Ronald Welch – The Gauntlet

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Book Review, Children's Book Review, Historical Fiction, Knights, Medieval Setting, Ronald Welch, The Gauntlet

Excellent adventure for boys 8-12, with an interest in medieval history and warfare

I was interested to read this Carnegie medal winning author from the 50s, and found this an enjoyable read (though with some reservations, as detailed in the last paragraphs) I discovered that this particular book was not the Carnegie medal winner – that is another with the same overall setting – medieval warfare – Knight Crusader.

Peter Staunton, a young, clearly upper-middle class boy, and his ditto friend Gwyn, are staying with Gwyn’s uncle `in the Welsh Mountains’. As Gwyn (devoted to things scientific) and Peter (drawn to history) walk in the ruins of an ancient Norman Castle, Carrag Cennen, Peter discovers a medieval gauntlet, which has the mysterious power, as he later discovers, to take him back in time to 600 years ago.

To aid the young (or even the adult) reader, Gwyn’s uncle and the friendly local vicar, history buffs both (like the author) offer twentieth century instruction on the Normans and their battles with Welshmen and women whose lands they had captured. Very fortunately for Peter this advance tuition does happen before he does, in the end, go back in time, preventing him from making a complete idiot of himself.

Gwyn’s Uncle and the friendly Rev do also manage to darkly tell the boys about certain local myths which will explain why and how Peter has the mysterious gauntlet experience, since it turns out he is descended directly from the de Blois Norman knights whose castle it was. And, surprise, surprise, once back in time, he also meets a boy who looks remarkably like Gwyn but is the son of the main Welsh chieftain, active in resisting those Norman Conquests in his area.

I have no hesitation in recommending it to its target audience – any boy who is a fan of invented warfare, of the Star Wars variety, might be intrigued by the same tales of derring-do carefully set in a very real, but equally `alien’ world – that of 600 years ago.

Carreg Cennan Castle, Wiki Commons

As an adult, there is probably a little too much obvious instruction of the reader about the things he doesn’t know, using Peter’s lack of knowledge, to be credible – it’s a device I particularly get irritated by in adult fiction, where two characters, who WOULD have knowledge, are made to give the reader, who lacks the knowledge, vital technical information – the device where Einstein turns to Niels Bohr and says, “so, Niels, remind me about the basics of particle physics, there’s a good chap!” – Or, in this case, Peter, firmly back in the fourteenth century, son of a powerful knight, who all his life has been defending the territory, is continually saying “so what exactly is a trebuchet?” “what is a mangonel?” and the like. Curiously, Roger de Blois, Peter’s fourteenth century father, does not seem to wonder why his son seems to have forgotten everything about medieval warfare, armoury, jousting, falconry and the like.

Fourteenth Century Jousting : Codex Maness, Wiki Commons

Some books written for children do seem to be able to be read with critical surrender by adults – this was not one of them, I felt every one of my more sophisticated and mature years, and the gender gap, very keenly – not to mention the uneasiness of someone who is sensitive, as a denizen of a `United Kingdom’ of the substrate of patronisation of the Celtic races which is part of our history. I’m not quite sure, even for young boy readers in the time this was written, whether this would have been such an enjoyable book if you were Welsh, as opposed to English.

Although adventure loving girls interested in history might also find much to appreciate in this, I would suggest that the lack of any female role model for a girl to identify with could prove a little puzzling and frustrating. There is only one female of any note, the central character’s mother in the fourteenth century, and though she demonstrates an ability for elegant dress, and is an authority on genteel table manners in the period – she spits on the floor, never on the table itself – and manages to gnaw on bones without dribbling down the front of her elegant apparel, this may not be enough for a girl reader who would like to know her own part in history. Oh, there is a particularly smelly old witch who makes a brief appearance, whom pretty well everyone thinks is a fool, not to mention far too grubby to take seriously. But that is it, as far as females are concerned. As a well-past-my-girlhood adult reader, I could enjoy this in a manner which tries to think myself into the mind and heart of a small boy, but I’m pretty sure that it would have annoyed me as a young girl, as even back in the day, I definitely preferred `children’s books’ which did have at least one young female who did rather more than model fashions, look pretty, and play admiring and passive audience to the young (male) adventurer

So – probably a fabulous book for a young boy who is not Welsh, who loves tales of the olden days, a good bit of derring-do, and fine writing. For them this may be 5 star, I’ve docked a star because I can’t escape from the culture of my own time, place and gender.

I guess this IS the advantage where enemies are intergalactic – you can make the bad guys anyone and no one!

The book is completed by the original black and white illustrations by T.R. Freeman – well it is in the 2015 UK republished edition from OUP

Ronald Welch was the pen name of Ronald Oliver Felton, teacher of history, and Headmaster of Okehampton Grammar School. He died in 1982, and the usual author picture does not seem to freely exist

I received this as a copy for review from Amazon Vine UK

The Gauntlet Amazon UK The Gauntlet Amazon USA

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Lynn Shepherd – A Treacherous Likeness

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A Treacherous Likeness, Biography as Fiction, Book Review, Crime Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Lynn Shepherd, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley

The French Lieutenant’s Lying Skylark

Lynn Shepherd continues her sure, impeccably researched, stylish, dark, inventive journey into the historical, literary, murder mystery genre.

