The Fighting Temeraire by Sam Willis

I'm a sucker for the majestic, elegant but deadly ships of the Great Age of Fighting Sail and HMS Temeraire, a British 98-gun ship of the line is, as author Sam Willis points out in this spendid new book, an iconic ship of the era. Unlike HMS Victory, alongside which she fought at the Battle of Trafalgar, Temeraire ended her life as a prison hulk and receiving ship and was eventually broken up in 1838 in the unsentimentally expedient way of the Royal Navy. But JMW Turner immortalised her in his famous painting, The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, reproduced on the cover of Sam Willis's book. The painting is not only Turner's best known, it was also voted the greatest painting in a British art gallery, having beaten Constable's Hay Wain and Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding in a 2005 poll organised by the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

The Fighting Temeraire, the first in a series published by Quercus called Hearts of Oak, is the story of not one ship but two. The earlier one of the name was a French 74-gun two-decker built in 1749 and captured in 1759 by HMS Warspite during the Seven Years' War. She was taken into the Royal Navy and sold in 1784. HMS Temeraire (without the accents) was built at Chatham and launched in 1798. At Trafalgar, under Captain Eliab Harvey, she fought astern of HMS Victory. Badly damaged relieving Nelson's flagship, she also captured the French ship Fougueux and helped force the surrender of the Redoutable, the ship from whose mizzen top a French sniper fired the shot that killed Admiral Nelson.

This book is driven by a fluid narrative, full of the authentic historical detail you'd expect from an Honorary Fellow in Maritime Historical Studies. And it's all informed by well-chosen illustrations and diagrams and the whole is made exceptionally vivid by the author's own experience: he spent 18 months as a Square-Rig Able Seaman, sailing the tall ships used in the Hornblower TV drama series and the TV film Shackleton.

The epilogue of The Fighting Temeraire is an essay on iconic warships and their continuing relevance down the ages. A sample:

...the biographies of warships are multi-layered and complex. Most obviously, the story of the Temeraire matters to our society because it was immortalized by one of the greatest artists ever to have lived, but Turner immortalized that story because it mattered to his society. In 1839 the Temeraire had already become icionic, and therein lies one of the peculiar values of iconic warships. They are potent historical objects because they transcend eras, and the ability to illuminate both our own times and those more distant offers an immediate and unmistakable example of the value of history. Moreover, the story of the Temeraire can be used to illuminate a whole range of historical topics, from the very broadest perspective of self-perception on an international stage - the question of how the navy serves to carry a nation's message around the world - to the tightest possible focus on day-to-day life in a warship.

Find out more on the author's website, including details of the forthcoming books in this Hearts of Oak series, Admiral Benbow and The Glorious First of June.

Another iconic ship of the era is HMS Bellerophon which also fought at Trafalgar (as well as the Glorious First of June and the Battle of the Nile) but which is perhaps best known as the ship that received Napoleon's surrender in 1815. She was affectionately known as Billy Ruff'n (Billy Ruffian) by her crew, hence the title of David Cordingly's fascinating biography of her.

Book Review: The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean

Given that my blog has the word book in its name, I really ought to talk about books now and again. I've been reading some rather good books lately and here's a review (slightly amended) of one of them, The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by Shona MacLean. It appeared in the August 2008 issue of The Historical Novels Review.

On a stormy night in 1626 in the Scottish town of Banff, the local apothecary's assistant collapses in the street. Next morning he's found dead in Alexander Seaton's house. Murder is suspected and when one of Alexander's few friends in the town is arrested, our hero sets out to clear him. But Alexander has a past. Having studied to be a minister of the Kirk, he had been denounced at his ordination for dishonouring the girl he would have married. The disgrace lost him not only his future wife, but also his vocation and his faith. Embittered and heartbroken, he took the only job open to him, that of a lowly schoolmaster.

Now, in the course of his investigations, Alexander must deal with his fellow-citizens, good and bad. Some reveal themselves to be selfless and wise, others devious, greedy or unscrupulous. He must contend with inflamed prejudices that erupt in a witch hunt and with accusations of treacherous Catholic plotting. But above all, he must confront his own personal demons.

This engrossing, atmospheric novel is a satisfying, skilfully constructed mystery with richly developed characters. But just as importantly, it's a vivid evocation of a particular time and place by an author whose uncle was the thriller writer Alistair MacLean and who is herself a historian specialising in 16th- and 17th-century Scotland. She has used her heritage and her skills to the full in creating this memorable and exciting read.

Here's an interview with Shona MacLean in The Scotsman.

Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

I'm not a big fan of crime novels and if I do read them it's usually for something other than the investigation of the crime (see, for example, my review of Ruso and the Demented Doctor by R. S. Downie).

