1) "Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s skillfully woven tenth novel is her most ambitious and challenging work to date, and a worthy successor to her recent triumph, Alias Grace (1996).
It tells two absorbing stories that cast an initially enigmatic, ultimately pitilessly revealing light on each other. The central one is octogenarian Iris Griffen’s bitter reminiscence of her life as the privileged daughter of a prosperous Ontario family, the Chases, and later as wife to Richard Griffen, the businessman who effectively inherits and firmly directs the Chase fortunes. The counterpart story, The Blind Assassin, is a strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual (faux-Oriental) fashion a nameless woman’s obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit his “power” over her. This latter tale is published as the work of Iris’s younger sister Laura, whose death in a 1945 automobile accident is judged by all who knew the sisters “as close to suicide as damn is to swearing.” Newspaper items reporting notable events in the lives of the Chases and Griffens over a period of more than sixty years further enrich a many-leveled, smartly paced narrative that gradually discloses the nature and root causes of Laura’s unconventionality and “madness,” the full extent of Richard’s compulsive aggrandizement and isolationism, and the price exacted from Iris for the “convenience” of her marriage. Intermittent echoes of Forster’s Howards End sound throughout this bleak saga of political, social, and gender conflict. And Atwood keeps our attention riveted by rendering her increasingly dramatic story in a fluent style distinguished by precise sensory description (“the thin, abstemious rain of early April”) and thought-provoking metaphor (“Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown”). Furthermore, a bombshell of a climactic surprise (which we probably should have seen coming) lurks in the stunning final pages.
Boldly imagined and brilliantly executed.
2) "The King Must Die" by Mary Renault
This is an enchanting recapturing of the events leading up to the story of Theseus -- and of its culmination in the minotaur myth. One has a sense of living in the period in ancient Greece; of experiencing with the band of youths and maidens the training for the ring which held their fate as victims of the lust for vengeance on the part of the ruler of Crete. There's a poignant love story-with a tragic ending -- but the book as a whole merits acceptance as giving veracity to the period in history so recently brought to life by archaeological discoveries.
3) "Empress Orchid" by Anchee Min
Chinese-born Min’s usual meticulous attention to local color (Wild Ginger, 2002, etc.) puts a brake on what should be a riveting tale—the ascent to power of China’s last Empress—in a court where beheadings are as frequent as concubines are numerous.
Min has done her research, and, unfortunately, it shows. The many and vivid details of court life—custom, costume and culture of late 1800s China—undercut her efforts to give a more balanced portrait of a woman who has often been vilified for her role in the decline of Chinese power. Narrated by the Empress, called Orchid because of her beauty, the story begins as Orchid, a member of an aristocratic clan related to the ruling Manchus, accompanies her family to Beijing to bury her recently deceased father. As the family faces poverty and starvation in Beijing, the 17-year-old Orchid learns of an Imperial decree announcing that the young Emperor Hsien Feng is looking for future mates who, to preserve the purity of the Imperial blood, must be Manchu. Miraculously, Orchid is chosen. Her family receives money, and she receives valuable gifts, lives in splendor in the Forbidden City, and has countless servants. But the life is stifling—protocol is all, jealousy commonplace, few can be trusted—and Orchid realizes that the only way to obtain a more secure life is to bed the Emperor and bear him an heir. Which, with some scheming, she manages to do, but China in the early 1860s is beset with problems. The European powers are seizing the country’s territory, selling opium, and insisting on reparations from the Emperor. Meantime, the Imperial court is divided, the Emperor is weak both in judgment and health, and Orchid fears her son may not succeed his father. When the Emperor does die, her five-year-old son, although he’s named heir, is too young to rule, and Orchid must ensure that both of them stay alive as rivals plot and treachery is everywhere.
Evocative, but underpowered in simple narrative.
4) "The Widow of the South" by Robert Hicks
A thunderous, action-rich first novel of the Civil War, based on historical fact.
