I read a reasonable amount of historical fiction, and I like the depiction of past eras to be gritty and even grim, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. I...moreI read a reasonable amount of historical fiction, and I like the depiction of past eras to be gritty and even grim, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. If I'm reading about a housewife in Elizabethan England, I want to see her lifting up her skirts to step over the rivelets of ooze in the street if she is running an errand near the shambles, and I want to see any sailors, towards the end of a long period at sea, to be knocking the weevils out of their hardtack; heck, they should just ignore the wriggling creatures and go ahead and eat the biscuits; they are, after all, good protein. I also hope that my authors will strive to be as true as they can to the period they are writing about; I prefer the details to be correct. At the same time, however, I realize that authors of historical fiction can't be spending all of their time in research libraries; errors will creep in, or new discoveries will be made, no matter how conscientious the writer may be. The novel has to be written, in the end.
I understand, too, that there is disagreement on how much people have changed throughout the centuries. Are the mind-sets of people from other times so altered from the modern era? I happened to think that they were very different, so when I read a work from a author such as Robert McCammon, who states in his interview here http://www.robertmccammon.com/intervi... that he doesn't really believe people have changed very much, I am probably going to find his characters rather anachronistic; or at least, not accurate depictions of what I can only imagine long vanished people to be. Fair enough. I can't really criticize an author's decision to go in that direction. It is, after all, only a guess.
I can, however, call him to account for inexcusably sloppy research, and for a fascination for the foul and vile that borders on the lurid. I get it--past times were none too clean, epecially out on the frontier; people stank, clothing reeked, and houses crawled with insects and were choked with smoke. McCammon's seemingly new-found discovery of these not very interesting facts (history isn't stuffy! he exclaims over and over in the previously cited interview) is like a little boy who has skewered a pile of dog poop and goes waving his stick gleefully in front of the grown-ups. "Lookee here what I have found! Isn't it COOL!" (Actually, I should have written "skewered a rat" instead; so many rodents are pitch-forked, crushed, drowned, smashed, that at times I thought I had wandered into a William and Mary era whack-a-rat game show; McCammon seemed to have just tossed in another rodent death when he was at a loss for ideas, which was often.) All of this endless description, which slows down the pace to a crawl, serves no real purpose, especially as it is often not really accurate.
I almost stopped the book at page 75, when he made his first really big historical boo-boo. (I'll pass over the highly unlikely conversations the two main characters, the magistrate Woodward and his clerk Matthew, on their way to try a witch at the town of Fount Royal, have with the slimy innkeeper, but the manner in which sexual details are disclosed is beyond ridiculous.) McCammon describes the home of Bidwell, chief mover-and-shaker of the fledging town, as having a dining room that would serve as the centerpiece of an English castle. I'm sorry, but that is absurd. Here is Bacon's Castle, one of the most imposing homes of the time, located in Tidewater Virginia, one of the most highly developed regions of the early colonial era, constructed just before this period of this book:
(It was actually less grand at the end of the 17th century, since the service wing was rebuilt and the roof was raised a floor much later.) And here are two English houses of the same time period, which I also visited during my years living in England. (The first one, Wimpole Hall, once every season as it has an excellent home farm which kept my toddlers busy):
And Belton Hall, just up the road an hour or so from my home, which I include as it was constructed during the same decade as Bidwell's imagined mansion:
It's pretty clear that nothing constructed during the colonial era (or until the times of the robber barons) would be judged worthy of being the centerpiece of an English manor house. So McCammon's just taking a bit of artistic license, right? He just wants to contrast the opulent home, with the barely beaten back nature in the form of incessant insects buzzing around, with the wretched hovels. All right, but then he has Magistrate Woodward, who is portrayed as a decent, mild man, condemning young, pretty white Rachel to burn at the stake, for the crime of witchcraft, and for petty treason for supposedly killing her husband.
