees, maps, list of battles, illustrations and colour photographs.

The book begins with a long introduction written by Philippa Gregory, which I actually found as interesting to read as the rest of the book! The introduction discusses the possible reasons why women in history have often been ignored and overlooked, and why it’s important to study the roles they played. Gregory also looks at the differences between writing history and writing historical fiction, and as a lover of historical fiction myself I find it fascinating to read about an author’s reasons for writing it.

The introduction is followed by Gregory’s essay on the life of Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Unfortunately very little is known about Jacquetta, there are no existing biographies and apparently there are only a few occasions where she actually appears in historical records, so Gregory didn’t have a lot of information to give us. For most of the essay she can only guess at what Jacquetta may or may not have done and how she probably reacted to the historical events going on around her. However, this was the essay I enjoyed the most and it was as easy to read as Gregory’s fiction. It sounds as if Jacquetta had a fascinating life and it’s a shame that so few historians have taken the time to study her.

The second essay is written by the historian David Baldwin and looks at Elizabeth Woodville. I did find Baldwin’s writing style slightly dry, but Elizabeth Woodville is a historical figure who interests me, so I still enjoyed reading the essay. The book’s final section is written by Michael Jones and examines the life of Margaret Beaufort. Again, there’s not a huge amount known about Margaret, but I thought Jones did a good job of working with what little information is available. He also spends some time discussing Margaret’s family history to help us understand the background she came from and to build up a more complete picture of the sort of person she was.

This book could be read either as a stand-alone non-fiction/reference book or as an accompaniment to Philippa Gregory’s three Cousins’ War novels. I’m not sure how satisfying it would be for a serious historian or history student though, as there are no footnotes or endnotes and only some brief lists of sources. I should point out that I have never studied the Wars of the Roses in any depth (most of what I know about the period comes from the small number of historical fiction novels I’ve read set during that time) and for the general reader like myself I would say that the book is very accessible and easy to follow. It filled some of the gaps in my knowledge and I thought it was worth reading, particularly for the wonderful introduction!

I received a copy of this book for review from Simon & Schuster

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

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Victoria Jones has spent the first eighteen years of her life being moved from one foster home and care home to another. On her eighteenth birthday she is released from the care system and sent out into the world with no qualifications and no skills other than her knowledge of flowers and what they mean. When Victoria is offered a job as a florist’s assistant she finally has a chance to turn her life around, but first she needs to confront a secret from her past.

Interspersed with this storyline, we are given flashbacks to an earlier period in Victoria’s life, when she was nine years old and living with one of her foster parents, Elizabeth. There are hints that something traumatic happened during this time, but we don’t find out what it was until near the end of the book. I liked the way the story was told in short, alternating chapters, divided almost equally between Victoria’s present and her past because structuring the novel in this way meant we could slowly piece together a vivid picture of Victoria and the moments that shaped her life. It also helped sustain some suspense and mystery throughout the book, making us wonder exactly what happened while Victoria was living with Elizabeth.

I did enjoy The Language of Flowers, but I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more if Victoria had been a character I had liked or could relate to in any way. I can appreciate that the author was trying to show the effects of a troubled childhood on a person’s emotions and social interactions, and I did sympathise with Victoria – I could see why she was so insecure and why she was afraid to get too close to anyone. I don’t really know anything about the US foster care system (or fostering in general) and while I’m sure the majority of foster parents genuinely want to give the child in their care a loving home, it’s sad to think there might really be children like Victoria who have had some bad experiences. So I could understand why Victoria behaved the way she did, but she continued to frustrate me throughout the entire book and I never quite managed to connect with her at all.

On a more positive note, I did love the ‘language of flowers’ aspect of the book. I really like the idea of people secretly communicating using flowers. I thought the ways in which Vanessa Diffenbaugh incorporated the flower meanings into the novel were cleverly done and as I have absolutely no knowledge of the subject myself, I appreciated the inclusion of Victoria’s Flower Dictionary at the back of the book!

For me, then, I think The Language of Flowers was a book where I liked the concept of the story better than the story itself. Don’t let me put you off reading it though, because I know not all readers will have the problem I had with Victoria – and apart from that, this was not a bad book at all.

Dreams of Joy by Lisa See

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Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Lisa See’s Shanghai Girls which I read in October. When I reached the end of Shanghai Girls and found that it finished with a big cliffhanger, I was desperate to find out what happened next. Luckily my library had a copy of the sequel available so I didn’t have long to wait. And this one, in my opinion, is the better of the two books. It certainly has a more satisfying ending!

It’s difficult to know how much to say about the plot of a sequel because I know there may be people reading this who haven’t yet read Shanghai Girls and I would hate to spoil things for anyone. All I will tell you then is that Dreams of Joy is set in China during the 1950s and is the story of nineteen-year-old Joy Louie, the daughter of one of the characters in the previous novel. Joy has recently made a discovery that has thrown her life into turmoil and she decides to leave her home in Los Angeles and travel to Shanghai in search of answers. She’s also looking forward to becoming part of Chairman Mao’s new communist China…but the longer she spends there the more she begins to think that maybe communism isn’t quite as wonderful as it seemed at first.

The story is told in the form of alternating narratives by Joy and another character from Shanghai Girls, Pearl. Although I didn’t think there was a lot of difference in the style of Pearl’s narrative voice and Joy’s, there are some big differences in attitude with Pearl being more cautious and cynical about communism and Joy full of enthusiasm, at least at first. It was good to have the chance to see things from two opposing viewpoints. Joy could be frustratingly naïve at times, but that’s only because we have the benefit of knowing what would happen during Mao’s regime.

The only other book I’ve read about communism in China was Wild Swans by Jung Chang (one of the best books I read last year, by the way, and one I highly recommend you read if you haven’t already). I had forgotten just how horrible some of the things that happened during Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward were. The Great Leap Forward included Mao’s campaign to increase the country’s steel production, at the expense of agriculture, which resulted in a severe famine. Lisa See goes into quite a lot of detail about what happened during this period, so there are some horrific descriptions of cruelty, starvation and suffering, particularly in the sections where Joy is living in Green Dragon Village, a commune in the countryside. Lisa See really likes to put her characters through some terrible ordeals, but the book isn’t completely bleak and depressing – it’s also a story about the relationship between sisters Pearl and May and the special bond each of them has with Joy.

So is it necessary to have read Shanghai Girls first? I would say it’s not completely essential, as I’m sure this book could easily be understood and enjoyed on its own, but my personal recommendation would be to read both of them in the correct order beginning with Shanghai Girls.