I’ve got a new book out this week: Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. By now I’m getting a bit tired of talking about it (though I’ve forced myself to put a paragraph or two at the end of this post). I’d like to talk about a book by someone else. It’s particularly good to be able to talk about a book I’ve really enjoyed. So here we are with The Fortune Keeper, the third of Swift’s Italian Renaissance series.
The story starts with Giulia Tofana, introduced in The Poison Keeper, still living in the Jewish ghetto in Venice with her lover Fabio. Things have changed, though. She has had two children who both died and she and Fabio have adopted Mia, a young girl now on the cusp of womanhood. The new setup marks a sharp change of gear from the previous story, The Silkworm Keeper. According to a historical note at the end of the book, this was driven largely by the need to adapt the story to take account of new information about Giulia Tofana that has turned up since the first in the trilogy, The Poison Keeper, was written. Whatever the reason, it’s worked out very well. The Poison Keeper is a brilliant book, but keeping the plot going for a second in the series was a stretch and I wasn’t sure that a third would work. The reset that the new research has made necessary means that The Fortune Keeper is able to draw a deep breath and, to a degree, start again, bringing new life to the series.
Not that we are starting from scratch. Several characters and incidents from the previous books feature crucially in the plot. Although The Fortune Keeper works as a standalone novel it would benefit a lot from a brief summary of the key points of the earlier books to guide any new readers.
So what does The Fortune Keeper offer? Firstly, a wonderful view of Renaissance Venice. I don’t know a lot about Venetian history but I found Swift’s Venice completely convincing. It’s rich but decadent. The palaces are already crumbling; the tides regularly flood houses and businesses. It’s a city where corruption runs deep. There are gamblers and whores everywhere (though Swift resists the temptation to titillate with sex). We are in the Renaissance, so Mia is able to go to lectures on astronomy. There are new and better telescopes, but they are as often used to produce more precise horoscopes than to research the heavens. Some people are pointing out that the earth moves round the sun but the Inquisition are busy and awful penalties await those who dismiss the Church’s cosmology too openly.
We follow Mia through marketplaces, into silk workshops, on visits to an old astrologer and on and off gondolas and the Venetian equivalent of buses, traghettos, larger vessels that run to timetables. Life is governed by those traghetto timetables and the state of the tides and, as Giulia and her family live in the Jewish ghetto, by the times that the ghetto gates are locked.
There’s a little about the Jews, tolerated because they were the city’s bankers but not really trusted. (Apparently the Venetians were 300 years ahead of the Nazis when it came to making Jews wear yellow badges on their coats.) We learn, too, about the guild system among gondoliers, but this isn’t an essay on Venetian society. It’s a thriller and a romance, starting slow but building up to a dramatic and bloody climax. And, like all the best thrillers, it has a wonderful villain. The man is a fraud, a swindler and a serial killer – but he does have style.
The climax is, perhaps, a little rushed. It’s a bit like those movies where people move in the shadows, shots ring out, the villain collapses and the hero stands over him as the credits roll. Personally, I prefer the Lee Child approach to violent denouements. I want the hero to feint with his left and lead with his right and only as he lies helpless (some blackguard probably hit him from behind) does he draw the pistol concealed in his boot and bring the villain down. Maybe that’s just me but I think that if you are doing the big fight scene, go all in or go home.
Since I wrote this, I’ve read Swift’s latest, The Silk Code, where the fight scenes match anything Lee Child has done, so I’ve no idea why this one didn’t work for me. It’s quite a minor quibble in any case. The important thing is that mysteries are solved. Some relationships are cleared up (no spoilers), others not. Life moves on. As do Mia and Guilia. It will be interesting to see where Ms Swift takes them next.
Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras
I can’t get completely free of Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras. It’s published on Friday and it’s already available on pre-order at mybook.to/TorresVedras. It’s the seventh book about James Burke. (I did a quick run-through of the others on my blog on Friday, if you need to keep up.) It’s set in Lisbon in 1810 where James Burke is hunting down French agents who are trying to discover the secret of the Lines of Torres Vedras. What are the Lines? And what is their secret?
Read the book to find out: £3.99 on Kindle and £7.99 (special launch offer price) in paperback.
My blog is called History and Books and Dance and Stuff so a historical fiction book about tango ticks pretty well all the boxes. And The Gods of Tango has quite a lot of Stuff too. In fact it’s a vast, sprawling work about tango and Buenos Aires and Italy and sexuality and those old tango perennials, love and death.
I can’t begin to discuss the plot, partly because there are twists and turns and I don’t want to spoil it for you and partly because the 384 packed pages defy synopsification. (Is that a word? It should be.)
