The Raven’s Seal – Andrei Baltakment

This book came from Netgalley for review (a long time ago – sorry about that) – thank you to NG and the publisher.

I seem to say this a lot lately: this was not what I expected. It’s a Dickensian, Dumas-esque, dark mystery with fantastic elements … I think that covers most of it. That The Count of Monte Cristo is in the book’s genealogy is without doubt.

It all begins with a tussle in a tavern, as Thaddeus Grainger defends the honor of a young working-class woman against someone who sees her as fair game. Thaddeus saves the girl, Cassie Redruth, and earns himself a duel with her aggressor, to her dismay. By the next evening, Thaddeus is nursing his wounds – but his rival is dead, and not from their duel. Thaddeus knows that, and his friends believe it, but the constabulary do not, and he is arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned – he never stood a chance.

And there’s where The Count of Monte Cristo comes in – except that the conspiracy behind the scenes of The Raven’s Seal is much bigger and more impersonal. They don’t care about Thaddeus, or Cassie, or even much about the murdered man. The latter had to be put out of the way, and Thaddeus was a convenient scapegoat. As a larger entity, this shadowy force is harder to discover, harder to get at, and harder to overcome – especially when the troops arrayed against it consist of a young housemaid, a man in prison, an impoverished writer, and an old man. Goliath, meet David.

The description on Goodreads for this specifically states that it is set in late 18th-century England – and that surprises me. I don’t know if I failed to pay attention at the right times, but I had this pegged as being set elsewhere entirely, a setting that looks and sounds and smells like but isn’t quite 17-something England. I think that’s my only real problem with the book, is that the setting – Bellstrom Gaol – is fictional, yet it was supposed to be England. I could have wished for either more of a footing in reality, or a complete disconnect from reality. It isn’t a fantasy, really, at all – but it feels like it ought to be. In fact, it feels a great deal like Ellen Kushner’s fantasies of manners – and that isn’t in any way a bad thing.

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Mariana – Susanna Kearsley

And a happy birthday to Majel Barrett Roddenberry.

As usual, I wandered into this Kindle book from Netgalley with little knowledge of what to expect; I knew there was a sort of time travel involved, and that GR friends enjoyed it, and I was optimistic. That’s odd – I didn’t make a single note or post a single real update as I read this? I think I was too busy devouring it.

I was delighted. The language, the tone, the pacing – all reminded me of one of the fine gothics, Mary Stewart or Barbara Michaels – or of Hitchcock in a non-murderous mood. Rebecca, maybe – although neither Rebecca nor Hitchcock tended toward the unabashedly magical as did Mariana.

It all begins with a family car trip when Julia Beckett was five years old; her father got lost, a cat ran across the road and almost got itself – and them – killed, and looking out the window at that moment Julia saw a little house which she immediately and unreasoningly identified as hers. Years later, as an adult and a working artist who has come into a bit of money, Julia stumbles across another cat – or is it? – and the same house, and still has that feeling of possessiveness, and this time she takes steps to make it true. Before long, strange things begin happening. Julia finds herself seeing through the eyes of – living the life of – a girl three centuries dead, Mariana.

I have to say I was not completely enamored of the version of reincarnation en bloc as depicted here. And I didn’t love the last-minute switcheroo; it didn’t feel right at all. I thought all along that Julia belonged with Iain rather than Geoffrey, but the fact of it was that she was with Gregory, and they were becoming quite serious. For that to change so abruptly purely because of what happened in the past is going to cause some serious pain to Geoffrey, and require quite a bit of explanation. That aside, the two time periods were beautifully handled, as how Julia handled hopping back and forth between the two. Well, mostly. I was left with questions about what was happening to Julia in the present day while her consciousness was in the past; it seems a bit of a stretch that no one ever made note of or passed comment on her odd behavior.

I loved the characters that peopled the book. They’re great folks, dimensional and quirky, but not so quirky it becomes a sitcom. I was happy in Julia’s vocation as an artist; it rang true, and yet didn’t sting. The relationships in the book were well-built; I liked the surprise Julia’s brother throws at her, as a sort of emphasis of both her distraction and the depth of the book’s background. The only relationship I hesitate over is the one most affected by the denouement, as above; I wish there had been added detail or an epilogue or something like that. It was the only thing keeping this at four stars.

 

Mansfield Revisited – Joan Aiken

I’m not sure what made me read this when I did. It certainly wasn’t a deep devotion to either Mansfield Park or Fanny Price that made me long for a continuation of the story. I know I acquired the book a good ways back because Joan Aiken is on my List, and because I was curious about her continuations of Jane Austen… it just slotted itself into my reading schedule, I guess.

So. Four years after the end of Mansfield Park, Fanny and Edmund are happily married and growing a family (MP spoiler! Well, but it’s in the book description); Edmund’s father has died and someone has to go to off to see to things on the plantations, and since every time anyone says “someone” everyone turns and looks at Edmund, off he and Fanny go. And with them neatly out of the way, the focus is free to shift entirely to Fanny’s sister Susan, brought to Mansfield at the end of the book to take Fanny’s place as Lady Bertram’s companion.

It was almost comical how briskly Fanny was ushered out of the book. After all, though, what’s to tell? She’s happy, and having children – how boring. On to Susan, who’s much more interesting anyway. There are new folks in the area – Edmund’s replacement as minister and his sister – and it’s almost comical how much they resemble the Crofts from Persuasion. They’re wonderful people, and bond with Susan, and even make a good impression on the Bertrams, fight though they must against their prejudices; I liked them – but then, I loved the Crofts, so I would do. And there are folks returning to the area: Mary Crawford, for one, who is ill and has fled her life of dissipation. Which of course now, as she begins to build a friendship with Susan, turns out to have been not so very dissipated, and she was wronged, and anyway she’s probably dying now so it’s all right. And then, of course, where Mary goes eventually Henry Crawford shows up – and you know, he’s not such a bad fellow, either. He was awfully in love with Fanny … but she’s married and not here anyway, and hey look here’s her little sister! It’s Fanny Lite! Maybe I have a shot with her … And of course as soon as it becomes clear that Crawford is sniffing around Susan, Cousin Tom Bertram wakes up to the fact that she’s of age now and no longer the uncouth plaguey nuisance of a child.

