The exploration of the unknown has fascinated writers since time immemorial, wanderings, encounters with a new culture and the induction into it. This has been seen in popular fiction as well as literary – the latter starting perhaps with Marco Polo, who was accused of manufacturing much of his information. What is also curious is that people have been fascinated by encounters between the west and the orient – one could number books like Lord Jim, Shogun, River of Smoke and most recently The Yellow Emperor’s Cure, the last two written by Indian authors. Amitabh Ghosh and Kunal Basu. In fact, the last two have hit the public gaze within a year of each other. Ghosh’s is specifically about the opium trade with China during Britain’s reign while Basu’s pinpoints the encounter of a Portuguese doctor with Chinese medicine. Specifically a son’s quest to find a remedy for syphilis, the plague that was for 400 years or more the world’s forerunner to AIDs and that was similarly regarded by society and the Church, and save his father, ironically a respected physician who is helpless in the face of the scourge.
Category > History fiction
Interesting Times
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The Winter Palace
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Eva Stachniak’s The Winter Palace is a colourful tale of the first years spent by Princess Sophie – who in the course of the novel becomes Catherine the Great – in St. Petersburg’s infamous Winter Palace. Told from the point of view of Vavara, a Polish girl who finds herself at the heart of Empress Elizabeth’s court, The Winter Palace is a veritable assault on the senses as well as a thoroughly absorbing tale.
Left an orphan Vavara, the daughter of an impoverished bookbinder who enjoyed the patronage of the royal court is permitted to serve in the court of Russia’s Empress Elizabeth. She begins her life in the palace sewing room but Vavara is a hopeless seamstress and she has to endure the wrath of the critical wardrobe mistress.
The Stranger’s Child
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The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst is a large book which spans the majority of the 20th century. It tells the story of a young poet, Cecil Valance, although he dies relatively early in the story during the First World War leaving behind a modest group of poems, mainly secondary rate, but one or two of which enter the public consciousness in the English-speaking world. The fulcrum of the novel is a weekend in the late summer of 1913 when Cecil comes to stay at the house of his close Cambridge friend, George Sawle. The actions of Cecil during that weekend and the ways in which he interacts with the Sawle family members and their retainers sends out ripples which penetrate the remainder of the novel and eventually extend into the late 20th century.
The Stranger’s Child is Hollinghurst’s first novel since The Line of Beauty won the Man Booker prize in 2004.
The Lady of the Rivers
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The Lady of the Rivers is the third novel in Philippa Gregory’s Cousins at War trilogy, covering the stories of three of the women involved in the Wars of the Roses. The first novel, The White Queen, was about Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s Queen Consort; the second, The Red Queen, covered Margaret Beaufort, mother of the first Tudor king, Henry VII. Now in The Lady of the Rivers we go back in time to the story of Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta, firstly Duchess of Bedford, and then following the death of her husband, she marries Richard Woodville who becomes the first Earl Rivers.
The Wars of the Roses is a fascinating and complex time in English history. The houses of Lancaster and York fought each other for the throne, which changed between them a few times.
Theodora: Actress, Empress, Whore
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Theodora had to earn a living on the stage since she was five, after her father was killed by his own bear. In her teens she also becomes a prostitute. Yet she ended up as Empress. Not surprisingly, she remains one of the more controversial and colourful figures of the Roman Empire.
In Theodora: Empress, Actress, Whore, Stella Duffy takes some of what is known about Theodora of 6th century Constantinople and turns it into a lively, rollicking historical novel. Theodora is an intelligent young woman who learns and takes on several different roles successfully. This is Duffy’s 12th novel but her first foray into historical fiction.
Sarah’s Key
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Sarah’s Key tells the story of an event in Paris during the Second World War and how it changed the lives of many, both directly and indirectly involved at the time and for many decades later. It’s not a book I would expect to sell well in France because it quite literally opens the cupboard and rattles the skeletons that many would prefer to leave firmly locked away. It is a look at the shame of a nation summed up with the word ‘collaboration’.
Paris in July 1942 was a city under occupation. The Jewish population had already been marked with the yellow stars on their clothes which were the standard branding of the Nazi regime. In an apartment a family receive a feared but expected knock at the door and know that the time has come to leave.
Pure
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Pure, by Andrew Miller, is a novel about the demolition of a cemetery in pre-revolutionary Paris, and it would be hard to think of a much more gothic premise for a book. The cemetery is les Innocents, a place filled to overflowing with the remains of countless generations of Parisians, rich and poor. Les Innocents has been closed to new interments but retains its priest, an organist and a verger. However, it has become an offense and health hazard to the surrounding area. The Minister commissions a young engineer from the country, Jean-Baptiste Baratte, to undertake the demolition of the cemetery and its buildings, and Pure is the story of the subsequent events.
The Coffee Trader
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It is a skilled author that can create a central character who is quite deceitful and ruthless yet still manages to have the readers rooting for him. Miguel Lienza tries to fix the markets by selling things he doesn’t actually own and even obtains credit for his schemes secretly in his brother’s name, but those who would put an end to any chances of him being successful are so much more odious and underhand that you would forgive Miguel almost anything.
Miguel Lienza is a Portuguese Jew living in Amsterdam and trying to make a decent living on the stock market, at the time the most important trading floor in Europe. When the story opens Miguel is living in the basement of his brother Daniel’s house; he’s recently been down on his luck after losing a great deal of money trading in futures.
The Collaborator
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The wartime experiences of Channel Islanders have been a popular topic in fiction recently, most notably with the quirky Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Mary Horlock’s much darker The Book of Lies. There are a few that don’t make the grade however, among them Margaret Leroy’s The Collaborator.
The premise is hardly original but there are plenty of opportunities for the story to be developed; these chances are not taken and the novel suffers because of that. Vivienne de la Mare lives on Guernsey with her daughters – Blanche is fourteen and has just left school, Millie is much younger, still at the age for bedtime stories – and her aged and increasingly infirm mother-in-law, Evelyn; her husband, Eugene, is away fighting in the war.
The English German Girl
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Anxious to avoid being accused of “bumming a ride on the back of the Holocaust” as he describes it, Jake Wallis Simons, author of “The English German Girl”, writes from the point of view of Rosa Klein who, at the age of fifteen, leaves Berlin on a train bound for England in the hope that, once there, she can find an escape route for the rest of her family. It’s an interesting viewpoint because the subject of the ‘Kindertransports’ is one that’s rarely encountered in fiction, in spite of there being so much literature around the Second World War and the fate of the Jews.
We meet the Klein family in the mid 1930s: father Otto is a successful surgeon who, as the book opens, is summoned to his superior at the hospital to learn that from now on he’ll only be allowed to carry out clerical work. One Saturday morning when Rosa goes alone out to buy pastries for breakfast the assistant in the baker’s shop gives her a pin brooch, a curious thing, with crooked angry looking arms; when her parents see what she’s clutching they tell her she mustn’t go out alone any more.
The Tenth Circle of Hell
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The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic is an eye-witness account of life in the death camps of Bosnia, where Serbs locked up Croats and Muslims and subjected them to the must unimaginable atrocities. It was first published in 1993, the year after most of the events that it describes took place and it has since been translated many times into many languages. It’s one of the most shocking books I’ve ever read but one I feel compelled to recommend and advise others to read. We should not forget that things like this happened in Europe, in a place where western Europeans took cheap package summer holidays and where the people killing each other looked like us, ate like us, sang like us, lived in houses like ours and got up in the morning to go to jobs like those we did.
Ramses: The Son of the Light
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Ramses: The Son of the Light by Christian Jacq was lent to me by a friend who assured me I would like it – we swap a lot of books and have many similar tastes so I thought she was probably right, but it wasn’t the kind of book I was likely to choose for myself. Telling the story of one of ancient Egypt’s most famous pharaohs, Ramses: The Son of the Light is the first novel in a series of five.
Opening when Ramses is only fourteen, Son of the Light follows the future leader through his teens as his father, the pharaoh Seti, subtly trains him for his future role – although Ramses older brother Shanaar is thought to be the heir, Seti chooses Ramses.
I know little about ancient Egypt, only what the average layperson would know – some place names, some people, and a general image of the civilization based on the monuments which survive today.
