Venice – Page 3 – She Reads Novels

The Midwife of Venice is set in 1575 and is the story of Hannah Levi, a midwife who lives in the Jewish ghetto in Venice. Although Jews are forbidden to attend Christian women in childbirth, when the Conte di Padovani summons her to his wife one night Hannah agrees to go with him. The Conte promises that if she assists in the birth of his heir he’ll reward her with a large sum of money – money that Hannah desperately needs so that she can pay the ransom to free her husband Isaac, who has been captured and taken to Valletta, Malta as a slave of the Knights of St John. But when it proves to be a difficult birth and Hannah is forced to use her special ‘birthing spoons’ (a device similar to forceps) she finds herself threatened with accusations of witchcraft.

The plot moves back and forth between Hannah in Venice and Isaac in Malta, until the two alternating storylines begin to come together. Luckily, I found both Hannah’s and Isaac’s adventures equally interesting to read about, so I didn’t mind leaving one character behind for a while to find out what was happening to the other.

I loved the first few chapters of this book; the story’s various locations (the Jewish ghetto, Venice’s streets and canals, the island of Malta) were vividly described without being too detailed, and it was interesting to learn about the relationship between the Christians and Jews in 16th century Venice. But halfway through, the plot started to take some dramatic twists and turns which I can only describe as unbelievable and ridiculous. Hannah was a likeable enough character, but it seemed to me that everything worked out too easily for her (and for Isaac) – there were too many coincidences, too many last-minute escapes and the villains were too easily defeated. If you can suspend your disbelief it’s all very entertaining I suppose – with murder, kidnapping, blackmail, disguises, slavery and even the plague, it’s certainly never boring – but I think I would have preferred something slightly more serious!

One other little problem I had was with the number of Italian and Jewish terms that were dropped into the text, a lot of which were unfamiliar to me. There was a glossary at the end of the book which I didn’t discover until too late – it would have been helpful to have known about it before I began instead of when I was nearly finished.

Although I prefer historical fiction novels to have a bit more depth than this one, The Midwife of Venice was fun to read. The setting and subject matter were unusual and interesting, and the fast pace and cliffhanger chapter endings made it a quick read. Oh, and I love the cover too!

With 2011 coming to an end, like a lot of bloggers I’ve been putting together a list of my favourite books read this year. One of the books on my list is Stone’s Fall by Iain Pears, which I finished a couple of weeks ago but haven’t had a chance to post about yet, so I thought it would make sense to tell you about the book today before posting my Top Books of 2011 later in the week.

I really wasn’t expecting to enjoy Stone’s Fall so much because a few years ago, I started to read Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost and despite it sounding like exactly the type of book I would usually love, I couldn’t get into it at all and abandoned it a few pages into the second of the book’s four parts. With this book, though, I’ve had a completely different experience and I’ve never been so glad that I decided to give an author a second chance!

Stone’s Fall is a very complex and cleverly constructed novel. At the beginning of the story we are told that a man is dead but before we can understand the circumstances surrounding his death it’s necessary to go back in time and learn as much as we can about his life. And so the book is divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, and moving backwards from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and finally Venice in 1867. The link between all three stories is the mysterious Elizabeth, Lady Ravenscliff, who plays an important part in the life of each narrator and is perceived in a different way by each of them.

The first narrator we meet, in 1909, is Matthew Braddock, a journalist working for a London newspaper. When John Stone, one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, meets his death after falling from an open window, he leaves behind a will containing an unusual bequest. Stone’s widow, Lady Ravenscliff, asks Braddock to investigate but as he begins to dig into the secrets of Stone’s business empire he makes some surprising discoveries.

At the end of the first part I was sorry to have to say goodbye to Braddock and move back in time and on to another narrator. However, it only took me a few pages to get back into the flow of the story – the second narrator is fascinating and I enjoyed the second section even more than the first! And in the third and final part of the book, we switch narrator yet again, with this section of the book being equally compelling.

Many of the characters are unlikeable or flawed in some way, but I found all of them interesting to read about. The way I thought about each character changed as I was given more information to piece together and I was constantly forced to re-interpret what I had just read.

Stone’s Fall is a long book (over 600 pages) and very detailed and the author takes his time in introducing us to each character and building up a full picture of John Stone’s world. However, despite the pace being slow at times I found the plot completely gripping and was never bored – it was all so wonderfully intricate and clever. The balance between the melodramatic plot twists and the more technical details of banking, politics and espionage was exactly right, so that the story was both entertaining and informative.

“Love, Murder, Espionage.” Those are the words on the front cover, but although all three can be found within this book, it also contains so many other themes and ideas that to mention everything would require a post twice as long as this one! And so I’ll finish by simply saying that I loved this book – which I hadn’t expected to, considering the problems I had with An Instance of the Fingerpost. This is a book I’d definitely like to re-read one day because I’m sure my knowledge of some of the later revelations would bring new meaning to the earlier parts of the book. I might even decide to try Fingerpost again too!