I don’t know. I have a great deal of respect for Joan Aiken, but this just seemed ill-advised from start to finish. All of the inconveniences from Jane Austen – Fanny, Mrs. Norris, Maria – have been surgically removed, and inconvenient aspects of other characters have undergone extensive plastic surgery, and really why not just write a whole new standalone novel? It was very hard to swallow the rehabilitation of two selfish, thoughtless, amoral characters. And the ending was … abrupt, and felt disjointed. It just didn’t work.

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The Lady of Secrets – Susan Carroll

This was a Netgalley book for review.

 

You know the saying about only having one shot at a first impression? That’s the first thing that keeps coming to mind about this book, in a couple of ways.

 

First, the genre baffled me. As always, Kindle book + no memory of what the synopsis said + no cover to judge by (not that the cover, deceptively pretty as it is, is so helpful) = mild befuddlement. Oh, okay, I thought, it’s a fantasy, with witches in sixteenth century Scotland. Wait. Historical fiction. Wait. Fantastic hist-fic – no, hist-rom? What it is, I guess, is a mélange of romance (with its full portion of romance tropes), historical fiction (on shaky ground), and a smattering of fantasy (witchcraft = real). As so often happens with a book like this, I just kind of wish it had stuck to one thing or another, and not tried to do everything.

 

This was my first book by the author, and considering this is the sixth book in a series that’s a little awkward. I will say the author does a pretty nice job of bringing a newcomer up to speed, with only occasional moments of (before I finally checked to see whether there was indeed a series) “that incident alluded to there has to have had a whole ‘nother book of its own.” That happened quite often. Still, there isn’t too much reliance on a reader’s previous knowledge. Whether that would be enjoyable for someone who has followed the series, I don’t know – I picture frequent pauses to say “I know. I was here” – but it worked pretty well for a newbie.

 

The other part of the book’s strange first impression was that the prologue was one of those intensely irritating ones in which something tumultuous happens – and then chapter one opens years later and miles and miles away with an entirely different cast of characters. (I understand the temptation to write such a prologue, and am in fact guilty myself in the book I’m trying to write. That doesn’t mean I hate them less in my reading. It just means that I’m going to try to find a better way to do it myself.) One main factor in the irritation is that I spent the next several chapters wondering which of the two men introduced as main characters had been the teenager in the prologue.

 

And it’s to those two men the “first impressions” thing applies as well. They are introduced in a threatening atmosphere: a village girl is giving every appearance of being possessed, and Meg, the Lady of Faire Isle, has been called in to try to help her – and at great personal risk, she has come. Any given moment could see the village ignite into superstitious/religious fervor against the girl, against Meg as a witch, against the eccentric old lady the girl is accusing of having cursed her … And the two strangers who are staying in the village are not helping. One is obviously a gentleman, his companion a physician who would have had to work hard to impress Meg more negatively. The description of him is chilling.

 

First: “… with enough light, the devil could be kept at bay.
It hadn’t worked, Meg thought with a small shiver. He hovered over the bed, in the guise of a tall dark man.”

 

Then: “Margaret stared deep into his eyes and it felt like falling into the depths of a well. She had never encountered an expression so dark, so cold, and so empty. Not since the last time she had looked into her mother’s eyes.”

 

(Her mother, by the way, for those who like me haven’t read the other books, was blind. Considering the amount of confusion the withholding of that bit of information caused me in the first 25% of the book, you’re welcome. Also? This just makes the description more unnerving.)

 

And then, a few pages later, he is being self-deprecating and kind of charming and making Meg – and, I admit, me – laugh.

 

And all the while I kept thinking “But … evil.”

 

Having already been expected by the book to switch tacks rapidly, maybe the author expected it to be easier this time. It wasn’t. I was just showing signs of whiplash by this point.

 

The whole second phase of the book felt to me like a car that needs a tune-up, clunking a little every time the gas pedal is pressed. Here’s this woman whose vocation could also be the death of her, only venturing off her island to help those who need it. And here is this complete stranger asking her to go with him to England to try to help King James I get out from under a curse. After some initial scrambling to keep up with the setting (wait – we’re not in England? Or at least Scotland?) I sat there reading in disbelief as Meg protested and refused and refused and protested and capitulated and went off and got on a boat with two complete strangers. For someone introduced as a Wise Woman, this seemed remarkably unwise. And even worse – when they get to London they’re staying in the home of one of the two men who has all-but-abducted them. Okay.

 

The other aspect to this that failed was one of wardrobe. Meg and her friend/bodyguard/duenna Seraphine (whose story as it appears in this book is ridiculous; it must have a book of its own. *checks* Wait – it doesn’t??? Oh good grief – hello book seven) left their island to go to a tavern in a mainland port village to see to a girl who seems to be possessed. It was not a long trip; they didn’t plan to stay long; I reiterate: it was a village; they were trying to keep a fairly low profile. Which to my mind means they didn’t bring much baggage – in fact, as far as I recall there was no mention of baggage. Five minutes later they’re on a boat to London to see the king. They do not stop off home to pick up so much as a change of undies. Right. They get to London, and Seraphine disappears and comes back with the medieval equivalent of a bunch of shopping bags from designer boutiques. Meg: “Oh, ‘Phine, what have you done? I thought we agreed any finery was unnecessary.” Wait a minute. Margaret is about to have an audience – a private audience – with James I, and she was planning on going in the dress she wore to the village at the beginning of the book? In what way in that world is finery unnecessary when going to call on the king? Wouldn’t that be highly inappropriate, and seen as disrespect, and – given James’s touchiness – possibly end in imprisonment? It’s nonsense.

