Dominion by C.J. Sansom

February 24, 2014February 24, 20146 Comments

C.J. Sansom is probably best known for his Shardlake novels, a mystery series set in Tudor England. Dominion, however, is set in the twentieth century – but not the twentieth century that you and I are familiar with. Before we even finish reading the first chapter, we know that something is very wrong. In Sansom’s alternate world, Britain surrendered to Nazi Germany in 1940, changing the course of history as we know it.

As the novel opens in November 1952, we begin to see what a high price Britain has paid for peace with Hitler. Yes, the war was brought to a premature end, avoiding more deaths and devastation, but now the Gestapo are established in central London, Britain’s Jews are being rounded up and removed from the cities, and Winston Churchill, who never actually managed to become Prime Minister, has gone into hiding as the leader of the British Resistance.

The story is told from the perspectives of four characters, all with different backgrounds and beliefs. The first of these is David Fitzgerald, one of many people who are unhappy with the way things are in Britain. When he is approached by the Resistance movement, David agrees to use his position as a civil servant to provide them with confidential information. He decides to protect his wife, Sarah, by not telling her that he is working as a spy…but he is also hiding another, equally dangerous secret – one that nobody must ever discover.

Sarah Fitzgerald, David’s wife, has been a pacifist for many years, like her father and sister. She has always believed that signing a peace treaty in 1940 was the right thing to do in order to avoid more lives being lost. However, Sarah’s views are now beginning to change.

We also meet Frank Muncaster, a scientist and an old friend of David’s from university. Frank is now in a mental hospital after pushing his brother, Edgar, through a window during an argument. The Resistance believe that before they began to fight, Edgar – another scientist – may have given his brother some shocking information about his work in America. Finally, there’s Gunther Hoth, a German who is in London on a secret mission. Could Frank Muncaster have the information he needs?

Dominion is a chilling and thought-provoking novel, all the more frightening because the world C.J. Sansom describes is so realistic and believable. In many ways, the Britain of Dominion is not greatly different from the real Britain, but as the story unfolds we begin to see more and more subtle differences, more and more ways in which authoritarian rule has replaced the freedoms we take for granted.

As well as being an alternate history, this is also an exciting thriller. After a slow start I found it became very gripping and suspenseful, with some cliff hanger chapter endings and a few moments when I feared for the fates of some of the characters. The Great Smog of 1952 is incorporated into the novel and really adds to the oppressive atmosphere. There were some parts of the story, though, that felt superfluous and had little relevance to the main plot and this made the book feel longer than it really needed to be.

My favourite character was Frank Muncaster, who through no fault of his own finds himself at the centre of the conflict between the Germans and the British Resistance. We are given lots of flashbacks to Frank’s childhood when, as a shy and lonely boy, he was bullied at school, leaving him suffering from low self-esteem and finding it difficult to make friends. Of all the characters in the novel, I thought Frank was particularly well-written and I found myself warming to him in a way I never really did to any of the others.

Dominion is a disturbing and unsettling novel with a sinister vision of what our lives could have been like had just one or two different decisions been made at crucial moments in history. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but when I reached the final page it was good to know that the world I was returning to was not quite the same as the one I had just finished reading about!

I read Dominion as part of the Historical Fiction Virtual Book Tour. For more reviews, interviews and giveaways, please see the tour schedule.

Less Than Angels by Barbara Pym

June 7, 201327 Comments

I’ve never read anything by Barbara Pym until now, despite feeling sure that I would enjoy her books, so Barbara Pym Reading Week seemed a good time to start. Less than Angels is not a book that I’ve heard much about so I was worried that it might not be a good one to begin with, but it’s the only one I actually own so it made sense to read it first. Luckily I did enjoy it and it has left me wanting to read more of Pym’s books as soon as I can!

Less than Angels revolves around a group of anthropology students, their professors, families and neighbours. Catherine Oliphant is a writer of romantic fiction and articles for women’s magazines. Her boyfriend, Tom Mallow, is an anthropology student who has recently returned home from being ‘in the field’ in Africa and is now working on finishing his thesis. Despite having very different personalities and not really understanding each other’s work, Tom and Catherine seem to have settled into life together – until Tom meets Deirdre Swan, a younger student who is just beginning to study anthropology.

While the relationships between Tom, Catherine and Deirdre form the central thread of the novel, another storyline centres around money for research grants which the rich widow Minnie Foresight has promised to give to Professor Mainwaring’s department. Among the students hoping to receive these grants are Deirdre’s friends, Mark and Digby, who provide a lot of the book’s humour. We meet lots of other great characters too, including Deirdre’s mother, Mabel, and her unmarried Aunt Rhoda. And there’s also Alaric Lydgate, an eccentric anthropologist who lives next door and can often be seen wearing an African mask around the house (and secretly wishes he could wear it all the time).