What you need to know is that the story starts in 1913 with Leda arriving in Buenos Aires, leaving a narrow life in a village just outside Naples in search of opportunity in the New World. In the first of many shocks in the book, all her plans are thrown into disarray before she has even left the boat and she finds herself struggling to survive in a city that seems to teeter forever on the edge of madness.
It’s a story packed with characters, all so perfectly drawn that you never get lost, but one of the biggest, most important, characters is Buenos Aires itself and particularly San Telmo, a part of the city I feel particularly at home in. The danger, excitement and opportunity of the city is perfectly captured. It is overcrowded and filthy (even more so in 1913 than now). Yet, as today, it holds you. Leda knows that Buenos Aires destroys its children, yet she cannot bring herself to leave. A peaceful life in a small Italian village is no longer something she can settle for.
Leda falls in love with tango. The music, she thinks, can save her. And it does, though it means she must sacrifice everything. (No spoilers, but ‘everything’ isn’t too much of a stretch here.) She carves out a life in the violent world of tango. She is there as tango moves from the bars and the brothels to the dance halls and eventually the grand clubs and cabarets, even achieving an international respectability. But for Leda, it is always about the music of the people, starting with the rhythms brought from Africa with slavery. (The Gods of Tango is unusual in featuring a black bandoneon player whose grandfather was probably a slave. Argentina used to have a substantial black population but no one talks about that now.)
If you are interested in the history of tango (you’ve probably realised I am), then The Gods of Tango is worth reading just for its description of how and why the music developed through the Golden Age. But the book is much, much more than that. I’ve never read a book by a woman which understands so well the reality of being a man. And when she deals with different aspects of sexuality, she writes better than anyone else I have read, or ever expect to read.
De Robertis has won prizes and fellowships and is definitely a ‘literary author’, a label I am generally suspicious of. But this is someone who has earned their reputation through extraordinary hard work as well as an exceptional ability to write. Leda’s life in Italy was researched in Italy. De Robertis reached Italian emigration to Argentina and Afro-Argentinian history (an area which, as I’ve mentioned, is generally overlooked). She studied the violin as well as tango history and learned to dance. She has explored Buenos Aires today and developed a deep understanding of its history. And she writes fantastic prose. (I just said that, but I’m saying it again.)
I’m getting carried away. All I can say is that this is an astonishing book.
This is a straightforward supernatural horror story. It isn’t the sort of thing I would usually read, but the author contacted me and asked if I might be interested in reviewing it. I read the first couple of pages and found myself immediately drawn into the tale, so I agreed to take a look.
What made this story work for me was the detailed and credible scene-setting. Our hero is first shown at home with his wife and two kids. It’s very well written and you warm to all the characters. The approach reminds me of Spielberg’s classic movies. Before we meet the aliens, we spend time getting to know the main characters in their everyday normal lives.
Eventually, of course, we find the supernatural intruding when a mysterious mirror is delivered to the home in the middle of the night. Now we have a classic, ‘Don’t go alone to the haunted mansion’ moment. Obviously if you receive an old mirror with no indication of where it came from, the thing to do is to lock in in a shed until you can get the local priest to exorcise it. But no: they hang it on the wall.
Spooky things follow, rather nicely described. The loft is over-run by rabid racoons and other critters, huge poisonous spiders appear in the fuse box. The horror is real but it can all be explained away – and is. ‘No, you fools! Run now! Run for your lives!’ But, despite living with what is pretty obviously an interdimensional portal, everyone just goes along with normal life until the Truly Evil Thing comes to do what Truly Evil Things do.
I’m not giving details because Spoilers, but, in any case, it’s not immediately clear what the Truly Evil Thing is doing because the details are deliberately left vague. Vague is good in horror. The things you glimpse from the corners of your eyes are always scarier than the hi-res CGI creations that fill your vision.
Sadly, all horror stories have to have some sort of resolution. Here, this is mediated through a mysterious Native American who hops through time, putting an end to Truly Evil Things. For reasons of plot, the mysterious Native American can’t directly kill the Evil Things himself, but has to recruit others to act on his behalf. Fortunately our hero is an expert sniper (a detail already carefully set up in the story) and it is for him to do the actual killing and hence save his family.
At this point we are introduced to a powerful but secret group of people who assist the Native American. This is exciting but also somehow mundane. Our hero, up to then a wonderfully detailed three-dimensional character, is now reduced to a comic book hero. The Truly Evil Thing has to emerge from the shadows to be defeated and turns out to be something you might well have seen in one of the less memorable episodes of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’.
I don’t blame the author for all this. It’s the rules of the genre which mean that, paradoxically, the climactic moments of action are always the least convincing, uninteresting parts of the book. In fact, Chris Coppel pulls it off because the amount of detail that we’ve had before we move into standard horror territory means that we are invested enough in the characters to ignore the hoariness of the horror tropes that Coppel has to deploy to make the plot work. That, as far as I’m concerned, is very impressive writing.