Lest this all sounds far too much of a hotch-potch, rest assured Shepherd is an author who can collect together bits and pieces of information, literary genres, literary tricks, and make something new so that you don’t even notice the joins

This is her third book with one of two detectives, both called Charles Maddox. Each book can be read as a stand-alone, but there is no doubt there is an especial enjoyment to be had if the reader has made the earlier journeys.

Her first book saw Charles Maddox senior, investigating an alternative world for Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Mansfield Park had a much less satisfying, rather glumly good long suffering victim heroine, Fanny Price, rather than the usual spirited, intelligent woman Austen gives us. Using THAT book as a springboard, Shepherd gave the world a twist, and brought a darker world, though still witty, into play, with the investigation of a murder, Murder at Mansfield Park

With her second novel, she got even darker and seamier, in Tom-All-Alone’s (Charles Maddox 2), an amalgam of Dickens’ Bleak House, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White, and Henry Mayhew’s real investigation of the dark underbelly of Victorian capitalism, London Labour and the London Poor (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature) So, she was still playing with plots from classic novels, and this time, her detective was Charles Maddox junior (great nephew of the Austen detective)

                       Shelley

  Mary Shelley

For this third book, she blurs the division between the real and the imagined still further, as young Charles Maddox (with the elder Maddox involved in the ensuing events forty years earlier) investigates the mysterious, messy lives of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his female circle – he of the tangled romantic liaisons with  very young women (something Shepherd rightly identifies a twenty first century reader might feel remarkably queasy about).

Espousing anarchism, free love, atheism at the early part of the eighteenth century was one thing – and no doubt Shelley and his poetry fed easily into libertarian sympathies (plus of course some soaring, elegiac poetry) However, as biographers have shown (and Shepherd utilises) the man did seem to bring an extraordinary collection of ruined young women, suicides, and the death of children along with him.

There seems at the time to have been a bit of an industry by his widow (Mary Shelley,the probable author of Frankenstein – though this has been more recently in question), surviving son, and son’s wife, to give Shelley’s life a severe whitewashing. Modern biographers have uncovered a lot of supposed very shady goings on, with the whole gang of Shelleys and Godwins of dubious moral scruples. A pretty stinking kettle of fish, all told.

Claire Claremont

It is this tangled web of whitewashed history, possibly very dirty linen and intrigue which Shepherd unleashes Charles Maddox into, turning a dark and shocking tale at times deliciously playful as she makes us, the reader, complicit as omniscient readers to her omniscient narrator.

However, much as I enjoyed this book, and the way Shepherd mangled my perceptions, and toyed with my understanding of what was going on and whom to believe, I am left with a couple of very uncomfortable questions about the ethics of `rewriting’ real people’s lives, particularly with some very murky allegations indeed. I discovered Shepherd `invented’ less than I thought she did, as she very correctly identifies which facts have been unearthed by recent, unwhitewashed biographies, and where she invented, but still, I have questions about `faction’.  It is one thing to imagine how a real person may have felt at the time of a real event, or what their motivations may have been for their real actions; it is quite another to invent dark events, which they are the protagonists of. I was left with a sense of moral ambiguity. What are the ethics of literary invention, in the lives of real people? Shepherd may well have transgressed such ethics. The dead cannot speak.

                                         Shelley and Godwin Tree

I received this as a pre-release ARC

Readers beware, for some obscure reason, exactly as with her second novel, there is a different title and publisher for the US and UK editions – BOTH of which are available on Amazon UK. This novel is called A Treacherous Likeness published by Corsair. In August, A Fatal Likeness (the same book!) will be published by Delacorte. Very confusing and annoying!

A Treacherous Likeness Amazon UK
A Fatal Likeness Amazon USA

Rose Tremain – Merivel: A Man Of His Time

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Book Review, Charles II of England, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Merivel: A Man of His Time, Restoration, Rose Tremain

A Falstaffian hero – The Merry Wives of Restoration

Rose Tremain is an author I’ve long admired. She knows how to craft a story, she creates extremely interesting, well rounded, individual and realistic characters, her use of language is wonderful, fitting, often very rich, but not self-indulgent. She has a great sense of time and place. And she seems to have things to say. And, almost more than this, she writes many different books – not the same one, in a formulaic fashion, over and over.

So it was a surprise, on one level, to find her revisiting the past, producing a sequel to the richly satisfying, hugely successful, Restoration, which was published more than 20 years ago. Her central character (fictitious) a larger than life physician, Robert Merivel, later Sir Robert, and his relationship with Charles II (and some of the real cast of characters surrounding him) was a rich, inventive tragi-comic read.