My first impression after reading Chapter One was that I liked Barbara Pym’s writing but was completely overwhelmed by the number of characters we were introduced to in that first chapter and the way the viewpoints changed from one to another so rapidly. Fortunately, after a couple of chapters things settled down and we could concentrate on getting to know one character at a time.

I thought Catherine was a lovely person and although she and Deirdre could be seen as rivals, Catherine’s mature attitude to the whole situation made it easy for me to like Deirdre too. It was interesting to read the contrasting descriptions of Catherine’s solitary but independent life in London, and Deirdre’s life in a middle-class suburban household, living with her mother, brother and aunt. I thought it was funny when one of Deirdre’s fellow students, a Frenchman called Jean-Pierre, visits the family to study a typical English Sunday! I liked the idea that there’s as much for an anthropologist to study in English habits and traditions as there is in the customs of African tribes, and I was also interested in the comparison of the insights writers have into human life as opposed to the views anthropologists have.

I loved Mark and Digby too. One of my favourite scenes was the one where they take Miss Clovis and Miss Lydgate to a restaurant and spend the whole time worrying about the cost and trying to choose the cheapest things on the menu. I also liked the part where Professor Mainwaring invites four of the competing research grant applicants to his house in the countryside for the weekend. Near the end of the book, the story takes a more dramatic turn which I thought felt a bit out of place with the rest of the novel. Apart from this, I enjoyed Less than Angels and am excited about reading more of her books.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

June 4, 20138 Comments

Do you ever find that after finishing a book you’re still not sure what you thought of it and couldn’t even say whether you had actually enjoyed it or not? That’s the way I felt about Doctor Zhivago. I’m glad I’ve finally read it as it’s a book I’ve been curious about for a long time, but while I didn’t dislike it I didn’t love it either. Thankfully I don’t even attempt to rate books on my blog but I do on Goodreads and wavered between three and four stars for a long time before settling on three. Doctor Zhivago is a long book and definitely not a light, easy read, so I was disappointed that I couldn’t rate it more highly after investing so much time and effort in it.

Doctor Zhivago was published in 1957 and Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a year later. The novel is set in Russia and follows the life of Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet. Yuri’s mother dies when he is still a young child and he is raised by his Uncle Kolya. After studying medicine at university, he marries his childhood friend, Tonya, and they have a son together but Yuri and Tonya are separated when Yuri joins the army as a doctor. Recovering in a field hospital after being wounded, he is drawn to another woman, Lara, who is working there as a nurse and over the years that follow he is torn between his loyalty to Tonya and his love for Lara. But this is more than just Yuri’s story…it’s also the story of Russia itself and the events that shaped the country throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

I have to admit that before I started reading this book I had absolutely no idea what it was about, though I think I must have had the impression it was a romantic historical epic set against a backdrop of beautiful snowy landscapes. Although I’ve never actually watched any of the film or television adaptations of this book it seems that they have chosen to focus more on the love story aspect, which is probably why I had this misconception of what the book would be like. This particular edition of the book does nothing to dispel that idea, with the claim on the cover that this is “one of the greatest love stories ever told”. It isn’t. Not in my opinion, anyway. After reaching the end of the book it seemed to me that the romance had only formed a minor part of the story, taking second place to the Russian history and politics, though whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on your personal preference, of course!

Doctor Zhivago was originally written in Russian and the translators of this edition are Max Hayward and Manya Harari. I hadn’t looked into which other translations are available – I just picked the book up on a whim when I noticed it on the library shelf because I’ve been interested in reading it for a while. Maybe there are other translations that are better, but I didn’t have any problems with this one; I thought the writing flowed well and was easy enough to read (although the story itself is disjointed, almost episodic). There are some beautiful, moving passages, and yes, some wonderful descriptions of snowy Russian landscapes too. But what did make this book very challenging for me was my complete lack of knowledge of most of the history involved: the February and October Revolutions, for example, and the Civil War between the Reds and the Whites. If you’re planning to read Doctor Zhivago and know nothing about the historical context I would strongly recommend doing some background reading first – I wish I had as I’m sure it would have made the story a lot easier to understand and follow!

