Tag: 17th century

Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini

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Captain Blood

“Thief and pirate is what you heard Miss Bishop call me today – a thing of scorn, an outcast. And who made me that? Who made me thief and pirate?”

One of my favourite books of last year was Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini, a classic historical adventure novel set during the French Revolution. I loved it so much I immediately added two more of Sabatini’s books to my Classics Club list – Captain Blood and The Sea-Hawk – though not without some reservations as these are both books about pirates and with my general dislike of books set on ships I thought the seafaring elements might be too much for me. I was wrong. Captain Blood is another wonderful book and I enjoyed it almost as much as Scaramouche!

Peter Blood, an Irish physician and former soldier, is arrested during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 when he is discovered tending the wounds of an enemy of King James II. Wrongly found guilty of treason, he is lucky enough to avoid hanging but instead he is sent into slavery on a sugar plantation in Barbados. Here Blood meets two people who will have a huge influence on his future: Colonel Bishop, the cruel, brutal plantation owner and his beautiful niece, Arabella, with whom Blood falls in love. When the island is attacked by Spanish raiders, he seizes his chance to escape by commandeering one of their ships and after transforming himself into the notorious Captain Blood, our hero becomes a pirate both feared and respected throughout the Caribbean.

Sailing up and down the shores of Barbados, Jamaica and Tortuga, Captain Blood becomes involved in a series of exciting adventures and daring escapades, while being pursued by both Colonel Bishop and a Spanish rival, Don Esteban, who has sworn revenge – but what sets Blood apart from the other pirates he meets is his sense of honour and his dream of one day clearing his name and settling down to a peaceful life with Arabella. To the reader, it’s obvious that Peter Blood has become a pirate because he feels he has no choice – his only other option is to remain in slavery – but Arabella doesn’t understand this and when she tells him she can never love a “thief and pirate”, he must find a way to redeem himself in her eyes.

It amazes me that Rafael Sabatini’s books are not more widely read. As well as his great writing style, clever plots and vividly described characters, his novels also have well-researched and believable historical settings. While I was reading this book, I never questioned that I was in the Caribbean of the 17th century, just as when I read Scaramouche I was fully immersed in revolutionary France. And my fears that I might struggle with the pirate theme proved to be completely unfounded!

Sabatini keeps the sailing terminology to a level that even I could cope with and I found that even without understanding every nautical reference it didn’t affect my understanding of the story (which is what I also discovered when I read Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian earlier this year). Although there were a lot of sea battles, they weren’t too difficult to follow and in fact, not only could I follow them but I actually enjoyed them too, which is something I never thought I would say! I suspect that the descriptions of these battles were not completely realistic and in real life Blood would never have been able to overcome such great odds every time, but with my total lack of naval knowledge I’m happy to pretend that he could.

But Captain Blood is more than just a swashbuckling adventure story and even if it had only been half as exciting, I would still have loved it solely for the great characterisation of Peter Blood, a true romantic hero (in the old-fashioned sense of the term). Like Andre-Louis Moreau from Scaramouche, Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo or Francis Crawford from the Lymond Chronicles, Blood is one of those characters who can sometimes seem to be almost superhuman. He has an intelligence and wit superior to everyone else’s, he’s charismatic and quick thinking, multilingual, as talented a swordsman as he is a surgeon, and when it comes to buccaneering, he’s a brilliant leader and tactician. However difficult the situation he and his men might find themselves in, he never fails to come up with an imaginative and ingenious way to get out of it. But despite his perfection or perhaps because of it, things don’t always go smoothly for Captain Blood and like the other characters I’ve mentioned, he experiences a series of injustices and misfortunes that makes him a character we can sympathise with and believe in.

Captain Blood was published in 1922 and is available online as a free ebook, though the edition I read was the Vintage Classics paperback pictured here. I recommend giving it a try even if pirate stories don’t sound appealing to you, as it’s worth reading this one just to meet Peter Blood!