The story is clearly setting up for a series. I don’t think I’ll be back for more (it really isn’t the sort of thing I’d usually read) but, based on this opening story, I think the sequels could be rather good.
Is Lynn Bryant a Marvel fan? I ask because she seems to be basing her considerable literary output on the 19th century equivalent of the Marvel Universe: a Napoleonic Universe, so to speak.
The core stories are her Peninsular War Saga, which follows one regiment through that bloody conflict. There were some spin-off romances, in which various of the characters return to England and balance the bloodiness of their activities in Spain with some more tender moments. There are regular short story offerings that she gives away free. (The latest, for Valentine’s Day, is available here: An Unsuitable Arrangement.)
As a proud resident of the Isle of Man, Lynn was anxious to involve some Manx characters. Given that the place is an actual island, this inevitably meant a concentration on the Navy rather than the Army. Hence a new series, the Manxman, centring on the adventures of Hugh Kelly, captain of the Iris. Kelly has joined the main characters of the Napoleonic Universe, but as is the way with Marvel productions (surely just a matter of time before we see the film), Kelly’s adventures mean that he keeps meeting characters from elsewhere in Lynn’s substantial oeuvre. In Lynn’s latest book, This Bloody Shore, Hugh is assisting Spanish troops besieged in the coastal town of Tarragona. This gives her the opportunity to view the battle from the viewpoint of the troops on the ground as well as the sailors. We meet existing characters from the Peninsular War Saga as well as introducing some new people who will doubtless find their way into the land-based books in time.
There are an awful lot of characters with an awful lot of subplots, but keeping track is easy. I love the Manxman series, but I can’t get on with the Peninsula War saga. (It’s not you, Lynn, it’s me.) That meant that in this book I occasionally came across characters who most of the readers would already know but who were strangers to me. It completely wasn’t an issue. You’ll probably enjoy this book even more if you have read Lynn’s other output (particularly the first two Manxman stories) but it definitely works as a stand-alone.
One of the reasons that I don’t like the Peninsula War saga is that I have taken against the main female character. But in the Manxman series, Kelly’s wife, Roseen, is a joy. There’s a lot of time spent discussing their marriage and his growing family and I can see that this might annoy some readers, but I loved it. We also get to see Kelly’s lieutenant, Durrell, moving forward in his own romantic life. Let’s just say I’m very happy for him.
In yet another subplot, we find Kelly taking up the cause of abolitionism. It’s always a problem in books like this when you start to discuss attitudes to something like slavery, that we now regard as reprehensible but which seemed perfectly normal to many people at the time. It’s easy to become preachy and see everything through the distorting prism of 21st century attitudes. Lynn swerves this problem skilfully. The horrors of the slave trade and the efforts of the abolitionist movement are clearly presented, but we also meet people whose family money comes from slavery and who do not see themselves as monsters. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in future books.
So many characters and so many subplots does mean that the story becomes a little episodic, but Lynn’s writing – always a pleasure to read – keeps you going and eventually all the threads of the story are neatly drawn together to produce a very satisfying book.
It goes without saying that Lynn’s grasp of the historical details of the military campaign is always assured. The book does suffer from the lack of any maps. The geography of Tarragona is important and Lynn does do her best to paint a word picture of the place, but some of the detail slightly gets in the way of the writing and in the end I was reduced to looking the place up on Google. A map really would help. Even without it, though, this book is clearly a five star read.
I’ve long been fascinated by the way in which the British claimed Waterloo as a British, rather than an Allied, victory – particularly as only a minority of the troops under Wellington’s command were actually British. The insistence that the British essentially pulled off victory on their own accounts for the way that the Prussian contribution is regularly dismissed. Nowadays we often read that the Prussians arrived late at the battle and that they had no effect until the very end. Some accounts even suggest that the final advance by the British would have taken place successfully whether or not the Prussians had been there.
This rewriting of history started on the evening of the battle when Wellington rejected Blucher’s suggestion that it be called the battle of La Belle Alliance (after the inn where Blucher and Wellington met at the end of the day), insisting instead that it be called Waterloo, after the town (not on the battlefield) where Wellington had set up his headquarters the night before the fighting started.
The most blatant rewriting of the Prussian involvement centred on a model of the battlefield created by William Siborne, a young army officer who was commissioned by the government to produce a large scale model as a permanent commemoration of Wellington’s victory. Siborne took his commission seriously, corresponding with hundreds of the officers who were at Waterloo, including Prussian officers and, although many were reluctant to discuss it, the French. As a result he was able to produce a picture of the battlefield representing the situation at 7.00pm, just after the fall of La Haye Sainte. Siborne considered that this was the crisis of the battle.