The parts of the book that I did enjoy were excellent – I particularly loved the penultimate chapter, Again Varykino, and its atmospheric descriptions of a deserted town surrounded by howling wolves – but I was disappointed that I never managed to form any kind of emotional connection with any of the characters. Although Yuri, Lara and Tonya found themselves in situations that I could sympathise with, I thought their characters felt underdeveloped. They never felt like real people to me, so their stories didn’t affect me as much as they should have done.

I wish I had been able to write a more intelligent, articulate review but I think I’ll have to leave that to other people as I’m aware that a lot of the political and philosophical aspects of the story just went over my head. To fully appreciate this book I would have to read it again and I don’t think that’s something I’ll ever want to do! I do usually like Russian literature in general – I loved Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, I enjoyed Anna Karenina and am currently taking part in a group read of War and Peace – so I have to conclude that Pasternak and Doctor Zhivago are just not for me.

Turn of the Century Salon: The Painted Veil by W Somerset Maugham

March 26, 201324 Comments

Despite the attempts of her mother to arrange a good marriage for her, Kitty Garstin is in no hurry to find a husband. She’s too busy enjoying herself at parties and dances, and it’s only when she’s still unmarried at the age of twenty-five and discovers that her younger sister has become engaged to a baronet that she begins to panic. She agrees to marry Walter Fane, a bacteriologist, and moves to Hong Kong with him. Walter is shy, clever and serious and to the pretty, frivolous Kitty, he seems very cold and aloof. Although he is in love with her, she doesn’t love him in return and soon begins an affair with the charming, charismatic Assistant Colonial Secretary, Charles Townsend.

Eventually Walter learns the truth about Kitty and Charles and confronts Kitty with an ultimatum. She can either accompany him into the interior of China where he has volunteered to deal with a cholera epidemic, or he will allow her to divorce him – but only if Charles agrees to divorce his wife and immediately marry Kitty. When Kitty goes to discuss the situation with Charles, she is cruelly disillusioned by her lover and is left with no other option than to travel to Mei-tan-fu with Walter. Kitty is convinced that Walter is taking her there in the hope that she will die, but it’s here in this remote cholera-ridden city that Kitty finally begins to grow as a person and to make some discoveries about both herself and her husband.

This book was such a surprise. I think I must have formed a preconceived idea that I wouldn’t like Somerset Maugham without ever having tried any of his books or knowing anything about him, because I really didn’t expect to love this as much as I did. I’m so pleased to find that I was wrong! The Painted Veil is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. I found Maugham’s writing much easier to read than I had thought it might be, but also filled with beauty, poignancy and emotion.

This is quite a short novel but both main characters have a lot of depth and complexity. I disliked Kitty at first – she’s selfish, spoiled and immature – but the fact that she is so flawed and makes such terrible mistakes is what makes her so human. Kitty is changed by her experiences in Mei-tan-fu and we see her mature and gain in wisdom and insight. By the end of the book, I still didn’t like her but I had a better understanding of her and I wanted her to be happy. I had more sympathy for Walter, but because we are viewing him through Kitty’s eyes, we don’t really have a chance to see the other side of his personality that we hear about – when the nuns in the convent tell Kitty how much they admire him, for example, and how tender and loving he can be with the orphaned babies there. Kitty barely knows or understands her husband at all and when she finally begins to do so, we are made to wonder whether it’s going to be too late.

There aren’t a lot of long, descriptive passages in this book but 1920s China is still portrayed beautifully and I loved this description of Kitty watching the rooftops emerging from the mist on her first morning in Mei-tan-fu:

But suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim, and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of coloured wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic, and unsubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.

I read The Painted Veil for Katherine’s Turn of the Century Salon. This book was published in 1925 and with its portrayal of society in 1920s colonial Hong Kong and an era when many girls were still raised with the sole aim of making a good marriage, this was an ideal choice for the Salon. If you read it I would also recommend reading Shelley’s sonnet Lift Not The Painted Veil and Oliver Goldsmith’s An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog.

Turn of the Century Salon: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

February 12, 2013February 12, 201322 Comments

This year I am participating in a Turn of the Century Salon hosted by Katherine of November’s Autumn. The idea of this is to read books published around the turn of the century – between the late 1880s and the early 1930s. While I do seem to have read more books from this period than I initially thought, there are still a huge number of turn of the century authors whose work I haven’t explored yet and E.M. Forster was one of those that I was most looking forward to trying for the first time.

