Eight (more) Great Historical Novels!

What better way to end the week than with yet another lavish, happy list of book-recommendations? Our sub-genre is once again that of my beloved historical novels, those perfect embodiments of Horace's famous split mission of delighting and entertaining, so let's get right down to brass tacks, shall we?

When Knighthood was in Flower by "Edwin Caskoden" (1898)

Charles Major wrote this book in 1898 under the pen-name Edwin Caskoden, and it sold like hotcakes. Month after month, year after year, customers would walk into bookstores from Boston to Boise and ask for "the knighthood book" - and long-suffering clerks knew exactly what they were talking about. Major was a hard-working Midwestern lawyer when the book first came out, but it was such a huge best-seller that he was soon able to retire to writing full-time - although none of his subsequent books managed to recapture the fire and fun of this, his debut. It's the story of the love that grows suddenly and unstoppably between Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and Charles Brandon, the King's best friend, and in its perfectly-tuned sunlit descriptions, it was the most irresistible piece of historical fiction to appear since Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur. Given the Tudor-mania that's recently been sweeping the reading public, I'm amazed nobody's reprinted this with a trendy cover. If an enterprising publisher were to dig deep enough, they could find a glowing blurb from none other than Theodore Roosevelt

The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci by Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1902)


The 1963 Washington Square Press edition of Merezhkovsky's monumental best-seller greatly expands the truncated version authorized by the Merezhkovsky in 1901. Despite its limitations (translators and audiences today would likely find them unacceptable), that 1901 translation done by Herbert Trench sold millions of copies around the world - month after month, year after year, customers would come into bookstores from Boston to Brest and ask for "The book about Leonardo" - and long-suffering book clerks knew there could be no other (despite the presence throughout the decades of some very good actual biographies of Leonardo). And with good reason: even in the 1963 translation by Morris Gurin and Helen Gourin (which improves on Trench but is still mighty damn creaky), the glow and pageant of the Renaissance lives again - and the central port of Leonardo is so perfectly researched and rendered that it's small wonder half the used bookstores in in the world accidentally shelve this thing under Biography.

 

The Devil in Velvet by John Dickson Carr (1951)

Carr wrote dozens of novels, perhaps hundreds, under his own name and many others. He was a quintessential hack, churning out perfectly (and sometimes not so perfectly) plotted mystery yarns at a rate that makes Anthony Trollope look like a slug-a-bed. Carr never took days off from writing, never revised a single word he wrote (a word of his fiction, that is - like many hacks, he could be meticulous about his nonfiction)(his 1963 book The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey is very much worth your time), and never agonized over the woof and weave of his plots' deeper meanings. Instead, he just kept at it, even when afflicted with a stroke. In this tangled and immensely rewarding pot-boiler, Carr's intrepid Professor Fenton makes a deal with the Devil that sends him back in time to Restoration London in order to solve a murder. Carr takes great pleasure in summoning all the gaudy details of that oft-fictionalized period, capping everything with his signature puzzles and sudden revelations.

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (1819)

It's almost a sin to mention the words "historical fiction" without mentioning "Sir Walter Scott" in the same sentence. His book Waverley, first published anonymously in 1814, changed the genre of historical fiction completely - indeed, it would be fair to say it created what we now know as the historical novel. It and all Scott's subsequent novels (none more so than Ivanhoe) exerted an influence on virtually every literate person in the Western hemisphere, and the strength of that influence can never be fully mapped and has thus, to my mind, never been given its proper due. Partly this is due to the uncomfortable fact that Scott is an atrocious writer of English prose - this famous story of the virtuous Saxon knight Ivanhoe, the various villains of King John's court, the sweet young Jewess Rebecca, and Robin Hood himself is a great galloping inelegant thing, full of purple passages and cardboard characters. And yet, Scott wrote with that particular magic that's only vouchsafed to hacks, and his millions of readers over the centuries (long may their line continue!) have willingly surrendered to the spell.

The Lord of the Two Lands by Judith Tarr (1993)

Alexander the Great is a tough choice for a fantasy writer, because his life reads more grippingly - and less believably - than most fantasy novels. Tarr takes the story of the young man who conquered most of the Western world before he was thirty and weaves into it a second narrative, a sinuous story of ancient Egypt and the many temptations it could offer somebody of Alexander's messianic tendencies. The temple priests of Amon send Meriamon, the artistic, insightful daughter of the Pharaoh, to the sweeps of Persia to find this rumored phenomenon, this unbeatable Macedonian warlord and convince him to turn south and come to Egypt, where a godlike destiny beyond his imagination awaits. Tarr creates an Alexander to remember, but even more she creates an ancient Egypt steeped in magic and the pretense of magic - what results is like a turbo-charged variation on the theme of Marc Antony and Cleopatra - a meeting not only of religions but of living gods. A well-made new trade paperback of this wonderful book would be a good idea.

Katherine by Anya Seton (1954)

Publishers have recently been very good at keeping the great, under-appreciated Anya Seton in print, and it's understandable why: in her taut narrative tempos, effective but not cumbersome 'period' dialogue, and powerful female characters, she's an obvious precursor to that Attila the Hun of contemporary historical fiction, Philippa Gregory (a fact to which Gregory herself pays ample and becoming tribute). Katherine is easily Seton's best book, the gripping story of Katherine Swynford, the smart, sharp long-time mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt (and the sister-in-law of that rising man about court, Geoffrey Chaucer). Historians look at Katherine Swynford mainly as the fons et origo of the Wars of the Roses, but no reader of this novel can ever do that - for us, history's Katherine is forever Seton's Katherine, inquisitive, passionate, self-assured yet self-doubting, and thoroughly, three-dimensionally human. And unlike some of her later disciples in the genre, Seton manages to impart something of that complex humanity to almost all of her characters.

Dear and Glorious Physician by Taylor Caldwell (1959)

This immensely popular historical novel about the life of Saint Luke was a best-seller for years, reprinted innumerable times, and month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Buenos Aires, customers would come in wanting "that Gospel book" - and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant. The author was prolific, and yet a great many of the novels are resoundingly good, and Dear and Glorious Physician (one of three of her books derived from the New Testament, the other two being Great Lion of God about Saint Paul and the vividly excellent I, Judas co-written with Jess Stearn) is one of her best. Her Lucanus is an early scientific sceptic, a rational young man who resists the Good News even while he's interviewing healed people and talking with Mary, the mother of Jesus. There's plenty of action and character here, but it's the lavishly detailed depiction of the grudging stages by which a deep-thinking man acquires an unthinking faith that's the most memorable thing about the book.


My Lord John by Georgette Heyer (1975)

At this point, need I say it? Month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Burundi, customers would come in looking for "her last book" and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant: My Lord John, the big, intensely ambitious historical novel by Georgette Heyer, published posthumously by her husband from the vast sea of notes and plot outlines and written drafts she left behind. Heyer was a monumental best-seller in her day, famous both for her fizzy murder mysteries (picture the novels of Agatha Christie, only well-written) and for her extremely lucrative Regency romances, which fell as the gentle rain from Heaven onto book shop front tables every Christmas and parted customers from their money as gently as a single raindrop. My Lord John - even in this truncated version (I often wonder if some enterprising Heyer archivist someday will give us a much, much longer version of this book - I'd clear my calendar to read it) - is a much weightier matter, the story of John, the nice-guy brother of King Henry V (and, coincidentally, the grandson of the aforementioned Katherine Swynford). The sweep and quiet swagger of this achievement will make just about any reader wish Heyer's public had been a bit less demanding for more of those damn Regencies, so that she might have had the time to do this epic justice.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory (2009)

I'm well aware that this surprisingly gripping novel of Elizabeth Woodville has been, um, very enthusiastically reviewed elsewhere, but I could hardly let this little round-up of historical fiction conclude without hauling in the very Philippa Gregory we've been hinting at and alluding to, now could I? Gregory of course made her name with The Other Boleyn Girl (bringing us full circle to those damn Tudors!) and its companion Tudor novels, but in this book and its mirror image The Red Queen, she explores the equally-fascinating (though far less popular) period of the aforementioned Wars of the Roses. The idiot ur-realityTV star Woodville is at the heart of that period, the wife of Edward IV and the mother of the famous Princes in the Tower, and The White Queen brandishes the same machinery that brought Gregory mega-success: short, fast chapters, naked first-person narration, and just the right seasoning of book club-friendly anachronisms. This book's portrayal of Richard III will, incidentally, both intrigue and in part infuriate any remaining adherents that wretched character might still have in this day and age.

And there you have it! Not only eight meaty historical novels to tempt you, but also, I can't help but notice as I look back on the list, a handy little illustration of that hoary old concept, the Wheel of Fortune: just look at how many of these authors are now entirely unknown despite once having their names on the lips of bookstore customers from Boston to Byzantium and back. Gregory had better salt something away for the proverbial rainy day.

The Persian Boy!

Our book today is Mary Renault's 1972 novel The Persian Boy, perhaps her masterpiece and certainly one of the greatest historical novels ever written. At its heart is the story of the young Persian eunuch Bagoas, who features as the briefest footnote in the actual historical accounts we have of Alexander (many of which qualify as historical fiction themselves, but never mind ...). Quintus Curtius Rufus mentions that Bagoas, owing to his exceptional beauty, was first the bed-toy of the Persian King Darius and then the bed-toy of Alexander himself, but we don't hear much more of this boy. There's mention that Alexander's Macedonian troops approved of their leader's choice in teenage boys, and there's a story indicating that preference might have made Bagoas arrogant and pettily vengeful toward Persians who had once offended him. Alexander was not besotted with the boy, despite many latter characterizations to that effect (Oliver Stone's ill-starred recent movie, in which the director's biggest mistake was casting Colin Farrell instead of Tom Hardy, being only the most visible) - indeed, both here and in her excellent The Nature of Alexander, Renault makes a strong case that Alexander was only besotted with two living beings in his entire life, and one of them was a horse (the story of his taming of his dangerous mount Bucephalus is lovingly retold, both in The Persian Boy and in Fire From Heaven):

The old beast threw up its head and whinnied loudly; you could see, then, it had been a good horse once. Suddenly Ptolemy, running like a boy, took its bridle from the Mardian, and loosed it. It broke into a stiff-legged canter, all its foolish fripperies jingling; made straight for the King, and nuzzled against his shoulder.