However, I can't resist a real-life murder story, particularly if it happened in a prosperous middle-class Victorian household and opens up a Pandora's box of seething emotional turmoil concealed beneath a veneer of stuffy respectability. The names Florence Bravo, Adelaide Bartlett, Madeleine Smith, Florence Maybrick and of course Lizzie Borden, spring to mind. And if they're unsolved mysteries, so much the better.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, the investigation of a child-murder in 1860s Wiltshire, ticks all these boxes, except the last. But that doesn't stop Kate Summerscale from telling a fascinating story with all the skill of a practised crime novelist, carefully setting out the troubled family background, the personalities involved and the circumstances of the murder, before gradually revealing the clues so as to allow the reader to play detective along with the real article.

Not a great deal is known about Jonathan Whicher, one of Scotland Yard's Victorian best, and the author doesn't embroider the facts, preferring to concentrate on contemporary police practice and the urban working class from which this detective sprang. Jonathan Whicher's police career ended in failure (though his suspicions in the Road Hill House murder, otherwise known as the Constance Kent case, were later proved right), and his real legacy is a literary one. The Constance Kent case was the original country house murder, sensational in its own time, whilst Wilkie Collins's Sergeant Cuff and Dickens's Inspector Bucket were both inspired by the intriguingly shadowy figure of Inspector Whicher.

Because they involve the brutal deaths of real people, true-life murder stories I find rather a guilty pleasure, though I hope I'm not being disingenuous in claiming that the real satisfaction lies as much in what they reveal about life in the eras in which they're set as in solving the mysteries themselves (or, as in the case of Adelaide Bartlett and Jack the Ripper, not solving them).

In any case, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a perfect gem of the genre, worthy to sit alongside such classics such as Poison and Adelaide Bartlett, Death at the Priory and The Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick.

The book has a website here.

Book Review: Mrs Woolf and the Servants by Alison Light

Nellie Boxall came to work as a live-in servant to Virginia and Leonard Woolf in 1918 and stayed until 1934. During those 18 years, a running battle was fought between mistress and servant

for control and for mutual understanding…Virginia wrote obsessively about Nellie in her letters and diaries; she felt sick after their arguments, furious, guilty, bewildered and disgusted by it all; sometimes she anxiously sought to appease Nellie, sometimes she burst out violently and defensively.

Fascinated by the ferocity of the feelings involved, Alison Light took this fraught relationship as her starting point for Mrs Woolf and the Servants,

a story about mutual – and unequal – dependence but…also about social differences, about class feelings and attitudes…I wanted to know much Nellie and Virginia’s story was special to them and how much it was an inevitable product of the servant relationship.

This led her back from the 1930s to the 1880s when Virginia and Vanessa Stephen were growing up in an upper middle class Victorian home with a regiment of servants to tend to their every need. The servants were mainly country women who “went into service” at twelve or fourteen because changes in the rural economy left them without work in their home villages. One such was Sophia Farrell, who remained in the Stephen family’s employ most of her life, first as cook-housekeeper to Virginia’s parents, then to members of the younger generation when they set up their own households in the 1900s.

But by the time Nellie Boxall came to work for the Woolfs, society was changing. The line that separated mistress and servant was beginning to erode: the seemingly inexhaustible supply of servants was drying up and social deference was not what it was. Alison Light uncovers the hidden life stories of those who served the households of Virginia and her siblings and uses them to show why and how the master-servant relationship changed and what it cost the people involved. As well as Sophia Farrell, loyal and deferential, and the volatile Nellie, we also meet the garrulous, giggly Lottie Hope, brought up in one of the homes founded by the now little-known Edith Sichel to train orphans as domestic servants, Grace Germany, “the Angel of Charleston” the oft-unsung mainstay of the bohemian household of Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa, and the capable, cheerful local Sussex girl Louie Everest who “did” for the Woolfs for many years.

But this is more than a fascinating study in social history. It also offers illuminating insights into the influence of the servants on the lives of the Bloomsbury set, and especially on the inner life and the writings of Virginia Woolf. As adults, Virginia and Vanessa saw themselves as liberated from the servant-dependent constraints of Victorian society but they still needed servants, however “difficult” they might be, to do the domestic chores that allowed them the time and freedom to pursue their artistic lives. Yet servants, no longer living in separate quarters behind the proverbial green baize door, intruded into the privacy of their employers – heard, for example, in the creaking floorboards and through the thin walls of Monk’s House, the Woolfs’ country home. Alison Light imagines Mrs Woolf thinking,

One would never really have a room of one’s own whilst they were in and out. And what if one’s housemaids were not so different after all in their dreams and desires? What if they had souls like one’s own?

Light shows us other paradoxes too: as a member of the Labour Party, Virginia subscribed to notions of equality, but she could never rid herself of inherited class snobbery; and the Bloomsberries and their friends never completely shed their dependence on “the servants”. Although Virginia eventually became a competent cook after Nellie Boxall was finally sacked and replaced by a “daily”, we may smile when Light tells us that

Lytton Strachey’s sisters couldn’t boil an egg and had to wait on the servant’s day off for one of their younger relatives to come in and light the stove before they could put a kettle on.