 

So there’s a curse on the king, maybe; he thinks there is, and that’s what matters, and Meg is the only one who can help him – although there’s every possibility that helping him might get her killed, since any help she can give will look like witchcraft and James is notoriously anti-witch. Meanwhile, Meg actually has another motive for going to England; she wants to find out more about her mother and the incredibly evil coven she was head of, and whether any of the members have survived and still practice. Meg had been raised to be her mother’s witchy successor, and more, and made a horrified and frantic break from that life when she was young. And as it turns out there are still women out and about in England who believe in her as the chosen one or what-have-you, and want her to take up her rightful place. Oh, and then – possibly related to the king’s curse – there’s the plot featuring Guido (Guy) Fawkes… which Our Heroine refers to as “the gunpowder plot”, which just irritated me as a piece of pseudo-prescience.

 

All of these scattered threads wind together into a weak climax that involves Meg at the mercy of the sort-of-reborn coven, being coerced to perform an evil ritual, while meanwhile the two heroes (neither of whom is particularly heroic) are variously involved with Fawkes (helping? Trying to stop? Both?). Despite her (rather weak) efforts to be Glinda the Good Witch, Meg/Margaret/Megaera (isn’t that one of Godzilla’s enemies?) is helpless to resist the evil coven. I kept thinking of how I would have my (strong, angry, intelligent) heroine react if I were writing the scene … and instead I kept getting Meg’s reactions. Which ran along these lines: “No! Please! I – all right, I’ll go with you. No! I won’t! Wait, you’re threatening me and my friend a lot, all right, I’ll play along and hope the cavalry comes. No! I won’t! I don’t know how! Well, okay, I’ll fake it, and oh golly look a ghost, I think I’ll pass out now and hope a big strong man comes.” Which he does.

 

Persecution of witches (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The ghost I mention above is just about the most literal deus ex machina I’ve ever seen. Meg’s mother, we are assured throughout something like four hundred pages, was an infamous Bad Witch, killing babies and kittens and plotting against the throne and leading astray assorted young women and brewing poisons and oh, just all sorts of nasty things. She was not a nice person. She wasn’t a very good mother. She died (maybe) when Meg was six. I covered the fact that she was evil, right? With Meg terrified of her and of being forced to follow in Mum’s (sorry – Maman’s) footsteps and be Evil-The Next Generation? So here Meg is being forced to try her hand at necromancy to reach the Evil Sisters’ evil grandmother, and who does she get instead? Mum. Is Mum still evil? Of course not. She’s tender and motherly like she never was in life, starts to apologize for all her evildoings, is interrupted by Evil Sister #2, and retaliates by – apparently – reaching through Meg to kill Evil Sister #2. Moral: don’t interrupt the ghost of an evil witch. Or something.

 

There is, I realize now, the vaguest possibility that this post-mortem personality transplant makes sense in light of the other books in the series; this is, after all, the sixth book. However, I haven’t read the other five, and without coercion won’t ever read the other five, and it made so little sense in light of this book that I started wondering if perhaps manuscripts had gotten mixed up at some point.

 

Besides the sheer idiocy of the deus ex, there was Meg’s behavior in this situation. If this was just some high-born female who never knew anything but embroidery and flowers who was stuck in this situation, that would be one thing. Going along with it all almost without protest and then fainting to be rescued – that would be fine for such a “heroine”. But this woman is supposed to be the strong, independent Lady of Fair Isle. She’s a leader. She’s a mature woman – 31, which was practically old in 1605. And she has worked her entire life to overcome the shadow of her mother’s evildoings, and to do good and only good. For her to recoil in utter horror at how of all her mother’s Evil deeds this is one of the Mostest Evilest, and then to capitulate with barely a squawk and actually sit down and try to perform this So-Evil deed of necromancy … and then for Evil Mum to turn up and not be evil at all … The manuscript had to have fallen in a bin (not, unfortunately, the correct bin) and gotten mixed up with another.

 

There was so much else. The setting, as I mentioned somewhere up there, was indeterminate. It hopped between prologue and Chapter 1 from Scotland to France without as far as I recall or noticed at the time making that clear, and left me floundering. Characters’ nationalities made no difference to the text – French, Scottish, English, peasant, noble, it didn’t much matter; there was little to indicate any of it. Not that I would enjoy lashings of pidgin scattered through dialogue – but I don’t remember any mention of anyone switching languages to accommodate someone else, or having trouble understanding or keeping up, or … anything at all that would indicate there were different tongues in the mix. At some point late in the book I believe Meg is referred to as being French, which threw me for a loop; it seemed so unlikely. For one thing, since when is “Meg” (or Margaret, or Megaera) a French name? Or “Faire Isle”? London and King James and the Gunpowder Plot? It could just as easily have been a completely invented world and monarchy and history. That might have helped, quite a bit.

 

Guy Fawkes before King James (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of my biggest pet peeves, which I probably share with a lot of people who love historical fiction, is the anachronistic outbreak. There are few things worse than being completely taken out of a book’s historical setting by a carelessly used word or phrase (though most of those few things were also present in this book). “The fuse will be lit and then wham!” Yes, I’m quite certain comic book sound effects would have been part of common speech in 1605. And “criminally insane”, used by one character, made little sense in the context. Insanity wasn’t really accepted as a defense in 1605, was it? A criminal was a criminal.

 

Those “few things” I mentioned? Here’s another. “Climb into bed and w-warm me.” My reaction was “Is there no cliche this book won’t stoop to?” It hit quite a few, right down to the old switcheroo, the character-so-seasick-she-wants-to-die, and the dangerous-royal-boar-hunt (I think it was boar – doesn’t matter). If there are any that were missed, they’ve probably already been addressed in the other books in the series… I gave this two stars out of my one solitary burst of holiday spirit. It will keep the second star because it made me chuckle, on purpose, once or twice. But it was a near thing.