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (re-read)

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The Three Musketeers One of my goals for 2013 was to re-read more of my favourite books, something I’ve been neglecting in recent years. Well, here we are in the middle of April and so far I’ve only re-read one!

The Three Musketeers may be the title, but our hero is not a musketeer when we first meet him at the beginning of the novel, in the year 1625; his name is d’Artagnan and he’s a young man from Gascony in France, on his way to Paris where he hopes to join the King’s Musketeers under the command of Monsieur de Tréville. On his arrival in Paris, d’Artagnan encounters three of the musketeers – Athos, Porthos and Aramis – in one of those wonderful openings to a book that once you’ve read you’re unlikely ever to forget.

Soon d’Artagnan and the three musketeers become the best of friends, and when d’Artagnan meets and falls in love with Constance Bonancieux, one of the Queen of France’s ladies, all four of them are drawn into the intrigue surrounding the Queen’s affair with the powerful English nobleman, the Duke of Buckingham. With the King’s advisor, Cardinal Richelieu, hoping to expose the affair, Constance, d’Artagnan and his three friends become targets of the Cardinal and his spy, the beautiful Lady de Winter. But Milady, as she is known, is hiding a secret of her own and if d’Artagnan discovers the truth, he and Constance could find themselves in even greater danger.

I first read The Three Musketeers five years ago and when I finished it I had intended to read the other books in the trilogy (the second is Twenty Years After and third is the three-volume The Vicomte de Bragelonne/Louise de la Valliere/The Man in the Iron Mask) but as so often happens other books got in the way and I never did get around to continuing with the d’Artagnan series. And so when I made my list for the Classics Club I put all of them on there – along with a re-read of The Three Musketeers as I thought it would be a good idea to remind myself of the characters and story before embarking on Twenty Years After – and anyway, I never need an excuse to re-read a book that I enjoyed so much the first time!

I love Alexandre Dumas and although The Three Musketeers is not my favourite of the three novels of his that I’ve read (that would be The Count of Monte Cristo) I still think it’s a wonderful book with some great characters. The musketeers all have such different personalities: the aristocratic, melancholy Athos, the loud, brash Porthos, the fastidious would-be priest, Aramis, and of course, the brave, passionate d’Artagnan. Everyone will be able to pick a favourite musketeer, and mine is Athos. In her recent post on The Count of Monte Cristo, Lisa compared the character of Edmond Dantes with Francis Crawford of Lymond from the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett (two other great fictional characters, by the way); I agree, but I can also see some of Athos’ character traits in Lymond too, especially during one of the most memorable set pieces in the book, where the four friends eat breakfast in a fortress surrounded by enemy soldiers because it’s the only place they can find to talk in private.

It seems five years is a good length of time to wait between re-reads of a book. I had forgotten enough so that I could be surprised by the twists and turns of the plot, but remembered just enough to be able to look forward to some of my favourite parts: the breakfast scene I mentioned above, the episode with the Queen’s diamond studs, and especially the sequence of chapters in the middle (entitled Porthos, The Thesis of Aramis and The Wife of Athos) which is just a joy to read. The friendship between d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis is so inspiring and heartwarming (all for one, one for all!) and this is why, for me, there’s a change in the tone of the book when towards the end, the focus switches from the musketeers to Milady and I don’t enjoy the final third quite as much as the first two thirds.

Now, a note on the translation. I read the Wordsworth Classics edition of The Three Musketeers which uses the first English translation by William Barrow in 1846 (I think this is also the one used by Oxford World’s Classics). I would be interested to try a newer translation, such as Richard Pevear’s, to see how it compares – and also because I’m aware that the older translations altered certain parts of Dumas’ original text because they considered it too sexually explicit for Victorian readers. I can see that some readers today would probably find the Barrow translation too literal and antiquated but I didn’t have a problem with it at all; I actually quite like the way the sentences are constructed and I think it has a certain romantic, old-fashioned quaintness about it.

I’ll be moving on to Twenty Years After very soon!