Guess how many white women in America were burned at the stake through judicial process during the colonial period? None. That's right: zero, nada, zip. There are NO adequately documented cases of a white woman being executed by this method in the colonies. English Common Law of the time period sentenced a person judged guilty of witchcraft to the gallows, as anyone even casually familiar with the Salem Witch Trials knows. And petty treason, though technically punishable by death by fire, was NEVER enforced on a white woman.* Clearly, if you were a black slave, man or woman, who dared to be involved in a slave uprising, or a white man who had the audacity to help in a revolt, you might very well be condemned to the stake. But a woman and her white skin was safe from the flames.**
So is Rachel's sentence an anachronism? A sloppy bit of research by the author? So what if Woodward--and by proxy the author--condemns her to the most gruesome and dreaded of executions--death is death, right? But I do think it matters, particularly as this barbaric custom is part of the story of slavery, and not of colonial white America. You have to decide how important this distortion is to you. I can only view McCammon's plot twist as the sensationalistic misreading of the historical record by a third-rate writer who is willing--even eager--to put a tawdry spin on everything. Why do I think this? Well, after starting to skim through the salacious and vulgar depositions (thorny cocks! blood dripping from female parts!) and the tedious descriptions of the thought processes of every single character that serves only to bloat an all ready deadly slow narrative, I was no longer terribly interested in the fates of the cartoonishly nasty characters (all the inhabitants of Fount Royal except the beautiful--of course!--young witch) and the Scooby-Doo-ish eager young Matthew. (Rachel herself is as wooden as the stake the townspeople want to lash her to; only Woodward was a well-defined creation who held my attention.) I kept going, however, as it was a buddy read, despite my suspicions that the author was revelling in the gross details. I stopped even skimming when I came upon the utterly out of place (view spoiler)[ drawn out account of a blacksmith's sexual assault upon a mare--complete with the love words whispered to the unwilling beast and an elaborate description of the mechanism designed to carry out such a foul encounter AND WHICH IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE PLOT AS WE HAVE ALL READY BEEN HIT ON THE HEAD THAT THE BLACKSMITH IS A DISTURBED INDIVIDUAL. There is also a sniggering insinuation that the horse enjoyed it. (hide spoiler)]. What's more, McCammon defends this disgusting and extraneous episode by saying that such events are part of the historical record. Very convenient of him to be suddenly concerned about historical authenticity, wouldn't you say? http://www.robertmccammon.com/intervi...
No, I did not finish the book. But I don't have to finish a bowl of stew, either, to know that something putrid lurks within it. (I did peek to the end of the book just to confirm my guess as to who the villain was; it was obvious when s/he first stepped onto the stage, so it wasn't even a good mystery.) Suffice to say that I was no longer feeling charitable enough to overlook the author having his characters using matches, envelopes, eating stewed tomatoes, using pounds instead of stones to describe human weight, referring to "tricorn" hats when the correct usage for the time would have been "cocked" hats, the use of "Violet"--a Victorian invention--as a proper name, or the countless other errors that showed that the author didn't even care to do more than a modicum of research. Just throw in another dead rat seemed to be his philosophy.
Not surprisingly, there wasn't even the consolation of interesting language to pull the reader along. McCammon's flat, leaden prose-- without style or grace--is as uninventive as his facts are made up. His sentences are just words slapped one after another like bricks upon mortar. But at least, at the end of the day, a mason might build something useful, like a wall. This book, on the other hand, is a poorly-constructed, ersatz fake that reminds me of nothing so much as: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/mag...
DICKENS WORLD--COMPLETE WITH PIZZA HUT
If you are an uninspired author, you can pretend to bring the past to life, much as the theme park Dickens World pretends to bring back the Victorian era by releasing a few chemical smells in the air from strategically placed "smell pots". By focusing on the nasty and the reeking, and by conveniently ignoring the truth, you can sketch a shadow of the past for an unwary audience. But in the end, the unlucky reader of this book is not transported to another time, but just trapped in a modern warehouse, just like the ticket-holders of Dickens World. An affront to the serious reader of historical fiction, a tiresome slog for the seeker of some escapist fun, and an insult to horses everywhere, this book is to be avoided at all costs. In the spirit of the author's own words: eschew this turgid turd.
