Antoine Vanner writes naval adventures set in the late 19th century as sail was giving way to steam. I was thinking of him last week as I visited (again) HMS Warrior, the first British iron-clad steel hulled ship which carried a full set of sail and a powerful engine.
HMS Warrior
Given his interest, it’s not surprising that the fifth book in his ‘Dawlish Chronicles’ series (named for the hero, Nicholas Dawlish) features an early submarine. Britannia’s Shark, set in 1881, is a largely fictional account of the adventures of ‘the Fenian Ram’, a submarine designed by the Irishman, John Holland. In Vanner’s story the ram ends up destroyed but the real Fenian Ram still exists and is on display at the Paterson Museum in New Jersey.
Vanner’s interest in naval technology means that there is a lot of technical detail in the book, fascinating enough to encourage me to visit the Submarine Museum in Gosport to have a look at the Royal Navy’s oldest submarine, the Holland I (named for the same John Holland).
Holland I
There are a couple of tiny details I’m not absolutely sure of but you certainly get a good basic understanding of how the thing worked and of how terrifying it must have been to sail in. Technical details alone, though, will not fill a novel and Vanner throws in a story that resembles a James Bond film in skipping from location to location with increasingly dramatic (and increasingly bloody) set pieces in each. Whether he is being hi-jacked by pirates off the coast of Greece, fighting Irish nationalists in New York or battling alongside rebel forces in Cuba, Dawlish combines the pluck of a traditional 19th century hero with a willingness to get down and dirty that would not disgrace Bond himself. The result is a book that is high on adventure and excitement if occasionally pushing the limits of credibility. Despite this, Vanner incorporates a lot of real history into his story. As is so often the case, the historically accurate details are often the most incredible. For example Holland – yes, the man the Royal Navy named its first submarine after – was a passionate believer in an Irish Free State and no friend of the British.
The account of the slave revolts in Cuba (the Spanish kept slaves there until 1886) is astonishing to a modern reader and a useful reminder that Britain rejected slavery relatively early.
In summary, this is a great story of historical adventure with a lot of technical and political detail wrapped inside the candy coating of daring deeds and thrilling escapades.
Sharpe’s Assassin is presented as a story about Sharpe freeing a spy from a fortress and then hunting down some rogue Bonapartists who would assassinate the victorious Duke of Wellington. It has enough similarities to Burke and the Pimpernel Affair (freeing a spy from a fortress) and Burke at Waterloo (hunting down rogue Bonapartists who would assassinate the Duke) to make it a ‘must-read’ as far as I was concerned.
So how do Sharpe’s exploits compare with Burke’s?
Cornwell’s creation is first and foremost a soldier and Sharpe’s adventures follow him through Wellington’s military successes from India to Waterloo. His fans love the military detail in the stories and the scenes of action, whether Sharpe is brawling with an individual or part of an army engaged in a historic battle. This story is set after Waterloo, so the possibilities for military set-pieces are limited. Even so, Sharpe’s approach to saving the spy from the fortress focuses on a brute-force military approach. Burke and Sharpe both use cunning to infiltrate the fortress, but where Burke’s approach is designed to slip out quietly with as little fighting as possible (though things don’t work out exactly as planned), Sharpe, having won past the first gate, goes for a straightforward military assault. It means Cornwell inventing an action where there wasn’t one but it does mean Sharpe can get in a small battle early in the book. Sharpe is, after all, not about subtlety. The story has him working alongside a rather foppish spy who is all about subtlety but is all-too-easily fooled by the Bonapartists. Fortunately he has Sharpe watching his back and cheerfully blasting away at the French at every opportunity.
There’s an attempt at blowing up a dinner being held by the victorious British (very similar to one of the attempts in Burke at Waterloo) and Sharpe, like Burke, foils it. Like Burke, he fails to stop the villains escaping, setting things up for the final conflict which, again, involves lots of troops in a firefight with some artillery and the odd Congreve rocket to liven things up. Burke would, I suspect, find the outcome messy, but Sharpe ends up seeing off the Frenchies and disrupting their evil plans. The Duke is saved and peace finally comes to Paris.