The King’s General by Daphne du Maurier

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The Kings General If you asked me to name my favourite author I wouldn’t be able to give a definitive answer; there are so many that I love and I would find it hard to single one out. But one name that would always be high on my list is Daphne du Maurier. I’ve read twelve of her books now, including this one, and I can honestly say I’ve enjoyed all of them.

The King’s General is set in seventeenth century Cornwall, during the English Civil War. Our narrator is Honor Harris, whose family are Royalists fighting for the King against the Parliamentarians. Honor is eighteen years old when she meets and falls in love with Richard Grenvile but on the day before their wedding tragedy strikes and the marriage never takes place. As the years go by, Richard rises through the ranks of the army, marries another woman and has children, while Honor stays in the Harris family home and remains single.

As the war intensifies and the fighting spreads throughout Cornwall, Honor joins her sister and brother-in-law in the safety of their home, Menabilly, and here she meets Richard again for the first time in fifteen years. He has left his wife, bringing their fourteen-year-old son, Dick, with him, and is now commanding the Royalist forces as the King’s General in the West. Richard and Honor discover they still love each other as much as before and although she refuses to marry him, they begin an unusual relationship that withstands the war, betrayal and rebellion going on around them.

I wasn’t sure at first that I was going to like this book. The first chapter was very confusing – it’s narrated by an older Honor looking back on her life and reflecting on people and events that we know nothing about yet, before going back in time in the next chapter to tell her story from the beginning. But as soon as Honor and Richard had their first meeting on the battlements of Plymouth Castle I knew I needn’t have worried! After I finished the book I went back to re-read the first chapter and it did make a lot more sense.

The King’s General is historical fiction rather than the gothic suspense Daphne du Maurier is probably better known for, but there are still elements of the gothic here, mainly in the atmospheric descriptions of Menabilly with its secret tunnels, hidden chambers and mysterious noises in the night. Menabilly (the inspiration for Manderley in Rebecca) was du Maurier’s home in Cornwall and previously belonged to the Rashleighs, one of the families featured in The King’s General. It was apparently the story of a discovery at Menabilly by William Rashleigh in the 19th century that inspired the writing of this novel.

But while this book could be described as historical romance, as you might expect from du Maurier the romance between Richard and Honor is not a conventional one and neither of the two main characters is a typical romantic hero or heroine. Even people who like flawed characters (and I usually do) might have trouble with Richard as he is not a very pleasant person at all. He’s ruthless, arrogant and cruel and the way he treats his shy, nervous son Dick is particularly horrible. I couldn’t help thinking that his relationship, or lack of it, with Dick reminded me of Heathcliff’s with his son, Linton, in Wuthering Heights and of course, many of du Maurier’s books do have a strong Brontë influence. The only point in Richard’s favour is that he does seem to truly love Honor and in the scenes where they are alone we sometimes see a more human side to him. Honor herself is another strong and complex person. I didn’t always agree with the decisions she made but I admired her courage in helping to protect her family and friends throughout the war and her strength in dealing with the disaster that befell her early in the story. I deliberately haven’t told you exactly what this disaster was because if you can manage to avoid knowing before you start to read the book, it will probably have more impact!

Du Maurier had obviously put a lot of effort into her research for the novel. Although this is a fictional story, the various battles and other historical events in the book did take place as described and most of the characters were real people recorded in history, including both Richard Grenvile and Honor Harris. The Civil War (actually three separate wars between 1642 and 1651) is not a period of English history I have read much about. I know the basics that we were taught at school – that the Royalists (Cavaliers) were defeated by the Parliamentarians (Roundheads), and King Charles I was beheaded and replaced by the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell – but beyond that, I don’t know very much at all. That wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because my total lack of knowledge of the Battle of Lostwithiel, for example, or the Siege of Plymouth Castle, meant that I never knew what was going to happen next.

While The King’s General doesn’t rank as one of my top three or four Daphne du Maurier novels I still loved it and am looking forward to the remaining du Maurier books I still haven’t read.

