The Burial Plot by Elizabeth Macneal

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It’s 1839 and Bonnie Fairchild has just killed a man. She didn’t intend to do it, but it has still happened and now she needs to escape from London, quickly, before she is caught. Bonnie is no stranger to crime – since fleeing to London to avoid an arranged marriage, she and her lover Crawford have been making their living through theft and fraud. This is the first time something has gone wrong, but Crawford thinks he has found a solution: Bonnie will apply for the position of lady’s maid at Endellion House, a grand estate outside the city owned by the wealthy Mr Moncrieff. Nobody will ever think to look for her there!

Arriving at Endellion House, Bonnie finds her new employer to be a sad, subdued man who devotes his time to designing mausoleums for his dead wife who drowned several months earlier. Meanwhile, his teenage daughter, Cissie, seems to have retreated into a fantasy world, writing imaginary love letters to herself. Then, just as Bonnie is beginning to make sense of this eccentric, unhappy household, Crawford reappears with another great scheme in mind…

I enjoyed both of Elizabeth Macneal’s previous novels, The Doll Factory and Circus of Wonders, so I was expecting good things from this one and I wasn’t disappointed at all; I think it’s probably my favourite of the three. Although I correctly predicted some of the twists and turns of the plot, there were others I didn’t see coming at all. One of the things that is obvious from the beginning, at least to the reader, is that Crawford is a con man who is using and manipulating Bonnie for his own purposes – and even though Bonnie is at least partly aware of this, she has convinced herself that she’s in love with him and so finds it impossible to free herself of him. The relationship between Bonnie and Crawford is the driving force behind the novel and is what kept me turning the pages, anxious to see what plan Crawford would come up with next and whether Bonnie would ever escape his grip.

The Burial Plot also gives some insights into the Victorian fascination with the rituals of death and mourning. The mourning industry in the 19th century was huge, with large sums of money being spent on clothes, accessories and elaborate funerals. At the beginning of the novel, Crawford has a job managing several private burial grounds in London but these are quickly becoming overcrowded and insanitary, leading to the creation of large, modern cemeteries such as Highgate, further away from central London. When Bonnie arrives at Endellion House, she suggests to Mr Moncrieff that he should build a cemetery like Highgate on his land so that he can bury his wife in style and then make money from selling the other burial plots. This storyline forms an important part of the novel and adds another layer of interest.

I loved this and am already looking forward to Elizabeth Macneal’s next book, whatever and whenever that may be!

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

Book 22/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

This is book 4/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

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I loved Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists but his latest novel, The House of Doors, sounded less appealing and I only decided to read it when I saw it had been longlisted (and then shortlisted) for this year’s Walter Scott Prize. Now that I’ve read it, I have mixed feelings about it; there was a lot to like and admire, but it definitely didn’t captivate me the way The Garden of Evening Mists did.

The House of Doors weaves the fictional story of Lesley and Robert Hamlyn around a real life visit in 1921 by the author William Somerset Maugham to Penang, Malaysia – or Malaya, as it was still known at the time. Lesley has spent her whole life in Malaya, while her husband Robert was born in Britain and moved to Penang as an adult. Maugham, referred to as Willie throughout the novel, is an old friend of Robert’s and has come to stay with them at their home, Cassowary House. Leaving his wife behind in England, he is accompanied by Gerald, his lover and secretary.

At first Lesley is not very happy about having visitors and it takes her a while to warm to Willie, but she eventually finds herself confiding in him and sharing with him stories about her past. She tells him about her involvement with Sun Yat Sen, the Chinese revolutionary who came to Penang to raise funds, and about her friend, Ethel Proudlock, who was charged with the murder of a man. Some of the things Willie hears and experiences during his time with the Hamlyns will later find their way into his fiction.

The book is beautifully written, which I had expected from my previous experience of Tan’s work, and the descriptions of Penang itself are particularly lovely and evocative. I can only think of one or two other novels I’ve read set in Malaysia, but it’s a setting I love and I enjoyed revisiting it through Tan’s descriptive writing. The book deals almost entirely with British characters and we learn a lot about the colonial lifestyles and attitudes of the time, but although Tan Twan Eng himself is a Malaysian author, if you’re hoping for a Malaysian perspective you won’t really find that here. Through the Sun Yat Sen storyline, we are given a little bit of insight into Chinese revolutionary politics, but again we see this from Lesley’s point of view, through her interactions with Sun Yat Sen and his associates.

