Although I've read quite a respectable number of books lately (if not nearly as many as I've bought), blogging about them is another matter. I confess that unless there is some book-related theme I'm burning to comment on, writing about geeky stuff is considerably easier. However, I realise that a book-themed blog post is well overdue.
Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm for book-blogging says something about the novels I've been reading. They've been good, sure, but they haven't made an overwhelming impression on me. I haven't discovered a new favourite author, but I've had a good time. Take The Clockwork Girl by Anna Mazzola, a historical novel set in Paris in the 1750s. Once in a while, I like to read historical novels set in times and places I am less familiar with. For one thing, it's exciting not to know beforehand how things pan out, and you learn something new, even if you have to take anything you pick up from a historical novel with a pinch of salt. The 1750s is a period of French history I don't know much about, so I was interested in the setting from the start.
The plot concerns Madeleine, the scarred daughter of a brothel keeper, who is tasked with spying on a clockmaker called Reinhart and his household. He is considered for a position at court, but there are rumours about unnatural experiments, and the question is if he's quite safe to be let near the royal presence. Madeleine is reluctant to become a police spy, but the reward she is promised could help her and her beloved nephew escape life at the brothel. She becomes the maid of Reinhart's daughter Veronique, and the novel is told alternately from the points of view of Madeleine and Veronique, sometimes with a section told from the point of view of Jeanne (Madame de Pompadour, no less) thrown in.
It's an intriguing story, where the setup reminded me a little of Fingersmith without the lesbian romance – Veronique isn't quite as innocent as she seems. Although the novel focuses a great deal on female solidarity, the mystery that kept me hooked concerned Reinhart. I was happy to be kept guessing about him. Does he have sinister intentions or is he just a committed scientist? Does he care about his daughter or not? It's a well-spun yarn, and clearly well-researched. There's a lot of local colour – a little too much for my taste – and the descriptions are filtered through the characters' consciousness, which always adds interest.
The characters seemed less authentic than the settings to me, though. I frequently felt the presence of 21th-century tut-tutting. Wasn't it awful that there was such a divide between rich and poor? And that women's lives were so limited? And then there was slavery too! (Reinhart's footman Joseph is a former slave, the "former" very much depending on the goodwill of his master.) The female protagonists felt less like 18th-century women than modern women stuck in 18th-century lives and hating it. Even Madame de Pompadour, who's at the top of the tree, is full of gloom.
It's hard to justify why the protagonists' lamentations irritated me so much. Of course the poor resented the rich in the 18th century, and gifted women must often have wondered why they were prohibited from earning their own bread. Many people found slavery appalling, because it was appalling. Only, I think 18th-century people approached these questions from a different angle, and if they expressed similar sentiments to modern ones they did so in a different way. I would have enjoyed the novel more if it had either dialled down the commentary or made more of an effort to make it feel genuinely 18th-century.
Kate Atkinson wisely stays away from social commentary in Shrines of Gaiety, a novel set in London in 1926 which focuses on hard-bitten nightclub owner Nellie Coker and her large family. I wasn't a great fan of Atkinson's One Good Turn, which is the only other novel I've read by her, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the glamorous if potentially dangerous nightclub settings and the expert juggling of several plot threads and characters. There's no downright moralising, mercifully, more wry commenting which reminded me of Fay Weldon's "Love and Inheritance" trilogy.
The ending, though it could have been more tragic, still feels a little downbeat, and it is somehow typical that the author leaves an open ending for one potential romance (which leads me to assume that everything went swimmingly, as I suspect that Atkinson wouldn't have held back from telling us if it all went to pot). But all in all, I liked Shrines of Gaiety. If the Coker family saga had been further expanded upon, it would have made for a good costume drama series of, say, ten episodes. I mean that as praise, though I'm not sure it's the kind of praise Kate Atkinson would appreciate.