 

Related articles

 

• Guy Fawkes Day: A Brief History (history.com)
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The Bull Slayer – Bruce MacBain

I started the year in ancient Rome, care of Netgalley (thank you). Well, no, not Rome itself, but the Empire in general and what is now part of Turkey specifically – Bithynia. Plinius Secundus, called Pliny by those around him (or Gaius by those closest to him, just to mess with your head) and Pliny the Younger by history, has been sent to this barbaric outpost to investigate and clean up the corruption that is rampant there among the Greeks – or, as the Romans patronizingly refer to them, Greeklings. The previous governor played fast and loose with lots and lots of money, and when he left – not quite in disgrace – he took a lot of the moveables with him, so now Pliny, his beloved wife Calpurnia, and his household – including the freed slaves he and his wife find indispensable, Ione and Zosimus – not only has to cope with insolent and indolent slaves, a disgruntled and resentful populace, and a corrupt and snobbish Roman community, but also a residence that has been left uncomfortable and ill-kept. It’s a challenge. But Pliny has the confidence of the emperor.

A new roadblock is thrown in his way when suddenly a Roman official is murdered. He was an unpleasant man, and corrupt, but his death is highly inconvenient – and given that less than a hundred years ago there was a rebellion and slaughter of Romans right there in Bithynia, Pliny is anxious to keep things as calm and steady as possible. Did the murder have something to do with this cult of Mithras that keeps creeping in around the edges? Was it because of money, and if so was it business or family? Was it political? Could it have been jealousy? (Nah.) Before Pliny can answer any of this, he is called to another scene of death …

For a good percentage of this book, I had a five-star rating dancing before my eyes. The writing was very fine, and the characters were well-rounded, dialogue felt “period” without being patronizing or archaic. The setting was vibrant in all its sordidness and felt alive and current, both alien and familiar. It was when part of the plot began to devolve into soap opera and a character I had really liked suddenly became Too Stupid To Live, and when it was – in one gut-wrenching scene – revealed that absolutely no one was faithful or trustworthy: that was when my opinion of the book started to slide. Wait. I take it back. One person was faithful and trustworthy. He didn’t last long.

So help me, I can’t imagine why writers still insist on putting boar hunts into their books. The minute someone says there will be a boar hunt I know there is, literally, no exaggeration, at least a 90% probability that someone’s gonna die. It’s ridiculous. It has become a cliché. Someday I’m going to go back through all the historical (and fantasy, for that matter) novels I’ve ever read and put together a compendium of Deadly Boar Hunts. People: STOP IT.

None of this makes it a bad book (hence the fact that it retained four (three and a half, really) of those five stars). But it was depressing. And it took the plot in a direction almost directly opposite from where I either wanted or expected it to go. The synopsis on Goodreads states that the finale is tragic. I don’t think so. “Tragic” would have had me in tears, surely, or feeling something; this … this just had me thinking “wait – you mean – aw, come on, isn’t killing that person off a little convenient, and kind of mean? And what about – oh, you’re kidding.

One smallish thing that did bug me was the contrived cleverness of Pliny’s man Zosimus. He would for the most part remain silent, as befitted a freed slave in the company they were keeping, but when he spoke up it was always pithy, always clever – and often coined those words and phrases used today. Clew = clue, for example. It was a little too cute.

I really enjoyed Pliny, and he’s a great choice to center a series around – he knew everybody. Suetonius was a fun character, and I’d love to read any of his works that have survived. I was looking forward to a first century detective series with these two, with a solid scholarly grounding and a sense of humor… Now I don’t know if I’ll keep going with it. A disappointment.

(However: the audiobook of the first in the series was narrated by Bronson Pinchot. Hm.)

 

 

A Soldier’s Secret – Marissa Moss

What it says on the tin: this is the story of a young woman who ran away from her life, and created a new one wearing trousers. Her life as a girl was intolerable, so she reinvented herself as a man, and when the Civil War came along she, or rather he, enlisted in a spirit of determined patriotism, and became the best soldier in his unit – and a nurse, devoted to his patients, and postmaster (which I never really realized was so dangerous) and attaché and Union spy. And in two years of service to the Union (almost) no one ever even suspected Frank Thompson was actually a girl named Sarah.

I’m not sure what this book is, exactly. (Besides received from Netgalley – thank you to them and the publisher.) It’s based on historic fact, which could make it historical fiction. Moreover, it’s based on the life of a real individual, so maybe it could be called a fictional biography – but no, it’s in the first person, so maybe a fictional memoir. Except that the individual in question, a woman named Sarah Emma Edmonds, wrote a memoir of her own in 1864, so it’s a little odd to have a novelized version.

I read this with the understanding that it was based on a true story, and the notes following the book emphasize this:

Although more than four hundred women are known to have dressed as men to fight in the Civil War, most of them were joining husbands, brothers, fathers, or fiancés. They had someone to help with their disguise and share the burden of their secret. Sarah Emma Edmonds was the only one known to have lived as a man before enlisting.

(I’ll come back to the extraordinary fact of that number, four hundred + women.)

But immediately after stressing the truth of the story, the author reveals that a major event at the end of the book was a complete fabrication, almost exactly the opposite of what really happened. The end of the story is not how the story ended. So, while “the bones of the story are all true”, this event at the end “seemed like something that should have happened, and the advantage of fiction is that you can choose the shape of the story”.

Yes, but – this isn’t fiction. Not really. It’s fictionalized. And I have a problem with the change that was made. Problems. For one, I don’t see making a change this big at the end of the story of a woman few have heard of as any more acceptable than, say, changing the end of a certain evening in April 1864 to have John Wilkes Booth miss his shot, or than saying that eventually Thomas Jefferson freed and married Sally Hemings. Or to have Henry VIII say “You know, that Catherine is actually rather nice. I believe I’ll go back to her and be a good husband.” If a writer takes on the task of writing about a life, about an individual’s existence, to make a change just because it feels like what should have happened is, in my opinion, intellectually dishonest. It breaks faith with the subject of the writing.

