When Stars Will Shine
is a collection of more than 20 short stories – some very short and some rather
more substantial. They are all on a theme of Christmas
and, because the book is being sold in aid of a military charity (Help for
Heroes ) many, though by no means all, of the writers have chosen to include
soldiers or ex-soldiers in the stories. Otherwise these stories have very
little in common. Some are funny – some of them very funny. (Lucy Cameron’s What Can Possibly Go Wrong? was a personal
favourite.) Some are horror stories. Several, given the Christmas theme, are
inevitably sentimental, often combined with a liberal attack on our uncaring
society that can become cloying. The message that we treat veterans shockingly
badly is one that needs to be heard, but light fiction may not always be the
right place.
Obviously I enjoyed some of these
stories much more than others, but that is inevitably the way with a collection
of short stories by different authors. It will probably be the case for most
readers, but what I enjoyed they may hate and what turned them off may have
been the ones I most liked. It’s like a tin of Quality Street. Some people like
the soft centres and some people like the nuts, but you have to rummage around
in the tin and pick out your personal favourites. All of the stories are
professional efforts by experienced writers. Given this, I’m not going to go
through recommending this or that story. A collection this size will have
something to offer almost everybody and, at just £2 on Kindle (https://www.amazon.co.uk/When-Stars-Will-Shine-Helping-ebook/dp/B08234131P) it represents excellent value for money. And all the proceeds go
to Help for Heroes, which offers ex-servicemen the help they should be able to
expect from government but often don’t seem to get.
I see beggars on our local train clean
up every night by pretending to be ex-soldiers. (They aren’t.) People hand over
money because, whatever you think of the wars we have sent people to fight over
the past decades, the men and women who fought them went because our government
sent them and we owe them something. If everyone who gave money to beggars with
a hard-luck story bought this book instead (or just donated directly to Help
for Heroes) it would make a real difference.
Lynn Bryant studied history at university and her books,
though an exciting read if enjoyed as pure invention, are excellent primers on
the history of the Napoleonic Wars. It does mean that any review of her books
ends up being a discussion/instant summary of historical incidents, so I’m
moving this from my occasional Tuesday book review slot to here on Friday.
People said they wanted more blog posts about history, so history you will get.
‘This Blighted Expedition‘ is the second in a series of books about Hugh Kelly, the Manx captain of the fictional HMS Iris. You’ll probably enjoy it more if you read the first in the series (‘An Unwilling Alliance’) but you don’t have to have read that to enjoy this one.
The Walcheren Campaign: the facts
Captain Kelly is off to Walcheren, arguably Britain’s
greatest military disaster of the early 19th century. Never heard of
it? That is so often the way with great military disasters. (Don’t cite the
Charge of the Light Brigade: this was a whole different level of awful.)
Walcheren was an island that commanded the approach to Antwerp, where the
French had a large number of ships that the British quite liked the idea of
sinking. To do this, they would need to land on Walcheren and then leapfrog
troops to Antwerp to capture the town. This was to be achieved by transporting
around 40,000 troops in one of the biggest fleets ever assembled. What could
possibly go wrong?
The answer is: practically everything. Delayed by poor
administration and bad weather, the fleet set off so late that the French were
prepared for them. Adverse winds meant that the Navy couldn’t provide the Army
with its promised support. Maps were unreliable and details of French defences
were out of date. The weather was appalling. Worst of all, it turned out that
Walcheren was a breeding ground for mosquitoes that carried malaria.
The evacuation of Walcheren by the English – By Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux
The Army was struck down by plague of almost biblical
proportions: four thousand died of malaria or typhoid fever. (Only 106 died in
combat.) Many of the survivors were plagued with recurring bouts of fever for
the rest of their lives (a typical problem with malaria). Wellington complained
that troops sent to joint his Peninsular campaign after Walcheren were often
hit with fever on arrival and were unfit for service.
So what line does the book take?
As with her other books, Bryant neatly interweaves romantic threads and straightforward military history in a way that many other authors find hard to get right. Hugh Kelly is still married to Roseen, the girl he courted in ‘An Unwilling Alliance’. She is now the mother of his young son and, though she has travelled with her husband on non-combat missions in the past, she is now firmly left behind when he sails into danger. News of the sickness in Walcheren, though, has her abandon her son with friends to sail to the Low Countries so that she can help to nurse the sick. It’s a credible plot line and the story benefits from her perspective as well as that of the fighting men.
Not that Roseen is the only romantic interest in the story. There are two other women who appear, one taking a significant role while the other seems more likely to feature in future books. The formidable Katja de Groot, a Dutch businesswoman, is a well-drawn and fully realised character, who takes up with a British soldier who is billeted on her. The other, a British girl who is one of the startling number of hangers-on who have come to see the fun, is more sketchy. She’s a sweet young thing whose father is a brute and who is being shown-off to any putative husband with the money or connections to improve the family’s social connections. The ending suggests she will return. One of Dawson’s characters is smitten: “She is intelligent, witty and very lovely.” We are, I am sure, going to discover her hidden depths in the future.
The number of romances gives an idea of the sheer scale of Bryant’s book. We follow not only Captain Kelly and his remarkable First Lieutenant Alfred Durrell, but a lot of the soldiers they work alongside. Many of these are in the fictitious 110th Regiment whose adventures in the Peninsular are the subject of her other series, the Peninsular War Saga, which allows her to have already fully developed characters available for this book. Reading the Peninsular War Saga may mean you enjoy ‘This Blighted Expedition’ even more, but I’ve read only the first in the series and I had no problems with understanding the nature of the 110th.