The King stroked its nose a time or two. He had been standing, it seemed, all this time grasping an apple, and with this he fed it. Then he turned round with his face pressed to its neck. I saw that he was crying.

There seemed nothing, now, with which he could still astonish me. I looked around at the soldiers, to see how they would take it. Beside me, two weathered Macedonians were blinking and wiping their noses.

Through Bagoas' eyes, Renault tells the story of Alexander's march ever eastward, of the hard-fought campaigns and perilous desert-crossings, and of the increasing tensions among Alexander's own men, many of whom had signed on to plunder Persia but were less keen about trying to subdue the entire known world. The horrible culmination of those tensions was Alexander's impulsive murder of his life-long friend and general Kleitos on a night when both of them had typically had too much to drink. It's a dramatic moment worthy of a Jonson or a Dryden, and Renault portrays it gripplingly:

"Here's Kleitos!" he shouted. "Here I am!"

He had come back for the last word. He had thought of it too late, and would not forgo it. It was his fate to be given his wish.

From the doors behind him, a guard came in doubtfully, like a muddy dog. He'd had no orders to keep out the Commander; but he did not like it. He stood spear in hand, looking dutiful and ready. Alexander, checking his stride, stared unbelievingly.

"Listen, Alexander. Alas, ill rule in Hellas ..."

Even Macedonians knew their Euripides. I daresay everyone there but I could have completed these famous lines. The gist of them is that the soldiers do it all, the general gets it all. I don't know if he meant to go on.

A flash of white went to the door, and turned again. There was a bellow like a slaughtered bull's. Kleitos clutched with both hands at the spear stuck in his breast; fell and writhed grunting; jerked in the death-spasms. His mouth and eyes fixed, wide open.

It had been so quick, for a moment I thought the guard had done it. The spear was his.

It was the silence, all down the hall, that told me.

Alexander stood over the body, staring down. Presently he said, "Kleitos." The corpse glared back at him. He took the spear by the haft. When it would not come, I saw him begin the soldier's movement to brace his foot on the body; then flinch and pull again. It jerked out, a handspan deep in blood, splashing down his clean white robe. Slowly he turned it round, the butt on the ground, the point towards him.

Ptolemy has always maintained that it meant nothing. I only know I cried "No, my lord!" and got it away. I took him unready, as he had done the guard. Someone reached over and carried it out of sight. Alexander sank on his knees by the body, and felt over its breast; then covered his face with his bloody hands.

"Oh God," he said slowly. "God, God, God, God."

The sheer confidence embodied in that single word 'presently' is amazing to me. Not one author in a hundred would even see that dramatic opening, much less have the wisdom to so perfectly understate it.

Of course, the novel's also noteworthy for its anxiety-free portrayal of homosexual sex and love, something it shares in common with all the rest of Renault's historical fiction set in the ancient world (or even in the present: her novel The Friendly Young Ladies is a remarkably clear-headed portrait of a contemporary lesbian couple - only The Charioteer dabbles heavily in self-loathing and persecution). In this case we're presented with a muted version of that kind of love - since Bagoas is telling the story, we're never directly privy to Alexander's love, physical or otherwise, for his best friend Hephaistion, although we get plenty of deft and even funny sex-interludes between conqueror and war-trophy:

Alexander took a fancy for me that night. The wound [A. had recently received] opened and I was covered in blood; he just laughed, and made me wash in case the guard thought I'd murdered him. The wound felt easier, he said; no physician like love. It is true that when dry they often fester.

Every single page of The Persian Boy shines with accomplishment and crackles with near-perfect storytelling, and I can attest to the fact that it's just as thrilling on the fiftieth reading as it is on the first. Virtually everything this author wrote is fantastic (for the explicit 'theme' of male love, I think The Last of the Wine is more tender and more true than this present book, but it also lacks the epic resonance), they each deserve their own entry here at Stevereads, but this one stands out even in such distinguished company. I can't urge you strongly enough to take it down from your shelf and finally give it that long-intended read. You'll be glad you did.

A Vision of Light!

Our book today is Judith Merkle Riley's 1989 historical novel A Vision of Light, and it falls into the ever-broadening category of 'second chance' books I like upon re-reading even though I disliked them when I first read them. Granted, 1989 was one of the worst years of my life for a new book to win me over, and quite a few deserving titles from that year got chewed up and spat out with less fairness than they deserved. But ideally, a dedicated re-reader will steadily correct such injustices, since fixed prejudices in reading are every bit as odious as fixed prejudices in walking-around life. So when I found a sturdy hardcover copy of this novel at the bottom of a heaped donation bin, I forked over the 25 cents, cleared two hours of my time, cracked the crust of old resentments off my reading mind, and jumped right in. Back 20 years ago, I thought the book was morose and sappy and creaky with anachronisms - so my guard was up for all three of those things, and naturally there were initial moments when I wondered whether I should re-read it at all.

I'm glad I did. Rather predictably, I missed quite a bit the first time through - and all three of my judgements were just plain wrong. What I thought were anachronisms were only the usual slight loosening of factual punctilio that historical novels do all the time (long before this book, in happier reading years, I'd forgiven a good deal looser stuff - hell, I'd laughed my head off during the whole of No Bed For Bacon) - no crime at all if the story carries it off. What I thought was sappy was merely openly sentimental - the openness of emotion, not the bathos of wallowing in it. And I don't know how I considered this book morose - a sparkling humor winks on practically every page.

In short, A Vision of Light is a wonderful, warm novel - exactly as good as half a dozen trustworthy bookstore customers told me it was, back when it first came out.

The story centers on Margaret of Ashbury, the vivacious young wife of a wealthy 14th century merchant with a kind nature ("It was fun to please her," he thinks), a young wife who one day hears a voice telling her to create a book. Not a book of sermons or love-visions, but an honest, everyday account of her own life and times. Those times have been remarkable by any standard - Margaret has been a midwife, channelled almost miraculous aptitude for healing, survived the Black Death, and survived the inquisition of the Church - but that hardly matters in 1355, when a woman's place is to keep her home running smoothly and her mouth shut. Margaret's husband Roger Kendall happily indulges her, which means the only thing she has to do is find a scribe willing to do the actual writing.

This proves instantly difficult. The first few scribes she approaches disdain the very idea of a woman writing a book. When she finally finds Brother Gregory - young, spare-boned, sharp-tempered - he's equally sceptical, but he's also poor and hungry, and in the initial stages of their working relationship, Margaret isn't above exploiting those facts to get her way. She doesn't do it to be conniving, but she wants her book written - and she's instinctively caring, if slightly maddening:

 "You haven't had breakfast, have you? You're much too tall to go without breakfast. You'll become weak and ill." (She told short people they were growing, when this mood came upon her.) "No, you just turn around and sit over here, while I see if Cook has a little something."

It is impossible to deny a woman in a feeding mood. It is as if they look right through you, to that small, weak part that has been there since you were a baby and that doesn't know how to defy authority. Brother Gregory was completely docile as she sat him down while bread, cheese, and a mug of ale were brought. She stood over him while he ate, and when it was clear that his mood was rapidly becoming mellower, she said, "There! Isn't that what you needed? Now, if everybody in the world ate breakfast, there would be no more wars."

Her new scribe, a caustic man who doesn't suffer fools gladly, doesn't even finish his last mouthful before he's going after this easy philosophy, with predictably frustrating results:

Brother Gregory's natural contentiousness had returned, and with his mouth still half full, he responded, "That is an entirely illogical statement. The Duke of Lancaster, who is a great warrior, eats breakfast every day. But I know of a holy abbot who goes without eating for days at a time, and he doesn't even kill flies."

"You can't prove anything with just two examples."

"You just tried to prove an outrageous non sequitur with only one example - me," said Brother Gregory primly.

"Oh, Latin, that's what you've run to hide behind."

The two set about writing Margaret's book, and the novel settles into a gentle, extremely assured alternating between Margaret's fascinating life-story and the complicated, very entertaining relationship that grows between Margaret and Brother Gregory. He is ready at all times with intellectual disdain and quick judgements (and his own personal history is also fascinating - his hilariously irascible father is the book's main scene-stealer), and he's constantly stymied by Margaret's bewitching combination of wisdom and innocence, as in the coda to her story about losing her baby:

Margaret looked up suddenly at Brother Gregory, and he lifted his pen from the page. Her face was very agitated. Her hands, clasped beneath the Byzantine gold cross she habitually wore, showed white at the knuckles.

"Do you think so, Brother Gregory? Do lost babies grow when they go to heaven? Does someone teach them and hold them? Or do they stay the same size, wetting their swaddling clothes forever and ever?"

Brother Gregory was appalled. This foolish woman was a wellspring of superstition. Spiritual beings, of course, do not wet, and the kind of mind that could even entertain such a supposition was capable of any idiocy.

"Do you know, I still dream about my lost girl, even now, sometimes?"

A Vision of Light deserved a better reading than I gave it in 1989. It's a sweet, welcoming, and deceptively well-researched story, one that's not at all ashamed of its basically theatrical simplicity (and right at the end the author throws in a gripping, gory climactic bit of action, like a gunshot in a Merchant-Ivory film). I'm glad I happened upon it again, and I hope I can get around to the rest of that blighted year in due time. Meanwhile, I contritely recommend this book, should you encounter it yourself.

Queen Catherine! (no, not that one)(no, not that one either)

Our two books today are historical novels dealing with the same figure: Catherine Parr, the staid, prudish hickory stick who was the last wife of Henry VIII. Readers who have a nodding familiarity with Tudor history will likely be more familiar with any of the five wives who preceded this one - there's the Rightful Queen, the Witch, the Mother of the Heir, the Dearest Sister, and the Slutty Girl - but by the time most people get to Catherine Parr, the whole point of keeping up with all the wives seems vitiated. What difference does it make what Catherine Parr was like, after all, if the whole gaudy show of it now moves to young Edward VI, and then on to Mary I, and then to Elizabeth I?