As for Virginia Woolf’s writing, the servants, despite their ignorance and their interruptions, were often her window on the world. She frequently jotted down their tales and gossip as potential copy for her fiction and essays, “the chinks of light glimpsed through the thick hedges of class feeling which boxed her in.” And they were sometimes in her thoughts on the nature of self in relation to others. She even included a lavatory attendant’s viewpoint (based on an overheard conversation) in a short story, though she dropped it from the final draft.

Written with clarity, vigour and sympathy, Mrs Woolf and the Servants is a gem of social history writing which also gives us the opportunity of seeing the Bloomsbury set in general, and Virginia Woolf in particular, from a new and sometimes surprising angle.

Book Review: Daphne by Justine Picardie

A novel about Daphne du Maurier and the Brontë sisters? Sounds like the perfect book to curl up with on the sofa for an intriguing evening or two. And so it proved - with one or two reservations.

In 1957, Daphne du Maurier is a best-selling novelist living in her beloved Cornish hideaway. But as the story opens she discovers that her husband, a war hero and now treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh, is having an affair. He's also having a nervous breakdown, which is why he's in a London nursing home. Daphne, who's had a few affairs herself, decides to make the best of things and to take her mind off it all, she embarks on research for a book she's had in mind for a while: a biography of that sad and neglected Brontë, Branwell, who died of drink and drugs, a failure in the shadow of his sisters.

Daphne's investigations bring her into epistolary contact with J. A. Symington, a scholar employed by the Brontë Society until he was booted out under suspicion of having stolen some original documents. This much is fact, and the resulting biography, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, was published in 1960. Most of Daphne happens in the (presumably made-up) letters Daphne exchanges with the embittered Symington, and in the private thoughts each has about the circumstances of their own lives. It's a tale of literary sleuthing (was Branwell the real author of some of Emily's poems and perhaps even of Wuthering Heights? What happened to Emily's handwritten notebook of her poems?), interwoven with ruminations on the past (Daphne's troubled relationship with her difficult, possessive father; Symington's fraught dealings with fellow-Brontë scholars).

There's also a parallel strand set in the present day: a young Cambridge graduate is doing a PhD on Daphne du Maurier and the Brontës. She, too, has a troubled past (her childhood) and an unhappy present, having recently married a much older academic divorced from a clever and beautiful wife, who haunts both him and his rather mousy new spouse.

The Daphne and Symington parts work very well, showing a mastery of pace and tension almost worthy of du Maurier herself. But the modern strand seems leaden and superfluous, the girl irritatingly wimpy and whiny and the parallels with Rebecca too clunkingly obvious to mean anything.

But the real fly in the ointment for me was the author's persistent habit of running sentences together with commas instead of separating them with full stops or even semi-colons. This happened once or twice on almost every page. Call me a pedant, but I found it annoyingly distracting: it interrupted the flow of the narrative and in some cases I had to re-read to get the sense. Aaargh.

On the other hand, the dust-jacket is a dream. That woodcut is so evocative of the 1950s. And I love the way Bloomsbury has provided not only head- and tail-bands on the spine of this book, but also a woven-in silk(y) bookmark. Bloomsbury seems to do this with many of its books and I wish other publishers would follow suit. Books are beautiful things and elegant touches like these make them a pleasure to handle as well as to read.

New Roman Detective: R. S. Downie's Ruso

I'm not a big fan of crime novels but I do love Roman Britain, so I couldn't wait to get my mitts on Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls by R. S. Downie, the first Medicus Investigation, when it came out in 2006 (as Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls in the UK and Medicus in the USA). I was lucky enough to review it for the Historical Novels Review and here's what I wrote:

Britannia, 117 AD. Having just joined the hospital staff at the Roman legionary fortress of Deva (Chester), world-weary surgeon Gaius Petreius Ruso examines the murdered corpse of a young woman dredged up from the river. Then a ‘barmaid’ goes missing from Merula’s establishment. If this indicates a serial killer at large, Ruso doesn’t want to know. Saddled with the debts of his dead father and home-improvements-obsessed stepmother in Gaul, he needs to finish writing his Concise Guide to Military First Aid and obtain a speedy promotion. But all he’s gained up to now is the useless, broken-armed slave-girl he impulsively rescued from a passing merchant.

So far, so Lindsey Davis, you might think. Perhaps, but this novel more than holds its own in the Roman detective stakes. Grounded in solid but unobtrusive historical knowledge, it has memorable characters, a satisfying mystery and a vivid sense of place. Downie also treats us to some inspired comic dialogue and a running joke showing the Roman military medical service as an NHS-in-microcosm, complete with bean-counting bureaucrats and literal-minded clerks. An engaging début, set fair to become a popular series.

Ruso and the Demented Doctor (Terra Incognita in the USA), the second in the series, came out in March and I'm delighted to report that it's even better than the first. Ruso and Tilla, now his housekeeper, accompany a detachment of the Twentieth Legion from Deva to Coria, a fort on the northern frontier near Tilla's tribal lands. Trouble naturally awaits: a Roman soldier has been murdered, the fort's doctor confesses (but he's as mad as a bucket of frogs), a sinister native with antlers on his head is making mischief - and the Governor is about to pay a visit. So Ruso the Reluctant is roped in to do his least favourite job, with no help from Tilla who's been reunited with various relatives - and an ex-boyfriend.