Durrell is attached to Home Popham, the ambitious post-captain who, despite his lowly rank, is widely credited as the man behind the whole disastrous expedition. Durrell is also an acquaintance of Lord Chatham, the nominal commander of the enterprise. Through his eyes, we see the way that the expedition is led and some of the inter-personal and inter-service squabbles that contributed to the disaster.
It is a tribute to Bryant’s skill that, except for some
junior officers, she keeps the vast cast well delineated so that even a
moderately inattentive reader like me seldom finds himself muddling his characters
together.
There is a certain amount of military action which provides
some excitement, but most of the drama takes place in the meetings of senior
officers. Bryant takes the line that Lord Chatham was set up to take the blame
for Walcheren because it was politically expedient for him to become the
scapegoat, although we are left in no doubt that Popham is the villain here.
More facts: the politics
Bryant’s research is impeccable. As a writer of military
historical fiction myself, I am absolutely in awe of the depth of her research
and the amount of detail she integrates into her plots. When it comes to the
politics of the Walcheren campaign she relies a lot on Jacqueline Reiter’s
book, ‘The Late Lord,’ which I reviewed a few weeks ago.
It’s a reasonable approach as Reiter’s book seems to be the definitive account.
She does, though, get caught up with Reiter’s interest in the way that Chatham
was treated after Walcheren. There was an Enquiry by the House of Commons
sitting as a committee and Chatham was, as the phrase goes, stitched up like a
kipper (allegedly).
Once everyone is safely back in England, Bryant carries on with
a view of the enquiry. Durrell is called as a witness, so we get to see things
close up. Unfortunately the way that Lord This was trying to get one over on
Lord That and that Mr Somebody was trying to do down What’s’isname requires
more than a casual interest in the politics of the period. Pop quiz: who was
the Prime Minister in 1810? If you don’t know (it was Spencer Perceval) then
this will not be your favourite part of the book. It’s one of those cases where
the history in historical fiction beats the fiction to a slow and painful
death.
Conclusion: read this book
Don’t let the political coda put you off. Bryant makes it as
interesting as it could be and there’s lots of fun with the characters we have
come to love at Walcheren as they try to get back to normal life – or as normal
as it could be in a country still at war.
There is still a young girl’s love to be won, reputations to
be made and battles ahead to fight.
Bryant is a lovely writer with a nice prose style and the
ability to fill a story with exciting incident. She blends real historical
detail with complete fabrication in a way that leaves you unable to see the
joins. It’s a book that kept me reading late into the night.
‘This Blighted Expedition’, despite its slightly damp-squib
ending, is a fantastic read. The ending isn’t an ending at all, of course
(always a potential problem with series books). To find out how everything
finally works out, I’ll be reading the next book to follow the life and times
of Captain Hugh Kelly and his wife as they sail on through the Napoleonic Wars.
Publicity about this book talks about somebody being sent
back in time to save the Crown of France, but it’s not an actual physical crown
that she is sent to save. Rather, she has to save the life
of one young man whose descendants will eventually become rulers of France.
The plot’s immaterial, really. The book is
mainly an opportunity to explore the world of the 13th century. There’s a bit
of history about the Crusades, but mainly it’s social history. What was it like
to live then? Dull, if the truth be told. If you want to get from A to B you
walk. If you’re lucky and rich, you may ride. There’s a lot of getting from A
to B in this book. Walking or riding, travelling takes a very long time and for
most of that time nothing really happens. According to this story your journey
may be broken by occasional extreme violence and quite a bit of sex, but much
of the sex will be boring too. (A huge shame as Macaire’s other books include
some brilliant sex scenes, both erotic and hilarious.) If your journey takes
you across the sea, you will do it in a boat which, lacking portholes, will
mean being shut up in a small, dark cabin. Inevitably this is, once again, dull
stuff until you are caught in a storm when it is extremely unpleasant and for
many of the travellers, fatal.
Our heroine’s journey takes us to
Tunis, on the Eighth Crusade. There are a couple of battles, but little detail
of the military goings-on. There is rather more detail of the aftermath – the
dead and dying and the general unpleasantness of war. As with most wars at the
time, disease is an even greater threat than the enemy and when the army
returns to Europe (more storms, more dull travelling) it’s a great deal smaller
than it was when it left.
All that sex results in pregnancy. (We
are told that people are very relaxed about sex, but I doubt that that is true
given that the danger of pregnancy – and the terrible consequences if unmarried
– must have discouraged most young women from casual encounters.) Our heroine
ends up with a baby, but no husband. Awkward. Fortunately, love (in the form of
a kind older man) conquers all and we have a happy, if hardly politically
correct, ending.
A Crown in Time is a great introduction
to the 13th century and Macaire is certainly more fun to read than a
school textbook. There’s more than a little school textbook in it, though, the
narrator often commenting on life at the time, with even the odd statistical
snip:
“Childbirth was the main cause of death among women at that time, with one-third of the deaths of adult women due to complications.”
Read it if you’ve always wanted to know more about 13th century France or if you enjoy exploring new worlds in an undemanding story.
A Crown in Time
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group (paperback copy) ISBN: 9781786157768
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.