The Beggar King by Oliver Pötzsch

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The Beggar King It’s 1662 and the Schongau hangman, Jakob Kuisl, is travelling to Regensburg to visit his sister Lisbeth who has sent him a message saying she is seriously ill. Arriving in the city, Jakob discovers that he has walked into a trap: his sister and her husband are found dead in their bathhouse and Jakob is arrested on suspicion of murder. Imprisoned and tortured, he awaits his execution in one of the city’s dungeons.

Jakob’s daughter, Magdalena, vows to help her father and sets off to Regensburg with her lover, doctor’s son Simon Fronwieser. As they begin to investigate, Magdalena and Simon meet a variety of characters including a Venetian ambassador, a raftsman, a brewmaster – and the city’s community of beggars and thieves, led by Nathan the Wise, the ‘Beggar King’ of the title. They must decide who can and cannot be trusted and come up with a plan to rescue Magdalena’s father before it’s too late.

The Beggar King is the third in a series of historical mystery/thrillers following the adventures of 17th century Bavarian hangman Jakob Kuisl and his daughter Magdalena. The first two in the series are The Hangman’s Daughter and The Dark Monk; I haven’t read either of these but starting with the third book was not really a problem as this was a complete story in itself and not dependent on things that had happened in the previous books. If I had read the others I might have got more out of the story, as there were relationships that had obviously been developing over the course of the series, but I was still able to follow what was happening easily enough.

There were things that I liked about The Beggar King and the fast-paced, action-packed story did keep me entertained, but I don’t think I will be looking for any of the others in the series. The problem I had with the book was the language used in the dialogue. Would people in the 1660s really have called each other ‘lowlife drifters’ and would they have said something like “Just my luck that I wind up in the hands of a quack like you”? A lot of the terms and phrases that were used just sounded wrong to me. I’m aware that the book has been translated into English from its original German, so it’s hard to tell how much of this is down to the original text and how much to the translation, but when I read historical fiction I like to feel that I’ve been transported back in time and because of the dialogue I did not get that feeling at all with this book. As well as the language being too modern, the way some of the characters thought and behaved also felt too modern and I found it particularly difficult to believe in Magdalena as a realistic 17th century woman.

What I did enjoy was all the information we are given on the living conditions and medical history of the time, things I always find interesting to read about. Magdalena’s lover Simon is a ‘medicus’ (physician) and she herself is training to be a midwife. Jakob Kuisl also has some medical skills – it seems that the town hangman did much more than just carry out executions and was also involved in operating the instruments of torture during the interrogation of prisoners, and ironically, was responsible for tending the prisoners’ injuries after he had finished torturing them. In this way, the hangman gained a good knowledge of human anatomy and physiology.

I also loved the setting and the descriptions of the Bavarian village of Schongau and the city of Regensburg on the River Danube where most of the action takes place. I haven’t read much, if anything, about Germany in the 17th century and I enjoyed the author’s note at the end which takes us on a journey through Regensburg and tells us more about some of the places mentioned in the novel.

Inappropriate dialogue is something that often irritates me in historical fiction, but I know not everyone will be bothered by it. Looking at other reviews of The Beggar King, it does seem that the general opinion is overwhelmingly positive and a fourth book is already on its way!

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley

The Oracle Glass by Judith Merkle Riley

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Set in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV, The Oracle Glass combines historical fiction with the supernatural to tell the story of Genevieve Pasquier and her involvement in one of the darkest episodes in French history, the Affair of the Poisons.

When her father and grandmother die under suspicious circumstances, fifteen-year-old Genevieve runs away from home and is rescued by the notorious witch, La Voisin. From an early age Genevieve has had the ability to read people’s fortunes by looking into water, and with La Voisin’s help she transforms herself into the mysterious Marquise de Morville, a fortune-teller who claims to be one hundred and fifty years old. Genevieve plans to use her powers to achieve two goals – to make the handsome Andre Lamotte fall in love with her, and to take revenge on the people who have wronged her in the past. But as she becomes more involved in the intrigues of the Sun King’s court, she begins to learn that she has stumbled into a dangerous world of magic and murder and that La Voisin, the Shadow Queen, is at the centre of a circle of witches, poisoners and abortionists.