It's a good, complex mystery tantalisingly played out, but what makes it shine, for me, are the characters and the setting. Coria (modern Corbridge) is a frontier fort with a shanty town attached. Here live the garrison 'wives' and girlfriends, merchants on the make and natives who are beginning to see that the Empire might have something to offer them after all. The interactions between conquerors and conquered are handled in a way that makes them both true to their time and real to us across all the centuries that separate us. And Downie is skilled at showing us the texture of her characters' lives and circumstances. Mainly they rub along together, Roman and native, but when those Britons who haven't come in from the cold get rebellious, everybody gets the shivers.

Ruso, wry, humane and recently divorced, who can't get far enough away from his troublesome family in Gaul and Tilla, torn between Ruso and her tribal loyalty, are shaping up to be a great double act in both head and heart. And each of them has an intriguing past that's being gradually revealed. I for one can't wait to meet Ruso's stepmother, Arria!

R. S. Downie (Ruth Downie in the USA) has a blog (wherein, amongst other things, she explains the Mystery of the Confusing Titles and Author Names). And here's an interview I did with her in 2006 for the Historical Novels Review:

INTRODUCING RUSO, THE RELUCTANT ROMAN GUMSANDAL

Watch out: there’s a new Roman detective prowling the mean streets of Roman Britain in R S Downie’s first novel, Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls. His name is Gaius Petreius Ruso and he’s a medical officer in the fortress of Deva (Chester), home of the Twentieth Legion. Round about the time that Hadrian succeeds Trajan, he reluctantly turns detective when the drowned body of a young woman is brought to his hospital. Then, against his better judgment, he rescues a slave girl from her abusive owner. And that’s just the start.

The early chapters of the novel won Solander’s very first competition – for a romantic historical. So how did it turn into a crime novel?

‘To be honest I didn’t plan a thing,’ says Ruth. ‘The competition only asked for the first three chapters so I lifted some back-story from a novel I’d been trying to write for years, and cheerfully set up situations I had no clue how to resolve. I had no idea that people would suggest it was worth continuing. The shift to crime wasn’t something I had considered, but a publisher and an agent who showed interest both suggested it. There was then a long hiatus while I couldn’t see a way forward – until I read a book about the modern slave trade, and saw ancient parallels that I could work with.’

Ruth’s interest in Roman Britain was kindled when she read visited Hadrian’s Wall and read a tantalising caption in a museum: ‘Roman soldiers were not allowed to marry, but were allowed to have relationships with local women.’

‘There had to be a story there! As for the British aspect – it’s not hard for us to imagine being part of a wealthy and powerful society which wasn’t at ease with its own decadence, but the fascinating twist during the Roman period is that we weren’t the powerful ones. We were the colonised.’

For some years Ruth has been a regular volunteer at the Whitehall Villa excavations in Northamptonshire. When it comes to research into Roman times, she feels you can’t beat hands-on archaeology, as long as your characters don’t become as obsessed with pots as you do! ‘For me, the attraction of archaeology is that you’re looking at leftovers from the lives of ordinary people. You find pottery with the maker’s finger-marks in it, or an animal bone with a knife-cut across it that suggests it’s the remains of somebody’s dinner. That’s both inspiring and humbling. Those people must have had joys and worries that seemed overwhelmingly important at the time, and now they’re forgotten. Mind you, I often think that if they could see the loving care with which we excavate their rubbish, they would find it very funny.’

Ruth didn’t always want to be a novelist, but reading was an important part of her childhood. ‘My Dad was studying for a degree when I was small, and in the winter everyone wanted to be in the room with the paraffin heater – so reading, being a silent occupation, was keenly encouraged. I have a degree in English, the straight Beowulf to Virginia Woolf kind they gave you back in the days of handwritten essays and full grants. Afterwards I was too much of a wimp to teach – or do anything where you have to be brave or articulate – so I did a secretarial course. You learn a lot about organisations when you work at the bottom rather than the top, and being able to think and type at the same time has come in very handy.

‘I took Creative Writing evening classes about fifteen years ago to keep myself sane while studying double entry book-keeping. Some of us have met regularly ever since, and we’ve all learned from each other. Along the way there’s been the occasional published short story and travel article, some scripting work for a video production company, and a couple of practice novels best forgotten.’

Ruth has also won a BBC story competition judged by Fay Weldon. ‘Competitions are great’ she says, ‘because they give you a reason to write and you know you won’t get a rejection. If they don’t like your work it usually just disappears, as mine often has. However I was once lucky enough to get the Writers’ News Winner of Winners award. The occasional prize is not only encouraging but it also shows your family that you really are doing something useful at the PC and not just avoiding washing up.

