A blog post about the 2nd Earl of Chatham and the book Jacqueline Reiter wrote about him.
I read an awful lot of books of historical non-fiction. The
occasional one is excellent. I read a fair number of
contemporary documents about the siege of Cawnpore for my book, Cawnpore, but honestly there was hardly
anything that wasn’t included in Andrew Ward’s astonishing Our Bones Are Scattered. It read like a novel too. In fact, I’d
recommend it over my own book but at more than 700 pages it’s maybe a bit heavy
for a holiday read.
Most of the historical stuff I labour
through, though, is beyond awful. I hate saying this, especially when I’ve met
some of the authors, but they really can’t write, which is sad seeing that
history is essentially about telling stories. (The clue is in the name.)
So let’s hear it for the amazing and
amusing Jacqueline Reiter (a clear case of nominative determinism if ever there
was one). This is a woman who writes so well that I even read (and mainly
enjoyed) her PhD thesis. I haven’t even read my wife’s PhD thesis. (It’s also
historical and, in fairness, I’ve read most of it in bits and she is also a
brilliant writer – possibly not unconnected to the fact that she didn’t train
in history.)
Jacqueline is an excellent speaker, a decent writer of short stories, and publishes an intermittent but stellar blog, but The Late Lord is (as far as I know) her only published book.
It is a biography of the 2nd
Earl of Chatham, the son of the Elder Pitt and the brother of the Younger.
I’ve met people born into a family of
over-achievers and it’s a terrible thing to happen to anyone. The poor guy
can’t make a speech or hold an opinion without somebody comparing it
unfavourably to his father or his brother. Painfully shy to start off with,
this drove him to become a virtual recluse, which meant everybody attacking him
as a stand-offish snob on top of everything else.
The
Earl should have hidden away in the country and bred horses, which seems
pretty well what he was put on the earth to do, but he had an enormous sense of
duty: to his country (which never appreciated him) and to his brother (who
knifed him in the back when it became politically convenient). Unable to star
in politics and unfitted for a professional career, he took what was
traditionally the role of the third son and tried to make a career in the army.
He was conscientious and personally quite brave (a key attribute for early
19th-century commanders), being wounded in action. His brother though, saw him
as more valuable as political cannon fodder than the traditional sort, so after
being wounded he wasn’t allowed to serve in action again until the Younger had
ended his political career. At this point, he was given command of a doomed
expedition to the Low Countries which was supposed to be a joint naval-military
operation. The venture failed spectacularly with the army blaming the navy, the
navy blaming the army and the politicians (who bore a significant amount of the
responsibility) blaming the most convenient scapegoat, which turned out to be
him. Unable to quite believe how completely he was being stitched up, he made a
totally inadequate defence and retired in public disgrace.
Failed politician and failed
general, the poor man’s main solace was his personal life until his wife went
mad and died after a long illness, leaving him distressed beyond measure. At this point the King (as far as I can see his only staunch
supporter in his life) made him governor of Gibraltar, in an attempt to give
him both an income (it goes without saying that he was broke) and a reason for
getting out of bed in the morning (which, as it happens, he very often didn’t
do, being a particular enthusiast for long lie-ins).
North View of Gibraltar from Spanish Lines: John Mace (1782)
He hated Gibraltar, but as with
almost everything else in his life, he persevered with a sense of duty and was a
solidly, if unspectacularly, good governor. The posting,
though, broke his health (he was already 65 when he arrived there) and he
returned to England after four years. For ten years he lived quietly with his
health continuing to deteriorate although, paradoxically, with the man himself
away from the public gaze his reputation began to recover. His funeral, after a
stroke in 1835, was, Reiter assures us, “in grand style” at Westminster
Abbey.
Reiter narrates the Earl’s life with
genuine sympathy and makes the politics of the early 19th century
much clearer than anybody else I’ve read. She doesn’t condescend to the
readers, but neither does she assume knowledge that most amateurs like me will
not possess. The book is indexed and annotated to within an inch of its life
(possibly more than the non-academic reader really wants) but it remains lively
and well written and a thoroughly enjoyable read. If only more history books
were written like this, more people would be interested in history.
Entertaining Mr Pepys is the third and, probably final, book in Deborah Swift’s series about Mr Pepys’ women. Although the protagonist, Mrs Knepp is an actual historical character who Pepys knew, the man himself is only incidental to the story. In fact, all the scenes featuring him could be removed without affecting the story arc at all.