The plot moves quite slowly, maybe because so much of the story is told in the form of flashbacks. At times I was bored, but one part of the book that I did find gripping was the Ethel Proudlock storyline. It’s based on a real murder case which I knew nothing about before reading this novel, so I had no idea what the outcome was going to be. Maugham used the case as the inspiration for his 1927 play The Letter, which was made into a film starring Bette Davis. There are references to other Maugham stories, novels and plays throughout the book as well, but they meant very little to me because I haven’t read any of his work apart from The Painted Veil. I think if I’d had more familiarity with Maugham’s writing it’s possible that I would have been able to get more out of this book. I had similar experiences with Colm Tóibín’s The Magician and Damon Galgut’s Arctic Summer, novels about Thomas Mann and E.M. Forster respectively (I haven’t read much of their work either and was left with the feeling that I’d missed something).

The House of Doors wasn’t a huge success with me, then, but the setting and the beautiful writing made it worth reading. The Walter Scott Prize winner is due to be announced later this week and of the shortlisted titles I’ve read so far, My Father’s House by Joseph O’Connor is still my favourite with this one second above Kevin Jared Hosein’s Hungry Ghosts. Maybe the winner will be one of the three I still haven’t read!

Book 21/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Thomasina by Paul Gallico – #ReadingtheMeow2024

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When I saw that Mallika of Literary Potpourri was hosting her second Reading the Meow event this week – a celebration of cats in books – I knew exactly what I wanted to read. The Disney film The Three Lives of Thomasina was a favourite of mine as a child, but it never occurred to me to read the book on which it was based until I noticed that Lory of Entering the Enchanted Castle had read it for last year’s Reading the Meow so onto the list it went!

Published in 1957, Paul Gallico’s Thomasina is set in the fictional Scottish town of Inveranoch. Having lost his wife a few years earlier, veterinarian Andrew MacDhui has moved to the town from Glasgow and opened a surgery there, where he treats the pets of the townspeople, as well as looking after the health of the livestock on the surrounding farms. When the novel begins, MacDhui has only been living in Inveranoch for eighteen months and has already gained a reputation as a cold, bitter man who is good at his job but not mentally suited for it:

The gossips allowed that Andrew MacDhui was an honest, forthright and fair-dealing man, but, and this was the opinion of the strictly religiously inclined, a queer one to be dealing with God’s dumb creatures, since he appeared to have no love for animals, very little for man, and neither the inclination nor the time for God.

Since his wife’s death it seems that MacDhui has given what little love he still possesses to his seven-year-old daughter, Mary Ruadh, who is devoted to her ginger cat, Thomasina. When Thomasina becomes ill with a suspected meningeal infection, Mary takes her next door to her father’s surgery and begs him to save her pet’s life. Not pleased at being interrupted at his work and distracted by a difficult operation on a blind man’s dog, MacDhui tells her that Thomasina can’t be cured and orders his assistant to put the cat to sleep. Heartbroken, Mary vows never to speak to her father again and seems to really mean what she says. As the days go by and Mary’s silence continues, a desperate MacDhui pays a visit to Lori, a young woman who lives alone in the forest and is said to be a witch. Can Lori help repair the relationship between father and daughter or has too much damage been done?

Although I was already familiar with the plot, I found that this novel had far more depth than the Disney version and also a stronger religious element. There’s a lot of focus on MacDhui’s internal struggles as he tries to confront the loss of faith that has been with him since his wife died and on the efforts of Lori and the minister, Angus Peddie, to restore his belief in God and the power of love. Lori, a gentle, compassionate woman who tries to heal injured wild animals that others see as worthless, is a lovely character and reminded me a lot of Froniga in The White Witch by Elizabeth Goudge. However, I didn’t find the book overly sentimental because it’s balanced by the darker themes of loss and grief, as well as animal cruelty and its consequences for those who perpetrate it.