By the end of the book, Sharpe is living peacefully in Normandy with his lady love. Burke gets no such happy ending. The real James Burke continued to spy for Britain long after 1815 and there is no sign of an end to war for him. I suspect we may see more of Sharpe in time, too. I wonder if he will ever decide that there are problems not best solved by bloody violence. Probably not. The world needs men like Sharpe as well as men like Burke. Long may they both thrive.
The books
Amazon provides a platform that is happy to host both a famous author like Bernard Cornwell and a significantly less famous one like me. Sharpe’s Assassin is available on Kindle at £4.99 or in paperback at £4.50 (it’s on offer). It’s an interesting pricing policy and explains why traditional publishers claim that e-books aren’t doing that well. It’s because they deliberately over-price them. The paperback is a bargain though.
My own tiny publishing effort can’t afford to subsidise paperbacks so I’m afraidBurke and the Pimpernel Affairand Burke at Waterloo will both set you back £8.99. (Printing isn’t getting any cheaper.) On the other hand, I do pass on the savings that come with e-publication, so the Kindles cost just £3.99.
At these prices, why not sort out your Napoleonic spy escapade needs for the rest of the month and buy all three?
My book reviews are usually quite long. (The last one I did ended up being an extended discussion of the life and times of Henrietta Howard.) Lately, though, I’ve read a few books that I’d like to share my enthusiasm for without going on at length. So here are three short reviews.
(Anyone would think that since I finished writing Eat the Poor I’ve been on a writing break and able to catch up on my reading.)
The Shepherd’s Life: James Rebanks
This is the third book review I’ve written recently that starts, “ I don’t generally enjoy memoirs but…” Perhaps it’s a sign of age that I am beginning to get more into this genre. In any case, I loved The Shepherd’s Life. It’s a memoir of a life spent as a hill sheep farmer in the Lake District and it sums up a place and a way of life that deserves to be more celebrated.
Recently my son, having got married and bought a house more conveniently located than a remote part of mid-Wales, decided to sell up the house in sheep country that had passed through three generations of our family. Three generations, according to James Rebanks, is the time it takes to be accepted in a hill farming community. Being English and living most of the time in England, it was only when people said how sorry they were to hear we were leaving that I realised we were, up to point, accepted into that remote community and I miss it more than I can say. Reading this book took me back to misty mornings and hills where sheep wandered apparently randomly.
We had seen life there only as visitors. We had never been up at a winter’s dawn, working with dogs to check the sheep, soaked to the skin and desperate to finish before dark. But I have talked to farmers about the price they get in a bad year when every lamb sold represents an actual financial loss. It’s not a romantic life. It’s hard and economically ruinous. (Rebanks points out that almost all the farmers he knows have a second job to keep the farms afloat. My neighbours had so many, I honestly lost count.) Yet the families stay. I was talking to someone who had a relative who sold up. That person had just vanished from society. You never leave.
Being English, we left. This is a book that reminds me what we’ve let slip away.
Hill farmers have been here for hundreds – maybe thousands – of years. That link with the land is a vital part of what makes a nation. The French, with their near obsession with ‘patrie’ understand this. In Britain that link is being lost. Rebanks explains why it matters. It’s not just a lovely book, but an important one.
Gooseberry: Michael Gallagher
This is the first of Michael Gallagher’s series of stories about boy detective Octavius Guy. Octavius is a minor character in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Other characters from Collins’ book also turn up in Gooseberry. It’s a very long time since I read The Moonstone and I’ve forgotten most of them except for the butler, Betteredge, with his obsession with Robinson Crusoe. It was fun meeting him again and I imagine fans of The Moonstone will enjoy the joke.
You don’t need to have read The Moonstone to enjoy Gooseberry, though. It’s a wonderful romp through the Victorian underworld with a lovely sense of period. There are one or two fantastical elements: Gallagher admits that the Thames Tunnel was never remotely as described and since it’s easily enough visited today that seems an unnecessary invention, but it does allow the plot to bowl along. I’m not going to carp. It’s a great book and I had fun reading it.
Where There’s Doubt: Terry Tyler
I’ve read several of Terry Tyler’s books and always enjoyed her easy writing style and ability to produce convincing characters. With Where There’s Doubt she has upped her game.
There’s been a lot of publicity about Romance Fraudsters lately, particularly Netflix’s The Tinder Swindler, so Terry’s latest is timely. It may even be a useful warning to women who are swept off their feet by men with conveniently vague past lives.