The other side of it is that now I have doubts about everything else in the book. There are some highly improbable events in the story, and the story as a whole is improbable, and I went along with all of it because, I was assured, it was all based on history. But. If that last really quite large happening never happened, I’m inclined to doubt the rest, however much the author assures me it’s faithful. There was so much luck running through it – sheer dumb luck that kept Sarah/Frank from major injury in battle, not to mention from discovery – that it became a little hard to swallow; s/he glided through the War like the Maryest of Sues, able to do absolutely anything they set her to: she was a crack shot, a born rider, a gentle and patient nurse with an iron nerve, a natural spy, a daring messenger, and no more concerned about killing the enemy than the next man. So to speak. Very shortly she had everyone thinking Frank was the best fellow ever, and in the two years she fought only completely coverable glitches occurred, and – as I said, almost no one ever even entertaining a suspicion that Frank wasn’t what he seemed to be in two years of sleeping and eating and everything else in close quarters with no real privacy. Only the “but she really existed!” thing kept me going. Once there was a hole knocked in that, all bets were off.

The point is played up that all the names in the book are true to life, that Sarah Emma Edmonds/Frank

Image of Sarah Emma Edmundson (or Sarah Edmonds) as “Frank Thompson” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Thompson did indeed serve in the same unit with Damon Stewart (hmm) and Jerome Robbins (!) and so on. But I wish the real names had not been used. I feel like this would have been a more honest novel – more honest as a novel – if the heroine had been named Jane Doe calling herself Joe Schmoe, and bunked with a lad named John Doe and fell in love with Richard Roe. Or something. My understanding is that Sarah’s experience served as the backbone of the book, and the plot was filled in with bits and pieces and shreds and patches from other tales of others of the four hundred women. If this had been straightforwardly presented as a composite portrait, leaning heavily on Sarah but not trying to revivify Sarah, I feel it would have been a much better book – a cleaner book, in a way.

Another way to keep it honest would have been to simply tell Sarah’s story without messing about with facts.

You can’t have it both ways. You can’t preen about how factual the story is and then say “well except for this bit here which I just didn’t like the historical reality of”.

Finally, and this is purely a personal reaction, I find it very sad that Frank’s way of proving his masculinity was to tell dirty stories and spit and scratch and fart.

Related articles

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Yseult – Ruth Nestvold

 

For some reason it took me a long time to get into this LibraryThing Member Giveaway. Once in, I didn’t want to leave, for about half of it. The second half was another story – I didn’t much want to pick it up.

It’s a famous story: Drystan or Tristan or Tristram, and Isolde or Yseult or Iseult, an offshoot (or rather predecessor) of the Arthurian legend. I knew this story; that’s a major challenge for a writer, to take a story with a foregone conclusion and tell it again in such a way that knowing the end doesn’t negate the suspense of the middle. And there was suspense here, and engagement. But. It’s a long book, compared to my average of about 311 pages this year, and knowing (or believing I knew) how it ended along with knowing I had a long ways to go before that end began to be painful. As it turned out, the ending did surprise me – but given that this is based on legend, I didn’t really consider it a good thing.

One thing I had a little trouble with, and this is probably not something which will trouble the vast majority of readers, was the variation of “Tristan” used by the author: Drystan. I’ve had allergies all my life, you see, and what got me through the 80′s was an antihistamine called Dristan. It made a tad bit hard to take the hero seriously in the beginning. And the middle. And, ah, the rest.

I had a much greater problem with the language in a few specific places. The writing on the whole is unpretentious, more of the sort that gets out of the reader’s way than that which flaunts an attempt at sounding historical, and this is positive. However, in the scene depicting the first sexual encounter of our main characters, the language surprised me and let me down. That scene was almost a deal-breaker for me. Suddenly it was like a common or garden variety romance novel, only instead of “roosters and kitty cats” it was “roosters and something a bit more Anglo Saxon”. What is commonly called “the c-word” is not something I ever expected to encounter here. (I generally loathe it when someone resorts to political correctness, shying away from using a “bad word” – but this isn’t a word I choose to use. Ever.) It might have been meant as trying to avoid anachronisms, but came off as crude and aimed to shock, and fitted poorly with the rest of the book. My take on the scene was that the book would have been better without the scene entirely rather than with a scene pretending at linguistic accuracy. Especially given that the handling of later love scenes was perfectly balanced with the rest of the storytelling, that one scene stood out – in a bad way, as though it had been roughed out in whatever words came to mind, and never edited to meld with the rest.

The other problem areas I mentioned are occasional other bits of what I would consider modern slang that just did not sit well within the context. Drystan “took out” an enemy soldier: killed, not went on a date with, but either way this usage jarred. At one point the story says that Yseult has trouble wrapping her mind around something. I can’t track down too much info on the phrase, but Merriam Webster (online) states that it’s an informal American usage. Again, it jars – suddenly Yseult went from medieval wise woman in my head to modern girl wearing Prada. There are more.

There is a lot in here – the growing power of Padraic (Patrick) and Christianity in what will one day be Ireland, versus the waning strength of “paganism”; the struggle of the Irish kings and the British in the wake of the departure of the Romans; the Tuatha De, and Arthur and Gawain and Bedwyr, bards and druids and kings and kingmakers. And, oh look – there’s Guinevere (Ginevra)! It’s a terrific job of world-building … except that I kept trying to balance the story in front of me – Yseult and Drystan and, eventually, and Londinium and Dumnonia and old Uncle Tom Cobley and all – with what I am familiar with – Isolde and Tristan (and not Dristan) and London and … Dumnonia kept throwing me. I had some vague idea for some reason that it was somewhere in what’s now Germany. It wasn’t; it’s at the southwestern tip of England. I knew Eriu was Ireland. Armorica (which, yes, became “America” in my head a couple of times – Dristan in America. *sigh*), Laigin, and all the rest of it – I never thought I was an expert on medieval Europe, and – I was right! I was completely lost in the sea of place names, and I finally got online about halfway through the book and printed a map of the UK and wrote in the 5th century names from the map at the end of the book. I would have loved that map to be available on the author’s website or something, but I didn’t see it. It’s awkward (at least for me) to click over to the map at the 99% point in the book every time I need to place a character – and it makes a difference whether a character is in Wales or in Germany.

Having Arthur running about was a huge distraction; I kept trying to fit the ancient-ized names in with what I knew, trying to cope with the surprise of Arthur’s favorite whore and the son they had, and wait, what? How does he fit in? I wonder why, when Guinevere was Ginevra and Merlin was Myrddin and Mark was Marcus, Arthur wasn’t Arcturus or Arturius or something. And I kept waiting for Lancelot.