I’m sure younger readers will enjoy the chapters written from Thomasina’s own perspective, where she gives amusing descriptions of life in the MacDhui household, but I never really felt that I was reading a ‘children’s book’ and I think there’s enough here for readers of all ages to enjoy. Finally, without wanting to spoil too much, if you think Thomasina’s fate sounds too sad, I can assure you that her story is a happier one than you might expect.

This is book 3/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron

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The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is an unusual novel because it’s based on the ‘true story’ of someone who may or may not have actually existed! One of a very small number of 17th century female pirates, Jacquotte Delahaye is not mentioned in any contemporary sources and appears in writing, possibly for the first time, in the 1940s in stories by Léon Treich, a French fiction writer. However, she has become part of pirate folklore and although her existence hasn’t been proved, it hasn’t been disproved either. In this new novel, Briony Cameron has taken the few ‘facts’ about Jacquotte that have found their way into the legends – such as her place of birth and the colour of her hair (red, leading to the nickname Back from the Dead Red) – and imagined a story around them.

At the beginning of the book, twenty-year-old Jacquotte is living in the town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, in 1655. As the daughter of a Frenchman exiled to the Caribbean for treason, all Jacquotte knows about her mother is that she was a free black woman who died after giving birth to her younger brother. When her father is implicated in another treasonous plot, Jacquotte’s world falls apart and she is forced to flee the island. Her life of piracy begins when she is captured by the brutal Captain Blackhand and finds herself an indentured servant aboard his ship, but eventually Jacquotte will become a pirate captain in her own right, with her own ship and crew to command.

There’s also a romantic element to the novel, with Jacquotte falling in love with Teresa, wife of the Governor of Yáquimo, but this was one of my least favourite aspects of the book. They seemed to rush into things very quickly, with no time for the reader to see their feelings for each other developing and I felt that the relationship lacked emotional depth. In fact, apart from Jacquotte herself, I thought all of the characters in the book lacked depth – the good characters were very good and the bad ones were very bad, with little in between. I would describe this as much more of a plot-driven book. Although it takes a while to get started, once Jacquotte is at sea there’s lots of action, with sea battles, fight scenes and all the swashbuckling adventure you would expect from a pirate novel.

Sadly, despite the fascinating protagonist, I wasn’t very impressed with this book. I did enjoy the first section, which describes Jacquotte’s life in Yáquimo and the events that lead to her becoming a pirate, but as I read on I felt I was reading the author’s fantasy of how she would have liked 17th century society to have been, rather than how it actually was. I don’t think many people in the 1650s had such progressive ideas on race, gender and sexuality, however nice it is to imagine that they did! If you’re not too bothered about historical accuracy and just want to read an entertaining story, then you’ll probably enjoy The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye, but it wasn’t really for me. On a more positive note, I liked the descriptions of the various ports Jacquotte and her crew visit as they sail around Hispaniola, Jamaica and Tortuga, which is the closest I’ll get to visiting the Caribbean this summer!

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

Book 20/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

This is book 2/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

The Noh Mask Murder by Akimitsu Takagi

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Translated by Jesse Kirkwood

My 20 Books of Summer reading is off to a good start with this 1949 Japanese locked room mystery, now available from Pushkin Press in a new English translation. Thanks to Pushkin, I’ve been able to try several Japanese classic crime authors over the last few years, including Seishi Yokomizo, Yukito Ayatsuji and Soji Shimada. The Noh Mask Murder is the first book I’ve read by Akimitsu Takagi and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The novel opens with a discussion between Koichi Yanagi, a chemist who has recently returned to Japan after serving in Burma during the war, and his old school friend, Akimitsu Takagi (yes, the author himself, who appears as a character in his own novel – just like Anthony Horowitz in his Horowitz and Hawthorne series). Akimitsu explains to Koichi that he wants to write a new kind of detective novel, one based on a mystery he has solved for himself in real life:

‘I’d tackle some fiendish real-life mystery, then set down precisely how I solved it in the form of a novel. My readers would be provided with the exact same evidence as the author. They’d be able to follow the detective-narrator’s train of thought, assess the appropriateness of his actions – and even come up with their own alternatives. But I don’t imagine an opportunity like that will ever present itself…’

His opportunity comes sooner than he had imagined when Koichi stumbles upon a mystery at the Chizui family mansion, where he has been staying since returning from the war. The head of the household, Professor Chizui, who was once a friend of Koichi’s, died ten years earlier and the house is now inhabited by his two children and the family of his younger brother, Tajiro. The first sign that something is wrong within the Chizui mansion comes when an eerie figure wearing a sinister Noh mask is seen at one of the windows. Soon after this, Tajiro is found dead inside a locked room, with a smell of jasmine in the air and a Noh mask lying on the floor beside him. Akimitsu Takagi joins Koichi at the house to investigate the murder, but when they discover that someone has called the undertaker to order three coffins, it seems that there’s going to be more than just one murder to investigate!

The mystery is a fascinating one and although some time is spent discussing the mechanisms of how the locked room murder took place, the story never becomes too bogged down by the puzzle aspect; the focus is on the characters, their relationships and their motives. I did find the structure slightly confusing at times as we know we’re reading a book within a book written by Akimitsu Takagi (as both character and author), but within that there’s a journal written by Koichi and a long letter written by Hiroyuki Ishikari, the public prosecutor, so the narrative is sometimes three layers deep. There are some clever twists towards the end, however, which might not have worked if it had been structured differently.

Apart from the mystery, I found it interesting to learn about the different types of mask used in Japanese theatre and how although the Noh mask, which represents a demon, cannot change expression the actors can still use it to show various emotions by tilting the mask up and down and by the clever use of lighting. With the story being set in the post-war period, it’s also interesting to hear the characters reflect on the irony of being so concerned with the death of one person after living through a war in which millions died. If you kill a man in peacetime you’re considered a murderer, says Tajiro’s son, Rintaro, but if you kill a man on the battlefield you’re given a medal.

I really enjoyed The Noh Mask Murder, then, but be warned – in the prologue, where Takagi is discussing his plans for a detective novel, he casually spoils the solution of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Not a problem for me as I’ve already read it, but I wish authors wouldn’t do that!

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

This is book 1/20 of my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis

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In Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about two sisters, Diamonds and Toads, a fairy rewards the good sister with the ability to spit gold and punishes the bad sister with the curse of spitting toads. This is the premise at the heart of Carmella Lowkis’ new novel, Spitting Gold, a tale of two very different sisters living in 19th century Paris.

It’s 1866 and Baroness Sylvie Devereux has settled into a respectable married life, but a visit from her younger sister, Charlotte Mothe, threatens to ruin both her marriage and her reputation. For several years, Sylvie and Charlotte had worked together as spiritualists, conning grieving victims out of large sums of money, but Sylvie has promised her husband that those days are behind her and her sister is no longer part of her life. Now, though, Charlotte is begging Sylvie to join her for one last job and Sylvie finds it impossible to refuse, knowing that Charlotte needs the money to pay their father’s medical bills.

Several members of the wealthy de Jacquinot family believe they are being haunted by the spirit of a great-aunt, who was brutally murdered during the French Revolution, leaving behind a hidden treasure. The Mothe sisters agree to help lay the ghost to rest and begin to use every trick and deception at their disposal to convince the family that they are making contact with the spirit. Everything seems to be going well, until the ghost appears to start targeting the sisters themselves. Is the de Jacquinot house really haunted or is there another explanation for what is happening?

There seems to be a current trend for historical novels about mediums and séances; I can think of several I’ve read just in the last year or so, including Lucy Barker’s The Other Side of Mrs Wood and Ambrose Parry’s Voices of the Dead. What makes this one different is the structure and the idea of using two sisters to give alternate views of the same story – the first half of the book is narrated by Sylvie and the second half by Charlotte. I’m not sure how well this worked for me; it was interesting to see things from two such different perspectives, but by the time Charlotte’s narrative began I had become so absorbed in Sylvie’s story I struggled to adjust to a change of narrator.