At this point, Prussian troops were already attacking the French in Plancenoit while others had linked up with Wellington’s left, enabling him to strengthen his centre. Hundreds of detailed models of Prussian soldiers were placed to reflect that. Yet if you look at the model today (it’s on display in the National Army Museum) these soldiers aren’t there. At the crisis of the battle, just before the decisive charge by Wellington’s troops, the French are faced only by the British. The Prussians, as so many people still believe, weren’t there. They arrived too late to have any decisive impact on the battle.
There is Plancenoit in the distance, with a suspicious absence of attacking Prussians
I love that model and I’ve visited it several times. I knew it misrepresented the Prussian position and I understood the politics behind it. But this Christmas I was given a copy of Peter Hofschroer’s wonderful book, Wellington’s Smallest Victory and now I know how the model came to be so inaccurate.
It’s a story of a naïve young man who set out to produce something that was to be both the historical record of a famous victory and a significant work of art in its own right. The project ran out of control, taking over his life, and he became quite obsessive about its accuracy. What he did not realise was that he was taking on the Duke of Wellington himself, who had no intention of allowing Siborne’s model ever to see the light of day with the Prussians in place.
It’s a story of a powerful man using money and position to crush somebody who threatened the image he had created for himself. Wellington, it is fair to say, does not come out of the story well.
Hofschroer’s book is incredibly detailed. Very occasionally it even verges on the boring with its accounts of exactly who corresponded with whom as the government tried to deprive Siborne of money owing to him. The detail is important, though, as Hofschroer is presenting a version of the battle of Waterloo which many people, after 200 years of propaganda, will find difficult to accept. He is also attacking the reputation of Wellington, somebody who was practically a demigod while Siborne was working on this model and who is still seen as one of the Great Britons of the 19th century.
The meticulous descriptions of exactly which troops were where helps the reader visualise exactly what was going on and will probably provide new insights even for those already very familiar with Waterloo. Hofschroer also extends the scope of his book to cover Wellington’s response to Prussian setbacks at Charlesroi and Ligny. Again, his account is detailed and convincing and does not show Wellington in a good light. Given how much time I spend reading accounts of Napoleonic battles, it’s worrying how much I struggle with many of these books, but Wellingtons Smallest Victory reads like a crime thriller. It’s gripping.
A Word from our Sponsor
There is a lot of detail about elements of the Battle of Waterloo Burke at Waterloo. (“A good general account of the battles described.” – Amazon review.) Burke at Waterloo is available on Kindle at a ludicrously cheap £3.99. If you enjoy my blog, you might consider buying it. mybook.to/BurkeWaterloo
In last week’s blog post I mentioned that my most popular posts were often book reviews. I actually tried to write fewer book reviews last year because I didn’t expect them to be particularly well read. Here are the books I reviewed with links to the original blog posts for people who might be interested.
A short review of the latest Sharpe novel with comparisons with my own Burke and the Pimpernel Affair and Burke at Waterloo, which have some overlaps in plot. If you were imprisoned in a French fortress, who would you rather have saving you: Sharpe or Burke?
The fourth of Horst’s Norwegian thrillers that I’ve reviewed. Not as good as the first three about his policeman hero, Wisting, but good enough if you’ve enjoyed the other three.
I remember lots of excitement about this book when it came out. Does anyone remember it now? Not the Great American Novel that some reviewers seemed to have thought it was. It may well be the Great American Novel That Defines 2022 though.
What do you do when your famous detective character (Falco) has been going so long that he’s no longer a credible action hero? Why, you have his daughter take over the family business. The Ides of April is the first in Lindsay Davis’s new series featuring Flavia Albia. It came out in 2013 but I only just got around to it. Sorry about that.
If you’ve read any of my blogs featuring Marble Hill House, you may understand why I found this book so fascinating. If you don’t know anything about Marble Hill House, reading this book might make you want to learn more.
I’m a fan of Val Poore’s blog, Rivergirl, so her story about how she came to be living on a classic Dutch barge fascinated me. Give it a go and you might end up a fan of the blog too.
The fifth book in Vanner’s ‘Dawlish Chronicles’ series features an early submarine, the ‘Fenian Ram’, a submarine designed by the pioneer of submarine warfare, John Holland. The adventures are largely fictitious but the technology is very real.
I’ve not included Tales of Empire in my eleven book reviews because it’s hardly an unbiased review. I published this book which is a very short collection of stories, one by me and three by other authors. Have a look about at what I say about the other three and then buy it. It’s only 99p.
OOPS!
Somehow (probably because it was so recent that I didn’t really think of it as being last year) I completely forgot to include Sisters at the Edge of the World, Ailish Sinclair’s stunning novel of Bronze Age Scotland. Almost impossible to categorise, I can only say that it is brilliant. Read it.