Part of me admired the way Kustonnen became Constantine to Marcus, and Dyn Tagell is Tintagel and Caer Leon compacts to Caerleon, the river Sabrina is the Severn, and the character names are familiar yet strange. The rest of me wanted to tear my hair out. I can usually keep a lot of plates spinning while I read – that’s how I sometimes manage to have eight books in my “currently reading” list. But Erainns and Saxons and Romans, oh my – all with a wild variation of names (those fighting at Drystan’s side at one point include Tuthal, Gerenhir, and Flavius). There’s no telling players without a scorecard. (And a map.)

All else aside, the overriding problem I had with the book is the central relationship. Again, I knew it going in: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl marries boy’s father, boy and girl keep relationship going anyway – for starters. And if that was it, the bare bones of it, with only three people involved who could be hurt by the couple’s lust-blinded stupidity, or if there was the oft-used excuse of a love potion determining the lust-blinded stupidity, that would be one thing. I can see an almost clean tragedy coming out of that, Romeo and Juliet-esque maybe. (I feel I should clarify here that by “clean” I mean not Victorian/bowdlerized clean, but as in no collateral damage, either decisions made by adults affecting themselves only or decisions made under the influence of a spell which left them no choice. The word refers more to my feelings about the plot rather than anything within it. Adultery is never going to be clean.) But it all begins with a lie. An understandable lie, but still a great huge life-changing lie. And once that’s overcome, it’s too late for them: Yseult is on her way to marry Drystan’s father, and cannot just run away with Drystan because it would endanger someone else.

It’s when (no spoiler this, as there wouldn’t be much of a book if it didn’t happen) the two of them carry on the affair under the roof of Yseult’s new husband (Drystan’s father, remember) that I lost all patience with them. On the boat over was one thing – stupid, since they took the song from Avenue Q as their motto (“You Can Be As Loud As the Hell You Want”) and sailors talk, but still: only putting themselves at risk. Sneaking around – ever so subtly – under Marcus’s very nose: good lord. (It was often noted in the narration how loud they became. Which to me means they’re even dumber than the politically lethal adultery already painted them.) Even then, if they were shown as having the sense God gave a dormouse (if I could have been on their side), enough to keep it quick and quiet, I could have gone along with it: life sucks, take what joy you can, stick it to the Man (so to speak), yadda yadda. But their stupidity ends up hurting Yseult’s best friend, Brangwyn, whose troubles were part of the reason Yseult let herself be sold off as a foreign bride in the first place. It made me angry, and sick. And it escalates. Of course. Any enjoyment I might have been able to find in the suspense and “romance” of the story vanished at that moment; it just left me feeling sick and angry.

Drystan I can cope with. He wants what he wants, and at times this singlemindedness can almost supersede his duty. He genuinely loves Yseult and wants nothing more in the world than to be with her. My issue is with Yseult. She is supposed to be a wise woman, raised by Yseult the Wise, a Queen, surrounded by the wise of their clan. She behaves for the most part with a deep grace and maturity – she is bred to be a leader and healer and to solve problems. With Drystan, though, she becomes wishy-washy, in a bull-headed way. She makes a decision with great determination, then regrets it, abruptly changes her mind; flings herself into the affair with no heed of repercussion and then without warning pulls away and turns cold. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I was interested, in looking into the Tristan and Isolde legend, to see a mention that in many versions the love triangle here is very like that in the Arthurian legends: like Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde and Mark all love and respect each other. That’s the part that always rips my heart out about Guinevere: she does love both men. That aspect is completely nonexistent here. Marcus is Drystan’s father (not adopted, as in some versions), and as of the beginning of the story the two have not seen each other in years, as Drystan has been fostered in Dumnonia, and when they meet again there is no love lost. Marcus is ambitious, has at least one illegitimate (and rather incestuous) child, and wants Yseult for the power she brings and for her beauty. (She could have Fran Drescher’s voice, the brains of a Snooki, and the personality of Ann Coulter and he wouldn’t care as long as she kept her beauty.) Nobody’s ever rooting for Marcus here, especially not the reader. That turns the adultery into something more palatable, and rather undercuts the historic tragedy of the story.

The theme of the book is, I think, betrayal; the central focus is Yseult betraying her husband, Drystan his father. But as the story wears on, it seems like just about everybody betrays someone at some point. It’s depressing.

As I mentioned at the top of the review, the ending surprised me. There’s a sequel, which explains some of it. The fact that the surprise of the ending was an unpleasant one to me was in part down to my expectations. I’m not a huge fan of tragedy, on the whole, Shakespeare aside – but this was a bit like doing a version of Romeo and Juliet in which Romeo wakes up, sees Juliet dead, and says “Well, damn. So… does anyone still have Rosaline’s number?” I said earlier that it was painful working through 500-odd pages knowing that with every chapter the heartbreak was only going to intensify. By the end of the book I wanted something to make the trek worthwhile. I wanted to need a box of Kleenex. I wanted grand, operatic, searing tragedy. Honestly, I wanted something out of Shakespeare, with half the cast of characters lying dead or dying – not because I hated anyone; I didn’t dislike anyone (even Marcus) enough to want them dead. (I never felt as though I’d gotten to know anyone enough to love them or hate them or grieve or cheer or … care. They all just were.) It just seemed a fitting payoff (and in keeping with the legend). Instead, there was a muted melancholy and a general air of “To be continued…”

I was thinking that part of me would like to see what this author does with the rest of the Arthur saga; Yseult is part one of “The Pendragon Chronicles”. However, Arthur Pendragon seems to be still a background character in the second book, Shadow of Stone, in the description for which I found this: “The threat to their way of life throws [Cador] together with Yseult, the woman he has secretly loved since he was a youth.” So much for the great and tragic love of Tristan and Isolde – I was being facetious when I put words into not-dead Romeo’s mouth a minute ago, but as it turns out I was … sadly, kind of accurate.