Blind spots like that are cat-nip to historical novelists. These writers correctly divine that often the most interesting things happen outside the bright spotlight of history - the key to effective historical fiction is to step just far enough outside that spotlight to let those interesting human details creep in but not so far outside that spotlight that you leave your readers groping around in the dark for something interesting. Set the entire story of Wolf Hall in the murky boyhood of Thomas Cromwell and you lose the background electricity of his interactions with the Tudor court. Set the climax to Gone with the Wind in the 1840s and you might have a pretty good book, but it wouldn't glow with the light of burning Southern plantations.

So writing about Catherine Parr can be tricky. Historian Carolly Erickson takes perhaps the safer route in her 2006 novel The Last Wife of Henry VIII by using as its setting the whole of that lady's life, the better to give us all the drama of that life's intersection with last dying embers of Henry VIII's insane personal life. Erickson's book is extremely good (a bit ironic that both she and fellow historian Alison Weir have done their best recent work in fiction), and the Catherine she gives us might be a bit stiff and a bit haughty, but she ends up being all the more real for it:

"Ah, so pale," said the sleek, moustachioed Duke of Najera as he took my hand to kiss. "I trust your majesty is not in poor health."

"I confess that I am in indifferent health, milord duke," was my response. ...

"May we hope that this indisposition betokens the arrival of an heir?" His tone was polite and his words formal, but the question was overly bold, even rude. He presumed too much. Just because he was the emissary of the Emperor Charles V, and charged with a very important mission to our court, he imagined that he could ask me bold questions and ignore the ordinary rules of courtesy.

"Milord, you forget yourself," said my friend and lady-in-waiting Kate Brandon, coming to my rescue. "The queen's health is a matter of state and cannot be talked of lightly."

A far riskier strategy is adopted by Susannah Dunn in her spectacularly good 2008 novel The Sixth Wife (not to be confused with the Jean Plaidy novel of the same title - and, um, about the same subject)(don't even get me started on the subject of incomprehensible choices in book-titles...): in that work, Katherine (so Dunn styles her) Parr is neither in power or the teller of her own story - the latter task falls to that same Kate Brandon, here given magnificent life and voice by Dunn as the novel's narrator. The book focuses on the stunning immediate aftermath of Henry VIII's death, when his still-young widow stunned the court and the whole country by quickly marrying Thomas Seymour, brother to the realm's new Lord Protector - and brother too to the mother of the realm's new king, young Edward. Thomas Seymour had a feckless, headlong quality about him that seemed drastically at odds with Parr's slightly beady-eyed calm; he seemed the very last person she might marry, let along marry impulsively. Again, catnip for historical novelists, most of whom (including Erickson) have assumed that the turn of events can only be explained if Seymour and Parr had been in love - and perhaps lovers - long before Henry took a liking to his prospective new queen.

Dunn (whose work I've praised before) skirts making such an easy, explicit explanation in favor of what is clearly one of her focal points as a novelist: the unpredictable, twisty ways of human emotions. Shortly after her Kate Parr reveals her marriage to Kate Brandon, the two of them go out riding, and when the former queen gallops away, Kate is left to wrestle with the whole mystery:

"He makes me laugh," Kate yelled of Thomas as she thundered away from me.

I didn't come back at her with, Yes, but my dog makes me laugh and I haven't married him, have I.

Nor, Yes, but I make you laugh.

People underestimated Kate in one respect: kind but serious, was a lot of people's opinion of her. Maybe it was as simple as that, it occurred to me as I trailed in her wake: maybe Thomas Seymour truly appreciates her.

Yes, but why marry him, and so soon?

Well, that was quite simple, too, in the end, it seemed. He'd asked her, she told me later. Marry me, he'd said: that's what she told me. Marry me, marry me, marry me: he'd said it a lot. So that it seemed less and less ridiculous, presumably. Why not? he said. I've been away for years and you've been - well, you haven't had an easy time of it for years, for your whole life, in fact, so ... and then that smile of his.

Dunn's book is the wiser book of the two emotionally, but it's a decidedly 20th century wisdom. Erickson's book is a more conventional historical novel (you'll find no 'milady's in Dunn's period fiction) but succumbs at times to the lure of the scenery. Many of the same characters come and go through these pages, and it's fun to see how differently the two authors portray them - including the young Princess Elizabeth, who's a monstrous enigma in Dunn and an enigmatic monster in Erickson. The exception seems to be Edward Seymour's wife Anne Stanhope, who's hated equally by both our authors - automatically making me wonder if somebody's out there right this moment penning a Tudor historical novel in which a thoroughly sympathetic Anne stars as the oft-misunderstood heroine. I'll keep an eye out at the Boston Public Library for The Lord Protector's Wife.

The Rationalist!

Our book today is The Rationalist, a lean and quite skillful 1993 novel by Warwick Collins. Despite working fairly close to the world of books, I first became aware of this novel when I found it under a particularly stubborn layer of muck at the bottom of a canvas tub at the back of a charity discard depot - to say it 'flew under the radar' in the United States would be a bit of an understatement. One potential reason for that failure to achieve liftoff might be signaled in Simon & Schuster's odd choice to decorate the book's back jacket not with the usual graffiti wall of glowing endorsements but instead with one line, "It is a strange dark tale, perverse, erotic, and haunting" - one plug, written by Josephine Hart, whose own novels read absolutely nothing like The Rationalist and whose endorsement, therefore, might strike some readers much as a skull-and-crossbones warning label would on a bottle they'd mistakenly assumed was creme de menthe.

Whatever the reason for the book's relative obscurity, readers who, like me, failed to catch it fifteen years ago missed a real treat. This is a smart, ruthlessly controlled, perfectly executed historical novel of exquisite discretion and an unfailingly high estimate of its readers' intelligence. It deserves an enormous audience.

It's the story of Silas Grange, an 18th-century physician operating out of Lambeth during the reign of King George III. Grange is a self-possessed fellow (one of his closest friends tells him he has "a mind as cold as winter," and he himself admits that he considers himself to be "a man who is not much at liberty with his own emotions"), and Collins' prose when dealing with him is equally austere - indeed, the book opens with an arm-amputation scene that reads like it was written by a Vulcan: we see and hear the poor patient's agony and doomed bravery, but the narrative doesn't feel any of it, won't let itself ... it's an altogether beguiling experience - it ought to have been a calling-card to Wolf Hall-levels of fame - and it's no false advertisement: the entire book is crammed with equally excellent set-pieces.

Grange is a man of science, and despite how carefully he schools them, his passions are quite strong - including a sometimes fierce desire to fly into pure inquiry, to risk everything in order that his insatiable curiosity might find hidden truths:

His own strict image of the truth, learned in the academies of Scotland, was central to this notion. One could not use the image of a candle shedding its light upon objects, for the truth seemed to emerge from inside like some internal radiance, as ghostly as the patina on silver. It appeared to him that truth was not prolix or voluble, but crept out shyly from the side, like a man escaping from a house.

When the book opens, Grange would hardly consider himself prolix or voluble, and yet his imagination is vast, and his attentive eyes miss nothing in the seacoast world to which he's relegated himself:

More than all the other birds, Grange loved the great gray herons that inhabited the marshes, for their solitariness, their silence, their casual grace as they swam upward into the air. He loved them too for the calm, recondite heartbeat of their wings when agitated. In surveying them, their silence moved him to remark on his own solitude, and perhaps therein lay an identity of interests, or at least of common form.When disturbed, they seemed to move upward into the thinner medium as calmly as thought, grasping the air in their big wings like hands.

The precise order of Grange's world is disturbed when he calls on the town's enigmatic Mrs. Quill, a woman who on the surface appears as reserved and formidable as he is himself. In their first fretful interview, he's driven by a confusion of lust and curiosity to an uncharacteristic piece of hyperbole: "I am a rationalist," he tells her. "If God's against that, I am against God."

If this is meant to shock the conventional moralities of the time, it's got nothing on the proposal Mrs. Quill subsequently makes to him, and from there the novel unfolds in a sequence of developments as predictable and yet appalling as a fifty-car pile-up on an icy road. You'll be spellbound and transported ... the two effects we like to demand of all good historical fiction and yet so seldom get. I haven't yet hunted down the rest of Collins' books at the Boston Public Library, but you'll hear about it when I do - and in the meantime, I can't recommend this one strongly enough. No matter what you may or may not think of Josephine Hart.

Mysteries Histories: Three Debuts!

What is it we love about murder mysteries? An old enemy of mine maintained the appeal came from order - that in murder mysteries, everything happens for a reason (even if it's a bad reason) and that's inherently comforting in chaotic times. An old friend of mine (reader, I loved him) used to consume an unending stream of murder mysteries to ease the burdens of his rather onerous job, and he said the appeal came from the fact that justice always triumphs ("which is not always the outcome in real life," he used to sigh, "however much we may strive for it").

I've been an avid fan of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries from the beginning, so to those two very good theories I could add a third: mysteries please us in part for the joy of watching pointed ratiocination at work. In our ordinary lives, thinking usually doesn't happen pointedly - we come at problems sideways, we defer realizations until after our TV shows are done, we let our most promising lines of contemplation drift off into complicated fantasies involving Taylor Lautner. For most of us, the protracted aria of proud link-by-link deduction produced by somebody like Hercule Poirot is one hell of a compelling dream. This also accounts for the backlash popularity of mystery's muddlers, the sleuths who slip and trip into the truth.

Whatever the root causes of the murder mystery's appeal, though, the result is the same: the library shelves and used bookstore bins are filled with them, to the point where you start to wonder if more people have been murdered on paper than were ever murdered in life. And for the last fifty years or so, a booming sub-genre of that profusion has been the historical murder mystery. We'll never know who the anonymous genius was who first had the inspired realization that people in the past must have had to solve crimes just like people in the present (technically, even Doyle was doing a bit of this), but in the 20th century, borne aloft by the boom in historical fiction just generally, the sub-genre exploded. Historical figures from Socrates and Aristotle to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams somehow found time amidst all the rest of their activities to snoop in warehouses and question evasive priests, and even more popular were the adventures of invented characters set down in the past and interacting with the great and the infamous from their own day.