In the second in the series, A Plague on Mr Pepys, Swift had moved away from the privileged world of the Pepys household in order to explore the poverty and misery of the artisanal class. This time the focus is on the world of the theatre, but again we see the way in which the mid-17th century trapped and exploited women. Mrs Knepp has been cast adrift by her uncaring father into an unloving marriage. Mr Knepp is a brute, using his wife as an unpaid servant. All that keeps her going is that she has one servant of her own who, being black, is even lower down the pecking order than she is.
Other women have more incidental roles, exchanging sexual favours for better parts in the theatre or driven mad by cruel husbands (in a scene of full-on Dickens-esque madness, she stands in the street as London burns, “her arms waving like a crazy statue”). Even Mrs Pepys complains of the cruelty and meanness of her husband though, by the standards of the time, Pepys seems to have been quite a good husband and her life was comfortable, verging on luxurious.
Samuel Pepys by John Hayls (1666)
If the first three quarters of the book reads, at times, like a feminist tract, does it give a fair picture of the position of women in the world of the period? I’m not sure that it does. We meet an orange girl whose mother was a prostitute and who is, at 14 years old, already little better than a whore herself. Bright and sassy, she still seems doomed to a miserable, and probably short, life, but this is Nell Gwynne, who is to become the King’s mistress. We hear lots about the present hardships of the characters but little about their future success.
We get a rather one-sided version of their married lives, too. We are assured that, though Mrs Knepp spends a lot of time with Pepys, they are not lovers. This is the Pepys who, we know from his diaries, will literally bend a serving girl over in a corridor and have his way with barely a break of step as he passes. But Mrs Knepp is unsullied by Pepys (though an excellent Historical Note suggests at least two lovers). Poor Mr Knepp: brute as he is, he is at least a faithful brute.
The problem that I have is not so much that the women have miserable lives but that Swift clearly believes that they are miserable mainly on account of their being women. You don’t have to be a committed Marxist to interpret the exploitation of women as an example of the general exploitation of the weak by the strong. Mrs Pepys, as we have seen in earlier books in the series, is not above casual cruelty to servants and the book does not dwell on the hardships faced by the labouring man of the period. In fact, Knepp’s business (he hires carriage horses) requires a yard full of lads who, one suspects do hard work fetching and carrying for rather more kicks than ha’pence. Even so, Mrs Knepp is quite happy to see them go without food when she spends the meat money on theatre tickets, demonstrating that the rule that the strong will exploit the weak applies across both genders.
Sadly (and uncharacteristically), Swift allows the requirements of the plot elements to over-ride the characterisation at the beginning of the story. Mrs Knepp has apparently had a very happy childhood with a father whom she loves and who seems to have loved her back. With her mother’s death, her father marries a wicked step-mother and the poor girl is foisted off on a clearly unsuitable husband after which her father cuts off all contact. It doesn’t ring true and sticks out as an obvious plot device in a book in which most of the other relationships are lovingly and credibly delineated. Even the ghastly Mr Knepp is given a back-story that makes him a sympathetic character despite his frequent cruelty.
Even with these reservations, the book demonstrates Swift’s fine grasp of her period. It’s full of convincing detail: the use of limes to avoid pregnancy; the actor-manager’s insistence on women playing roles where they are disguised as men because “Killigrew likes you in breeches so they can see your bum”; the casual prejudice against Catholics. She takes you into that world and makes it real. You hear the noises and smell the smells (and how revolting many of those smells are). If the miserable domestic life of Mrs Knepp sometimes acts as a bit of a drag on the plot we, like her, can at least escape to the theatre and the world of the King’s Players is as lively as the world of Knepp’s stable yard is dull.
The book, like the theatrical performances that are such an important part of the story, is divided into three acts. Act Three sees a dramatic change of pace. Domestic drama and sexual politics give way to the horror that is the Great Fire of London. Here Swift comes into her own. She has a flair for melodrama and, with the fire, melodrama is clearly appropriate. Swift first describes the fire as we see it in Pepys’ diary.
Elisabeth peered over Janey’s shoulder. There was an orange glow a little way off on Marke Lane.
“Fancy you waking us up for that,” Elisabeth said. ”It’s just someone’s bonfire. Someone could piss it out.”
By the morning more than three hundred houses have been burned down and the Thames is clogged with the boats of refugees fleeing the flames. We see the disaster from the point of view of several of the characters: Pepys burying his parmesan cheese in his garden; a Frenchman returning up the River from a trip across the Channel; Knepp with a stable full of straw and horses terrified by the smell of burning. We move from the detail of horses trapped in their stalls and people staring in dismay at the wreckage of their houses pulled down to make firebreaks, to a broader view of the impact of the fire on the city.