‘I entered the BBC competition because my friends did, all trusting that there would be so many entries we would never have to be on TV. The day before filming I managed to injure my foot and spent the shoot hobbling around trying to keep the crutches out of sight. Fay Weldon was lovely and the BBC folk were kind and patient, but I’m definitely not destined for a career in television.

‘The BBC then decided there might be some mileage in a follow-up programme, and filmed the finalists talking about their writing. I could hardly say that I’d got stuck halfway through Medicus and was thinking of burning it and studying archaeology instead. So I said I was going to finish it. “Fine,” they said, “If the programme goes ahead we’ll come back next year and see how it’s going.” Having just failed a significant job interview, I had plenty of time. All through the winter I kept writing, quite unaware that the BBC had decided not to go ahead and they weren’t coming back at all. If I’d known that, I’d now be hunting for a job to fund an archaeology degree.’

One of the delights of Medicus is its wry, dry humour. I wondered if Ruth finds it easy to do humour that both appeals to the modern reader and rings true to what we know about the Roman sense of humour/satire etc? Did she research much about Roman humour? ‘Not as such, but many Roman writers were deeply gifted at insulting people and Pompeii had prolific graffiti scribblers. Humour is a dodgy business anyway – I wrote something I thought was extremely funny the other day and nobody noticed.’

She chose Chester as the setting for the first Medicus novel because she wanted a lively Army base. ‘When you walk through the centre of Chester you are actually walking the streets of the legionary fortress. It’s a wonderfully evocative place.’

The National Health Service, with its tortuous bureaucracy and officious officials, appears as a running satirical gag in the novel. Did her publishers want it changed for overseas readers? ‘No,’ says Ruth. ‘Nobody seemed to have a problem with it. I think similar situations occur in all big organisations. There are conflicting priorities, and there are people who worm their way into positions of power. Actually I have great sympathy for administrators – I used to work in Local Government finance – so maybe Priscus is playing out my megalomaniac fantasies.’

Ruth plans her novels before she starts to write – then she realises the plan is rubbish and rewrites it. Later she realises the novel is rubbish and goes back to redo the plan. And so on. She wishes she were a disciplined writer. ‘But I do worry regularly about writing – does that count?’

Finally, I ask Ruth which historical novelists have influenced her. ‘Lindsey Davis is of course the queen of the Roman whodunit, and discovering Falco was both a joy and a relief. My characters from the ancient world had been using modern dialogue and humour because that’s how people are, but until then I had wondered if it was really “allowed” in a historical novel. Bernard Cornwell, Simon Scarrow, Manda Scott and Robert Harris all combine convincing settings with a gripping story. But naming people is risky – I haven’t read all their books and I’ve probably left somebody out.’

Book Review: Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

If you loved Beatrix Potter's books as a child and if you saw the recent film Miss Potter and wondered about Beatrix Potter's life before and after the events in the film, Linda Lear's Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (in paperback Beatrix Potter: The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius) is the book for you.

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) was the only daughter of a wealthy family of north-country Dissenting stock. Her father was a London barrister of independent means and almost limitless leisure, her mother a rampant snob who didn't like to be reminded that her forebears made their fortune in what upper-class Victorians sniffily referred to as "trade". Beatrix grew up in a grand part of London but was happiest during the family's frequent country house holidays in Scotland, Wales and the Lake District. Awayfrom the stifling conventions of city life, she was able to indulge her love of nature, deepen her knowledge of it, whilst cultivating her artistic gifts. From an early age she drew detailed studies of plants and animals and she made pets of rabbits, mice, hedgehogs and other small creatures, which she loved to draw and paint (and dissect when dead, for she was no sentimentalist), thus acquiring the detailed botanical and anatomical knowledge that would not only save her later creations from Victorian tweeness, but would also lead her to make a serious study of botany, something her family did not encourage.

But Beatrix, outwardly ever the dutiful daughter, had a stubborn, determined streak. After she had failed on her own account to get a student ticket to the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew which would enable her to pursue her study of fungi reproduction, she persuaded her scientific uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe, to apply on her behalf in person to the Director, William Thiselton-Dyer. Linda Lear gives a vivid account of her visit to Kew in the company of her uncle. After casually authorising her ticket, Thiselton-Dyer proceeded to ignore her as he accompanied her and Uncle Henry across the Gardens to catch the train home. Beatrix, by then a woman of nearly thirty, later insisted she wasn't offended by Thiselton-Dyer's behaviour, but she took satisfaction in shooting in "one remark which made him jump, as if he had forgotten my presence". The eminent Director would probably not have appreciated knowing that Beatrix's fungi paintings are still consulted for their accuracy of detail and colour, or that her professional contemporaries were later found to have been wrong in dismissing her fungi reproduction research.

Beatrix's mother was extremely demanding, and at a age when most young women would have been married off to a suitable young man, Beatrix was still at her mother's beck and call. But in between her daughterly duties, Beatrix found fulfilment in her scientific studies and, increasingly, in paintings and drawings of animals in fantasy. It was in the illustrated story-letters she sent to various children of her acquaintance that the Peter Rabbit books had their origins.