The rise of this second type of historical murder mystery is only natural - even through the mists of time, we know a little too much about the movements of somebody like the Black Prince or Joanna the Mad to make it credible that they could be dueling with tennis rackets atop the 4:15 to Paddington. But a thoroughly invented My Lord of Loverwurst can get into all kinds of scrapes (including punching the Black Prince in the nose - or punching Joanna in the nose, if he's a blackguard) without prompting that most lethal of historical fiction questions from the reader: did that REALLY happen? If you force the reader to ask that hated question too often, you lose that reader to those boring old sods who write history, and the game's over.

No, the key is to create a historical stand-in who's in a believable position to encounter mysteries (we will forever adore Agatha Christie specifically because the Miss Marple stories are so infinitely unlikely) - an army officer, a government official, the king's better-looking cousin, etc. This person must have access to famous historical figures and events, but the 'public' face of those figures and events must be allowed to proceed unperturbed, like some grand floating parade, while the dirt and skullduggery happens around and underneath them. King John still signs Magna Carta - little knowing that our intrepid castellan has just disarmed the would-be crossbow-cocking assassin.

A good example of this is the first of our three debuts, Murder in the Place of Anubis, Lynda Robinson's 1994 first novel starring Lord Meren, chief investigator to the teen pharaoh Tutankhamun. In this first adventure Lord Meren must unravel the murder of Hormin, a detested scribe whose body is found in the sacred embalming-dedicated precincts of Anubis. Since the pharaoh is a living god in his society, Meren carries a good deal more authority than most historical sleuths, but his best weapon is his own reflective nature, which Robinson manages to convey just as effectively as she does her well-researched background. Meren is a man who's smart enough to listen to his own reactions, and every time he does, he starts to learn something:

As he listened to Selket, Meren became aware of his own vague uneasiness. At first he couldn't understand his discomfort, but then he realized that the woman talking to him shifted from fury to complacency and back again in half a heartbeat. When she spoke of Beltis, her eyes took on the look of a rabid hyena, yet moments before she'd mentioned Hormin with a sweet lilt in her voice.

At the opposite end of the social spectrum from Lord Meren and his unlimited authority is Marcus Didius Falco, the downtrodden working-stiff hero of Lindsey Davis' 1989 debut Silver Pigs. The year is a.d. 70, and Falco is eking out his living in Rome as a poorly-paid informer and part-time snoop. His life changes forever when he encounters beautiful, high-spirited senator's daughter Helena Justina and he suddenly finds himself embroiled in plots and counter-plots involving no less than the imperial family - genial emperor Vespasian and his two sons, creepy Domitian and suave Titus:

Domitian gave no further sign of nerves. He kissed Helena's hand, with the half-closed gaze of a very young man who imagines he is brilliant in bed. She stared at him stonily. Titus intervened, with a smoothness I envied, kissing her cheek like a relative as we reached the door. I let him. If she wanted, she was perfectly capable of stopping him herself.

I hoped she realized these two came from an old-fashioned Sabine family. Stripped of their purple, they were provincial and ordinary: close with their money, ruled by their women, and obsessed with work. They both had paunches already, and neither of them was as tall as me.

Falco is the anti-Meren in every way: he intimidates nobody, he carries no authority (even when he's technically working for Vespasian, it's clear that if he screws up he's on his own), and he's not all that good at deductive reasoning. He has a mongrel stubborn streak that Lord Meren's type of investigator doesn't even think to need, so Davis' readers get a good deal more desperate fisticuffs than Robinson's do (and a great deal more humor - there are set pieces in the first three Falco novels that alone are worth the price of the books). One key thing they have in common: they each make their historical period come alive.

Veering almost totally in the Miss Marple direction is the first novel in Ellis Peters' venerable Brother Cadfael series, 1977's A Morbid Taste for Bones, which introduces Peters' great fictional creation: the Benedictine monk Brother Cadfael, who came to his religious calling after years of wandering the world as a battle-hardened soldier and is now the chief herbalist at the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, in 1137 Shrewsbury. Cadfael is wiser than Lord Meren and more temperate than Marcus Didius Falco - he has a personal passion for seeing justice done in all things, but there's a distinct undercurrent of irritation in many of his adventures, as though he partially resents these intrusions by the murderous outside world into what was supposed to be his contemplative retirement.  The series is some twenty books long, and all of them are fantastic (this rarely happens in murder series, or indeed series of any kind), and they're all enlivened by Cadfael's always perceptive, somewhat wry observations of everyone and everything around him:

They met in the orchard, the five of them, Prior Robert presiding in as solemn dignity as ever. Brother Richard read out the saints to be celebrated that day and the following day. Brother Jerome composed his wiry person into his usual shape of sycophantic reverence, and made all the appropriate responses. But it seemed to Cadfael that Brother Columbanus looked unusually withdrawn and troubled, his full blue eyes veiled. The contrast between his athletic build and fine, autocratic head, and his meek and anxious devoutness of feature and bearing, was always confusing to the observer, but that morning his extreme preoccupation with some inward crisis of real or imagined sin made it painful to look at him. Brother Cadfael sighed, expecting another falling fit like the one that had launched them all on this quest. Who knew what this badly-balanced half-saint, half-idiot would do next?

The Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul is near the Welsh border and often caught in pivotal events in the epic struggle between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda - too often, as often happens in the Miss Marple formula. After a few books in this series, even the most willing reader will start to wonder if it isn't a little odd for all these strange events to be cropping up at this one abbey. Fortunately, Peters' steely-confident prose is on hand at every point - to be enjoyed whether it's believable or not.

And these three are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to historical murder mysteries, of course.  Countless others await our inspection, if the Silent Majority is at all interested in pursuing the case!

The Journal of Kitty Adair!

Our book today is R. T. Lawrence's 1963 historical-fiction romp, The Journal of Kitty Adair, and the instant you read the front cover copy, “the lusty adventures of an Elizabethan wanton and her lovers, told by the wench herself,” you'll not only get a fair idea of the book's parameters but also start to wonder if you haven't heard this one before.

In confirmation of that suspicion, you need look no further than the book's back cover, on which is scrawled (in lettering designed to look like red lipstick): “Another Forever Amber!”

By 1963, Kathleen Winsor's monumental historical novel Forever Amber – the lusty adventures of a Restoration wanton and her lovers, told by the wench herself – had been a bestseller for twenty years and spawned an entire mini-library of imitators (including, prior to Lawrence, the indomitable “Angelique” series that we'll get around to here at Stevereads, one of these fine days). Only a curiously naive academic would cite Moll Flanders as the ultimate genesis of these books. No, the read spur of invention here was the advent of the women's rights movement at the forefront of the American social scene. During the Second World War, far more women than ever before in American history were given a taste of a working world previously known only to men – many of those women liked that world and worked well in it (better than most of their male counterparts, as both they and the poor drafted counterparts knew quite well). The modern women's rights movement in America was born of such humble beginnings – it's only when we get an actual taste of what we've been missing that we become insatiable for it.

As unlikely as it seems, steamy bodice-rippers like Forever Amber, To Dance with Kings, and The Journal of Kitty Adair were born not of literature (although Gone with the Wind certainly didn't hurt) but of widgets – of punching in and out of the local manufacturing plant or writing up a storm at your local newspaper (even if it happened to be The New York Times) while all the go-getting male writers were drafted away.

And it isn't that women took these opportunities and through them gained the confidence to write the blockbusters in question (R.T. Lawrence was, after all, a man – and he had lots of company) – it's that all this female empowerment in the workplace created a market in the publishing trade … for novels in which pretty women succeeded or failed entirely on the strength of their looks and sexual appeal. These novels, most of them, may have been written by women, but they were most certainly written for men – nervous men, vaguely emasculated men who wanted to escape into a fantasy-literature in which “the wench herself” narrates her life story. That story invariably involves the wench being born to poverty and raising herself to the glittering world of high-class solely by sleeping with increasingly more powerful men. To some benighted male readers (like, for instance, the manufacturing plant's ad-copy writer, whose job had been taken over in 1942 by a woman who did it faster and better than he did and wasn't an unremitting A-hole to her co-workers the whole time), this stuff must have seemed like a return to Eden.

Not that it couldn't also be lots of fun. The Journal of Kitty Adair is lots of fun, in its earnest, overheated way. Two pages haven't gone by before young orphaned Kitty is peeling off her clothes for a little pubescent romp with the local hostler's boy, and the boys – and men – keep, as it were, coming: Kitty soon learns that she has a knack for pleasing, and this propels the book along.

But it isn't the only thing that does. Lawrence's single greatest skill as a writer luckily appears at the single weakest spot of most historical romances: he's very good at dialogue – when his characters are talking, you can't stop reading. As an example, look at this snippet from almost half-way into the book – Kitty has been brought to the attention of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's sepulchral spymaster, and he's examining her in his fire-stoked study. When he asks her if she feels any love for England, she boldly tells him no, that she'd only be undertaking his services as a business arrangement. His answer startles her:

“Without love?” He pulled himself up and walked closer to the fire. “I don't want just another spy. I have dozens of them in every important city, in every important country. Few of them have any love for England. They take English money, yes, but they will also take French, Spanish and Papal coin. We pay them for information about France; Spain pays them for information about England; the Pope pays them for information about every country. Spying, my young lady, is a lucrative business. Money comes from all sides., Sell secrets as you would mussels and cockles in the marketplace.”

Walsingham started into the fire for a long time.

“Would you like to see England invaded?” he asked, his back still turned.

“No, sir.”

“Would you like to have Spanish soldiers marching up and down the streets of London, killing everyone who looks disloyal to King Philip? You say you are not a Catholic. Would you like to face the Inquisition and say that? England, my dear, is in danger of becoming another Spanish colony ...”

“Impossible!” I cried. “We have Sir Francis Drake … we have ships … soldiers ...”

He turned and snapped his fingers.

“We have nothing powerful enough to stop the Spanish except love for England. Ships? A heap of floating timbers compared to the Spanish fleet – and Philip is now building more and more men-of-war. Every prow is pointed in but one direction: England.”

