It's time for a book-related post, but it's hard to find a common thread tying it together. I think I'll have to go with the historical novel theme, rather than some (actually very entertaining) "family therapy chick-lit" which I've also read recently.
Back to my summer holidays, then, when I read Antonia Hodgson's A Death at Fountains Abbey and The Silver Collar in quick succession. As they take place in the 18th century (more unfamiliar territory for me than the Victorian age), and some serious issues play a part in the stories (the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble and slavery respectively), they kind of count as ambitious reads for me. And yet, they shouldn't, as they are so insanely readable. I had just started Fountains Abbey at the start of a six-day trip to London; by the time of the return flight, I had already finished both it and Silver Collar and had to resort to aforementioned family therapy chick-lit for the return flight.
Hodgson is an author who has clearly done a formidable amount of research, but she wears her learning lightly. There is never a sense of local colour added just to show that she has done her homework: everything feeds into the plot and characterisation. Thomas Watkins, Hodgson's unruly hero – I'd call him hero rather than anti-hero, as for all his supposed roguishness he has a strong core of decency – is really likeable, and so is the woman he loves fondly and faithfully, the fiery Kitty (who loves him just as much in return). The setup reminds me a bit of Lindsey Davis's Falco novels, before I went off them: the down-on-his-luck protagonist and his lady figuring out mysteries together and making the reader root for them and wish they'd finally tie the knot properly.
I started this book series with book two, The Last Confession of Thomas Hawkins which I also loved, about a year ago. Now I've purchased book one, The Devil in the Marshalsea, and look forward to reading it eventually. I should have read it before Confession, but was put off by the title: now, however, I'm reassured that there is nothing very infernal about Samuel Fleet whose nickname is in the title. However fierce to others, he is remembered by Thomas and Kitty with great warmth. So couldn't his fellow crooks have called him "the ogre of the Marshalsea" or something?
One thing Hodgson's novels do not have, though, is antagonists worthy of a villain-lover's sympathy. The main villains are horrible, enough for a Game of Thrones baddie to say "hold up" a couple of times. But it works plot-wise, and instead sympathy is shown to other shady characters, such as the unhappy fraudster in Fountains Abbey who in an inferior novel would only be an object of moral censure.
Feeling well disposed to historical novels, I started Emma Donoghue's Frog Music: I had read and liked her novel The Sealed Letter, about a fascinating Victorian divorce case, and knew that the writing would be good. And so it was, but goodness, how depressing! The cover and the blurb were, I would argue, intentionally misleading. The cover showed the torso of a woman in a bright dress carrying a pair of fancy boots, and the blurb spoke of "a compelling story of intrigue and murder" involving "three former stars of the Parisian circus", and hinted at some relationship-centred chamber piece ("When an eccentric outsider joins their little circle, secrets unravel, changing everything").
Not with one word is it mentioned that the main reason for the protagonist Blanche's ("an exotic dancer at the House of Mirrors") falling-out with her appalling lover Arthur and his equally ghastly chum Ernest is her and Arthur's singularly unlovely baby. Blanche belatedly rescues the baby from a "baby farm" and then cares for him, mostly out of guilt at first although she eventually starts to love the kid. Arthur and Ernest are miffed. The "eccentric stranger" Jenny Bonnet is only a part of it.
Donoghue is rather too good at describing discomfort, and I trudged through the descriptions of the heat- and smallpox-ridden San Francisco of 1876 and Blanche's tribulations with little enjoyment. Blanche's wearisome child-minding is only the start of it: then, things get worse, as she keeps failing to collect money that is hers and losing what she has. It's all well-written, just decidedly not my cup of tea. There is hope towards the end, but it's precious long in coming. I can't blame myself for sinking into chick-lit and very satisfying fairy-tale-themed fantasy (which I may return to in a later post) after I was finished.