The Oracle Glass was a wonderful, magical read. After a slow start, I soon began to look forward to picking up the book and escaping for a while into Judith Merkle Riley’s recreation of 17th century Paris. Not knowing anything about this period of history, I was surprised to discover that many of the characters I’d assumed were fictional were actually real people: Madame de Montespan, for example, the King’s mistress who frequently visits the Marquise de Morville to have her fortune told, La Reynie, chief of the Paris police, and the sorceress La Voisin herself. A lot of the events described in the story, including the eventual fates of some of the characters, were also true and in a way, I’m glad I didn’t know anything about these people as it meant I never had any idea what was going to happen next.

Genevieve, or the Marquise de Morville, is a wonderful character with a warm and engaging narrative voice and through her eyes we are shown how difficult life could be for a young single woman trying to make an independent living for herself in the 17th century. What makes her such an interesting character is that she is so flawed; she makes mistakes, does things that are wrong or stupid, and although she is intelligent she can also be very naïve.

There’s no real attempt to make the dialogue sound authentic – and Genevieve’s narrative voice sometimes feels very modern – but although this often irritates me in other books, I think there’s a certain type of historical fiction where it doesn’t matter too much and this is an example of that type: a book designed to be fun and entertaining, with plenty of humour to offset the darker themes. And yet the depiction of Paris in the 1600s does still feel vivid and real; I loved the descriptions of carriage rides through the snow-covered streets and the court of Louis XIV, the Sun King, is also very well portrayed. My only criticism is that at over five hundred pages I really don’t think the book needed to be quite so long and there were a few sections, especially in the middle, that seemed to drag.

Judith Merkle Riley is an author I’ve heard about but have never had the opportunity to read until now – I believe some of her books have been out of print for a long time but I’m glad to have finally had the chance to read The Oracle Glass and would certainly be interested in reading her other novels after enjoying this one so much!

I received a copy of The Oracle Glass through Netgalley courtesy of Sourcebooks

The Sultan’s Wife by Jane Johnson

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The Sultan’s Wife is set in Morocco in the year 1677 and is narrated by two different characters. The first is Nus-Nus, a eunuch slave in the palace of the Sultan Moulay Ismail and the second is Alys Swann, an Englishwoman who has been captured at sea by corsairs and given to the Sultan as a gift. Amidst the dangers and conspiracies of Ismail’s court, Nus-Nus and Alys form a friendship and try to help each other survive.

I haven’t read any of Jane Johnson’s previous novels and chose to read this one purely because the setting sounded so interesting. I’ve never read a novel set in 17th century Morocco and I fell in love with the setting from the very first chapter. Everything was described so vividly, I wasn’t surprised to find that the author lives in Morocco herself and has already written two other books set in the same country. I learned so many fascinating little facts about Moroccan history and culture and about the building of the historic city of Meknes (which was intended to rival Versailles). There are also a few chapters where the action moves to England and the court of Charles II in Restoration-period London. It was interesting to be shown the English court through the eyes of Nus-Nus and to see the ways in which it was both different and similar to the Moroccan court. But although there are lots of descriptions of food, clothing, furnishings etc, the pace of the story never slows down and there’s always something happening.

Nus-Nus and Alys are fictional characters but Moulay Ismail, the Sultan, was a real person and is considered to be one of the cruelest rulers in history (one of his nicknames is ‘the bloodthirsty’). This is something that Jane Johnson portrays very convincingly – based on some of the things he does in this novel, living in his household must have been a terrifying experience! Nus-Nus and the other slaves and courtiers are constantly in fear of their lives, knowing that they are at the mercy of his whim, and they have learned to be extra careful when they see him dressed in yellow as this indicates he’s in a particularly murderous mood. Ismail’s wife, Zidana, is also portrayed as a villain; a jealous, scheming person who uses poisons and witchcraft to attack her enemies.

