Category Archives: 1800′s/19th C

Review: Flashback by Nevada Barr

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Flashback is really two books in one, told via alternating chapters. Both stories take place on a tiny group of islands off the coast of Key West, Florida which during the Civil War was the site of Fort Jefferson, a Union prison, and is now the Dry Tortugas National Park. In the present-day story National Parks Ranger Anna Pigeon has taken a temporary job at the park because the permanent supervisor has had to leave quickly due to mental illness. Anna was quite pleased to have an opportunity to escape Mississippi as her boyfriend has just proposed and she is not sure how she feels about the idea of marriage. In addition to her routine duties she is, as the book opens, called upon to undertake a search, including scuba diving, for a missing colleague which soon turns into a more macabre investigation. The second story is a historical one. Anna’s sister sends her some old family letters which were written by one of their relatives who happened (in a stretch of credibility) to have been stationed at the Fort with her husband towards the end of the Civil War. In a series of letters to her sister in the North she tells a story of young love gone awry and the incarceration of several men who had been convicted of being part of the conspiracy to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

There really is nothing much connecting the two stories so it felt to me as if I was reading two entirely separate books a chapter at a time which is not something I would ever do. Just as I felt like I was becoming interested in one story I’d be jerked out and thrown into the other, only to be rudely pulled out of that one a little while later and hurled back into the first. I have read and enjoyed a few books which use this kind of convention but here I never felt fully immersed in either story. I think it was the fact that there was nothing at all connecting the two (aside from the awkward coincidence of the narrators’ family link) and the historical story in particular was slow going (16 hours is long for an audio book), and was more of a gothic romance than mystery until the very end. A big part of the enjoyment of historical fiction for me is becoming immersed for a time in the language and social conventions of the period which just does not happen when you’re being pulled back to the 21st century at the end of every chapter. There were some fascinating and (I think from my limited knowledge of American history) accurate details about the period, and a creative imagining of what life might have been like for a woman in a harsh, man’s world but their impact on me wasn’t as strong as it might have been had this been a story in its own right.

The present-day story suffered from the interruptions too, as any suspense built up towards the end of a chapter dissipated by the time I’d spent another half-hour or so listening to details of life on an 1860’s prison island. However, Anna Pigeon was, as always, an engaging character who rarely acts as expected but is always very believable in the way she thinks and behaves. She doggedly pursues her investigation, despite almost non-existent communication to the mainland and a growing wariness to trust her fellow islanders. As I have come to rely on with Barr’s writing, the story makes much use of its physical location, both in detail and more broadly, to the point where I almost feel like I have visited the location myself. Why some enterprising American tourist association hasn’t coerced Barr to become their spokeswoman (spokeswriter?) is beyond me: she would attract tourists by the bus load.

This is the fourth Nevada Barr/Anna Pigeon book I’ve read and I did enjoy aspects of it almost as much as the other novels I’ve read. Though for me the dueling storylines was not a terribly satisfactory plot device I like the fact that Barr tries new things to keep her long-running series fresh, and each story in its own right was well told and had a very authentic sense of place. I shall continue to hop around this series, which seems not to suffer from my reading the books out of order, as my mood and the books’ sale price at audible dictates.

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I have reviewed three other Nevada Barr books, Hunting Season, Borderline and Burn

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My rating 3/5
Narrator Barbara Rosenblat
Publisher Recorded Books [this edition 2009, originally 2003]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 15 hours 53 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book series number 10 in the Anna Pigeon series
Source I bought it

Review: Pelagia & the White Bulldog by Boris Akunin

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After an abandoned attempt to read Death in Breslau I borrowed a second book from the local library to kick off this year’s Eastern Europe Challenge.

Pelagia & the White Bulldog is the first novel of a series set in late 19th century Russia and introduces Sister Pelagia: “a fidgety, curious woman, undignified in her movements and not cut out to be a nun.” She is tasked by the Bishop of Zavolzhie to investigate a situation which is vexing his Aunt who claims that someone has tried to poison the last remaining examples of the the white bulldogs with brown ears that her husband had especially bred before his death. That is really all I can tell you about the plot without delving into action that does not take place until the half-way point of the novel. Although I suppose it is not spoiling things too much to add that there is a second (eventually intertwined) storyline relating to the appointment of Vladimir Lvovich Bubenstov as a representative of the Orthodox Church’s Holy Synod to investigate religious improprieties in the town.

I have to admit to struggling with this book and in some ways I shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the reasons I stopped a formal study of literature during my University days was that I couldn’t face reading what I came to think of as ‘another bloody Russian’ that the syllabus seemed to be full of. I don’t know if it is the original writing or the way the language is translated into English but the one thing the Russian fiction of my acquaintance has in common is an unwillingness to use 10 words when 200 (or 2000) are available. I found the flowery, long-winded prose of Tolstoy and Dostoyesvky dread-inducing all those years ago but I thought perhaps a less ‘worthy’, more recent title might be different. Alas I did not find it so. Amidst the interminably lengthy descriptions of nothing much at all there is a story, of sorts, here but not one that kept me particularly engaged (and not one that couldn’t have been told in one-third the word count). I teased out some interesting observations about the politics of the day but as a mystery the book left a lot to be desired in that the culprit for the crimes that were eventually described was obvious almost from the outset and the way in which Pelagia deduced the answer bordered on the inane.

I didn’t find the characters particularly enjoyable either. I thought I would like Pelagia’s quirkiness but she soon turned into a kind of reject from a Carry On movie what with knocking over fruit bowls and spilling tea in men’s crotches and whatnot. Slapstick has never been my humour of choice. The rest of the characters were all pretty formulaic for the intimate melodrama the book turned into, though the way Bubenstov hid is evilness was the most entertaining thing about the book for me.

I know there are readers who don’t share my admiration for brevity and conciseness and more who simply enjoy the kind of writing that Akunin has produced here. I am probably the poorer for not being able to appreciate this particular style but it can’t be helped. For me the hints of wry humour and mildly interesting plot were lost in the flowery, tangent-riddled prose that made me want to poke my own eyes out with one of the knitting needles that Pelagia carried everywhere.

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I couldn’t find much in the way of online reviewing of this book but did come across a 2006 review in the UK paper The Independent that describes a similar reaction to mine. However in the interests of fairness you might want to check Amazon for some more positive reviews.

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My rating 2/5 (yes it probably is a little low, but it’s my opinion after all, as all the reviews here are, I’m not making any claims to objectivity)
Author website http://www.boris-akunin.com/
Translator Andrew Bromfield
Publisher Weidenfield & Nicolson [this translation 2006, original edition 2000]
ISBN 0297852507
Length 295 pages
Format paperback
Book Series #1 in the Sister Pelagia series
Source borrowed from the library

Review: Mosquito Creek by Robert Engwerda

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I really enjoyed this author’s first novel, Backwaters, a few years ago so snapped this second novel up when it was released in June. Warning, only the most liberal of definitions would include this as crime fiction.

In 1855 the goldfields at Mosquito Creek near Bendigo in Victoria have seen their best days. Much of the easily extractable gold has been taken and many of the diggers have moved on. As this book opens it is teeming with rain and the river has burst its banks, causing a small group of diggers to be cut off from the main field. Amongst the general unrest over the fact that little work can be done due to the weather there is a feeling that ‘something’ must be done to rescue those cut off by the rising flood waters, there appears to be an outbreak of disease to contend with and it seems that one of the diggers has gone missing.

Early white settlement in Australia often seemed to me to be the stories of people who didn’t want to be here. This includes both the convicts who were transported here from England from 1788 onwards and many of the officials charged with maintaining order in the colonies whose postings were a form of punishment in themselves. How they deal with their circumstances, whether they treat it as an opportunity or an ordeal is, often, at the heart of things. The two central characters in Mosquito Creek seem to fit this category though they do approach it differently.

Niall Kennedy, now a sergeant in the goldfields police, was transported as a convict and over the course of the novel we learn about his background, why he was transported to Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), how he has arrived at this point in his life and what he would like to do in the future. Early on in the novel when he is considering some of the other troopers on the goldfields he thinks

Joining the goldfields police would be just another job for them, something he’d thought himself at the start: a green winter uniform, a wage and a new carbine in your hands. A chance to swagger a bit and pay some bastard back for all you’d suffered yourself. There were a lot like that – most were, in fact. But he saw it differently now. It was a wage for him, but it was something else too: a chance to slip into some new kind of skin, a chance to make up for a past that had grown over like brambles and suffocated his life.

The other significant person in the novel is Commissioner Charles Stanfield who was forced into accepting his posting to the colonies by his father. Again as the novel unfolds we learn about the events which led to his ostracism and his compulsion to achieve some level of importance or notoriety that would enable him to return to England, which is his sole goal in life. In one of the letters to his family that he composes (either literally or in his head) he provides this insight into both his own character and the nature of the settlement he has been sent to

You must not believe the lies that are spread from these parts because this is not a real place. When the sources of gold are exhausted a population disappears with it. A town of ten thousand people can be reduced to little more than a hundred overnight, more lying buried in the cemetery than remaining near it. Nor are the inhabitants of a goldfield people as you or I would know them. Everything here is built on rumour and gossip, every conversation designed only to advance the interests of the speaker. When a person occupies a position such as I occupy here there are many enemies and very few friends. Everything I do is subject to scrutiny.

Of course the setting itself is also a major player in a novel like this. Engwerda does a fantastic job of depicting a time and place where the natural elements play a crucial role in day-to-day life. We see, for example, snippets of life for the men who have been cut-off by the flood and their increasing desperation at being cold, starving and having no sense of when or if there might be respite is wholly believable. Even the fact that there is only one female character who actually opens her mouth in the entire book helps give the setting a sense of realism.

The story didn’t capture my interest as much as the two men at the centre of the novel. Though at some points it was quite gripping, overall it didn’t feel particularly tense and wasn’t one of those books I felt I had to get back to as soon as I’d put it down (though I was always happy to pick it up again). I found one of the story threads in particular, involving Charles Stanfield’s efforts to retrieve a valued family heirloom, a little confusing and too reliant on innuendo over concrete plot advancement but this is a minor quibble really.

I have to admit that the early colonial history of my country is not my favourite area of history to read about (due to a combination of bad history teaching and a stint working as an archivist where all any researcher ever wanted to know about was their family’s convict past) but I found Mosquito Creek’s focus on two very interesting characters and the way they dealt with the tribulations life handed them to be very engaging. I would certainly recommend it to anyone who is interested in getting a sense of this period of Australian history from an unusual perspective.

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My rating 4/5
Publisher Penguin [2010]
ISBN 9780670073719
Length 337 pages
Format Trade Paperback
Source I bought it

Review: The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

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I chose this as the second book to count towards the Canadian Book Challenge #4

In 1867 in the small Canadian town of Caulfield a French trapper Laurent Jammet, is murdered. His body is discovered by a neighbour, Mrs Ross, whose own son Francis disappears at around the same time and some of the town’s inhabitants think he might have killed Jammet. However a friend of Jammet’s, a mixed-race trapper named Parker, is also suspected of the murder and is arrested. When Hudson’s Bay Company men are sent for to sort out the legalities they are unsure of who has committed the crime and eventually set out to search for Francis Ross in the dangerous, snow-covered wilderness.

Set exactly 100 years before I was born, what struck me particularly about this book was its sense of time and place. The simple problems of staying alive in such a harsh environment without access to any conveniences of our modern world were starkly portrayed. Several incidents in the small town’s history reveal how easy it must have been to die a fairly grim death in this new world. The book also depicts the political setting in the way society was governed for the most part by ‘the Company’ (a fur trading company that acted as a de facto government in much of Canada during this period) using a fairly basic system of justice that placed white men squarely at the top of the food chain.

There are a lot of characters in this book which makes it hard for very many of them to be depicted in much depth. I think the book might have been more successful for me if there were fewer characters explored more deeply. The standout exception is the character of Mrs Ross who is particularly well-drawn and is also the only one who reveals anything much about her past before the events of this book. Her willingness to undergo any amount of hardship and face any danger in fierce protectiveness of her son is both believable and very engaging and her journey, particularly during the second half of the book, is worth reading for its own sake.

As a work of crime fiction I found the book less successful than as a piece of historical fiction as the solving of the mystery is not really the heart of the novel and even seems to be forgotten for several large chunks of the narrative. For me the book did stretch the bounds of narrative credibility at a couple of points (there were so many separate groups trailing each other through the wilderness they just about needed traffic lights) but I did thoroughly enjoy being transported virtually back to this time (all the while thanking my lucky stars for being born at a time offering more creature comforts to women in particular) and the personal journey of Mrs Ross is worth reading for its own sake.

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My rating 3.5/5

Publisher Quercus [2006]; ISBN 9781905204823; Length 420 pages

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The Tenderness of Wolves has also been reviewed by Maxine from Petrona and at Reading Matters

Review: The Railway Detective by Edward Marston

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A good (non-blogging) friend of mine recommended this author to me as a purveyor of fine, light reading, which is just what I’ve been after lately.

In 1850′s England railways were expanding all over the countryside and were being lauded by authorities as a safe, fast form of transport. So when the London to Birmingham mail train is robbed and its driver badly bashed and left to die Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck is immediately dispatched to uncover the culprits and return Britain’s faith in its rail system.

The first thing I always look for in historical fiction is interesting period details and this book is brimming with them. Clever use has been made of real events from the time, such as London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, and there are loads more tidbits as well. I was particularly struck by the realism of such things as the fact that the train driver was never consigned to a hospital despite his severe injuries and the descriptions of Devil’s Acre, London’s darkest and seediest corner at the time. For steam train enthusiasts there are plenty of wonderful details of locomotives and the various companies that were in operation during this era and overall it’s a jolly good depiction of the era.

Robert Colbeck is a fairly stereotypical super-sleuth: well-educated, more intelligent than everyone around him and impossibly knowledgeable about a wide variety of subjects. But he’s not arrogant about it and he does have some foibles to make him more human and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting him. He is ably assisted by Sergeant Leeming who unquestioningly does whatever is asked of him, including riding on the railways he doesn’t much care for. There is, of course, the somewhat bumbling senior officer for Colbeck to contend with but on the bright side there’s a hint of romance for him too so life is not all bad for him. The villain of the story is also quite thoughtfully depicted and lent a bit of gravity to the light tale.

The story rips along at a cracking pace and while the resolution to the mystery is not particularly complicated it all hangs together properly and there are a few unexpected twists. I enjoyed both the way the book depicted a general opposition to technological change which seems to happen repeatedly in human history and the wealth of historical detail to become lost in. Highly recommended as a ‘summer read’ for the historically inclined.

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My rating 3.5/5

Publisher Allison & Busby [2005]; ISBN 9780749083526; Length 318 pages

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Edward Marston is one of the pseudonyms used by Keith Miles but under this name alone he is a very prolific author with several series on the go including one featuring a Restoration-period architect and another set in and around Elizabethan theatre. I’ll be stocking up on more titles for those increasingly common periods when intelligent escapism is required. Check out the lengthy list of his titles at Fantastic Fiction for some reading inspiration.

Review: Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters

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Title: Crocodile on the Sandbank (the 1st Amelia Peabody mystery)

Author: Elizabeth Peters

Publisher: Warner Books (original edition 1975, this edition 1992)

ISBN: 0-445-40651-8

Length: 262 pages

This is the first book to introduce the impossibly unbelievable heroine Amelia Peabody. It’s around 1880 and Amelia is a 32 year old single woman who has just inherited a sizable fortune. She leaves her native England and, after a short stop in Europe where she acquires a companion by the name of Evelyn who has been ruined by an unfortunate love affair, she heads for Egypt. While waiting for their boat to be ready for a trip down the Nile, Amelia and Evelyn meet the Emerson brothers, Radcliffe and Walter, who they later encounter at Armanah where they are excavating. When the ladies join the dig a mysterious mummy frightens the local workmen away but Amelia is not so easily scared.

This series is something of a guilty reading pleasure for me. I have always been a little obsessed with things Egyptian and so love the tales of the digs and discoveries that are full of fun and adventure. It’s rare for me to want to swap lives with the fictional people I read about but I’d happily switch places with Amelia if such things were possible. Peters clearly knows her subject as even in this first book the historical details are accurate and she takes care to depict the excavations and other events as they would have been carried out at this period (assuming that a force of nature such as Amelia had taken part any way).

This book does a nice job of introducing all the characters of the series: providing some back story but leaving some things too for revelation in later books. Over-the-top Amelia is able to master all manner of skills including medicine, archaeology, negotiation, languages and virtually anything else she turns her mind to. I’m sure she’d be annoying to be around at times but her total disregard for the social conventions of the day would, I think, make up for her superiority complex. The rest of the characters are either equally wonderful human beings (Amelia wouldn’t settle for anything less in her friends) unless they’re dastardly rascals intent on mischief.

If you fancy a girls own adventure with a heroine you can’t help but admire and a liberal dose of humour then try Crocodile on the Sandbank for yourself. The plot is a little convoluted at times but it all works out in the end and, anyway, I like these books more for their sense of time and place and can forgive some annoyances with the plot.

My rating 3.5/5