The story of how she eventually found a publisher and fell in love with Norman Warne, one of the brothers who ran the company, is beautifully told here as is her grief at Norman's sudden death not long after her parents had given their grudging and belated consent to the marriage. One can't help but feel anger toward the selfish mother who denied her a happy courtship, and would have deprived her of a subsequent happy marriage as well, if Beatrix hadn't asserted the independence the success of her books gave her. But Beatrix herself, to her credit, never seemed bitter, probably because after Norman's death she made herself a new life in her beloved Lake District as Beatrix Heelis, wife of a Hawkshead solicitor and a prominent farmer and landowner in her own right. Long before conservation became the watchword it is today, she had the foresight to realise that the integrity of rural landcapes and ways of life needed protection, and she used much of her fortune, as well as her husband's local knowledge and legal expertise, to buy up Lakeland fell farms in order to keep them out of the hands of property developers and maintain them as working farms. The magnificently-named Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, joint founder of The National Trust for the Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, had been a longtime family friend and inspired by him, she intended all her Lake District property to go the Trust including, after her death, her principal homes, Hill Top Farm and Castle Cottage. She took up farming with gusto, aided by an unerring instinct for finding the right men for the jobs she couldn't do herself, and overcoming a good deal of local prejudice in the process; she was, after all, both an "off-comer" and a woman, and this was rural England between the wars.

Toward the end of her life, Beatrix Heelis wrote to a kindred spirit, Samuel Cunningham, summing up her philosophy of land preservation:

For years I have been gradually picking up land, chance bargains, and specializing on road frontages and the heads of valleys. I have a long way towards three thousand acres...It is an open secret it will go to the Trust eventually...I own two or three strikingly beautiful spots. The rest is pleasant peaceful country, foreground of the hills, I think more liable to be spoilt than the high fells themselves...I am sometimes surprised at myself, being contented. I lift my eyes to the hills, and am content to look at them from below.

Although she could be abrasive and didn't suffer fools gladly, Beatrix kept the robust sense of humour so evident in her books and she always had time for interested visitors, especially children. She continued to write and illustrate her animal stories until her eyesight and her inspiration began to fail, but she farmed until her health finally broke down. She was always happiest as a stout, rosy-cheeked figure tramping her fields and woods dressed in clogs and clothes of coarse wool from the unique Herdwick sheep she loved and championed.

In this beautifully-written biography, Linda Lear paints an honest, yet appealing portrait of a woman both ahead of her time and part of it, a woman who against the odds created a useful and fulfilling life for herself whilst giving pleasure to generations of children and preserving the fragile Lake District landscape and way of life for the benefit and enjoyment of all.

And because Linda Lear has given us the real-life contexts for the illustrations in Beatrix Potter's books, we can re-read these nursery classics and appreciate the exquisitely-detailed illustrations with a new depth of knowledge about their characters and settings.

In 1940, Lear tells us, Beatrix Potter wrote to a child who had asked her what happened to the fairy caravan after the book of that name ended:

When we grow old and wear spectacles, our eyes are not bright, like children's eyes, nor our ears so quick, to see and hear the fairies...where can the circus have wandered to? I believe I know! Right away amongst the fells - the green and blue hills above my sheep farm in Troutbeck. Such a lonely place, miles along a lovely green road. That was where I first saw the mark of little horse shoes. There is an old barn there we call High Buildings...and when I was younger and used to take long walks, I used to eat my bread and cheese at High Buildings, or shelter from the rain. That was where the Caravan sheltered in a very wild rainstorm, and Xarifa made acquaintance with the melancholy Mouse...

Book Review: Of Merchants and Heroes by Paul Waters

We're in the third century BC. The Romans have at last driven Hannibal out of Italy and there's a plan to destroy Carthage once and for all. Against this background our young Roman hero, Marcus, is captured by pirates who attack the ship in which he's sailing to Greece with his father. The pirates kill all the passengers except Marcus, who manages to escape, vowing to hunt down and kill the pirate captain in revenge for his father's death. Once home, however, he finds he has a more pressing problem to deal with in the ample form of his Uncle Caecilius, who has decided to marry his mother. Marcus is a sensitive, intelligent lad, whilst horrid Uncle C. is a grasping philistine of a merchant with his greedy eye permanently on the main chance. Needless to say, they don't get on, but Marcus sweats it out for several years, farming and merchanting in his uncle's employ until the fates lead him to his destiny by way of love and war - for no sooner has he lost his heart to a beautiful Greek than a new threat to civilisation comes rampaging out of the East in the form of Philip V of Macedon, one of whose henchmen is the very pirate who murdered his father.

Of Merchants and Heroes is the first novel by Paul Waters, who ran away to sea at 17 and during his travels fell so much in love with the classical world that he went on to get a degree in classics. He certainly knows his stuff. His world-building is excellent, evocative and authentic. But this novel just didn't work for me. It's partly a problem of pacing. The story gets off to a cracking start with the ship's capture and Marcus's escape. Then it slows to an uphill crawl whilst other people are introduced and we follow Marcus's rather dull career in agriculture and trade. It doesn't pick up again until over halfway through when the love story takes off and the tale hurtles toward its denouement with tense and vivid action scenes worthy of Bernard Cornwell, Conn Iggulden or Simon Scarrow, interspersed with a little philosophy-lite.