To indulge the conceit of his novel (Lawrence follows the 'battered tin dispatch-box' idea of having only found the journal of Kitty Adair), the author adds a curiously charming footnote at the bottom of the page:

Walsingham was violently anti-Catholic. Much of his feeling stemmed from the fact that he was English ambassador to the French court when the Huguenots were slaughtered on St. Barholomew's Eve, Aug. 24, 1572, and narrowly escaped serious injury. It is strange he did not lecture Kitty on this point.

Kitty finds a perilous future in espionage – and a veritable parade of famous Elizabethan personages make their appearances. It's a quick, eminently satisfying read, as so many of your better historical romances tend to be. Kitty does indeed come a cropper of the Inquisition and comes a whisker away from being killed – she also finds her true love (and the almost-true love who's always waiting in the wings in books like this), although Lawrence very cannily leaves the whole business hanging in mid-air, ready for sequels should Angelique-style sales warrant it.

They did not, and for all we know Kitty spent the rest of her days as an insurance underwriter – happy to be out of the house and earning an honest (though not yet equitable) paycheck.

Duchess!

Our book today is Susan Holloway Scott’s 2006 historical novel Duchess, not to be confused with Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana, about the Duchess of Devonshire, which was retitled The Duchess to coincide with its movie version. Scott’s Duchess is Sarah, the Duchess of Marlborough, who’s never had a big-budget movie made about her, although nobody who’s ever seen Susan Hampshire’s magnificent turn as the character in the BBC’s 1969 production The Churchills will ever forget it (if this were Stevesees, I'd write up a storm about that mini-series, so good, so well done). It’s hard to know who a modern casting director would find to play Sarah – we only know the actress would be really, really skinny. A walking skeleton was found to play Georgiana, after all, and even more hilariously, another walking skeleton was recently cast to play a young Queen Victoria, who was never in her life anything but butterball-plump.

Not that it matters: who needs movies when there are books? And this is a fine, fun book – Scott has inconspicuously mined the historical sources (there are fewer factual errors in this novel about the age of Queen Anne than I found in the last history of the period I read) and transmuted them into a narrative bursting with life.

One life in particular, of course, that of Sarah Jennings, who came from an old, well-born family late of Somersetshire and by the 17th century long based in Hertfordshire. She and her sister Frances were both attached to the court of the Duke and Duchess of York while Charles II was on the throne and careers were being made. In 1675 Sarah was 15 and energetically dancing with the court’s brightest rising star, the young and stunningly handsome army officer John Churchill, who in Scott's passage semi-teasingly questions how many of her motives for serving the Duchess of York are in fact selfish:

Careful, I thought, careful, careful. “I’m loyal to my mistress, Colonel, just as I believe you should be loyal towards your master, the Duke of York.”
He smiled, pleased, I think, by what I’d said. “You’re scolding me, Miss Jennings.”
“If you need scolding, then I shall do it,” I said warmly. “The duchess has been very generous in her kindnesses to me.”
“Nothing in Whitehall is given for free,” he said. “You must have worked hard to earn that kindness.”
“I have,” I said, “for isn’t that one of the purposes of coming to court? To make oneself agreeable to those in high places, so that they will be agreeable and obliging in return?”
He laughed. “You’re an ambitious lass.”
I didn’t join his amusement. “I AM ambitious,” I said. “As are you, Colonel Churchill.”
“True enough.” His laugh had changed to a thoughtful smile: another judgment, and I passed.

Sarah’s most famous descendant, 20th century Prime Minister Winston, in his epic biography of her husband, aptly summarizes her with the line “she owned, when roused, the temper of the devil.” This is putting it mildly – Sarah Jennings was a brash, opinionated, omnivorously pugnacious woman, and that was before she became Sarah Churchill, the first noblewoman in the land. She bristled like a porcupine, and the wonder is that she never turned on her famous husband. “It was a case of love, not at first sight, but at first recognition,” Sir Winston wrote. “It lasted for ever; neither one of them thenceforward loved anyone else in their whole lives” … and then the end-note expected by anybody who’s ever read anything about her, “though Sarah hated many.”

The most famous and problematic person she both hated and loved was the woman who eventually became Queen: poor rheumatic Anne, who had for most of her life shared a sisterly intimacy with Sarah. Both of them were smarter than outsiders usually estimated, and both of them loved sharp, elbow-throwing humor. Anne called her “Mrs. Freeman,” and she called Anne “Mrs. Morley” – in part in knowing testimony to their belief that they’d have been fast friends even if they’d met as commoners, that their hearts were in sympathy regardless of titles.

Of course that sympathy could be strained, as when Sarah’s husband was off fighting the French – campaigns that cost Anne’s government heaps of money, as her advisers were forever telling her:

“Oh bah, Morley, don’t be so timid,” I said with disgust. “It’s a different tale when the messengers bring word of another victory. Then you order the church bells rung and the guns fired from the Tower to celebrate the new glory that’s come to your reign. You can’t have that without paying the piper.”
She sighed again. “I’ve never said the victories have not been appreciated. It’s only that Mr. Harley and the others believe there might be ways to accomplish the same good without spending so very much.”
“Oh, I see!” I snapped my fingers together. “We’ll pay for gunpowder with fairy dust, and sell pippins for cannon. Is there any wonder that Lord Marlborough writes to me constantly of quitting the army altogether and retiring to St. Albans?”
“I won’t allow it,” the queen said, aghast.
“John would indeed quit the army, and resign his commissions,” I said, my voice rising with emotion. “and so would I retire, and join him in the country. After all the service we have given, there’s only so much we can bear.”
The queen’s face crumpled. “Oh, Mrs. Freeman, don’t speak so, I beg of you! You know you are still my dearest friend! Why must you insist that I agree with you in all matters? Why can’t I be permitted to hold my own counsel, and you yours, the way you once did?”
I rose from my chair, unable to listen to any more. “I’ll be the same Mrs. Freeman when you can manage to be the same Mrs. Morley.”

The story of a woman who could behave so to a queen (and Scott is only nominally inventing, for this and many other such scenes) is well worth a novel or two, and this one will stand as the best of the generation. Now if only some enterprising soul, some modern Winston perhaps, would embark on the 800-page straight-up biography this infuriating woman deserves ….

Keeping Up With The Tudors: The Other Boleyn Girl!

Our book today is the one that started it all: Philippa Gregory’s totally unexpected runaway bestseller, The Other Boleyn Girl (originally titled The Other Boleyn Sister – obviously it was feared that historically illiterate American audiences would feel they were reading a sequel, as with The Madness of King George III)(although I myself actually prefer the American title here – it has a slightly more brutal, impersonal tone, one that fits the book’s mercenary tale better than the more familial ’Sister’).

Safe to say no historical novel written in the last thirty years has been as influential as this one. In only ten years, The Other Boleyn Girl has generated five spin-offs, two different movie adaptations (one for the BBC and one for the mysterious ongoing purpose of keeping Eric Bana employed), an ongoing HBO series (since The Tudors would be unthinkable without the success of the book), and a vast, untrackable ocean of like-minded books set in the Tudor era (I plumb that sea at greater depth here). And like great touchstone historical novels before it, The Other Boleyn Girl has exerted its main influence as a kind of imaginative primer. Just as Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur opened the floodgates for Roman historical fiction, just as Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber opened the floodgates for a brief resurgence of Restoration bodice-rippers, so The Other Boleyn Girl has taught a generation of readers that the Tudor era isn’t something they need a Ph.D. in history to enter and understand. Such teaching often pays long dividends, and this time is no exception: Hilary Mantel owes her recent Man Booker win as much to Philippa Gregory as to the intrinsic strength of Wolf Hall.

Gregory’s book stands like an imperturbable tower above the brick-bats that have been hurled at it by its critics (myself included, way back when and under a pen-name), who for years have assailed its historical accuracy. Those critics, being critics, would have done that anyway, although in this case they were egged on by Gregory’s own claims for the historical accuracy of her book. Historical novelists almost always make such claims, and critics are well-advised to ignore them and concentrate on the important things about fiction, foremost of which is this: does it work?



The Other Boleyn Girl incontestably works. Gregory had written extremely competent if tweedy historical novels earlier in her career (including a whole series chronicling the exploits of a family of gardeners to royalty – how’s that for an English double-whammy?), but in this book she makes some key decisions, and they all pay off.

As you all know, this is the story of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, who was the first of Thomas Boleyn’s daughters to catch the roving eye of King Henry VIII, who’s portrayed here as tiring of his aging Spanish queen and hungry for sexual adventures – and a male heir. Gregory decides to tell the story from Mary’s point of view, to tell it sharply with none of the fustian palaver that had usually infested Tudor novels, and to shape her characters into resolutely modern people in period costume. Scenes unfold and transform with almost time-lapse rapidity, and Gregory’s previously languid approach to character development is here whittled to a series of mostly pointed observations. In crafting such a narrative, Gregory inadvertently grants Mary far, far more intelligence than she really possessed, but it’s a minor infraction, especially considering the sheer amounts of fun that result. The Other Boleyn Girl is above all a quite fantastic read. It’s comforting to think that alone might account for a great deal of its success.

Despite the cavils of historical critics, there’s a good deal of accurate research at the back of this book. But its main delight comes in it quick exchanges of dialogue, as in the tense little scene in which Anne sends her sister off to be with Henry:

“Are you clean?” Anne asked sharply.

I nodded.

She looked at me anxiously. “Go on then. And you can resist for a bit, you know. Show a little doubt. Don’t just fall into his arms.”

I turned my face away from her. She seemed to me quite unbearably crass about the whole matter.

“The girl can have a bit of pleasure,” George said gently.

Anne rounded on him. “Not in his bed,” she said sharply. “She’s not there for her pleasure but for his.”

I didn’t even hear her. All I could ear was the thud of my heart pounding in my ears and my knowledge that he had sent for me, that I would be with him soon.

“Come on,” I said to George. “Let’s go.”

Anne turned to go back into the room. “I’ll wait up for you,” she said.

I hesitated. “I might not come back tonight.”

She nodded. “I hope you don’t. But I’ll wait up for you anyway. I’ll sit by the fire and watch the dawn come in.”

I thought for a moment about her keeping a vigil for me in her spinster bedroom while I was snug and loved in the King of England’s bed. “My God, you must wish it was you,” I said with sudden acute delight.