Burning of old St. Paul’s, by Wenceslaus Hollar Engraving (Yale Center for British Art)
The landscape of London was like mouth with missing teeth, full of blackened stumps and gaps. The view was alien; unrecognisable. Half-burned joists and rafters stuck out from church steeples, in the distance something exploded.
By the time the fire is burned out, relationships have been changed for ever. “It’s a purification,” one character says. “London needed it.” There is talk of how the city cannot survive, though we know, of course, that it did. Out of the fire, came a better London and, in this book, better people. Even Knepp is redeemed and, at last, Swift allows that some men do try to be decent people, even prepared to sacrifice themselves for the women they love. (No more details because spoilers!)
In the end, the fire redeems not only the characters but the book. Any criticisms that the reader has in the earlier chapters are likely to be burned away in the flames. If some of the reconciliations seem a little pat, well, it worked for Dickens, so I don’t see why Swift shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it too. She has, once again, produced a gripping and convincing tale of the Restoration. If you enjoy this period (and books like M J Logue’s An Abiding Fire) you should definitely read this one.
[This is an extended version of a review that first appeared in Historia, the on-line magazine of the Historical Writers’ Association: http://www.historiamag.com/ ]
This is the latest book that Sapere have been kind enough to
send me for review. It calls itself a legal thriller, but
it shares many of the attributes of a police procedural. Think Law and Order with the emphasis on the
lawyers.
Sapere sent it to me because it was
described as a historical mystery. It has a prologue in London during the
Blitz, which I felt caught the period
better than many thrillers. Most of the book,
though, is set in 1965. I can remember 1965, so, for me, it’s odd to think of
this as a historical novel, but it meets the criteria that I use. It is a book
firmly embedded in its period – so much so that I wondered if it was a reprint,
but the copyright assures me that it was written in 2019.
Not only the period, but the legal
procedures are totally convincing. At the end of the book there is a note about
the author who, it turns out, was a practising barrister. His books are based on real cases and draw on his personal
experience and this intimate knowledge of the law definitely shows through.
Although it will appeal to lovers of the police procedural who are in the
position of solving a whodunnit closely based on actual crimes, it can get a
bit turgid at times. For example, court depositions are not literary works and
many of them are reproduced in full. This can slow the narrative, but the
subject matter is generally gripping enough and I would imagine that most
people will have no trouble pushing through occasional dull passages.
Possibly in an attempt to keep the
excitement level up, the whole book is written in the present tense. I did not particularly enjoy this approach, but I found that I
was automatically putting all the verbs into the past tense as I read, so
though it occasionally jarred it was not a huge problem.
I did not warm to the protagonist
who is too much a creature of the plot to really come alive. He is provided with a family and a back story and these
incidental characters are much better fleshed out than the hero, although I
found they very often intruded because this was the only point at which I was
aware of coming in in the middle of a series. The plot, though, definitely
carried me along although the twist at the end did not come as the surprise
that it should have.
Overall this is the sort of book
that will appeal to people who like period piece detective mysteries. I imagine fans of Agatha Christie or even the Inspector Morse
books, for example, may well be in for a treat.
I reviewed this book in a piece about how I spent a lazy few days in the country and the writer (whose Twitter presence as @CandyKorman is regularly entertaining) didn’t notice the review. “Serves her right for not reading your wonderful blog carefully enough!” I hear you cry. But I try to be nice, so here it is again, with a few words about one of her other books as well.
Bram Stoker’s Summer Sublet
Out in the country without TV or internet, I was lucky to have taken a copy of Candy Korman’s Bram Stoker’s Summer Sublet, a gloriously silly spin on vampire stories, set in today’s New York. Wilhelmina (obviously cursed from birth with a name like that) is recovering from the shock of finding her fiancé in flagrante with another woman and has decamped to a stranger’s house to pet-sit her dog and strangely loquacious parrot, while her now ex-fiancé enjoys the honeymoon they would have spent together in Italy. She is in an understandably emotional state – the sort of emotional state where you might easily decide that your next door neighbour is a vampire. Having another neighbour whose name is Dr Van Helsing probably doesn’t help keep her imagination in check. Or is it all her imagination? (I’m not telling – you’ll have to read it for yourself.)
Candy Korman has a lovely prose style and writes with a strong sense of place. I felt I was in New York – quite an achievement isolated in the middle of Wales. Ms Korman has written several books based around old-school monsters and I’ll definitely be reading another.
Poed
This novella is a wonderful pastiche of Poe’s writing with lots of sly (and not-so-sly) references to his stories. Like the residents of The Usher Institute for the Study of Criminal Psychopathology, it’s nuts. But, unlike the assembly of killers hidden away in the Institute, it’s nuts in a good way. A great, short, fun read.