* The author of Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, whose work remain the cornerstone of women's studies for Colonial Williamsburg--where McCammon did his research--states categorically that she could find no case in the South in which a woman was burned at the stake for petit treason.
** For an overview of the history of execution in the colonies, here's an interesting bit of research from a fascinating web-site, "Before the Needles." http://web.archive.org/web/2008040311...
This is my review, and my complaints are my own. Any tisk-tisking over my request that historical fiction remain somewhat true to the times (as if a less demanding reader is somehow more worldly wise in the ways of fiction) will be, depending on the tone of the comment and my mood at the time, either not responded to--or deleted. (less)
I normally don't review books that I just couldn't bring myself to finish without skimming, but in my opinion each book that Gortner has written has b...moreI normally don't review books that I just couldn't bring myself to finish without skimming, but in my opinion each book that Gortner has written has been poorer than the last, so I thought I should warn other readers. I was really looking forward to this novel--I'm fascinated by Isabella, and even went very far out of my way on rather bad roads to visit her birthplace while I was living in Spain (a dusty, obscure little town at the time, a rather sad place, with a tiny shrine to her memory in the partially ruined castle where she was born). I really enjoyed The Last Queen, as I thought the depiction of the harsh landscape of central and southern Spain was evocative without being sentimental; I could just tell, without then knowing anything about the author, that he KNEW Spain, which of course he does as he is half-Spanish and spent years growing up there. I thought his portrait of Juana was excellent; Gortner does crazy quite well. He still is a good man to turn to when looking for a portrait of the unhinged: the depiction of Isabella's whacked-out mother is by far the most compelling part of this novel. The descriptions of the landscape are still good, too, but frankly, it's not enough any more.
This book is not very good at all. It's filled with the most absurd, info-dumping dialogue where people "remind" each other of complicated political machinations of decades past, and chockablock with the most terrible wooden writing, where people's blood run cold and eyebrows lift sardonically, and the villain's breath is always fetid. Gortner seems to have forgotten every lesson on writing that he ever knew, especially the one of SHOWING and not TELLING. Everything seems to be seen at a distance, which is quite a feat when you're dealing with first-person narration.
Isabella comes off as a very modern woman, and kind of a stupid one at that. Where is the determined monarch of the early Renaissance, the fervent believer, the warrior driven by the conviction that she was doing God's work? You won't find her here. There's far too much talk of women's rights, and sentimental sighings over sending off her daughters to be wed. It's not that I don't believe she had a mother's feelings, but royal girls were raised up to be political pawns; for Isabella to describe herself over and over again as being distraught seems to be unrealistic. Her relationship with Fernando--the greatest political/matrimonial alliance in history--is reduced to a a bunch of squabbles that finish with cries and kisses and make-up sex in bed. Isabella doesn't hate anybody except the Portuguese--it's OK to describe them as vermin. Other groups that were sanctioned/expelled/murdered by her orders, such as the Moors, Jews, and Conversos--well, she was terribly sorry; someone else persuaded her to do it. I guess it is all right for Isabella's feelings towards the Portuguese to be accurate--it seems nobody cares about Spain's neighbor to the west--but let's tippy-toe around everyone else for the sake of political correctness. It bothered me that Gortner would rather depict her as weak, or easily persuaded, rather than examine carefully Isabella's attitudes on the social and political turmoil that occured during her reign, merely to spare the modern reader's feelings.
I started skimming the book when Isabella was present at the bedside of her brother when he was dying of plague (really? having the heir to the throne present?) but I was impatient before that, when Gortner had Isabella and Fernando meeting years before they met each other (they actually met the night before their marriage). It's just to make the story better, Gortner says reassuringly in his afterword. Yes, I get it, most readers aren't looking for complete historical accuracy in their novels, but give us something for our troubles. Exciting action. Excellent writing. Or the feeling that we can really understand the characters, who have vanished into the past, even though they are very different from ourselves. Something. Anything.