A Room with a View is the story of Lucy Honeychurch who we first meet on a trip to Italy with her cousin, Charlotte Bartlett. Lucy and Charlotte have just arrived at the Pension Bertolini in Florence and are disappointed to find that they have been given rooms with no view of the River Arno. Two of the other English guests – a Mr Emerson and his son, George – hear them complaining and immediately offer to exchange rooms, but instead of accepting their generous offer, the rules of Edwardian society mean that Charlotte is shocked and offended by what she considers their inappropriate behaviour. During the rest of their time in Florence, Charlotte and the other middle-class English tourists dismiss the Emersons as bad-mannered and socially unacceptable but Lucy has several more encounters with them and is intrigued by their different outlook on life.

Back in England, their paths cross again when the Emersons move into a cottage in Lucy’s village not far from the Honeychurch home, Windy Corner. Lucy is now engaged to Cecil Vyse, a cold, pretentious man she doesn’t really love, but who is considered to be a suitable husband for her. But with George Emerson living nearby Lucy must decide whether to be true to her heart even if it means breaking the social conventions of the time.

As this is the first E.M. Forster book I’ve read, I didn’t know what to expect so I was pleased to find it was much easier to read than I had been afraid it might be. I loved the wit and warmth of Forster’s writing and I enjoyed watching Lucy’s slow development from a young woman who allows other people and society in general to dictate how she should think and behave to one who finds the courage to be herself and live her life the way she wants to live it.

The beginning of the book with the portrayal of the English in Italy made me think of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and as for the descriptions of Italy itself, they were beautiful and vivid:

At the same moment the ground gave way, and with a cry she fell out of the wood. Light and beauty enveloped her. She had fallen on to a little open terrace, which was covered with violets from end to end.

“Courage!” cried her companion, now standing some six feet above. “Courage and love.”

She did not answer. From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty gushed out to water the earth.

Forster has a sense of humour as well; the dialogue is often quite funny and he puts his characters into some amusing situations. I also loved the character names and the chapter titles (especially Chapter Six – “The Reverend Arthur Beebe, the Reverend Cuthbert Eager, Mr. Emerson, Mr. George Emerson, Miss Eleanor Lavish, Miss Charlotte Bartlett, and Miss Lucy Honeychurch Drive Out in Carriages to See a View; Italians Drive Them.”)

Published in 1908, A Room with a View was a perfect book to choose for the salon as it really does epitomise turn of the century society and a gradual move away from Victorian values into a freer, less socially constrained twentieth century.

Which of E.M. Forster’s other books should I read next?

The Aviator’s Wife by Melanie Benjamin

January 3, 2013January 3, 20139 Comments

Melanie Benjamin picks such interesting subjects for her novels, introducing us to historical figures who, despite their significance, we may not know much about: first Alice Liddell, the inspiration behind Alice in Wonderland, then Lavinia Warren or ‘Mrs Tom Thumb’, and now Anne Morrow Lindbergh, wife of the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh.

We first meet Anne Morrow, daughter of the US ambassador to Mexico, in 1927 at a reception attended by Charles Lindbergh who has recently completed his first solo flight across the Atlantic. Everyone expects Lindbergh to be drawn to Anne’s beautiful older sister, Elizabeth, but instead it is the shy, quiet Anne who catches his eye and when he takes her up in his plane for a private flight, she finds that she shares his love of flying. Soon Lindbergh proposes and Anne accepts, but she quickly discovers that being married to one of the most famous men in America is not going to be easy.

Before reading this book I had heard of the Lindberghs but knew almost nothing about them so, for me, The Aviator’s Wife was very educational as well as being an enjoyable story. I’ve never given much thought as to what being an aviator actually involved and it was interesting to see how the Lindberghs use their roles as aviators to perform a range of useful and varied tasks including charting new routes and mapping flight paths for passenger planes, flying over places of interest to take aerial photographs, and delivering aid to disaster zones. Flying in those early aircraft must have been an amazing experience – the description of Anne’s first flight with Lindbergh is wonderfully written and sounds both terrifying and exhilarating.

This book gives us some fascinating insights into what it is like to be a celebrity. The Lindberghs have very little privacy and everything they do attracts attention from the world’s media. They are followed by reporters and photographers everywhere they go, though as quiet, reserved people neither Charles nor Anne seem very comfortable with being constantly in the spotlight. Charles has already learned to deal with it in his own way, but Anne often finds it difficult. Their fame eventually leads to tragedy – I won’t go into details here (if you’re familiar with the Lindberghs’ lives you will know what this tragedy was and if not I won’t spoil the story for you) but this part of the book was heartbreaking and made even worse by the fact that the way Charles chose to deal with the disaster was completely inadequate.