She did not flinch from it. “Of course. He is the king.”

You can see several of the basic ingredients of The Other Boleyn Girl in that little scene (and a few of its key weaknesses, here symbolized in that repeated ‘sharply’): the modern speech cadences, full of contractions and free of ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ the economical evocation of setting (characters in the book imagine each other doing things almost as often as they actually do things), and of course a free-wheeling willingness to make a scenery-chewing Lucifer out of Anne Boleyn.

Gregory’s also not above winking a little at her audience, as in this much later scene in which Mary and George attend the banquet in honor of Anne becoming the Marquess of Pembroke (and honor bestowed by the besotted Henry):

At the banquet George and I sat side by side and looked up at our sister, seated beside the king.

He did not ask if I was envious. It was an answer too obvious to be worth inquiry. “I don’t know another woman who could have done it,” he said. “She has a unique determination to be on the throne.”

“I never had that,” I said. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted from childhood was not to be overlooked.”

“Well you can forget that,” George said with brotherly frankness. “You’ll be overlooked now for the rest of your life. We’ll both be as nothing. Anything I achieve will be seen as her gift. And you’ll never match her. She’s the only Boleyn anyone will ever know of or remember. You’ll be a nobody forever.”

It was the word “nobody.”At the very word the bitterness drained out of me, and I smiled. “You know, there might be some joy in being a nobody.”

“You’ll be a nobody forever” indeed. There are Other Boleyn Girl tours, Other Boleyn Girl garden parties, Other Boleyn Girl stationary lines and book clubs … and I already mentioned the legion of knockoff novels set in a Tudor court suddenly become so lusty it’s a wonder anybody ever had time to trade dispatches with the Venetian ambassador.

We all owe that renaissance – the good and the bad of it – to Philippa Gregory and her improbable blockbuster of a book. Each publishing season, roughly 400 hopefuls plop their Tudor wares on the counter and hope the public will consume them in equal quantities, but so far that kind of success has evaded them all (and Gregory herself – none of those sequels sold more than a fraction of what the original did and still does). This is only natural, though the poor things don’t see it. The next lynch-pin book that catches and sparks the public’s imagination will be as unexpected as The Other Boleyn Girl was, and it will turn all eyes toward a different era entirely. The Windsors, anyone?

The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers

Our book today is The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers by Delia Falconer, a 2006 novella released by Counterpoint, and reading it reminded me of a conversation I had the other day with a young novelist friend of mine. We were talking about the skill – and the courage – good writers exhibit not by piling on detail but by steadily whittling it away from their finished product.

Of course what I withheld from my novelist friend was how much I usually loathe such finished products. Novels aren’t verse, after all, and there’s a reason for that – fiction, especially historical fiction, wants to revel in abundance. The extra words aren’t there out of authorial laziness (in the best cases, that is) but rather to present the reader with long hours of research turned into a banquet, a lavished table from which they can pick and choose the delicacies they want. Slim novels are too often slim for the wrong reasons; they can easily be pale, skinny, even boney … and who wants that?

Happily, having read The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, I’m reminded that when novellas are done right, when they’re crafted with the skill and courage my friend and I were talking about, they really can approach the sheer sledgehammer intimacy of poetry. Delia Falconer has written such a book.

The story here centers on Captain Frederick Benteen, who in 1898 Georgia is an old man worn thin by drink and trauma – and who, in 1876, rode with the cavalry of George Armstrong Custer and through his own initiative managed to survive (and help some of his men survive) the Battle of Little Bighorn. That famous, bloody event has pressed a heavy hand on Benteen’s life and mind, and Falconer shows us a man whose memories lurk in the shadows, ready to darken even the most mundane activity, like when Benteen, idling at home while his wife Catharine (“Frabbie”) is away, goes to the icehouse out back:

Inside, he sees nothing at first but blackness and the vapor of his breath. Vegetables and flesh in hibernation in the pit below him. He hears tiny fissures open in the ice like the infinitesimal and random tickings of little pocket watches. Maggots sound similar, he recalls – a more liquidy eagerness about the ticking as they burrow through a corpse.

Into these warped twilight years comes the unexpected: a letter from an earnest young man back East who wishes to correspond with Benteen, to write a definitive account of the great battle and rescue Benteen’s reputation from those naysayers who claim he abandoned Custer at the last crucial moment. The young man has included a photo of himself, and Benteen, that former recruiter of men, reflexively notes ‘the transparent look about the chops of a man who lives on vegetables alone,’  but he can’t help thinking about prospect, however unlikely the vessel:

Like the faint stirrings of sex, he feels old venom sacks filling; the swelling weight of another, second, body within the old made up of bitter organs.

So. This is his avenger.

He pictures him cooking beans in a small room in a boarding house that is overrun with cats.

Like any other reader of historical fiction, I like to get totally caught up in the work. The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers took me 37 minutes to read, so that was never going to happen – but I don’t think novellas like this one want to do that. Instead, they want to lodge themselves, like splinters, underneath your imagination; they want to burrow; they want to be remembered. Falconer’s skill – and courage – in writing such a spare book is totally assured: the perception with which she displays, bends, refracts every scene, every character, every memory, guarantees you’ll remember this book. Images and their counterpoints break upon the reader constantly:

This is what you did before a battle, he said to Frabbie last night; you had to fold your life like a jacket you would return to, and leave it with De Rudio and his trumpet, or in among the bushes; important to move weightless and unburdened toward your horse, otherwise your life’s tender weight would trip you up.

And Frabbie asked him, Do you think this is a feeling women never have?

I’m glad that Counterpoint is publishing this little book; I urge all of you to read it.

God Knows

Our book today is Joseph Heller's 1984 novel about the Biblical King David, God Knows - and it serves as yet another illustration of one of literature's odd quirks: how often writers are best known and longest remembered for books other than their masterpieces. Examples multiply like toadstools, especially in the undiscriminating 20th century, where Anthony Burgess is linked instantly to A Clockwork Orange but not Earthly Powers, William Golding is known for Lord of the Flies and not The Spire, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is so well known its title is a term in dictionaries, while God Knows languishes in comparative obscurity. You can never tell what will catch the zeitgeist, but once it's caught, it sticks like fly paper.

And of course it's a shame in this case. God Knows is David's life story narrated by himself, and throughout Heller uses a historical novel trick that originated in the 20th century heyday of historical fiction: piercing the novel's equivalent of TV's 'fourth wall' - David knows he's writing a book for the 20th century, knows all about his enormous statue in Florence (and doesn't approve of it), knows the contents of the Bible and is cockily certain he has the best story in the Table of Contents - it's a story that has everything, including the bitter dispute at the heart of the book:

I've got a love story and a sex story, with the same woman no less, and both are great, and I've got this ongoing, open-ended Mexican standoff with God, even though He might now be dead.Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use Him no differently anyway. He owes me an apology, but God won't budge so I won't budge. I have my faults, God knows, and I may even be among the first to admit them,but to this very day I know in my bones that I'm a much better person than He is.

David isn't speaking to God (and vice versa) because as punishment for David's transgression with the wife of Uriah the Hittite, God kills the baby Bathsheba had just borne to David - and David can't reconcile the wanton, capricious, nonsensical cruelty of it. God Knows is a very funny book, fast-paced and firmly tongue-in-cheek most of the time; but it has a tragedy of stunning simplicity threading through its entire length, as David grapples with the weird nature of the God he used to consider a friend:

I know if I were God and possessed His powers, I would sooner obliterate the world I had created than allow any child of mine to be killed in it, for any reason whatsoever. I would have given my own life to save my baby's, or even to spare Absalom. But maybe that's because I am Jewish, and God is not.

All the familiar stories of King David are here, and all the familiar characters, from Goliath to Saul to Bathsheba to Jonathan to Solomon, all rendered with sharp sardonic humor and a depth of insight that exceeds anything else Heller ever wrote. There are wisecracks everywhere, of course - most of them deadpanning on Jewish culture:

Boy, did we have laws - laws governing everything. Before I gave up, I counted six hundred and thirteen commandments, which I found a remarkably large number for a society with a language that had no written vowels and a total vocabulary of only eighty-eight words, of which seventeen can be defined as synonyms for God.

And through David, we get fast-paced and delightfully demystified scenes from all over the Hebrew Bible, including several featuring the guy who really does have the best story in the book:

"I'll kill them all," He roared to Moses. "You think I'm joking? How much more do you think I'm going to be provoked by these people and do nothing? How many more signs do I have to show them before they begin to believe? I did it before, once with flood and once with fire and brimstone. Stand back, Moses."

"Can't we reason together?" Moses began trying earnestly to deter Him, emphasizing that God would become a laughingstock to the Egyptians for destroying His chosen people after taking them so far and promising them so much. "... they will say we were killed because You were unable to lead us in, not because we were unable to follow. They will believe You failed, not us."

"All right," relented God, who did not want to become a laughingstock in Egypt. But He aimed His thumb over His shoulder in a jerking motion and commanded, "Start walking. Hit the road."

This is a far more powerful, mature, and questing novel than the somewhat slight farces that make up so much of Heller's work, and at the heart of its many inquiries is an unflinching study of the many ways the father-son relationship can turn tragic. Of David's own father we hear almost nothing, but the book probes the depths of his bonds with his two great father-figures, King Saul and God, both of which present almost bewildering complexities (David's own sons fare no better - the book's characterization of Solomon is very funny and not very nice). And likewise Heller's facility with giving his novel's great endings (a skill that has all but vanished from practitioners of the craft in the 21st century) is at its strongest here - the final paragraph of God Knows will knock you flat, and the book's final sentence is quietly stunning.

I'm pretty sure you can walk into your nearest Barnes & Noble and buy a new copy of God Knows (the high tide of Catch-22 floats almost all the rest of Heller's boats), and you should. And of course if you'd rather not, I'm happy to send you a copy, with my whole-hearted recommendation.

tamburlaine must die!

Our book today is Louise Welsh's 2004 novella Tamburlaine Must Die, which takes the form of a frenzied account of Christopher Marlowe's last few days on Earth, as narrated by the famous playwright himself in an easy quasi-modern idiom Welsh has here perfected. The book is as beautiful and intense as a snow-squall, and in that it joins its only two competitors for the title of the best Christopher Marlowe novel of them all - those being Anthony Burgess' A Dead Man in Deptford and George Garrett's Entered from the Sun.

