Frances Hardinge – The Lie Tree

Tags

Book Review, Frances Hardinge, Gothic Fiction, The Lie Tree, Victorian set fiction, Young Adult Fiction

“Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies”

Frances Hardinge’s YA book, The Lie Tree, with its angry, highly intelligent, discounted central character, fourteen year old Faith Sunderly, is set in 1868, with a central theme involving scientific enquiry, fossil hunting, Darwin’s theories, their impact on faith, and the deepening realisation for the central character, that her life is unlikely to be what her character and abilities should fit her for, due to the unfair opportunities closed to her gender.

There was a hunger in her, and girls were not supposed to be hungry. They were supposed to nibble sparingly when at table, and their minds were supposed to be satisfied with a slim diet too

Hardinge won the Costa Children’s Book Category Prize with this – and, in fact, the Costa Judges also awarded it the Costa Book of The Year, the outright winner over the other category winners. And it is easy to see why

Firstly, she is a wonderfully rich literary writer, taking pleasure in rich language, gorgeous imagery – and giving huge pleasure to the reader. She has created a brilliant central character – awkward, fierce, resentful, loving, frustrated, and far more intelligent than most of the other inhabitants of her world, male and female, her contemporaries and the adults.

Faith is absolutely believable as an educated, intelligent, individual middle class girl on the edge of womanhood in Victorian England and she also stands for what it might have been like for many young girls of similar intelligence and independent thinking, rammed into the corseted embrace of narrow opportunities and confined expectations

For most of his six years, Howard had looked to Faith to be his oracle, his almanac, his source of all truth. He had believed everything she told him. This tide was changing though. Girls don’t know about sailing, he would say suddenly. Girls don’t know about the moon……Each time he said such a thing it was a shock, and Faith felt her domain of expertise breaking apart like an ice floe

So Hardinge’s book inhabits a real society at a certain time, but is also very much a fantasy historical novel, and a kind of detective story. It’s a mash-up which for the most part works very well indeed, and has much to absorb and fascinate the adult reader as well.

Faith, her winsome, eyelash batting, flirtatious mother, her far less intelligent younger brother, Howard, and her austere, secretive clergyman fossil hunting father leave their Kent home under some sort of secret cloud of impending disgrace. The Reverend Sunderly has achieved fame (and in fact, notoriety) around the discovery of a fossil which appears to verify the existence of the biblical Nephilim. Sunderly and family decamp to Vane, one of the Channel Islands (an invention which seems as if it must in fact exist!) which is a hub of archaeological interest.

Her emotions were so large and strange that they seemed to be something outside her, vast cloud patterns rolling and colliding above while she watched

There are darker matters afoot, and this is much more than a working out of Victorian reality – Hardinge injects dark Gothic fantasy into the mix, including a search, by several interested and fanatical parties, for a fabled and curious tree, The Mendacity Tree, which grows in complete darkness, has frightening hallucinogenic fruit and may even possibly be The Tree Of Knowledge of Good and Evil. There is even a beloved pet snake.

Along the way, murder, suicide, good old fashioned lust for riches, thwarted passions, revenge and a small society turning on those who flout its conventions flicker in and out of view. Hardinge also skilfully exploits that favourite crime-fiction trope, the country house murder – in this case, as the shenanigans which are going on happen against the background of a small island, the list of suspects, and the motives for the various mysteries which will need unravelling, are dizzyingly busy.

My only reservations about this glitteringly absorbing book came in the last 40 or 50 pages, where the pace of plot, ravelling up and being unravelled, became a bit too much for me, and the sense of galloping towards the tie up, the reveals, the explanations for the first time made me realise that I was reading a book for a younger market, perhaps one more desirous of fast, dynamic, dramatic action

The Lie Tree Amazon UK
The Lie Tree Amazon USA

Michelle Lovric – The Book of Human Skin

Tags

Book Review, Gothic Fiction, Michelle Lovric, Peru, The Book of Human Skin, Venice

Gothic, Grand-Guignol, Grisly, Grim and Gorgeous!

Good Heavens! Michelle Lovric has a rich, inventive imagination, steeps herself in research, wears it lightly, and overflows with a kind of earthy vitality that seems to belong to an earlier century and indeed to be more akin to South American literature than English literature. Or it may just be the time and the place she is writing about

The marvellous Book of Human Skin is set in Venice, and also in Peru, or what later became Peru, at the tail end of the eighteenth century, up to and beyond Napoleon’s death on St. Helena in 1821

The book is written in 5 voices, each of which is excellently delineated. Two of them are quite definitely of the devil’s party, even though one of them is a deranged nun who believes she is due to ascend in beatitude, and 3 are most definitely on the side of the angels

Minguello Fasan, born in 1784 is a vile, sadistic, sneering, puffed up and very funny scion of the house of Fasan. He bears more than a passing resemblance to the monstrously compelling central character of Patrick Susskind’s Perfume. Minguello, right from the start has a whiff of brimstone about him, and whether by nature or by nurture is determined to express that fully. He is the second born of the house, and aware of the dislike in which everyone holds him, including his parents, is determined to inherit all his family’s substantial riches. And he is a passionate collector of books which are bound in Human Skin.