The other problem lies in the characters, who never quite rise from the page. Marcus remains an annoyingly po-faced prig throughout, his lover a paragon of physical and intellectual perfection, whilst the venality of Uncle Caecilius is laid on with a trowel to the point of caricature. The rest of the cast - the wordly-wise courtesan, the straitlaced Roman official and his wastrel brother, etc, etc - never grow beyond stereotype.

Also rather heavy-handed are the clues the author strews about to indicate that Marcus isn't one for the girls, before finally producing the goods (so to speak). At which point it all seems rather an anti-climax (sorry). Oh, and there's one scene that did liven up the dull phase a bit - but for the wrong reason: young Marcus puts the wind up a bunch of battle-hardened Carthaginian soldiers attacking a detachment of Roman cavalry by running at them shouting a battle cry. With only a bit of DIY weapons training behind him, he kills their leader and the rest of them scuttle off. I just didn't believe it, even if Marcus does claim to have Mars on his side.

If Of Merchants and Heroes were a straight-up historical adventure yarn, none of this would matter particularly, but it comes garlanded with puffs likening it to Mary Renault's novels, which made me look forward to something more, or at least different. Not only does this sort of silly hype risk setting up the reader's expectations for possible disappointment, it's hardly fair to the author to deny him his own voice in this way. If I were Paul Waters, I'd rather be known as "the unique Paul Waters" than "a Mary Renault readalike". But I think the author needs to write a few more novels before that's likely to happen. On this showing, though, I wouldn't entirely rule it out.

For another opinion, see the Historical Novels Review's Editors' Choice for February 2008 (scroll down to end).

Book Review: Paths of Exile by Carla Nayland

Why are so few novels about the so-called Dark Ages published nowadays? Alfred Duggan used to write them and Bernard Cornwell dabbles there occasionally with his Arthurian novels and his current series set in the time of King Alfred. It was a pivotal period in English history: the end of Roman Britain, and the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon age, an era of conflict and culture clash with shifting frontiers, divided loyalties, danger, idealism, heroics and high tragedy, far from the popular image of thud and blunder, mud and middens, as Carla Nayland shows us in her new novel, Paths of Exile. And on top of all that, so little is known of the period that the novelist has exhilarating scope for the imagination in the big gaps between the lines of the scant but often vivid sources.

Paths of Exile is set in what is now Northern England at the beginning of the 7th century AD. Aethelferth, king of Bernicia (roughly modern Northumberland) has invaded the neighbouring kingdom of Deira (approximately today's Yorkshire), and defeated its ruler Aelle and his son and heir Eadric. Eadric's devoted younger brother Eadwine comes too late to the rescue and believes Eadric has been treacherously murdered. Eadwine, homeless and lordless, the worst predicament for an Anglo-Saxon man, nevertheless vows to avenge his brother's death and sets out to find the mysterious assassin as well as rescuing his betrothed in the terrible knowledge that Aethelferth has sworn to kill him in thanks to the gods for victory.

Thus begins an exciting, tautly-plotted tale that's action-packed thriller, murder mystery, tragedy and romance all rolled into one and set in an authentic landscape I can see and touch and feel. But it's much more than that, mainly because the author has peopled her story with flesh-and-blood-characters who are both convincingly of their own time and yet, with all their fears and hopes, not at all alien to us. I still find myself thinking of them as if they were old friends just lately gone away and whom I hope to meet again*. Character is revealed mainly through dialogue which is often laced with humour, wry, dry and bawdy. No doubt the purists won't like it (too modern, too much swearing, tsk, tsk, yet it feels entirely right for Eadwine say "Bugger off" in moments of affectionate exasperation such as when he tries in vain to release his followers from their oath of loyalty - a telling, and touching, scene).

Oh, and I learned a lot without even realising it, for example from Eadwine in his moving exposition on the structure of Anglo-Saxon society, "A lord is the helmet of his people, Treowin, not their scourge."

The author has published Paths of Exile using Lulu. And a very good job they've made of it (I feared spine-cracking and pages falling out, but the book is a pleasure to handle). I wish a publisher would take the novel up and bring it to a wider readership. It's that good.

*A sequel is in the offing, hurrah! But will it reveal the words of that naughty ditty known as Attacotti Nell?

Book Review: The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies

If your father is Welsh, your mother Chinese-Malay and you were brought up mainly in England, your mind will probably dwell frequently on identity and belonging. So it is, I imagine, with Peter Ho Davies, whose novel The Welsh Girl turns on precisely those themes.