When this novella opens, Marlowe is spending his days at the country estate of his patron, Francis Walsingham (plague has shut the theaters in London and driven away everyone who can get away), when word comes from London that somebody has posted a scurrilous attack on recent Dutch immigrants and signed it with the name of Marlowe's most famous stage-creation, Tamburlaine. Suspicion naturally falls on Marlowe himself, and a messenger is sent to fetch him before Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council. Such a meeting is no minor thing, as Marlowe knows quite well:

This was the Privy Council. Ministers who cared enough for high office to profit from death. Who had committed men they knew well and men they had met only once to torture and death. Dangerous men, each with a ruthless core, who had played chess with their own lives and still lived, though some had sat in prison cells and listened to the hollow sound of nails splitting wood as their own gallows grew in the yard.

They don't arrest him, but they do require that he present himself to them every day while they decide his fate - in the troubled final years of Elizabeth's reign, that was as close as you could come to walking around with a death sentence hanging over you, and Marlowe knows this too. Welsh's Marlowe is made of all the familiar, comfortable conjectures about him, including the two most popular ones: that he was happy to roger men, and that he was from an early age involved in the cloak-and-dagger world of Elizabethan spying and counter-spying. Her Marlowe has seen it all and is no stranger to life and death situations and the odd things they do to your mind:

Death makes the world a brighter place. I've seen the shape danger gives to things, an edge so sharp that if you like your head atop your shoulders and your entrails tucked safe in your belly it's best not to stop and admire the view. Yet the prospect of death renders everything lovely. Colours shine stronger. Strangers' faces fascinate and your sex calls you to business you must not attend.

Tamburlaine Must Die is constructed around the tried and true 'secret memoir' 'I'm writing this down and hiding it away for future generations to find' formula (a formula given its apotheosis in Robert Graves' I, Claudius), and it works perfectly. This skinny little book came and went in 2004 with barely a ripple, but it's vivid and fast-paced and entirely worth your time, should you ever run across it. I ordered a copy from London back then, read it and loved it, then somehow lost track of it (I'm convinced a mysterious stranger periodically enters my apartment, somehow bypasses the razor-sharp vigilance of my basset hound, bags up books at random, and sells them to faraway bookstores). I recently found a copy and re-read it - and I'm glad I did. Marlowe still hasn't had his ultimate novel ... but Tamburlaine Must Die joins the ranks of great partial versions!

Big Fat Historical Novels - A Dozen from the 1980s!

It's a damn lonely business, writing a novel, and that loneliness only increases the longer the novel is - this (and the ironclad guarantee of poverty) is the best-known deterrent to the writing life. But there's one kind of novel that's even lonelier than all the rest, one kind where the length is virtually required, the subject matter is virtually certain to be obscure, and the attendant research is even more crushingly isolating than the act of writing itself. Underneath their brittle bon vivant mannerisms, all novelists are wretched outcasts from normal human society (because you can't 100 percent enjoy something if you're watching yourself enjoy it)(and because the very idea of attempting to write a novel is pretty much inherently delusional, like deciding one morning that you were going to lay out a gridwork in your back yard and actually count every blade of grass in it ... anyone hearing the plan would first ask 'why' and then immediately ask 'what the hell is wrong with you for even thinking it?'), but can there be a more wretched wretch than the writer of an 800-page historical novel? Their research has made them incomprehensible to their fellow novelists, most of whom are content to do coke, stare at their navels, and write about that. But they're also incomprehensible to the actual historians of their period, who, being historians, have never even considered making their learning accessible to the public. It's no wonder Margaret Mitchell was as crazy as a March hare.

There are exceptions, of course. Writers of Tudor historical novels are enjoying a vogue right now - a vogue that's lasted 400 years and shows no signs of ending. They can get invited to parties, and they've had enough predecessors so that the burden of their necessary research is comparatively light. And certainly the same holds true for writers of Roman historical novels - hell, you can buy a kit at Walco that'll let you slap one of those together in about a week, with no muss, no agony, and a decent shot at attaching Willem Dafoe to the finished product. These kinds of products are exceptions because, due to unpredictable quirks of the American educational system (and thanks to all those predecessors), most Americans believe they know something about the time periods involved, and the familiar is always more acceptable (this also applies to novels set in the Old West, naturally).

But oh, the poor writer of the fat historical novel set in some less-paddled historical backwater! These books appear in their serried legions, some burn brightly for a season, most fade into obscurity almost instantly, and all the work, care, and bitter isolation that went into creating them goes for nothing at all. You can find these fat old novels moldering in boxes at flea markets and on the shelves of the more lowbrow used bookstores, but without a knowing heads-up to distinguish the good ones from the dross, what reader can't be forgiven for ignoring them all, life being short and reading time even shorter?

So here's a dozen good ones! To emphasize just how many of these worthy items are published and then forgotten every year, we'll concentrate this time around only one books from one decade, the best damn decade of the 20th century, the glorious '80s. If you should happen to spot one of these titles cobwebbing away somewhere and the time period at all interests you, spend the $1 and buy the book! In each case, I can guarantee you three things: 1) the research is sound and pleasantly presented, 2) the atmosphere of the work will work on you, carrying you away, at least temporarily, from your debit-card world, and 3) like so many books mentioned here at Stevereads, none of these books actually deserves the obscurity to which merciless bookstore economics and lack of library shelf-space have consigned them.

So! In no particular order, first up is Malcolm Bosse's 1983 novel The War Lord, a panoramic view of dramatization of 1927 China, with bloodthirsty warlords ramping the country from end to end. Bosse's story has a huge cast, although we see a great deal of the action through the viewpoint of feckless everyman missionary (from Connecticut!) Philip Embree (most of these books sport at least one feckless everyman - it's a characteristic of the breed), not that this is a necessarily a bad thing. Bosse's prose can be very gripping, aided by his decision to tell the whole story in the immediate present tense:

Next morning the monsoon intensifies. Thunder squalls alternate with steady downpours that either lash the countryside brutally or monotonously hammer water into every depression of the land. Gray silt spreads like mush across the leachy soil and oozes into every hollow of it, making eroded meadows as smooth as butter. Tang drives the men without rest and for good reason: another few days of such flooding will mire the horses belly-deep in the muck of Shansi, like flies caught in amber.

Real historical figures like Chiang Kai-Shek mingle freely with Bosse's avatars, and the many reviewers who liked the book all agreed that it would cost you time to read - not just because of how big it is, but because it would absorb you - and the same holds true today.

Next is John Barchilon's 1984 novel The Crown Prince, which has as its central character a happy (though not quite feckless) young man named Paul Wittgenstein, a piano prodigy in Vienna on the eve of the First World War. He's a happy young man, sure of his own talent and vigorously attracted to - and attractive to - the opposite sex (indeed, the book's most interesting character is his lover Countess Marlene von Hess), but his world is shattered when he loses his right arm in the war (Barchilon archly assures his readers that while his book is based on authentic characters, it's not meant to be an authorized biography)(hee), and he has to figure out all over again how to live - and perhaps embrace his talent again. The book is very good at portraying its cast of historical figures (Ravel is a standout there), and its musical passages are among the best ever written on the virtuosity of performance.

Rosalind Laker's 1989 To Dance with Kings is next, a gay and playful fat novel about a lovely and lusty peasant girl in 17th century Versailles who manages to sleep, laugh, intrigue, and yes, dance her way into the world of nobles and kings at the Royal Court. The book follows the tempestuous lives and love affairs of three generations of these women, and Laker - a practiced hand at the meatier, brainier historical romances have have all but vanished from bookstore shelves these days (although not entirely! I'm happy to report that To Dance with Kings is now available at your local Barnes & Noble in a very pretty trade paperback) - keeps things simmering with her opulently borderline-purple prose, so joyous to read in long stretches:

"Did you set a spy on my in your absence?"

"No!" He leapt out of the chair with such abruptness that it toppled and fell backwards. "I was told in my father's house by someone who came to me there from the highest motives."

Putting her fingers to her temples, she rocked in her anguish. There was only one person who would have gone running to him. Hadn't Susanne warned that she would take up cudgels on his behalf? "It's true that I spent a night away from my bed when you were away and Stefane brought me home. But nothing is as it must have appeared. I had met him shortly before in the Court Royale when he was going for a morning ride."

"In the Court Royale? Where had you been there?"

"Lost in the corridors of Versailles. After I had spurned the King!"

Hee.

For a far more somber turn we have Jessie Ford's The Burning Woman from 1985, the story of 1687 Venetian foundling Cathryn Godwyne and Father Vittorio, whose mutual love of the glorious music that fills the city eventually leads them to love of each other (although Cathryn will in the course of the novel come to love another far more disastrously). The book is essentially the story of Cathryn's awakening - as an independent person and as a sexual being - and it's also got a bit of the feminist political tract about it (you'd expect nothing less, what with it sporting both an acknowledgment to Erica Jong and a good deal of her poetry at the beginning of chapters), since Cathryn is eventually accused of being a witch and put on trial in one of the book's most harrowing scenes. It can be preachy, yes, but it can also be powerful stuff.

A Pride of Royals is next, Justin Scott's hyperactive 1983 novel, a two-fisted non-stop action-packed blockbuster of a novel set in ... well, the whole world just on the brink of the First World War. With unapologetic gusto, Scott puts the welfare of that entire world in the hands of one man: American naval officer Kenneth Ash, who's a crack shot, a dab hand with mechanics, a gifted linguist, a fiery lover, and a "secret courier for presidents and kings." He takes on a mission on behalf of the British and the Americans to whisk Czar Nicholas out of Russia, and along the way he must face hostile borders, bloodthirsty assassins, and, of course, uppity women:

"Commander," she said with a quick smile, "the Irish side of my family bequeathed to me red hair and a fine ear for blarney."

"I have a drop or two of French blood on my mother's side," Ash said. "It left me with a taste for claret and an eye for beauty."

Lady Exeter turned to her butler. "Graham, bring this gentleman a whiskey. And please tell His Lordship that I am growing impatient."