This isn’t a book review site, but 2019 saw around two dozen books reviewed. It seems sensible to give a quick summary here, with links to the original reviews for anybody who wants to read more about them.
At the end I do ask if people have any thoughts on what they would like me to write about next year. Please take a quick look at that and use the ‘Comment’ boxes to give me some feedback. Thank you
Historical novels
Because this is primarily a history blog, most of the reviews are of historical novels. I’ll sort them by time period.
17th and 18th century
Some authors made repeat appearances in 2019. Two of Deborah Swift’s books featured: The Gilded Lily, and A Plague on Mr Pepys, both set during the Restoration and both excellent reads. The Gilded Lily will appeal more to Young Adults, but both can, in my opinion, be enjoyed by all age groups.
There were also two books by M J Logue, also set in the Restoration: Abiding Fire and A Deceitful Subtlety. Both are enormous fun and I do recommend them.
Also sort of in the Restoration is Jemahl Evans’ Of Blood Exhausted. The action of the book takes place during the Civil War, but the narrator is telling his story from the time of the Restoration. It’s the third of a series that starts with The Last Roundhead and you do need to read them in order to have any idea of what is going on, but if you’ve enjoyed the first wo, you will enjoy this one.
Moving towards the present day, we have The Wolf and the Watchman set in Sweden in 1793. This is a truly remarkable book, though not a pleasant read. Definitely one of the best things I read last year.
19th and early 20th century
Only one of the books I reviewed this year was set in the Napoleonic era: Lynn Bryant’s An Unwilling Alliance. It centres on the British attack on Copenhagen in 1807. It works well as historical military fiction, but it is also an excellent love story. For once, love story and adventure yarn manage to complement each other in a way that seems to give many authors a lot of difficulty. (There’s a reason why there’s not a lot of romance in my Burke series.) Lynn knows her history and she can write. Recommended.
Burial Rites is one of those books where very little happens but which is absolutely gripping. It’s set in Iceland in 1828 and apparently based very closely on an actual event. I can’t sum it up in a couple of sentences – read the review and then I hope you will go on to read the book. Another serious contender for my book of the year.
I reviewed a couple of books that described themselves as Victorian mysteries. Both were competently written. Jean Stubbs’ The Painted Face is more an exploration of the mind of one of the protagonists than it is a conventional detective story and I’m not sure it quite comes off, but it’s provides pleasant enough descriptions of Parisian life in 1902.
Marilyn Todd’s Snap Shot is set at pretty much the same time. The plot bowls along with plenty of gruesome deaths and a little bit of sex to keep the pages turning. Finding out whodunnit came as a surprise, but not so much of a surprise as to make me feel cheated. It’s frothy and it’s fun and it has a convincing historical background.
In a world outside of history as we know it
The Castle of Otranto isn’t your regular historical fiction, but I reviewed it after a visit to Strawberry Hill House, Walpole’s fantasy Gothic castle which was designed to reflect the setting of the story. Published in 1764, it’s widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. It’s a curiosity piece rather than a book you would read for its literary merit but it is fun and worth a look. (It’s very short, so it’s not going to take long to read.)
Historical non-fiction
I reviewed three works of historical non-fiction in 2019: Rees-Mogg’s book on the Victorians, Tony Gould’s Imperial Warriors and Weirder War Two, a collection of weird facts or nearly-facts or might-have-been facts about the Second World War.
Gould’s history of the Ghurkas and their role in the British Army is easily the best of the three. Rees-Mogg’s book got a lot of critical attention, but you can make a decent argument that Weirder War Two is the better piece of historical writing. It’s certainly more fun to read.
Other fiction
Thrillers
It’s all very well reading the odd literary masterpiece, but, like a lot of people, what I really like to do at the end of a day of reading serious stuff about old generals and suchlike is sit down with a good thriller.
Lots of people are quite snooty about thrillers. In fact, it’s really difficult to write a good “bad” book. Scandinavians seem pretty good at it (too many long nights with not enough to do?) and I had a couple of Scandi-noirs on my list this year: The Cabinand The Island.
Away from Scandinavia, the British writer, Sally Spencer (who does some nice historical mysteries as well) has taken to setting stories in the USA. Violation is an enjoyable read, though the subject matter (assaults on very young girls) is a bit disturbing for what is essentially a lightweight work.