Related articles

• Was King Arthur a real person? (history.com)
• Henry McKean auditions for Wagner’s epic opera Tristan and Isolde (newstalk.ie)
• Rediscovered Edward Burne-Jones painting reveals artist’s love-triangle angst (telegraph.co.uk)
• Roche Rock – Where Tristan And Isolde Hid In Plain Sight (presurfer.blogspot.com)

 

 

Whorticulture – Marie-Anne Mancio

This is a very unusual book. I won it through LibraryThing’s Member Giveaway in exchange for a review; otherwise I’m not sure I would have finished it. Yet in the end I’m glad I did finish it.

The title is just what it appears to be, a play on “whore” and “horticulture”. (I’m sure there’s a word for that; conflation?) For the first part: The lives of four young women of antebellum America are highlighted, and through them the expectations and limitations of women in the time period. Four young women begin as innocents, with their own ideas of what life will be like; four young women wind up with their innocence shattered, their expectations crumpled. Life acts on these girls – rarely do any of them have the chance to take action to change their own circumstances, and when they do make the attempt it tends not to work out well for them. This is not a book of erotica, much less a romance novel – there are some scenes which border on the graphic but nothing to compare to most of what’s out there. It is more than anything a sociological study of the circumstances leading up to different forms of prostitution – by its legal definition as well as circumstantial – through four (five, in a way) separate but intersecting stories. The young bride solidly and terribly under her husband’s thumb and the young woman attempting to build a business and maintain an illicit love affair are not much better off than the actual prostitutes – “owned”, in a way, by their madams. This is one of those books which scours away all the little wishful 21st century fantasies of a simpler life in a simpler time; this is one of those books which leaves all the Happily-Ever-After endings looking kind of silly and impossible

For the second part of the title: Throughout the book is woven the language of flowers, and language relating to flowers and plants. This was obviously done very deliberately, but the intention was not so obtrusive as to be annoying.

In some ways it is not an easy read. It’s set in the present tense, which can be off-putting. And the subject matter is difficult. I don’t think it will ruin anyone’s reading experience (and might serve as fair warning) to say that the closest thing to a happy ending in this book is not very happy at all. No one is entirely good in these stories, and no one is entirely happy, even at their happiest – misery runs thick and heavy for these women. Innocence is largely a matter of ignorance, and the ignorance is massive, though short-lived. It’s fascinating to see how these girls’ lives spiral downward, and disheartening. There is a spirit and a sense of humor to the points of view which both makes it easier and makes it harder to watch. This is a book after which I didn’t much like anyone, but particularly men, and after which I probably should have reached for Winnie-the-Pooh or something equally antidotal.

Related articles

• Floriography: The Language of Flowers in the Victorian Era (proflowers.com)
• Language of Flowers (maccandace.wordpress.com)

 

Something Red – Douglas Nicholas

I was wary of all the extravagantly glowing reviews I saw on Goodreads for Something Red (which I received from the publisher through Netgalley, thank you to them). In many cases it’s simply a sign that the author has a lot of cooperative friends. I’m happy to report that this is not the case here.

I was dismayed by the formatting of the ARC on my Kindle; it was a mess. The decorative elements of the text, while very nice, played harry with the reader program, and it took persistence just to get from one chapter to the next. However – well, two things. First, I pushed through despite the issues; I have been known to quit a book because of excessive formatting problems (there are just too many in queue to waste time on something that fights me), but this time I wanted to read this book. What’s wonderful about this is (the second thing): I made a comment on Goodreads when I started – and the author got in touch with me for more details to pass on to the publishers to fix it. Which they did. Mostly. Except that new problems cropped up. But I’m sure the final product will be sorted. This book deserves a beautiful format (which, Mr. Nicholas tells me, is exactly what the hardcover is – I look forward to seeing it).

I keep trying to think of other books to compare this to, and I’m finding it difficult. Maybe that’s why I’ve had trouble writing a review for it. It’s a sneaky book. What could be very dull, traveling through forest in the winter, is turned into a small masterpiece of suspense as the travelers – Molly, a temporarily dispossessed Irish queen and her tiny caravan of an ox, a mule, two carts, and three of her kin, adopted and blood – pick their way through the coldest winter in living memory to trade and heal and maintain the bonds. The tribulations of journeying on muddy roads through a freezing and vast forest are detailed without every becoming tedious – and part of the beautiful way this is accomplished is through the boy Hob, whose perspective is used, and his relationship with the animals who pull their wagons. The ox and mule are given personalities better than a good number of human characters I’ve encountered in lesser books. And those basic difficulties of travel begin to pale next to the fear that suddenly comes one evening as they draw near a monastery where they will take shelter.

“He felt like a coney in a snare, and he could not tell why.”

There’s something in the trees. They can’t see it, really, but they – humans and animals – know it’s there. It’s a predator, and nothing so clean a killer as a wolf or a bear, nothing so stupid as a brigand. They can feel its malice, and its attention … and it is a tremendous relief for the little group when they meet up with other travelers.

There are no stereotypes in Something Red. The individuals within these pages look askance at expectations, and walk the other way shaking their heads in disgust. The people – and the events, and the setting … this is thirteenth-century England, in the very dead of winter, and almost as alien as Narnia. Maybe more. In this England there are small enclaves of people huddling together for survival, and travelers – like Molly and her troupe and the holy and unholy travelers they encounter – move from haven to haven trading what they have, such as music and news and healing, for shelter from the elements and the bandits and beasts haunting the forest. In this England there are battle monks who can – and will – beat intruders into bloody pulp, and who have created an ingeniously walled refuge; there are kindly nobles who keep packs of dogs that are almost as scary as anything in the woods; there are Templars and pilgrims and Lithuanian travelers.

Molly is a heroine to make all others look insipid. And I am including the horde of vampire-fighting/loving girls in recent fantasy in that sweeping statement. Molly is a battle queen, and the fact that she is middle-aged (or as I prefer to say, in her prime) has only made her tougher. One minute she will be healing with the gentlest of touches; the next she will be unerringly picking off bandits with a powerful bow. She is desirable: more than one man encountered in their travels makes it clear he would be happy to have her stay with him, but she already has a man in her bed when she chooses. And she has plans to end her exile from Ireland. Her enemies will need to start gathering an army now.