It's 1944, not long after D-Day. Young Esther lives with her widowed father on a sheep farm near a remote village in North Wales, where Welsh is everyone's first language and outsiders are distrusted, especially if they're English. She works part-time in the village pub where she meets English people for the first time, including soldiers, with one of whom she has a brief, rather brutal encounter before he's shipped off elsewhere. Soon after, a group of German prisoners of war is brought to a nearby disused holiday camp and Esther finds herself befriending Karsten, a German soldier full of alienating guilt at having surrendered his men on D-Day. How can he explain this in letters to his proud mother in Germany? Their relationship, mainly conducted through the camp's wire fence, is the main thread of the novel and is in touching contrast to her one-night stand with the English soldier, although Karsten is technically the enemy. Exposure first to the English, then to Germans, creates tension with her nationalistic father who (deliberately?) stumbles over his English, and makes Esther think about her own Welsh identity and what it means in the wider world.

The story of Esther and Karsten is bracketed by another: Rotheram, a British intelligence officer whose German-Jewish family fled to England when he was a child, is sent to North Wales to question Rudolf Hess in order to help determine whether he's sane enough to stand trial for Nazi war crimes. Obviously, Rotheram (I used to be a German, but now I'm just a Jew) is also wrestling with problems of belonging and identity. And so, rather more obliquely, is Hess.

If all this sounds rather contrived and message-driven, I didn't find it so. Peter Ho Davies has given us flesh-and-blood characters, not ciphers. Even minor characters like Harry the radio comedian, Jim the evacuee child and the mother of the Welsh lad who loves Esther are full of life. And if, unlike these let-it-all-hang-out times of ours, they seem unengagingly restrained in their emotions, that's surely authentic - people were like that in those days, which makes the story all the more moving.

And if the novel as a whole is understated and the story slow to take off, this is all to the good: we get to know the characters in their settings much as we get know the people we meet in real life, and for this reader, at any rate, they and their dilemmas stay in the mind long after the novel is finished.

Here's a perceptive article from The Observer on Peter Ho Davies and his work. It's particularly good on the historical background to The Welsh Girl and how its themes connect with the author's own life and background.

Book Review: The Islamist by Ed Husain

The Islamist is neatly summed up by its own subtitle: Why I joined radical Islam in Britain, what I saw inside and why I left.

Ed Husain was born in the East End of London into a family of Indo-Bangladeshi origin and raised in the traditional spiritual Islam of the Indian subcontinent. As an intelligent, idealistic but naive teenager he joined a succession of increasingly extreme Islamist organisations until at around the age of twenty he was a leading student agitator for Hizb-ut-Tahrir, whose aim was (and probably still is) to establish a worldwide fundamentalist Islamic state, by force if necessary.

Gradually he became disillusioned with Hizb-ut-Tahrir's emphasis on a political rather than a spiritual form of Islam (his colleagues would routinely speak of popping into the mosque to "drop" their prayers, as if relieving themselves of a tiresome burden), and with its wilful misreadings of the Quran to justify its racist policies and advocacy of terrorist acts against non-Muslims. He was also dismayed at the inability of Islamist ideologues to explain without resorting to the rhetoric of terror how they would bring about an Islamist state. But the turning point came when a Hizb-ut-Tahrir supporter stabbed a black Christian youth to death outside his college. Husain withdrew from Islamism and set about rediscovering the spiritual Islam of his youth.

In his journey into Islamist fundamentalism, Ed Husain describes the classic brainwashing techniques and bully-boy tactics of religious and political cults the world over, whilst his retreat from it brings to mind accounts like those in The God That Failed which chart the disillusionment of various European intellectuals with Communism after World War II.

Ed Husain also provides a cogent explanation for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the United Kingdom: "the multiculturalism fostered by the Labour government [which] had created mono-cultural outposts in which the politics of race and religion were now being played out before my eyes"; the same government's mistaken inclination to regard the Muslim Council of Britain as the voice of the moderate Muslim majority; and the (understandable) failure of the real moderate Muslim majority to distance itself from the fanatics: "if British policy makers and elected officials are content to tolerate intolerance and give a platform to those who are committed to destroying democracy and advocate religion-based separatism, why should a minority Muslim population turn on its own?" And on top of all this, let's not forget the insidious influence of Wahhabi fundamentalism propagated by foreign imams in British mosques funded by Saudi Arabia (which Husain, from firsthand experience, shows as the horrific epitome of our worst nightmare: an Islamist state of the type that Hizb-ut-Tahrir would force us all to live in, a totalitarian theocracy devoid of democracy and freedom of expression, rife with religious and racial intolerance, sexual repression, barbaric punishments, oppression of women and homosexuals - you get the picture.)

And yet the book finishes on a note of hope: "...all is not lost, for there are signs of a resurgence of interest in spiritual rather than political Islam...a more tolerant, inclusive, flexible approach both to scripture and to life. Without doubt, a British Islam is emerging. It remains to be seen whether it will be in harmony with the world in which it finds itself, or if it rejects and repels it."

The lucid, well-reasoned and heartfelt argument presented in The Islamist makes it a must-read for everyone concerned for the future of Islam and for the peace and security of our world.