The last book that fits more or less in this category this year was Tannis Laidlaw’s Half-truths and Whole Lies. It’s a bit different from the usual thriller, being a story of Machiavellian professors lying and twisting their way up the academic greasy pole. It’s a lot of fun. albeit with the required melodramatic conclusion. (If you’ve never worked in academe, you may think it’s an improbable tale but it really isn’t.)
Terry Tyler
Terry Tyler is one of those self-published authors who give the lie to those who say that everything worth reading has come through a conventional publisher. In fact, Terry encouraged me to move into self-publication myself with Dark Magic and I have been pleasantly surprised by how much freedom this gives a writer.
Terry has written a range of different kinds of book, from short stories and light romantic fiction to dark post-apocalyptic fantasies. The common thread to all of them is that Terry is just a very good writer. She doesn’t produce high blown literary fol-de-rols but solid light prose which makes her books easy to read and keeps you turning the pages. It’s a hugely underrated skill.
Book of hers I have reviewed this year are Round and Round(fantasy/romance), Hope (dystopian fiction, which reminds me a bit of 1984) and Blackthorn (post-apocalyptic)
Poetry
I don’t usually review poetry, but I took up an invitation from Australian poet Frank Prem to read his “blank verse memoir” Small Town Kid and, rather to my surprise, I loved it. I went on to read two more of his poetry collections, Devil in the Wind and The New Asylum. All three are astonishing. Devil in the Wind, about the Australian bush fires of 2009 has a particular resonance right now. I do strongly recommend it.
My final mention is for a book of non-fiction about how we respond to messengers rather than messages. In the decade that brought us Trump and Johnson, this should have been a fascinating book but, sadly, I found it irritating – neither an easily read series of anecdotes nor a serious academic study, it repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered. It’s a subject close to my heart, though, so I’m afraid I wrote quite a long discussion of it. If you read that, you can probably skip the actual book.
My books of the Year
It’s impossible to pick out one book. Even amongst those I have reviewed, there are so many different kinds of writing . Three, though, did stand out as particularly worth reading. They were (in no particular order):
What do you want to see in 2020? I started out just reviewing historical novels, but occasionally I get sent books for free (especially through the rather wonderful NetGalley, which I do recommend) and these come with a sort of implicit expectation that they will be reviewed. That means that they find their way onto my blog where they are not necessarily a natural fit. But people do read them and I imagine some writers (although not all) appreciate the additional exposure. But, honestly, my views on a thriller like The Cabin are no more valid than yours and what I enjoy reading won’t necessarily appeal to you and vice versa. Do you read the reviews? Do you enjoy them? Would you like to see more? Or fewer? I’m thinking I might focus more closely (though far from exclusively ) on historical novels next year. What do you all think?
Terry Tyler’s latest, Blackthorn, is another dystopian novel set in the world she initially established in the Renova trilogy, but it stands up perfectly without you reading the others.
Blackthorn
explores a Britain (and probably the rest of the world) that has collapsed and
is being rebuilt with England having a tribal structure. A few small towns
dominate the countryside with villages and other communities gradually falling
to bands of travelling outlaws. Blackthorn is one of the most successful of
these towns.
This isn’t a political book and a political theorist would, I suspect, struggle with the economic basis of Blackthorn. It isn’t quite a feudal system, because it’s not based on ownership of the land, but it does reflect the feudal era in that there is a strict hierarchy within the village with a hereditary leader supported by guards (equivalent to nobles) and then skilled workmen working its way down to people who are essentially serfs. There is a lot of exposition of the nature of the society, which made the book hard for me to get into. It also has an enormous cast with lots of minor characters and I initially found it quite difficult to keep track of everybody.
Fortunately, not that many of Terry Tyler’s readers are likely to be political nerds and once the story really gets going we begin to focus on a more manageable number of characters. The characterisation comes alive in a way which seemed unlikely in the opening chapters. I began to wonder if the characters had taken over from the author, because the plot, too, becomes much livelier. We move away from the details of the village economy, with its peculiar currency of chips and crowns (surely eaten away by inflation in any real-world economy expanding at that rate) and its tightly defined social structure and start getting into something more interesting, centred on the strengths and weaknesses of the people living there.
I had started reading almost with a sense of duty, but, as the plot picked up, I was increasingly drawn into it and by the end I was sitting up late to find out what happened next. This is encouraged by Terry Tyler’s prose style which is, as always, fluid and engaging.
I’m not going to say anything about the plot because it’s
almost impossible to do so without spoilers. At first I
thought it was boring and predictable, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.
That’s all I’ll say and that’s probably too much.
There are a lot of people who will be put off this book, with its dystopian background, its detailed invented society, and its discussion of religion, but they, like me, will probably find that it draws them in if they stay with it.