The book starts slowly and reads like so many romances as Kate, a smart cookie with a sweet centre, meets her new man, Nico. We all know, from the blurb and publicity, that Nico is no good, so I did have my doubts as the romance grows. Kate, it turns out, has recently inherited a lot of money. Is Nico after this? You bet he is. All of us reading know he is, but we are wading further and further into Mills & Boon slush. Can this con sustain a whole book?
Suddenly we switch from Kate’s point of view to Nico’s. (His name’s not Nico, of course.) Now we see just what a creep the guy is and how complex the fraud he is building up to. And now it’s not slow (or like Mills & Boon) at all.
I can’t say anything else because of spoilers. The plot twists and turns with some genuine surprises that make perfect sense once they are revealed but which I never saw coming. We see how different victims of Nico’s crimes respond differently. Some are made stronger, other collapse. The victims’ stories are as fascinating as the main plot. We meet good people and bad – those we want to see come to a terrible end and those we have a sneaking sympathy for. (Making a villain simultaneously evil and vulnerable is a very difficult thing to do and one which Terry pulls off very well.)
The end is not the neat and tidy finish that you might expect, but it is very satisfying.
I can’t say any more. I really don’t want to spoil it. But I do hope you read it. It’s very, very good.
I was a bit nervous about reading Valerie Poore’s account of moving into an old barge that was little more than a shell and converting it into a floating home. Not only am I not that interested in memoirs, but I have no enthusiasm for blokey conversations about re-wiring and the joys of MDF boarding. I took the risk, though, because I have become a fan of Val Poore’s blog, Rivergirl (https://rivergirlrotterdam.blogspot.com/). She makes life on a barge sound fun, which, given that it’s too hot in summer, freezing cold in winter and your whole life has to fit into 30 square metres, is impressive.
It turns out that Val’s no more a fan of DIY than I am – or she certainly wasn’t when she bought her heritage barge, the Vereeniging. It was a literal museum piece and a thing of beauty, to a historic barge enthusiast at least.
Now I’m a big fan of museums, but would you really want to live in one? Val did. She was allowed to change the inside around, so long as she kept the barge looking like it should. That meant the first step was to strip everything out and start building her accommodation pretty much from scratch.
(Actually, the first step should have been to make sure that the hull was solid and keeping the water out. Still, we all learn from our mistakes, don’t we Val?)
Building her new home meant learning carpentry and then wiring and finally plumbing. And, of course, there was the engine to maintain. The Vereeniging isn’t a twee little houseboat. It’s a real schip that can (and does) pootle around the local canals. So basically, she has all the problems of living in a beautiful but old and run-down house, combined with the doubtful pleasures of maintaining an old car except that she’s doing all this on water and she hasn’t even got anywhere to go to the loo.
Here’s a picture of the Vereeniging from a recent post on Val’s blog
It should be miserable (every so often she allows herself a good cry) but the harbour she lives in is filled with a weird collection of friendly and supportive people and she learns as she goes along until slowly (oh so slowly) the Vereeniging turns into the home she always wanted. And on the way she learns Dutch (doing all this in a language she speaks fluently would take the fun out of it) and explores Rotterdam and beyond.
Harbour Ways is a vibrant and life-affirming book that can even make the details of plumbing a toilet into a boat surprisingly interesting. I found myself anxious to know what would go wrong next and how Val would overcome her problems. It read like a thriller: I just had to turn the page. Definitely recommended.
My home is very close to Marble Hill House in Twickenham, where Henrietta Howard lived. The house is owned by English Heritage and has recently undergone major work. English Heritage are restoring the place to how it was when Henrietta Howard lived there and this has meant a lot of discussion about who she was and the life she lived.
Tracy Borman’s book was written before this sudden flurry of interest in Henrietta, but it remains the standard book for people wanting to know more about her.
The instant summary of her life (as used to appear on posters advertising the house) is that she was the mistress of George II and she was given Marble Hill as a retirement gift on leaving the court.
Tracy Borman’s book shows that she was much more interesting than this (inaccurate) summary suggests.