Music publisher Hicks treats a long-overlooked episode of the war in this account of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., which took place in November 1864 near Nashville. As a field hospital is pitched in her field, Carrie McGavock, an iron-spined farm woman and upstanding citizen of the town, takes it upon herself to tend after the Confederate wounded; later, she and her husband will rebury 1,500 of the fallen on their property. Hicks centers much of the story on Carrie, who has seen her own children die of illness and who has endurance in her blood. “I was not a morbid woman,” Carrie allows, “but if death wanted to confront me, well, I would not turn my head. Say what you have to say to me, or leave me alone.” Other figures speak their turn. One is a young Union officer amazed at the brutal and sometimes weird tableaux that unfold before him; as the bullets fly, he pauses before a 12-year-old rebel boy suffocating under the weight of his piled-up dead comrades. “Suffocated. I had never considered the possibility,” young Lt. Stiles sighs. Another is an Arkansas soldier taken prisoner by the Yankees: “I became a prisoner and accepted all the duties of a prisoner just as easily as I’d picked up the damned colors and walked forward to the bulwarks.” Yet another is Nathan Forrest, who would strike fear in many a heart as a Confederate cavalryman, and later as the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Hicks renders each of these figures with much attention to historical detail and a refreshing lack of genre cliché, closing with a subtle lament for the destruction of history before the bulldozer: “One longs to know that some things don’t change, that some of us will not be forgotten, that our perambulations upon the earth are not without point or destination.”
An impressive addition to the library of historical fiction on the Civil War, worthy of a place alongside The Killer Angels, Rifles for Watie and Shiloh.
5) "The Other Queen" by Philippa Gregory
Gregory (The Boleyn Inheritance, 2006, etc.) makes a return trip to Tudor England, focusing on the period when Mary, Queen of Scots, fleeing from rebel Scottish lords, found herself imprisoned in England by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
The story is narrated from multiple perspectives: that of Queen Mary as well as her two jailors, George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his new wife, Bess of Hardwick, a much-married and canny financial administrator as well as a spy for the ruthless William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s chief adviser. As the months, then years, pass, George’s hopeless, forever unfulfilled love for the Queen of Scots wars with his desire to retain his honor and serve Queen Elizabeth, and also destroys the affectionate business relationship that united him and his wife in amiable marriage. Bess watches the substantial fortune she amassed through well-chosen husbands, good investments and careful accounting dwindle in support of Queen Mary’s extravagant lifestyle. And, of course, Mary plots and plots again, to little avail. Reading the novel is a bit like witnessing a fixed tennis match: Queen Mary shuttles back and forth between various castles, her return to Scotland always imminent until each grand scheme fails. Meanwhile, the reader marks time waiting for the queen’s inevitable walk to the scaffold. Gregory vividly evokes her three protagonists, but their personalities remain static to the point of tedium; however, it’s fair to say that each one’s inability to change is the very thing that leads to their joint tragedy. Mary believes that her beauty and royal status allow her to do whatever she likes with impunity; Bess, despite her wealth and title, can never surmount her humble origins; and George, in the face of obvious evidence that his way of life is dying, stubbornly insists that noble blood, not ambition, must determine rank.
Not without interest, but this claustrophobic novel should be more intriguing than it is.
6) "The Eagle of the Ninth" by Rosemary Sutcliff
7) "Dissolution" by C.J. Sansom
A brilliant lawyer investigates murder in a monastery that’s under attack by Henry VIII’s greedy forces of secularism.
It’s 1537, and Dr. Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer operating on the fringes of the rapacious Tudor court, has been handed a case that may advance his career but is more likely to sink it. Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s powerful and ruthless vicar general, has charged Shardlake with the investigation of a grisly crime on what should be holy ground: the Benedictine monastery in Scarnsea, Sussex. A lawyer sent down previously to lean on Scarnsea’s abbot about a possible signing over of the monastery to the crown lost his head. With a sword. Shardlake, a great brain in a twisted body (he’s a hunchback), can’t say no. Having risen by his wits to a profitable legal career and ownership of a comfortable house in the city, he is indebted to his monarch’s machinery. Besides, he, like Cromwell and, supposedly, the king, is firmly committed to the great religious reforms that have all but taken the country to war with the once supremely rich and powerful monasteries. Accompanied by his young clerk Mark, Shardlake plods through the frozen countryside to Scarnsea. What he finds is an institution despised by its neighbors, depleted by the reforms, demoralized by revelations of sodomy and unchasteness, and thoroughly spooked by the decapitation of the royal emissary. Understandably suspicious of nearly everyone, Shardlake comes to rely warily on the monastery’s Moorish medic and becomes unhappily attracted to Alice, the comely and clever serving girl. Grilling his suspects like a modern detective, he sifts through the inevitable red herrings, turns up a new corpse, and dodges death by falling statuary. Handsome Mark, meanwhile, is getting lustful looks from the master of music and growing more familiar with Alice than suits the lawyer. And London is pressing for the case to be wrapped up. The right way.
Spooky atmosphere and a wealth of fascinating historical tidbits suffer from rather grinding detective work.
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