Fast forward 17 years in the life of Merivel, and what we have is something slightly different. Age has intensified the nature of all the principal characters, both real and imagined. And Merivel has become Falstaffian in his ability to be deluded, often shallow, excessively driven by superficial desires, humorous, fun loving, clumsy, the butt of jokes – but loving, loyal, tender hearted. Like Falstaff, he is the jester who can break our hearts, and whose own heart is frequently broken, by his genuine love towards his king

This is a darker journey than Restoration. The subtext here is not the flowering and the crazy parties and the sweeping away of restriction of Restoration. Death is the constant character whose shadow grows larger. Merivel is now in his late 50s and we know this is set towards the end of Charles’ reign. Remembered characters from Restoration are now either dead, or inching towards death. Often raging against the dying of the light

The reader does not need to have read Restoration to appreciate this stand-alone work. Tremain, her artistry sure, finds plausible and meaningful ways to tell the back-story. She shows her craft again here – it’s a trap a lot of writers seem to stumble over – how do you give the reader information which THEY may need to know when the characters themselves will all already have that information, particularly if you are writing a first person narrative. All too often the lesser writer will have two luminaries in conversation with each other, and (for example) Albert Einstein turns to Neils Bohr and says `so let me remind you, Neils, of my Theory of Relativity’ Tremain does nothing crass. What the new reader needs to know (and the old, forgetful reader to know again) is effortlessly fed in little sippets. It felt like having memory reawakened, but through the filter of an older, darkening Merivel

If this doesn’t hit quite so many fizzy high spots as Restoration, and I had a few ‘hmm, could it really have been like this’ moments, that is in keeping with a Merivel who is more conscious of where journeys must end.

One small niggle – I was slightly surprised, given the extraordinary level of widescale rumpy pumpy encounters within these pages, that in an era before prophylactics, the characters all remained pox and baby free!

Paintings of Charles II by Peter Lely, 1670’s. Wikimedia Commons
Merivel: A Man of His Time Amazon UK
Merivel: A Man of His Time Amazon USA

Naomi Alderman – The Liars’ Gospel

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Book Review, Colm Toibin, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Naomi Alderman, Testament of Mary, The Liars' Gospel

Reader, Where Lies the Truth?

Naomi Alderman presents another view of the 4 Gospels of the New Testament. This is fiction, and imaginative, and at the heart is the premise that so is the story Western Civilisation has largely been built on. Which version is the Liars Gospel is left to the reader to decide

Alderman is a cool, pragmatic, reasoned writer, with excellent control of her medium. However, having recently read Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary, inhabiting some of the same territory, the Toibin book was constantly in my thoughts, and comparisons inevitable.

Inevitably, as Toibin has continued to snag and pull at me, it was impossible to read the Alderman book without preconceptions. Had I read Alderman first, I’m sure I would have given it 5 stars, AND then the same to the Toibin – having read that first, I value this a little less.

Comparisons ARE odious, the personality of each book is very different – by focusing on one person’s story – that of Mary, Toibin lifts this into a universal which will, I think, be disturbing, unsettling and insistent for committed Christian, agnostic and atheist alike. Toibin is clearly not a believer in the Gospel’s `spin’ (neither is Alderman) but he is more passionately, and personally engaged within the very human relationship of Mother and wayward, disruptive son. Although he offers a plausible explanation for how this particular story was woven, he is not afraid to come close to unexplained mystery – hence, there is unsettling questioning for the reader, of faith or none.

Caracciolo – Wikimedia

By comparison, Alderman’s book, told, with more of an idea of the historical and political background than the Toibin, is a story of Roman occupation across more than a century, and the ways in which both conquerors and occupied territory make pragmatic, workable choices – or battle for control of dissidence on the one hand, and to overthrow the hated aggressor, on the other Giving her 4 central gospellers , in the main, Hebraic rather than Romanized names,

Giotto – Wikimedia

the first Gospel is in Miryam’s voice (Mary). Yehoshua is clearly a man of charisma, but unstable and deluded. Quite mad. (Here is where Toibin scores as though his Jesus has many of these characteristics, his fervent belief is not quite so logically dismissable, there is……..a something).

Iehuda (Judas) is here one of the more understandable characters – he is the visionary, the man of faith, who sees Yehoshua tumble into pride and a kind of arrogance.

Caiaphas, the High Priest, is a wily politician, holding on to power, trying to find a way to wrest from Rome what he can, and keep what he can for his people, trying to give away as little to the occupying force as possible. Playing Pilate at his own wily game, keeping the faith of the people.

Bar-Avo (Barrabas) is in many ways the simplest character (and I felt this was the least successful narrative. Essentially a powerless young man, hating the tyranny of occupation, testosterone driven, and ripe for grooming as a freedom fighter

Alderman’s historical sources come from Josephus‘ The Jewish War, and the Gospels themselves. These are the springboards for a clever, reasoned imagination

I received this as a digital copy for review from the publishers
The Liars’ Gospel Amazon UK
The Liars’ Gospel Amazon USA