Unlike Marcella’s my flesh proved insultingly mortal. The damaged finger turned yellow, then red and then black…..In the end Surgeon Ruggiero unceremoniously lopped the digit off. I had lost my index finger, my pointing finger, my stabbing-on-the-table-to-prove-a-point finger, my eye-poking, shame-slitting finger. I kept it in a box until the worms found it

Marcella Fasan is his younger sister. Born with a congenital weakness, she is initially loved by all, (except Minguello who loves no one) and almost immediately becomes the next target of Minguello’s sadism and ire (something happens to his older sibling) Marcella is intelligent, a gifted wielder of the pen and pencil, loyal, loving, resourceful and refuses to accept the role Minguello assigns her (dead through his many designs)

My pencil began to reveal fear in people’s eyes when they beheld me – me, the slightest, least fearsome creature imaginable. Even my hair was soft like chicken-down. The very cartilege of my nose was transclucent in the sunshine. But that, I was learning, is what frightens people: creatures who are weaker and rarer than themselves. I drew caricatures of elegant baboons, their eyes and tails askew with terror – fleeing from a tiny mouse – with my features – in a wheeled chair

Gianni delle Boccole is bright, devoted to Marcella, but appears a dolt. By circuitous means he learned to read (though most assume him illiterate); he is Marcello’s valet. Though he can read, he can barely write, and certainly has a more than usually phonetic grasp of spelling. Initially, his often hugely funny misspellings were a little irritating or contrived, but by the third or fourth of Gianni’s tellings of the tale, I was sold on him. And some of the tale is so dark and seamy than the levity of unintentional writos are a relief!

Swear my old Master Fernando give the boy babe one long look and betook himself to the furthest corner o the world. He were that shamed to be the author o sich an abdomenashun as Minguello Fasan, Great Canary ovva God!

Doctor Santo Aldobrandini is a poor young orphan, with a desperate desire to help and heal, and a large and tender heart, who gets himself, by hook or by crook, apprenticed to learn the craft of physic.

My famous patient, Napoleon, suffered his first attack of dysuria at the Battle of Marengo in 1800. I never got quite close enough myself to make a personal diagnosis, but they say his urinary pain was a terrible thing to behold. He would lean against a tree, moaning as he tried to relieve himself of a burning liquid clotted with sediments. His men rather admired his symptoms, which seemed those of an amatory complaint

These four start their journey in Venice, a proud, patrician, sophisticated, urbane, cultured – not to mention decadent (according to some) – state, whose fortunes will be changed by Napoleon.

Sor Loreta, the deranged, delusional nun, dreams of becoming a martyr, a saint, and the prioress of Santa Catalina, Arequipa, in modern day Peru

Arequipa, Peru, Santa Catalina convent

I contented myself with Santa Catalina. She knew she was married to Christ, for she received a vision in which she wore as a wedding ring the Holy Prepuce…..When she was just a child she threw herself into the boiling waters of a spring near her house in order to burn the skin of her face and body and so discourage human suitors……When they took my Santa Catalina away too, my soul rebelled inside my body. I scrubbed my face with the pepper and lye that I had hidden in my bureau drawer

Another way of looking at these five (and there are many other equally ebullient characters who might almost have strayed from Balzac or even Rabelais) might be in the tradition of some of Rossini’s operas. And I’m sure this is deliberate, on Lovric’s part, as another character, the kindly prioress of Santa Catalina, whom the deranged Sor Loreta is desperate to eliminate and supplant,  is devoted to Rossini’s music (not all nuns are quite the dour characters which the outside world thinks they might be)

In this, Marcella and Santo are of course the young lovers (Rosina, Almaviva/Lindoro) (Santo, like Almaviva in The Barber of Seville is expert in disguise in order to gain the enemy stronghold to meet his truly beloved) Gianni, valet, is Figaro, and Minguello the much more wicked version of the merely buffoonish Doctor Bartolo, and the equally sadistic Sor Loreta a notched up version of the prim Berta,

Act I Finale mayhem, production by Ponelle, Hermann Prey as Figaro, Teresa Berganza as Rosina, Luigi Alva as Almaviva

This is a glorious, twisty, turny (utterly credible within its own reality) plot. Characters that make sense in place and time. Humour which is as dark as you like, but, overall, an explosion of intelligence, vivacity, inventiveness and originality.

Saint Sebastian by Gerrit van Honthorst, circa 1623

As you can tell, I like Lovric rather a lot, following my earlier read of her later novel, involving the wonderfully tressed Irish sisters The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

Photo of Lovric by Marianne Taylor, from Lovric’s website

The 466 page novel is followed by a much soberer and more explanatory 30 page afterword by Lovric, where she lays out the factual aspects of her book, and where she departed from the facts. In essence, all the historical information IS there, but may have been woven in a unique way by Lovric. The dots are in place, she does the joining.

I think I’ve gone off reading ‘wood books’ and will stick to the less potentially dangerous Kindled editions. Readers of this will understand my new sensitivities……….

The Book of Human Skin Amazon UK
The Book of Human Skin Amazon USA