The relationship between Anne and Charles becomes more and more tense and strained as the years go by, but even as Charles grows increasingly cold and distant, Anne tries to stay loyal to her husband and is supportive when he expresses his controversial views on Hitler and the Nazis, despite the fact that she’s not convinced that he’s right. Charles is portrayed as a complex person with some good qualities but also a lot of bad ones. He tries to control every aspect of Anne’s and their children’s lives and at first it’s frustrating to see how Anne allows him to do this, but eventually she begins to move out of his shadow and finds some independence. As well as being her husband’s co-pilot, navigator and radio operator, Anne becomes an accomplished pilot in her own right and is also the first American woman to obtain a glider pilot’s licence. She later starts to build a successful career of her own as an author, publishing books including the best-selling Gift from the Sea.

I’ve enjoyed all three of Melanie Benjamin’s books but I think this one is her best so far. I was left wanting to learn more about Anne Morrow Lindbergh and feeling that she really deserves to be known as more than just ‘the aviator’s wife’!

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

Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson

November 25, 2012November 25, 201216 Comments

I felt a sudden longing to record…to retain…my everyday life here in Madensky Square. I shall remember my tragedies, my follies and my joys – everyone remembers those. But what of the ordinary things, the little happenings? What of the ‘dailiness’ – who has a care for that?

I think this is the first Eva Ibbotson book I’ve read. I say ‘think’ because it’s possible that I’ve read one or two of her children’s books (Which Witch? sounds very familiar), but this is definitely the first time I’ve read one of her adult or young adult books. Ibbotson is an author I’ve been wanting to try for a long time as so many of the bloggers I follow keep mentioning how much they love her. Madensky Square isn’t one that I’ve heard much about so probably wouldn’t have been the one I would have chosen to start with, but Amazon were offering it as their Kindle Daily Deal a few weeks ago and I couldn’t resist!

The book is set in Austria just a few years before the start of the First World War. Our narrator, Susanna Weber, is a dressmaker with a small but busy shop on Vienna’s Madensky Square. At the beginning of the novel, Susanna tells us that for the next twelve months she is going to keep a journal recording the lives of her friends, her customers and the other inhabitants of Madensky Square. She starts her story in the spring of 1911 and in the pages that follow we meet and get to know the people who populate Susanna’s world.

Being a dressmaker gives Susanna the opportunity to meet a wide range of people from different walks of life. She hears all of their gossip and becomes involved in the various dramas taking place in each of their lives. There’s Frau Schumacher, for example, who already has six daughters and whose husband is hoping for a son to inherit his timber business; how will he react if their next child is another girl? Then there’s Nini, Susanna’s Hungarian assistant, who is an anarchist and needs to decide whether her political beliefs are more important than her chance of love. Others include the Countess von Metz, a proud, sharp-tongued old lady who still loves buying dresses despite living alone and in poverty, the beautiful and very religious Magdalena Winter, and the eccentric Professor Starsky, an expert in Reptile Diseases. There are a large number of characters, but they are all so different and described in so much depth I never had any difficulty remembering who they all were. Some did feel a bit stereotypical (particularly the plain and awkward ‘bluestocking’, Edith Sultzer, and the fat butcher, Herr Huber) but I could overlook that as they were still so well-written and memorable. Even Rip the dog, whose owner sends him out every day with a little purse tied around his neck to buy the newspaper, has a distinct personality of his own!

Susanna herself is a lovely, warm person who others frequently look to for help and advice. However, her own life is no less interesting and complicated than that of any of the other characters I’ve mentioned. She has experienced a lot of sadness and loss in her past, but I don’t want to give too much of her personal story away as it’s only revealed to the reader slowly as the book progresses. Of all the other storylines in Madensky Square, my favourite was the one involving Susanna’s relationship with Sigismund Kraszinsky, a young Polish orphan. Sigi is a talented pianist and his uncle has brought him to Vienna in the hope of furthering his career as a musician, which unfortunately comes at the expense of allowing him to have a normal childhood. The story of how Susanna befriends this lonely, nervous little boy and tries to bring some happiness into his life is one of the most moving of the novel’s many subplots.

I loved reading the descriptions of Madensky Square itself, with its fountain, café and statue of Colonel Madensky, as well as the countryside, the opera houses and all the other places Susanna visits; I especially enjoyed reading about Susanna and Sigi’s trip to the magical Grottenbahn in Linz! I was satisfied with the way the book ended too – it wrapped things up nicely for all the characters we had been following in so much detail and had grown to love and care about over the course of the novel. There are happy endings for some of them, but not for others, which is realistic and more effective than if there had been a fairytale ending for everyone.

I loved this book and I’m hoping that maybe those of you who are Eva Ibbotson fans can tell me which of her books I should try next?