Henrietta had an unfortunate life. Orphaned at an early age (her father was killed in a duel), she had made an unfortunate marriage in 1706 to a man who robbed her, beat her and essentially made her life hell. Reduced to living in lodgings in “an unsavoury part of the capital” and often skipping meals because her husband took all her money, Henrietta moved into a single room shared with her son and a husband she by now loathed, sold her furniture and saved whatever money she could from an allowance from her father’s will until she had gathered enough to pay to travel to Hanover. Her plan, almost incredibly bold, was to ingratiate herself with the Hanoverian court so that when Queen Anne died and the Hanoverians inherited the English throne, she would be well placed for a position in their London court. (I know it’s complicated but just trust me on this. We love to tell ourselves that the monarchy traces a single line back to Alfred the Great, but that line has an awful lot of kinks in it.)
Despite the fact that she arrived impoverished and with her drunken, loutish husband in tow, and that she was only on the very fringes of the English aristocracy, her desperate gamble succeeded. She made such a favourable impression on Sophia, the Hanoverian monarch who was tipped to inherit the English throne that Sophia promised that she would make her a Woman of the Bedchamber if she became Queen of England.
Queen Anne inconsiderately refused to die. Henrietta, though now a fixture in the Hanoverian court, had no official status. In 1714, Sophia was the first of the two royal ladies to shuffle off this mortal coil. Weeks later, Anne followed.
In the absence of his mother, George drew the lucky ticket that made him king of England. He took his time travelling to his new realm. (He never liked the country and almost resented being king.) Eventually, though, a date was fixed for his coronation and Henrietta and her husband returned to London ready to welcome their Hanoverian friends to their new home. It was a tense time. With Sophia dead, there were no firm promises of any position in George’s court.
Henrietta hitched her wagon to the rising star of George’s daughter-in-law, Caroline. Caroline’s husband (also George, because Hanoverians were unimaginative with names) would become king on his father’s death. Fortunately, Caroline had become very friendly with Henrietta in Hanover and honoured her mother-in-law’s promise that Mrs Howard should become a Woman of the Bedchamber.
Henrietta, then, was a professional courtier. Intelligent, charming and diplomatic, she naturally rose through the ranks of the court. By 1718, she had become George’s mistress, whilst continuing to serve with his wife, who she would spend hours with almost every day.
There is no suggestion that this was a grand passion. George was unfashionably devoted to his wife. In fact, one reason for taking a mistress may well have been to counter the impression, widely held in court, that it was Caroline who made all the decisions in their household. George was not a particularly sensuous man and his lovemaking took place to a strict timetable. A mistress was customary and convenient and Henrietta, subtle enough to serve both George and his wife, was ideally suited to the position.
She remained George’s mistress until 1734 by which time George was king. During that time her links with Caroline and George made her a key figure in the intrigues of the court, although she did her best not to become identified with the various factions. Eventually, though, she was inevitably drawn into politics and championed the Tory cause, to the intense irritation of Queen Caroline, who was a supporter of Walpole. The political divisions in court and her own fading charms (she was 45) led her to find life in royal circles increasingly difficult and she was relieved when the break with George was finally official.
She had known a break was coming for years and had prepared her house in Marble Hill as an escape from court life. She loved the place and spent as much time in it as possible. It’s not true that it was a retirement present from the king: she had bought it with her own money while she was still serving at court. However, the king did make her generous settlement when she left which enabled her to finish the building (work was constantly being delayed because of cost overruns) and live there comfortably.
Her appalling husband had died, leaving her free to marry again. She wed George Berkeley in 1735. She was too old to have children by then, but the couple were devoted to each other and she moved nieces and nephews into Marble Hill where they lived very happily as a family (albeit it one with a degree of coming and going among the younger family members).
Henrietta’s terrible experience of her first marriage and the helplessness of her position as a woman made her what we might well think of as an early feminist. She helped women friends and relatives to protect themselves against the predations of their menfolk and her will, when she finally died, tied up bequests to women in a way that ensured that they maintained control of their money in an age where most women were entirely dependent on husbands or fathers.
She had not only been involved in court and political life, but was the centre of an intellectual circle that included the playwright, Gay; the poet, Pope; and the novelist, Swift. Her private memoirs are regarded as one of the best guides to life in the early Georgian courts and the house at Marble Hill (the designing of which had been one of her main pleasures in her later years at court) still stands as one of the finest Palladian villas in England. (A quick Google search suggests several other contenders for this title but it is certainly a fine example.)