Queen Isabella was a complex and amazing woman, no matter what you think of her role in history. This novel does not do her justice. At all.(less)
**spoiler alert** Sometimes a book makes such an error that the reader stops dead in his tracks. I'm not talking about nit-picking a small detail so t...more**spoiler alert** Sometimes a book makes such an error that the reader stops dead in his tracks. I'm not talking about nit-picking a small detail so that the reader can be accused of being pedantic. (In the early years of our marriage my husband would lean over to me in movie theaters and whisper that that guys in war movies were wearing uniforms that were a little out of date but I finally broke him of that habit). No, I'm talking about making a totally dumb factual mistake, like having a regency heroine taking a casual stroll to Windsor Castle when the author really meant Buckingham Palace, or misunderstanding a character's world point of view so fundamentally that the reader literally jerks his head from the pages, and even if he does manage to continue the book he never really trusts the author again. I once had a friend fling "Pet Cemetery" aside; no vet, she said, would be against sterilizing dogs and cats, and since she worked as a veterinary assistant she knew what she was talking about, and had no interest in reading a book whose protagonist was so far-fetched. Alan Brennert makes such an error in Moloka'i, only his misstep is even more egregious than Stephen King's since it is an important, though not central part of the plot.
In the beginning, I liked the book well enough. I lived in Hawai'i for some years. I know how deeply skeptical (to put it mildly) people born in the islands view haole mainlanders coming in and writing about their homeland, but I was willing to give it a try. Besides, what did I know about turn of the century O'ahu since I had never lived there, and one brief visit to Molokai and occasional chats about the island with an acquaintance who had grown up there certainly didn't make me an expert. It was a choice for my book group, too, so I thought I'd better get going.
Young Rachel develops leprosy in turn of the century O'ahu and is eventually sent to the colony at Kalaupapa. The description of the symptoms of the disease, and the long bureaucratic process that banishes her to the other island, make for interesting reading. The novel traces the course of her life, and as sometimes happens in this sort of historical novel which covers a long period of time, the author crams in a lot of laboriously-researched events and details that don't quite fit, and it may also be for that reason that the book had a certain emotional distance. I never felt that close to the main character. OK, a great many historical novelists fall into this trap; it's understandable that you want to share all that hard work.
It was at this point the author makes his big mistake.(view spoiler)[ Rachel and her husband have a baby, and they are forced to send the baby away. The little girl is adopted by a Japanese couple and they move to California. Eventually she and her new family are put into the internment camp at Manzanar.
It.Could.Never.Have.Happened. Not in a million years. Not today, and certainly not almost a hundred years ago. No issei peasant family would have adopted a child---especially a girl(!) that was a hapa (or as the Japanese say, hafu) girl from an unknown, "unclean" bloodline. It would have been out of the question. It simply is not possible. When I told my husband about this plot twist he looked bewildered and said "Was the family really Christian, or something? But even so...."
You see, my husband and I have lived in Japan, and one of the organizations I belonged to has sponsored an orphanage since the end of WWII. The children grow up there; almost none of them leave in "outside" adoptions. It is NOT a Japanese custom (or indeed an Asian custom) to adopt outside the family. Bloodlines are very important. And the idea of a non-Christian man with three boys agreeing to take in a strange girl just because his wife wanted a daughter was just so deeply wrong that I set the book aside and wondered if I should continue. I am sorry not to be PC, but these are the facts and the author should have known something about Japanese culture. It would have taken two minutes of research.
But no, the author was bound and determined to shoe-horn Manzanar into the plot, just so that he could make a heavy-handed parallel of the two internments, so he shoved it in, with no regards as to what actually could have happened. (hide spoiler)] Shaken, I continued (after all it was a book group choice) but my confidence in the author was gone. I kept wondering... what other facts had Brennert twisted and contrived to suit his purposes? What would a kama'aina reader think of this book? Was the Hawaiian viewpoint misrepresented as well and I wasn't close enough to see it? What else had I missed? Should an outsider even attempt to write about a fundamentally foreign culture? It really made me aware of all the manipulative tricks the author had used; I could barely keep my mind on the last part of the novel.