"Have I offended you?" Ash asked her when the butler had left.

"I imagine you can't help yourself, but I find your proprietary attitude toward women not overly flattering - one feels like a candidate for a very large club with an undiscriminating membership committee."

"I'm sorry - "

"Good God, you meant it ... forgive me, a friend was killed in France today. I'm in no mood to entertain. I was against the war in the beginning and now I find myself praying for total victory ... Where the hell are the Americans?"

They sat in stiff silence until the whiskey came.

A Pride of Royals is one of the best-researched books in our present dozen and certainly the one with the fastest pace, if you're in the mood for that sort of thing.

Next is 1979's Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo, and if A Pride of Royals is the highest octane offering on our list this time around, Sacajawea is the most absorbing book here, an enormous novel telling the story of Lewis and Clark's fabled young Shoshoni guide and interpreter. She's been the subject of many novels (including one published recently with the single worst title any book has ever had, in any age, in any language), but this one beats them all hands-down for its engrossing portraits of all involved - especially stalwart Lewis and pathetic Charbonneau - but it's her well-researched glimpses into the American Indian world (a world whose destruction came at the end of the road Lewis and Clark paved) that form the book's many highlights:

"Are you something special to these white men that they cannot powwow without a woman sitting among them?" asked Willow Bud. Again the squaws tittered.

Sacajawea folded the precious robe over her arm and tried to explain. "It is not because I am a squaw and they are braves. It is because I can speak the Shoshoni tongue and the white men cannot. I can speak for you to them."

The women slowly nodded. "Ai, ai, we understand that." And with a clucking noise made with their teeth and tongue they showed that they approved of this and she should go at once.

Willow Bud followed at a distance, then, getting up the courage, asked, "May I care for him?" She held her arms out for Pomp.

Sacajawea handed the sleeping baby to her girlhood friend, kissing him first.

"What is that?" asked Willow Bud, making a smacking noise with her lips.

"It is a sign for love," Sacajawea crossed her arms over her breast in the manner of a woman greeting her man when he returns from a hunt or war. "See?" And then Sacajawea kissed the startled Willow Bud on her cheek.

That slim glint of humor flickers throughout Sacajawea, but it's entirely absent from Larry Collins' Fall From Grace, written in 1985. Instead, this is an intelligent and somber espionage story, as you'd expect from one-half of the century's finest reporting team - and if you'd also expect lots of snappy dialogue and a penchant for pith, you'd find lots of that here too. The book is chock-full of spies and counter-spies and spy-masters, and one of them at one point says, "There's a fundamental rule to apply when you are appraising a double-agent situation: Who is getting more out of him, you or the other side? If the answer is you, keep him going. If it's them, kill him." - and virtually every character talks like that; it becomes a very naughty delight. The plot revolves around all sorts of feverish backstabbings in the days leading up to Operation Overlord (which, we're amusingly told, was originally going to be called "Operation Mothball" because, in true British fashion, that was 'the only name left' - an enraged Winston Churchill renames it), and things culminate in one of the most satisfying triple-crosses ever put on paper. Collins, needless to say, packs his novel with accurately-researched historical data, and that keeps things moving briskly even when his newsman's ear for human drama (i.e. tone deaf) momentarily lets things flag a little.

We follow this one with The Court of the Lion, written in 1989 by Eleanor Cooney and Daniel Altieri. It's a whopping thousand-page novel about the 8th Century T'ang dynasty (yep, we're back in China), and despite its length and requisite enormous cast, it's a nimble dance of a book, as smart and funny and sharp as any historical fiction you'll ever read (Cooney and Altieri also collaborated on a much slimmer - and almost equally good - historical novel called Deception, also well worth your time to hunt down and read). The story centers on the revered emperor Hsuan-tsung, a strong and mostly good man surrounded by scheming viziers, power-mad generals, obsequious eunuchs, and beautiful courtesans, and our authors pepper their narrative with the fabled poetry of the era, extracts from the fabled philosophy of the era, and their own easy natural feel for the flow of a scene:

Love. It brings them back from the edge of death, from what I have heard. It makes them whole again. Songs and poetry were rife with testimonials to its healing power. But the Emperor seems to be beyond its reach; he has no interest at all in any of the harem women - says his "old man" is as limp as a drowned snake. Who, then? What woman is going to come and work this miracle and wake him up before it is too late? Kao Li-shih was interrupted by Lu Pei quietly opening the door and entering the room. In the moment that his eyes met the apprentice's, inspiration hit.

"Grand Verity," he said aloud.

"Pardon me?" said Lu Pei politely as he shut the door behind him.

"That is her name."

"Her name?"

"It has been two years. I had nearly forgotten!" Kao Li-shih leaned forward as the apprentice lifted his eyebrows appreciatively. "Lu Pei, we are going to try to wake the dead."

I can't recommend The Court of the Lion enthusiastically enough - it's got everything a great big fat historical novel should have, in even greater helpings than most of these dozen books are lucky enough to have.

We follow it with Emily Hanlon's 1988 Petersburg, a tightly-woven family novel set in Russia on the eve of the revolution that toppled the Czar. The plot turns around the family of self-made businessman Alexei Kalinin, whose various children and their various friends and lovers manage to find themselves at the center of all the action in that sprawling, troubled land. The author writes, "Historical fiction, I discovered, is a rather amazing mix of reality and fiction, so much so that I soon found myself slipping around corners into turn-of-the-century Russia, hardly feeling the time warp. Imagination was reality for so long; yet, oddly, now that I read what I have written, like a traveler recalling a trip, scenes have become remembrances of the people I met along the way." And judging from Petersburg, this familiar mixing certainly happened to Hanlon - you'll put down her book feeling like you've actually met the Kalinin family.

Then we have Judith Merkle Riley's A Vision of Light from 1989, which tells the life story of Margaret Ashbury as she makes her way through the pitfalls and glories of 14th century England. She marries a couple of times, she gets accused of witchcraft (she fares rather better with it than poor Cathryn), loves two very different men, and in the process shows Riley's readers the time and its beliefs more congenially and thoroughly than half a dozen textbooks could have done. Riley has a distinct knack for making the archeological and sociological data of the period come alive - when she describes a humble cottage's single room in winter, you feel the description, as you do her evocations of clerical life. There's a love story woven throughout the proceedings, but it's almost touching how thoroughly it gets shoved into the background by Riley's boisterous portrait of her chosen age.

Such things achieve a better balance - but only slightly better - in Graham Masterson's 1984 novel Maiden Voyage, which tells the story of the maiden 1924 launch of the luxury liner Arcadia, which Masterson populates with the usual assortment of characters from all walks - and classes - of life. There's the main character, Catriona Keys, who life goes through seven or eight upheavals during the voyage across the ocean to New York, and there's the brutal George Welterman (if the Arcadia had gone the way of the Titanic, he'd have been first in line for a very poetic-justice style drowning; this book climaxes instead in fire), and a haughty countess (I'm pretty sure she's meant to be that weird anti-anatomical alien creature on the paperback's cover, but it could just be a space monster), and even, in the best tradition of Herman Melville, a confidence man:

Mark looked up at him for a moment or two, and then pointed a finger at him. "I know you, don't I?" he said.

Maurice shrugged. "No reason why you should."

"I've seen you before, I'm sure of it. Did you ever travel on the Melusine, of the American TransAtlantic line?"

"I know the Melusine," said Maurice ambiguously.

"Well, I think I know you," replied Mark. "You're a gambling man, aren't you? One of our professional passengers, to put it politely."

"You're not obliged to bet with me, Mr. Beeney," said Maurice affably.

"I'm sure I saw you aboard the Melusine the last time I sailed on her to Rio de Janeiro," Mark told him. "A great many of our passengers lost a great deal of money on the gaming tables on that trip; and it wouldn't surprise me at all if most of it as lost on your account."

"You know how it is," Maurice smiled. "Memory sometimes plays odd tricks on you."

"Not half so odd as some of the tricks that you play, I'll bet."

By the time Maiden Voyage reaches Coney Island, you'll be rooting for Catriona - and, most winningly of all, for the ship's captain, whose quiet personal drama very nearly steals the show and entirely commands it in the climactic final scenes. You'll find this book in the library of virtually every cruise ship in the world, but you don't need to sink the $10,000 and risk the food poisoning to enjoy it yourself - a library card should get the job done.

Last but not least (since we're not, remember, ranking these dozen books), Noel Barber's 1983 novel A Farewell to France, a leisurely and lavishly detailed World War Two narrative starring two war-tossed young lovers, the heir to the fabulous Chateau Douzy champagne vineyards, and his fiery Italian heiress girlfriend. The novel opens in 1931, when the sleepy paradise of their French valley is hardly troubled by the sight of German tanks filing along the road at the edge of the horizon. But the war grows closer and closer, and Barber does a very good job of intertwining that approach with the deepening of our young lovers' feelings for each other. By the time you're 200 pages in, you're thoroughly invested in all the characters (her Nazis start off curiously indifferent, but they work themselves up to some fine moments of evil as things heat up) - and thoroughly steeped in the feel and nuance of the German occupation of France. That occupation is also a much-storied subject, but A Farewell to France manages it with singular and memorable intensity.

But then, all of these dozen titles are richly memorable, and they're just the tip of the iceberg! There are roughly a dozen more big fat historical novels from the 1980s that could just as easily be assembled and praised (I'm sure I've given more than one of you a copy of Flanagan's Run, for instance)(it would have been on this list, but a certain basset hound got in the way)(sigh), and the same thing is true for every decade (although all the others must limp along without Ronnie Reagan in the Oval Office). Somewhere out there right now, there are dozens of hopeful writers scribbling away, stack of note cards by their legal pads, laboring to get every detail of weather and topography just right for 10th century Byzantium, or 15th century Provencal, or 2nd century Britain, and plenty of those writers, if you asked them, would tell you that yes, they know that all the great parts of any novel - including any historical novel - aren't connected with accurate meteorology or metallurgy. But these same writers, toiling on the next crop of big fat historical novels, would immediately add that it's still important to get all those details right anyway.

And we shouldn't complain! They're doing a lot of work on our behalf, after all.