Even this whistle-stop tour of Henrietta’s life has run well past my usual word-count and Tracy Borman’s book is an impressive 350 pages. Sadly, though, she is distracted by the splendours of the Georgian court and the eccentricities of the courtiers and we can lose sight of Mrs Howard for extended periods. Pages are dedicated to details of the procession in which George I entered London, though Henrietta was not involved. There are rambling asides on Swift’s career and the social rituals of Bath (although, in fairness, these were rituals that Henrietta definitely joined in). But, although there is an awful lot about Marble Hill there are huge gaps in what we are told about the house. As it stands today, it is unliveable in. (There are, most obviously, no cooking facilities.) In fact, it has been described in the past as really just a ‘party house’ rather than a proper home. Borman makes it clear that it was definitely ‘a proper home’ and one which was lived in by young people as well as Henrietta who was in her mid-forties before she could spend much time there. I’m biased, knowing the place as I do, but a little more about the domestic arrangements would have been appreciated, given how much of the book is devoted to discussing the house.
Much the same is true of Hampton Court. A visit there makes it clear that the physical position of Mrs Howard’s rooms put her geographically close to the centre of power and this is important in understanding why she was (as Borman says) known as ‘the Swiss cantons’ (connected to everywhere but independent of all). This is not at all obvious from her account.
Sometimes Borman seems overwhelmed by the volume of material she has to hand. Why so much irrelevant discussion of details of the peccadillos of the young maids-in-waiting while Henrietta’s London house in Savile Street gets only a couple of pages? The Hanoverians were expert in distracting attention from things that mattered with glorious public displays (like the coronation, which is described at length) and riveting private feuds. Borman seems no less distracted than the citizenry of the time. There are also one or two occasions where I think some of her details is questionable. I would doubt, for example, if Twickenham is really only a couple of hours from London by river. (On a favourable tide and with a following wind, maybe, but other historians of the period would differ.)
Is it worth reading? Emphatically yes. Henrietta Howard is a fascinating figure and hers is a wonderful story to tell. Tracy Borman’s book is a good place to start, but I hope it is far from the last word we will read on this remarkable woman.
I used to be a huge fan of Lindsay Davis’s Falco stories – a model of how to write historical crime fiction. Falco eventually grew a little too middle aged to keep on with his criminal investigations and the torch was passed to his daughter, Albia.
The Ides of April is the first of the Flavia Albia books. It was published in 2013 but I have only just got around to reading it. It’s certainly encouraged me to read more in the future.
The Ides of April is clearly written as the first in a series. Although there are frequent references to her father and you will probably enjoy the book more if you have read Falco in the past, it definitely starts from scratch. We have not only a new detective (though still working from Falco’s old office) but a new Emperor. Vespasian and Titus (both of whom featured a lot in the Falco series) are dead and Domitian is running the country. Davis is clearly not a fan of Domitian and this means there is a dark political background to the story.
The change in the politics of Rome and all the new characters that come with a new series means that much of the early part of the book is given over to establishing the characters and the background, which makes it a little slow, especially for people who already know some of it from the overlap with Falco. Eventually, though, the story – Albia’s attempts to track down a serial killer who is murdering apparently at random – gets properly under way and gallops along very satisfactorily.
There are quite a lot of characters and all are clearly drawn and easy to keep track of when they are around, but I did find myself getting lost from time to time when they were being referred to while they were not present. There are lots of nephews and nieces and lovers and ex-wives and freed slaves who are essentially part of these rambling extended families and all have two names and may be referred to by either. At one point there is a discussion of how somebody had called on someone’s father about someone’s uncle (I’m being vague as to details) and I had to read it several times to work out who was talking about whom. Eventually, though, even with characters who take on hidden identities, we work out who is who and the plot is clear. Perhaps a little too clear: once all the red herrings are discarded the big silver herring is a bit obvious. In fairness all the people involved do accept that they have been remarkably obtuse and the story is much more than just a murder mystery. The sense of time and place is (as I’d expect after the Falco series) brilliant and there are some interesting characters I expect to meet again in future books.
Is it as good as Falco at his best? Of course not: Falco at his best was already established with his family and his friends and we all knew the Rome he lived in by then. Albia is starting over and it will take a while for her to be as sure-footed as her father, but I think she’ll get there. Definitely a series worth sticking with.