That man is Jack, a big, inscrutable, terribly scarred man who trails a history behind him that he would choose not to discuss even if those scars did not make speech difficult for him. He is far more than the gentle giant a story will sometimes feature; there is always the sense that there is a great deal going on in his heart and his head. He is Molly’s man, in every way, and it is that that helps save him, and all of them in the end.

Nemain is Molly’s granddaughter and her apprentice, on the edge of becoming a woman and shaping up to be every bit as formidable as Molly. She is, at times, otherworldly, a sprite earthbound; at other times she is a young girl who has been rather like a sister to Hob for the year and a half he’s been with the group. At still other times she is like anything but Hob’s sister, and baffling to the poor boy.

Hob is a lovely, lovely character. He is all boy; whatever the setting, boys always have and always will be unchanging in some regards: he goes where he shouldn’t, does what he shouldn’t, is always eager for a treat and reluctant for chores – and is just becoming old enough to see the allure of the young women they meet along the way. He develops a sweet infatuation with one girl, all the while growing more and more aware of Nemain.

Many times I’ve found that after the first flush of a read has worn off, a cooler head and heart means that the original rating for a book edges downward. After a while I’ll go back and look at the notes I made toward a review, and I’ll wonder why on earth I was as generous as I was… With Something Red, though, it went in the opposite direction. I gave it four stars, a “B”. But time has passed, and I find that the impact of the book is still with me. The characters are still vivid. Four is not enough.

 

Master of Verona – David Blixt

A few pages into Master of Verona one of the two characters who opens the book jumps out of the path of an oncoming horde, off a bridge and feet first into a river. That’s pretty much how that first chapter runs for the reader, as well – straight into it, and swept off with the current.

And the action never really lets up. Before long, the main point of view settles firmly behind the eyes of Pietro, eldest son (eldest surviving, that is) of Dante Alaghieri. (Alaghieri, the poet insists, not Alighieri: the pronunciation has a point to it.) Seventeen-year-old Pietro, his little brother Jacopo (Poco), and their illustrious father have just arrived in Verona, and almost immediately Pietro is swept from a wedding celebration into a wild ride straight into battle – his first – at the heels of Cangrande, the Scaliger, the Greyhound.

Or is he? There is a prophecy about the Greyhound, which Cangrande has grown up believing applies to him … but … there is another candidate. This adds a whole new layer to the story: a man’s life is shaped by his belief in what his destiny is supposed to be. Change the destiny, mute it down from the phenomenal to the merely great, and there will be repercussions.

As another reviewer somewhere in there pointed out, there are a number of typos in the Kindle edition (stray apostrophes, “laying” instead of “lying”) (how ironic is it that I initially misspelled “typos”?), but not so very many – not, I think, enough to turn me away from any but an otherwise very bad book. In an otherwise very good book, they are mere blips.

My familiarity with Dante is, I regret to say, mainly through second- and third-hand sources. I will certainly need to address that. It was wonderful fun reading David Blixt’s version of the working poet.

It was around the time of the first battle against Padua that this began to remind me – in all good ways – of Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. There is something about Pietro being swept off his feet so by the charismatic and irresistible Cangrande that chimed in harmony with Devin’s similar sweeping away by Alessan. Just a boy, if a rather extraordinary boy, caught up in the powerful wake of one of those men around whom history reshapes itself, a man who attracts the sort of loyalty it’s hard to maintain in this age of jaded cynicism.

That’s huge. Cangrande is magnificent, a man born at exactly the right time. Today … there is no one to follow

Dettaglio della spada di Cangrande della Scala (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

with the sort of fierce devotion Cangrande inspires. Today he might begin a meteoric rise in politics, only to be brought down by an illegitimate child or a temper too fully expressed; the standards are more stringent today. But give the man a sword and a horse (or a bottle and a mule) and stand back: something spectacular is going to happen. The Scaliger in his own time and place is something glorious – a leader, the embodiment of a Cause, someone and something to fight for – and fight beside, to sacrifice for and sacrifice to, unto one’s own life.

The book as a whole has a general feel which is reminiscent of Tigana. The setting of Master of Verona is, of course, Italy, in the 14th century, but there is for me a strong flavor of fantasy – it feels like as much a fantasy Italy as the Hand in Tigana. This Italy is a feral place where a poet is revered as a rock star. It is a setting of feuds and battles, swords and, if not sorcery, then soothsayers, and astrology and fate and destiny taken very, very seriously – and it’s all seen largely through this young man’s fresh eyes, with excitement and wonder.

There is a battle near the end of Tigana which, the first time I read it, might as well have been happening around me. My heart pounded, my breathing was short and fast, and internally I was ducking and dodging and parrying. I’ve never had an experience like it while reading … till now. Blixt hasn’t stressed my blood pressure to quite the same levels, but the duel … Whoof.

It’s clear from the flurry of words surrounding this book that it has something to do with the tale of Romeo and Juliet. This idea is a minefield, I think; like any delving into Shakespearean topics it could go drastically badly or beautifully well. Blixt already proved to me that he knows Shakespeare; I loved Her Majesty’s Will as much as anything I read this year. I was inclined to trust him on this one.

I was right.

By the time a friend of Pietro reveals that his actual Christian name is Romeo (threatening his friends with death if they ever use it), the setup had seen to it that I cared about these characters and the announcement gave me a sinking feeling. No, I thought, dammit, not these guys.

And I just realized: that feeling is what I read for. That level of investment in the story and its people – that is the goal. There are lots (and lots) of bad books out there; there are plenty of mediocre books and even good books that are fun to read without engaging the emotions to any great extent. There are even quite a few books which do cause laughter and tears and all that. But this – this is near the pinnacle of the reading experience in my book (so to speak). This is being made to care, very very much indeed, about what happens to the people who live and breathe through the words – made, without ever feeling manipulated. At this level, this is pretty rare.