Of the two narrators, I didn’t find Alys Swann a very memorable character but I did really like Nus-Nus. In fact, he was the main reason why I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Nus-Nus was captured from his Senufo tribe as a young man and before coming to the Sultan’s palace had spent some time assisting a British doctor who taught him to read and write and to speak English. These skills make him invaluable to both Ismail and Zidana and are the reason why he’s in a position where he’s able to befriend and help Alys. As a black slave and a eunuch, Nus-Nus is often treated unkindly by other members of the court, but still has a lot of dignity and courage. I thought he was a wonderful character.

The story does touch on some controversial subjects including slavery, racism and prejudice, torture and cruelty (some of the things described in the novel are very brutal and characters lose their lives in some gruesome ways) but I thought everything was handled sensitively. The only criticism I really have is that Alys didn’t have a very distinctive voice; sometimes she didn’t sound any different from Nus-Nus and I didn’t immediately realise the narrator had changed. Apart from that, The Sultan’s Wife was exciting, informative and swept me away to another time and place, which is what I’m always looking for in historical fiction. I loved it!

The Glovemaker by Stacia Brown

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The Glovemaker is set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, just after the execution of Charles I in 1649, and follows the trial of Rachel Lockyer, a glovemaker’s assistant who has been accused of killing her illegitimate child. A new law states that any unmarried woman who is found to have concealed the death of her baby must be guilty of murder. Apart from Rachel herself, nobody knows the truth about what happened, but Rachel is reluctant to speak up and defend herself, so it’s left to investigator Thomas Bartwain to examine the evidence and the jury to decide whether Rachel should be sentenced to death.

The time period Stacia Brown has chosen for this novel is one that does not seem to be widely covered in historical fiction – the years between the English Civil War and the Restoration, when Oliver Cromwell ruled (known as the Interregnum) – and this is what had drawn me to the book. But when I read historical fiction I like to get a good sense of the period the book is set in and to feel as if I’ve been transported there myself and unfortunately, this did not happen with The Glovemaker. It didn’t help that I kept noticing inaccuracies – houses here in England don’t have stoops, for example, and I’m fairly sure we wouldn’t have been eating cranberry biscuits in 1649 either. Just small things, but they meant that I was never able to feel completely immersed in the atmosphere of 17th century London.

I did think the parts of the book set in Newgate Prison and describing the conditions under which the prisoners lived were quite compelling. And I learned a lot about the Levellers, the political movement that some of the characters in the book are part of. One of the Levellers in the novel is William Walwyn, the father of Rachel Lockyer’s child, who I discovered from the author’s note was a real historical figure.

I thought The Glovemaker was interesting in that it portrayed what must have been a very real situation for a lot of women at that time who found themselves pregnant but without a husband. It seemed very unfair that if the woman’s illegitimate child died at birth she would be assumed by law to have murdered it and unless she could produce a reliable witness, she would be sentenced to death – and even more unfair when you consider that this law did not apply to married women.

But other than as a study of the 17th century legal system, I wasn’t quite sure what the purpose of this story was supposed to be. There was no mystery, because we were told in the opening pages that Rachel had concealed her child’s death (we see her burying it behind the Smithfield slaughterhouse in the prologue) – the only question was whether or not the baby had died naturally. I didn’t think the romance aspect of the book worked either: the affair between Rachel and William Walwyn formed quite a big part of the story but I never felt emotionally involved in their relationship. The one character who did interest me was Thomas Bartwain, the investigator in charge of Rachel’s case, whose conscience starts to trouble him as he interviews witnesses and learns more about Rachel’s story and the injustice of the law.

I just wish I had been able to care about Rachel as this could have been such a moving story. Instead I was left feeling disappointed that, for me, this novel didn’t live up to its potential.

This book has also been published under the US title of Accidents of Providence.