Now, some readers just read for the fun of reading about an exotic land and they might say I am just being fussy, and that it is OK, or not really important that he misrepresented another culture's mindset. But people, we read historical fiction to learn about other times and cultures. What's the point if the author holds up a mirror instead of a window, and pretends otherwise? It's just a cheat. Brennert's mistake bothered me. It really did. Because when an author breaks faith with his reader...well, what else is left?
Post Script Nov 7th:
I've made some strongly worded criticisms calling Brennert to task for a key implausability in his story, which are concealed in the spoiler. For those who are curious, or who need more convincing, please check the comments, where I've linked to half a dozen articles supporting my views. Any discussion on how important the truth is in historical fiction is welcome (with the caveat that comments along the line of oh-it-is-just-fiction-so-anything goes will not be viewed as a seriously debatable position); disputing the claims from sources such as the L.A. Times/Japan Times/Time Magazine/The Department of State/The American Embassy in Japan/ The BBC/ The Seattle Times/Reuters in favor of personal stories not really relevant to the main topic, or opinions based more on wishful Western feelings rather than facts will not be responded to. Thanks!
Several well-read friends whose opinions I respect recommended this book to me. The title sounded intriguing--even poetical--and when I saw a copy at...moreSeveral well-read friends whose opinions I respect recommended this book to me. The title sounded intriguing--even poetical--and when I saw a copy at my library of the audio book (read by one of my favorite narrators, Rosalyn Landor), I snapped it up. I was even more thrilled when I saw that the mystery took place in Cambridgeshire, where I had lived for several years, and looked forward to several long quilting sessions getting reacquainted with the town I left long ago, perhaps learning some things I hadn't known before, and enjoying a fun mystery along the way.
I almost stopped the book a few chapters in, quilting be damned. It's very hard listening to descriptions of a child being tortured, and Rosalyn Landor's elegant delivery of the gruesome details somehow made it worse. But then came Ariana Franklin's depiction of Henry II. Her Henry is marvelous--one of the best I've ever read--a real force of nature- brilliant, egotistic and enthusiastic--he fairly picks up the plot and carries it before him. So I continued the tale of Adelia Aguilar, female doctor of Salerno, who along with her manservant-Mansur, is sent to England to investigate the series of strange child-murders in Cambridge. And yes, it was fun to read about Cambridge's long-vanished castle, and the towns I'd mostly forgotten--Cherry Hinton(!), Fen Ditton.(!) It was like bumping into old friends. So I kept listening, despite my growing misgivings.
It's strange what a reader can find that he can overlook, and what he cannot. I could handle the mostly inexplicable advanced knowledge that Adelia possesses long before the age of Lister and Pasteur--the emphasis on sterilization by alcohol, the frequent hand-washing, the scorning of leeches and purges (the cornerstones of a medieval doctor's repertoire). I shrugged it off by saying that she was from Salerno, and Saracen medical techniques were indeed far ahead of western European knowledge. A body farm at the medical school where students could study the advance of decay? Very unlikely, but maybe so. Her love of salads and dislike of meat? Yes, perhaps more of a modern outlook, but there were certainly eccentrics of any era. Her CSI-like autopsies (complete with slate-wielding attendant)? Um, I guess so. The PC correctness of the superior Mansur? Heavy-handed, but tolerable. Even laudable.
But modern attitudes--as opposed to knowledge--well, that was the stumbling block for me. In the end, the murderer is of course, unveiled. And Adelia pleads mercy for him, saying that the cathartic release of the trial (a very modern entirely Anglo-Saxon attitude by the way and quite alien to most of the world) and imprisonment were sufficient. For any medieval person to be against the death penalty--and a murderer who tortured and slaughtered the most innocent of victims--for that person to plead mercy for such a monster--seems unbelievable to me. She seemed, at that point, to be not of that world at all--but rather a being from somewhere else altogether. Certainly not of medieval Europe, wherever she might have been born. Her dispassionate view seemed more akin to that of an angel's--and angels are terrifying creatures. I wanted nothing to do with angels, thrown into a plot where they didn't belong. And I won't be reading any more books from this series.(less)
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