Apart from the references to the French Revolution, I felt that the book lacked the strong sense of time and place I prefer and at times I even forgot that I was reading a story set in 19th century Paris and not Victorian London. I did love the good sister/bad sister theme, though – while at first it seems obvious that Sylvie is the good one and Charlotte the bad, as the novel continues we learn that things are not that simple and that we shouldn’t rely on just one point of view to give us the full picture. As a debut novel it was quite entertaining, with some interesting twists; I’m not sure whether I’ll read more books by Carmella Lowkis, but I could be tempted!

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

Book 19/50 for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge 2024

Six Degrees of Separation: From Butter to The Land of Green Ginger

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It’s the first Saturday of the month which means it’s time for another Six Degrees of Separation, hosted by Kate of Books are my Favourite and Best. The idea is that Kate chooses a book to use as a starting point and then we have to link it to six other books of our choice to form a chain. A book doesn’t have to be connected to all of the others on the list – only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with a Japanese novel, Butter by Asako Yuzuki. I haven’t read it and probably won’t, but here’s what it’s about:

Gourmet cook Manako Kajii sits in Tokyo Detention Centre convicted of the serial murders of lonely businessmen, who she is said to have seduced with her delicious home cooking. The case has captured the nation’s imagination but Kajii refuses to speak with the press, entertaining no visitors. That is, until journalist Rika Machida writes a letter asking for her recipe for beef stew and Kajii can’t resist writing back.

Rika, the only woman in her news office, works late each night, rarely cooking more than ramen. As the visits unfold between her and the steely Kajii, they are closer to a masterclass in food than journalistic research. Rika hopes this gastronomic exchange will help her soften Kajii but it seems that she might be the one changing. With each meal she eats, something is awakening in her body, might she and Kaji have more in common than she once thought?

Inspired by the real case of the convicted con woman and serial killer, “The Konkatsu Killer”, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter is a vivid, unsettling exploration of misogyny, obsession, romance and the transgressive pleasures of food in Japan.

Butter is a dairy product, which makes me think of Nick Davenant, a character in Bee Ridgway’s The River of No Return (1) who owns a dairy farm in Vermont and is anxiously awaiting a visit from the cheese inspector at the beginning of the book. Nick is not just a dairy farmer, however – he is also a time traveller and was once an English nobleman who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. I think this book was intended to be the first in a series, but a sequel has never appeared.

Next is a simple link to another book with ‘river’ in the title: River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay (2). This novel is set in an alternate world based on China during the time of the Song Dynasty. Although Kay’s books are often described as historical fantasy, there are very few actual fantasy elements in this one, apart from some mentions of the spirits and fox-women who are part of Chinese myth.

Fox spirits also feature heavily in The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (3), set in Manchuria in 1908. The novel follows the dual stories of an elderly private detective investigating a suspicious death and a white fox spirit who has taken the form of a human woman while she searches for the man who killed her daughter. I found this book very slow, but enjoyed the details of Chinese myth and foklore.

The title character in the Yangsze Choo novel is called Snow, so my next book is one in which snow features heavily in the plot: The Sittaford Mystery by Agatha Christie (4). The village of Sittaford is cut off by snow, making it the perfect setting for a murder mystery to unfold. This is a wonderful standalone Christie novel and I loved the heroine, Emily Trefusis.

Like my edition of The Sittaford Mystery, Benighted by J.B. Priestley (5) also has a picture of a house on the cover. A married couple and their friend get caught in a storm while driving through the Welsh countryside one night and take shelter in a crumbling old mansion inhabited by a very strange family! This was my first book by Priestley and I’m sure I’ll be looking for another one.

Benighted was published in 1927, so the final book in my chain is another published in that same year. The Land of Green Ginger by Winifred Holtby (6) is about a missionary’s daughter who is born in South Africa but comes to England to be raised by her aunts in a small rural community in Yorkshire. I’ve read nearly all of Holtby’s novels now and this is probably my least favourite, but it still explores some interesting topics.

~

And that’s my chain for June! My links have included: Dairy products, the word ‘river’, fox-women, snow, pictures of houses and the year 1927.

In July we’ll be starting with Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck.