Harriet Devine's Blog

A Treacherous Likeness

I do like a good historical thriller (with the emphasis on good) and especially so if they have real historical figures appearing in them. Tricky to do, but fun if it works. So I was more than delighted when I was offered Lynn Shepherd's latest novel to review, since the historical figures in it are people about whom I already knew rather a lot. But as it turned out, that was a bit of a mixed blessing.

The people concerned here are the poet Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and her step sister Claire Clairmont. In fact when the novel begins, in 1850, Percy is long dead, and Mary is a sick elderly lady living with her son, the 'controversially ordinary' Sir Percy and his manipulative wife Jane, whose sole purpose in life is to sanitise the poet's posthumous reputation, a far from easy task. This is, indeed, the starting point for the novel. Jane Shelley is deeply anxious because Claire, for many years an exile from England, has reappeared in London. Jane fears that she holds documents that will show that the poet, far from the ineffectual angel she wishes him to appear, was actually immoral, untrustworthy, and verging on the unbalanced. To help her to retrieve the documents Jane calls in the detective Charles Maddox, who soon works out that there are other secrets to be uncovered which are at least equally damaging, and which involve his own family. Soon we are back in the years 1814 to 1816, as Charles looks hard at the existing evidence of the shenannigans of the Shelley entourage, uncovering disturbing indications of unexplained infant deaths and promptings to suicide. 

Lynn Shepherd was well qualified to write this novel, as she has a PhD in English Literature and has clearly used all her research skills here. Not only that, but she has brilliantly interwoven the real words of her characters -- Mary, Shelley and Claire -- with her own imagined dialogue, so that the people appear totally convincing. Also, all the mysteries that Charles sets out to solve are genuine and have puzzled Shelley scholars for generations. What was the true nature of Shelley's relationship with Claire? Whose was the baby Elena, adopted and then inexplicably dropped by the Shelleys in Italy? What happened in Wales in 1814 to terrify Shelley so much? and much more besides. I could not possibly fault all this, or indeed wholly disagree with her conclusions about Shelley's peculiar mental state. I've always had a very soft spot for Claire and thought she came out well here. But, though I've never really warmed to Mary, I can't say I've ever gone down the road that Shepherd takes us on -- enough said.

Many years ago I wrote a book about Mary Shelley's mother, the great feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and did my fair share of puzzling over discrepancies in the historical accounts, one of which resulted in an article with the rather charming name 'A Meritorious Wife; or, Mrs Godwin and the Donkey'. You might think that this foreknowledge would have put me off the novel, and I see that Daisy Hay, author of the recent Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives, showed her displeasure with it in her Guardian review. But you know what? I took it all with a pinch of salt and thought it was really good fun. In fact my only real quibble was that by the end my head was rather spinning with all the revelations and complications that Charles uncovered. But maybe that's just me. 

I have not read Shepherd's other novels, but I am now keen to read Tom All Alone's, which uses the characters and seetings of one of my favorite novels of all time, Bleak House, as well as featuring the attractive detective who reappears here. Anyone else read either of these?

 

Dr Thorne

How Did He Do It?  is not the title of a novel by Anthony Trollope, though it could be (cf. Can You Forgive Her? Is He Popenjoy?, Did He Steal It?). No, it reflects my amazement at the astonishingly prolific output of a man who managed to hold down a highly responsible job while producing 47 novels, 12 volumes of short stories, 18 works of non-fiction and two plays. And not just any old novels, mind you -- although his reputation was a bit up and down at first, there's no doubt -- in my mind at least -- that he was one of the most important novelists of the nineteenth century. And in fact, one reason why he was looked at with a rather beady eye by some of his contemporaries was the very fact that he wrote so much and in such an organised way -- he paid his servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up with a cup of coffee at 5am so that he could write for three hours before he went to work. What's wrong with that, you may ask? Well, there was a view at the time that you had to wait for the Muse to strike you before you picked up your pen, so Trollope's method seemed a good deal too mundane. Also, he was not much liked for his most delightful way of suddenly addressing the reader, or, in more contemporary parlance, drawing attention to the act of writing:

But it will be too much, perhaps, to tell the reader what she wore as Beatrice's bridesmaid, seeing that a couple of pages, at least, must be devoted to her marriage dress, and seeing, also, that we have only a few pages left to finish everything...

I've read a few of Trollope's novels over the years, though only reviewed one on here, the not very well known Lady Anna. Dr Thorne is much better known, being the fourth of the so-called Barchester Novels, of which I have read the first three, though in pre-blogging days. The eponymous doctor is a middle-aged gentleman of modest means, who lives in the village of Greshamsbury. Twenty or so years before the story begins, he adopted the illegitimate baby daughter of his ne-er do well brother, who had been murdered by the brother of the village girl he made pregnant. The child's mother has married and gone to America, the brother has served his sentence and subsequently become stupendously rich, but the doctor and his beloved adopted Mary have gone on quietly with their lives in domestic peace and comfort. Mary has become very close to the daughters of the neighbouring squire Mr Gresham, with whom she has shared lessons throughout her teenage years. Now, as the novel begins, the Gresham's only son Frank has reached twenty-one, and the whole neighbourhood is sharing in the celebrations. As we soon learn, Frank and Mary have fallen in love, but from this seemingly innocent fact springs the whole convoluted and often nail-biting plot.

Money, social class and "blood". To these and their often complex interactions are owed the trials and tribulations of poor Mary and Frank. For Frank's father has managed to get himself into deep financial trouble, and that part of his estate that he has not sold is heavily mortgaged. Thus it is that, certainly as far as his mother and her aristocratic relations are concerned, Frank has but one duty -- to marry money. Mary has neither money nor that second prerequisite, "blood" (of the blue variety), and indeed her illegitimacy puts her beyond the pale. Of course, the immensely wealthy heiress who the family would like Frank to marry is the daughter of a tradesman, but her riches overrule what would otherwise be an absolute barrier.

As anyone who is familiar with Trollope will know, these are his common concerns. But that does not make this novel any less appealing. Trollope manages to satirise the worst excesses of the appalling aristocrats and the dreadfulness of their lawyers in a way which is both funny and horrifically convincing. But he also manages to create characters who have undoubted faults and yet make them surprisingly sympathetic. And then of course there is Mary, the most admirable heroine, intelligent and feisty as well as pretty, who suffers dreadfully through a great part of the novel but bears it with great courage, and dear, good-hearted, loyal Frank, and the delightful doctor himself, very human and not always right but always having at heart the best interests of those he loves. 

I am so happy to have rediscovered Trollope. After a rather worrying reading block earlier this year, it is exciting to find that there are more than forty unread novels to look forward to! I've started one already, and another is on its way, so keep a watch on here for more reviews soon. Any fellow Trollope fans out there? What's your favorite?

 

Waiting for Sunrise

It is a clear and dazzling summer's day in Vienna. You are standing in a skewed pentangle of lemony sunshine at the sharp corner of Augustiner Strasse and Augustinerbastei, across from the opera house, indolently watching the world pass you by, waiting for someone or something to catch and hold  your attention, to generate a tremor of interest. There's a curious frisson in the city's atmosphere today, almost spring-like, though spring is long gone, but you recognise that slight vernal restlessness in the people going by, that stirring of potential in the air, that possibility of audacity...

Lovely lovely book! 

It feels like a long time since I've felt able to say that. I've read most of William Boyd's novels, liked some more than others, but for some reason never reviewed one on here. Most of them must have been in pre-blogging days, and though I see I bought Restless in 2007 I didn't write about it for some reason. Anyway, my daughter, whose opinion I trust implicitly, gave me this for Christmas, and I've just finished it. 

The novel starts in Vienna in 1913. A young actor, Lysander Reif, has come to the city to consult an eminent psychoanalyst about a very intimate and distressing problem which, the doctor tells him, is called anorgasmia. Lysander is engaged to beautiful Blanche, a fellow actor, and wants to get himself sorted out before the wedding. But everything changes even before the consultation, as Lysander meets, in the waiting room, a young English woman called Hettie Bull. Hettie, who lives with a bad-tempered sculptor, is clearly unstable, but, despite not being Lysander's type (small and dark rather than tall and blonde), she manages to get him into bed and the two start an intensely passionate affair, one result of which is that Lysander's problem disappears in an instant, never to return. But events in Vienna take a dramatic turn, and Lysander narrowly escapes a very serious situation and finds his way back to London. Then it is 1914, and Lysander gets caught up in the war in various unusual and often threatening and upsetting ways, culminating in an involvement in military intelligence which ends up being closer to home than he could ever have imagined.

So why did I love this novel so much? Well, William Boyd writes really well -- not obtrusively beautiful prose but just consistently intelligent, perceptive and enjoyable to read. Then the story is attractively unpredictable, with many unexpected twists and turns. And, perhaps above all, Boyd has achieved something that I think only the best writers can do -- a wonderful multiplicity of tone. Sometimes the novel is comic, sometimes serious, sometimes tense or threatening, and sometimes all of these combined. And he does this, I think, by filtering events through Lysander himself. Mostly the novel is told in the third person, though there are some chapters which are extracts from Lysander's 'Autobiographical Investigations'. But always the reader is inside Lysander's head, seeing things through his eyes, filtering them through his often slightly confused consciousness. Lysander is a delight, or was so to me -- an actor, the son of a famous actor and an equally famous singer, he is constantly aware of his lack of a proper education. Far from stupid, he is nevertheless often puzzled by the turn events are taking, and -- as befits someone in the new age of psychoanalysis -- tries to make sense of his reactions to it all.  Of course despite his attempts at self-analysis he is frequently swept away by his feelings and emotions, but though he gets into some quite sticky situations he is fundamentally a good and honest man and his aim, or one of them, seems to be to try to reach some kind of 'truth'. Whether he has reached it by the end of the novel is dubious -- he has certainly changed, but Boyd leaves us with a very ambiguous final view of him, as

a man who evidently prefers the fringes and edges of the city streets, its blurry periferies - where its hard to make things out clearly, hard to tell exactly what is what, and who is whom -- Mr Lysander Reif looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

There's so much to enjoy here. Some wonderfully conceived characters -- amoral, addicted Hetty, for one, but also the mysterious Madame Duschene, who Lysander is much attracted to despite the fact that she once tried to murder him, Lysander's beautiful, rather mysterious mother, and an amazing cast of British diplomats, all in varying degrees deeply untrustworthy. The historical background -- hardly a background since it is so essential to the plot -- is brilliantly evoked, whether pre-war Vienna or wartime Normandy and England. Well, you can tell I liked it. Highly recommended.

The Prodigal Spy

I'm really not sure what's happened to my reading of late. Where are all the Viragos and Persephones that used to be my daily fare? For the last few months I have been straying about all over the place and venturing into areas I never thought to explore before. Here's the latest -- spy fiction. Some of this is owing to the availability, or lack of it, of much in the way of literary fiction here in the depths of rural France.  But I belong to a sort of Anglo-French association, and go to art and photography groups in a nearby village. There's a bookshelf there where people leave books they don't want any more, and I trawl through them from time totime hoping somebody might have left something I could bear to read. This rarely happens, I'm sorry to say. But this one caught my eye the other day and so it came home with me and I read it with a surprising degree of enjoyment. 

 You might think that spy fiction would be full of drama and intrigue, and there certainly is some of that, but this is a remarkably quiet and thoughtful story. The prodigal spy of the title is Walter Kotlar, an American government official who, in 1950, defected to Moscow, abandoning his wife and small son. She remarries, and the boy Nicholas takes his new father's name.  Twenty years later Nick, now a post-grad student in London, gets a message -- his father, now living in Prague, wants him to come for a visit. Nick is unwilling, but is persuaded by his beautiful new friend Molly. When he gets there he finds his father old, sick, dying -- and also desperate to return to the United States. But before Nick is able to help, or even to be sure if he wants to help, Walter dies in mysterious circumstances and Nick is flung into a messy world of intrigue and suspicion -- will he ever find out the truth?

This is, in fact, a really good story, and has plenty of interest to say about father-son relationships. The historical background (yes I'm always a sucker for that) is very well done, both 1950s America and 1970s Prague and London. But what struck me above all was how extremely well written it was. My snobbish remarks about literary fiction should really be edited out, or at least I must say that it's good to have your horizons broadened and to discover that there is some really good and readable writing going on in genres way outside the work of women writers of the twentieth century. I shall be looking out for more novels by Joseph Kanon.

The Long Song

I started this novel a year or more ago, but quickly got irritated with it and put it aside. Why I picked it up again this week I can't say, but this time I read it to the end and was quite rivetted by the story it tells. 

Reader, how can this be? as our narrator, July, would say. And therein, I'm afraid, lies the problem, for me at least. As I'm sure everybody knows, because I suspect I'm the last person ever to have read this novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010, the story is mainly narrated by an 80 year old woman who was a born into slavery. She has been urged to write it by her son Thomas, a wealthy and well-educated printer, with whom she has been reunited, having given him up soon after his birth. In fact the story is framed by explanations from the son, and throughout the narrative there are interruptions for July to recount her arguments with him about the writing. And, of course, July writes in her native patois, except when she is reporting the speech of her white superiors, when she is perfectly able to reproduce their grammar and vocabulary. 

Now, I suppose there's nothing wrong with all this, but I'm afraid it got rather on my nerves from time to time. I find any dialect writing rather hard going, and I could have done without the interruptions, which didn't seem to me to add much, and I wasn't entirely sure why Levy decided to include them. But as there's quite a lot of to-ing fro-ing through various time periods, perhaps they are there to support that? Anyway, the story is a long and complex one, and it could, of  course, have been told in a straightforward third person narrative. But that would have lost what I think is one of the most successful aspects of the novel -- the fact that July herself, if not an entirely unreliable narrator, is filtering events through her own sometimes skewed perception.

Anyway, enough of all that for the moment. I read one review on Amazon that said something like "this is not a novel about racism or slavery". Well, of course, it is just that. It's set in Jamaica and the main events take place in the 1830s, so the abolition of slavery, in 1834, is central to the events of the plot. We learn of July's birth, the result of her mother's rape by a white overseer; of her early years working in the fields beside the other slaves; of her catching the eye of the woman who owns the plantation, who takes her in, changes her name to Marguerite, and trains her up to be her companion. Then there's the conception and birth of her son, her decision to leave the baby on the doorstep of the enlightened Baptist minister, who takes him in and brings him up as his own. And later there is July's love affair with her mistress's new husband, the birth of a second child, and the terrible circumstances under which the child is stolen from her. All of this is painful enough, but the story's context is sometimes almost unbearable in its revelations of what happened after abolition. Although initially this event is greeted by the slaves with great jubilation, this soon turns to anger and despair as they discover that their masters still expect them to work as hard as before for very little pay. Presumably based closely on real events, this is a shameful passage in the history of the island and indeed of the British in general, whose behaviour towards the freed slaves is really shocking. Even Thomas's story is quite upsetting, for though he comes out of it OK in the end, he meets the most appalling prejudice both in London and Jamaica on account of the colour of his skin.

A few years ago I read and loved Andrea Levy's earlier novel, Small Island, which was also very well televised on the BBC. This one is much more ambitious, and though I have a few quibbles I am really glad to have read it and it's left me with  lots to think about.

Girl Reading

Here's a nice painting with some literary connections -- it's called Girl Reading, by Vanessa Bell, who as I'm sure you all know was Virginia Woolf's sister. I suspect it's a picture of her daughter Angelica Garnett, who died earlier this year. Angelica's father was not Vanessa's husband Clive Bell, though she did not discover this fact till she was 18, when she learned she was the daughter of the painter Duncan Grant. When she was 24, Angelica married the 50 year old David Garnett, who had been her biological father's lover, and who had been present at her birth, after which he declared his intention of marrying her when she grew up. Phew. 

You can read her own version of these events in her memoir, Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (1984). And among David Garnett's novels is his 1922 Lady into Fox. 

Gielgoodies

Anyone who knows about the history of the British theatre will know about John Gielgud, perhaps the greatest actor of the last century. And anyone who knows about Gielgud will probably be aware that he was celebrated -- if that's the right word -- for his gaffes. I mentioned this in passing last year, when I reviewed Jonathan Croall's impressive biography of Gielgud, and this year a slim volume has appeared which is partly dedicated to some of these terrible, hilarious faux-pas, and also includes some of his witty perceptive comments on the people and events of his day. 

This is not in any way an academic book, but it's very entertaining. My parents knew Gielgud so I was more or less brought up on the famous Eddie Knoblock story "He's the most frightful bore, just like old Eddie Knoblock -- oh, Eddie, I'm most terribly sorry". Evidently this was not the only occasion as he seems to have done much the same to Edith Evans, Athene Seyler, Clive Morton and several others. Most people seem to have dealt with this sort of thing very well, like Elizabeth Taylor, whose ex-husband Michael Wilding Gielgud had recently met:

'Such a charming man', he said. 'I can't imagine how he got mixed up with all those dreadful tarts'. Elizabeth said, 'John, I was one of them'. 

He was evidently completely unable to see how insulting some of his comments could be: 'We have two very beautiful men playing Bushy and Bagot. You might make a good contrast' (to Peter Sallis); 'Get someone to teach you to act. Try Martita Hunt -- she'll be glad of the money' (to Alec Guiness); 'You girl, move to the right. No, no, not you. The ugly one with the big nose' (to Jill Bennett); 'Have you ever known an American who could play Shakespeare? Oh, sorry, Orson. I thought you were Irish. Or something'. But most people took this kind of thing extremely well, perhaps because, as Alec Guiness remarked, his gaffes were 'entirely forgiveable, because they sprang spontaneously from the heart without a glimmer of malice'. His private observations about his friends and acquaintances were equally perceptive, iconoclastic,  and funny, and often summed people up remarkably well: 'Dear Ingrid [Bergman], she speaks five languages and can't act in any of them'; Lindsay Anderson was 'quite a pleasant little man. Rather short, wore a funny cap. I think gay, but not quite up to it'; Edward Albee 'looked like a surly pirate with his drooping moustache'; 'Isabel Jeans' walk splays outwards with a strange totter that suggests the cab horse about to slip on an icy paving stone saving itself by a valiant effort'. Laurence Olivier played Malvolio 'like a Jewish hairdresser, with a great lisp. He would fall off a bench in the garden scene, which I begged him not to do'; John Barrymore's acting was 'like a monstrous old make impersonator jumping through a hoop'. 

I suppose what I liked the most about this slim volume -- it's less than 150 pages -- is the way it shows Gielgud's absolutely genuine innocence, sweetness and honesty. It must have been particularly hard for him to have to disguise his homosexuality in public, but he clearly made up for it in his private letters and comments to his closest friends. He loved silly puns, and often brought rehearsals to a halt by causing his fellow actors to collapse in giggles. He lived, of course, to be 96, rather regretting, as he said on his 90th birthday, that 'most of my friends seem either to be dead, or deaf, or living in the wrong part of Kent'. But he never lost his sense of humour, or his ability to keep dropping bricks -- as he said to Giles Brandreth when invited lunch at the House of Commons: 'I'm delighted to have been asked. You see, all my real friends are dead'.

This little book would make a great Christmas present -- highly recommended for anyone who enjoys a giggle, particularly when laced with a good swig of theatre history.

Island of Steel

I've always been fascinated by the Channel Islands, or the Isles Anglo-Normandes, as the French call them. Most people think they are part of the UK but Wikipedia tells me they are actually "considered remnants of the Duchy of Normandy", to which they were first annexed in 933. Be that as it may, they are a good deal closer to France than they are to England, and many places, and indeed people (remember Bergerac?) have French names, although the currency, language and shops are British.

I've never visited these islands but I discovered recently that I could take a day trip from St Malo, not far from where I live, and so I'm going to Guernsey in a few weeks' time. And by a happy coincidence, I've also been reading a new novel which is set on that very island during World War Two. 

The fact that the Germans occupied the Channel Islands in WW2 is quite a chilling thought  -- if things had gone a different way, the experiences of the inhabitants could have been shared by everyone living in the United Kingdom. So I was really interested to read Island of Steel, which takes place largely in Guernsey, and very entertaining and informative it is, too. It's an adventure story, really, but as you'll know from my recent post on Rogue Male, I'm open to reading those at the moment.

The novel centres on the experiences of a small group of people who have ended up together by pure chance. Three are servicemen, one American and two British. Having encountered each other in Normandy, they set about making their way back to England by sea, helped by two French resistence fighters, but following a shipwreck they all get stranded on the island of Guernsey.  They are then asked by the War Office to undertake a seemingly impossible task, the capture of a high-ranking German officer. Fine -- if they could work as a team. But they are all independent, even maverick, and can't begin to agree on the best way to proceed. The problems of living in occupied territory, with the impossibility of proper communication either with each other or with their superiors back in London, adds greatly to their difficulties. The novel captures well the pains and privations of living under German rule and the bravery of the local inhabitants who have to put up with it as best they can. Some lighthearted moments and some exciting adventures -- all great fun.

The novel is at present only available on Kindle -- and a bargain at 99p. I have not got a Kindle but can read books on my iphone or my computer. And so can you, so why not? You can see the author talking about it here.

A Willing Victim

This is the fourth of Laura Wilson's 'Stratton' series of crime novels, which are set in the 1940s and 50s, and feature the appealing DI Ted Stratton. I've read them all now, though slightly out of order, and reviewed two of them -- Stratton's War and An Empty Death. I'm not sure why I didn't review A Capital Crime, though possibly it was partly because I liked it a little less than the first two. Not that there's anything wrong with it -- far from it, as I can't imagine that Laura Wilson would be capable of writing a bad novel. The problem I had with it was that it was based rather closely on a real and very famous case, or rather two cases, those of Timothy Evans and John Christie, both of whom lived at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, in the 1950s. Knowing quite a lot about the real events, I had trouble separating that knowledge from the fiction of the novel. But don't let that put you off, as you probably wouldn't react in the same way, and I see Amazon has lots of 5 star reviews for the novel.

Anyway -- I found A Willing Victim absolutely superb. We've moved forward in time once more, and it's now 1956. As the novel begins, Stratton is starting an investigation of the murder of a young man, Jeremy Lloyd, who has been found dead in his London bedsit. Lloyd, it turns out, has been involved for many years with The Foundation for Spiritual Understanding, an organisation based in a gloomy, possibly haunted, Suffolk mansion and run by one Mr Roth, an enigmatic foreigner who keeps the 'students' on a very tight rein indeed. When Stratton visits the Foundation, he encounters Michael, a twelve-year-old boy who is believed by the Foundation's members to have special powers, and indeed to be something along the lines of Buddha or Christ, and rumoured to have been immaculately conceived. He does, however, have a mother, the stunningly attractive Mary, or Ananda (=bliss), as she has been renamed by Roth. However beautiful and charming she may be, though, Mary/Ananda proves to have a very dodgy past, and Stratton soon gets enmeshed in an investigation of various births, adoptions, and infant deaths, which proves really hard to unravel. The apparently unrelated death of another woman in the nearby woods only adds to the confusion. And if that were not enough, Stratton is also in a muddle about his relationship with beautiful upper-class Diana, and trying to come to terms with some very challenging news about his beloved daughter Monica. Times are changing -- will Stratton be able to keep up?

 I recently read a Daily Mail article online in which Laura Wilson talked about her own upbringing by parents who were members of what the Mail (and presumably Laura herself) describes as a cult -- The School of Economic Science. Clearly the fictional Foundation is based very closely on this organisation, and pretty strange and repressive it sounds. Today, of course, people are generally much more familar with this sort of thing, with its roots in various Eastern philosophies and its promises of spiritual development. But it's all news to Stratton in 1956, and he takes a very sceptical view of the beliefs and activities of the Foundation and its members, though it does make him think and question, not a bad thing. Stratton is in fact a most marvellous fictional creation -- an honest man, brought up on a farm in Dorset, widowed in the war, intelligent and thoughtful but by no means intellectual, very traditional by nature but open, in the end, to questioning and even trying to accept new ideas and changing times. 

There are, of course, other crime writers who set their novels in the mid-20th century -- the Lydmouth series by Andrew Taylor springs to mind as a very good example, and I've just finished Ruth Rendell's The Monster in the Box which, though set in the present, takes Inspector Wexford back into his own early days in the police force. But for my money, Laura Wilson does it best. It's all done so seamlessly, and the period evoked so perfectly, that you hardly realise you are reading a historical construct. Part of this, of course, includes the penalties suffered by her various perpetrators, which sometimes seem extremely harsh by today's standards, and in this novel particularly I longed for some kind of hint that perhaps some mercy and understanding might be shown to one invidual. But I'm afraid that would probably would not have been the case at the time, and I was left with rather an aching heart. I can't say more, though you'll know what I mean if you have read it. If you haven't, well, time you did. Excellent stuff.

Shadow of Night

Just over a year ago I read  A Discovery of Witches, which proved to be the first volume of a trilogy. Now the apparently indefatiguable Deborah Harkness has produced a second volume, just as fat as the first, which takes the story of extremely attractive vampire/Oxford University professor Matthew Clairmont and his beautiful witch wife Diana back into the last decade of the sixteenth century. Well. 

Deborah Harkness is a proper historian and knows a lot about the 1590s. A lot more than I do, obviously, but though I've heard that some people have quibbled about the accuracy of her fictional world, I was happy to accept it all and found it really fascinating. She's even, in this book, based Matthew's sixteenth-century persona on a real, though shadowy person, Matthew Roydon, who was apparently a member of the so-called School of Night which supposedly centred around Walter Raleigh and included Christopher Marlowe and other well-known people. As you can tell from all the qualifiers in that sentence, this is all rather speculative, but hey, this is fiction, so who cares? I don't. 

In this book, Diana and Matthew spend a good deal of time in London, hob-nobbing with Raleigh and co, but also go to France and meet Matthew's amazing, powerful, beautiful, vampire father Philippe, who takes a while to accept Diana but finally does so wholeheartedly. Then there's a protracted period in Prague, where a lot of skullduggery goes on. Essentially Matthew and Diana are looking for the alchemical manuscript that Diana found in the Bodelian Library at the beginning of The Discovery of Witches. They track it down to the library of Dr John Dee, but Dr Dee has given it to his assistant, the unstable Edward Kelley, who has taken it to Prague and presented it to the Emperor Rudolf II, who really fancies Diana...

I could go on, but you get the general idea. I actually found the blending of fact and fiction rather satisfying, and learned a lot about the practice of alchemy at the period, and about attitudes to witchcraft. I really enjoyed Diana's friendship with Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, who was a poet and an alchemist (and does not have a wikipedia entry though she really should). And sixteenth century London was very vivid and convincing. As for Diana and Matthew's relationship, well, it did seem a bit cheesy at times. But that's all part of the fun.

Fantasy has never been my genre of choice, so I'm not sure why I'm enjoying all this so much. Can't wait for volume three, in fact. Anybody else tried this one?