Andrew Taylor, “An Unpardonable Crime”

Maybe it’s a symptom of the weariness of the mystery genre that so many writers now do historical mysteries. It could be simply that this is an excellent moment for historical fiction of any kind, or it may be a sign that the form of the murder mystery is just about exhausted, and now has to be goosed up by the historical content to become viable. Or at least, not to bore its writers. Andrew Taylor — and why isn’t he better known here in the US? — is prolific, talented, and, it would seem, intellectually restless. No cranking out endless series with one detective and a cast of quirky sidekicks. Nope — this time he’s dragged poor little Edgar Allan Poe into the mix.

An Unpardonable Crime is really only tangentially about Poe, who is merely a child at a small school outside of London in this book. He is a near-doppelganger for another boy whose role is much more important. But Taylor is a good enough writer so that, having invoked the creepiness of Poe’s work, he mines it for effects and themes (burial, doubles, the undead). The plot itself is pretty conventional. Thomas Shield, the narrator, is the classic liminal character, educated enough to pass as a gentleman, but possessing no power or money and thus meriting no consideration. So Shield is almost invisible: he can can go everywhere, hear everything. Little Edgar Allan is the friend of Charles Frant at the school where Shield teaches. Frant’s rich, handsome father Henry is involved in banking, while his lovely mother represents the unattainable woman Shield adores. Henry Frant disappears and a body is found, with mangled face and hands. Is it Henry? Was he involved in the banking collapse? What is the identity of the tall stranger with the blue glasses and the unplaceable accent? Do we need to worry about the impeccably correct black Canadian Salutation Harmwell? Why is Mrs. Johnson found drowned in an ice house wearing men’s clothing? (I’m not actually sure I ever sorted that out.) And where did that severed finger come from?

Lots of questions, many of them sinister. Lots of great period detail. Taylor is quite fond of squalor. Since Shield is the narrator, the voice is flavored with the locutions of 1819. But I think what I appreciated most was the gloomy romantic-horror aspect of it all. Let’s not forget that Poe, with “The Murders in the rue Morgue,” can be said to have launched the mystery genre. An Unpardonable Crime pays homage to Poe’s writing. While the fictional world is internally consistent, and thus satisfying, it’s also crafted with enough showiness so that you appreciate the author’s virtuosity. He’s having fun “doing” Poe. You have fun reading him.

Richard Hughes, “The Fox in the Attic”

And it started so well. The opening scene of The Fox in the Attic presents a damp autumn afternoon in Wales, with feathery clouds, swans “creaking” overhead, and finally introduces two masculine figures walking through the landscape: “The younger man was springy and tall and well-built and carried over his shoulder the body of a dead child.” I thought that was a very promising opening.

But Richard Hughes doesn’t stick with that mood, or for the matter with that character or that setting. The Fox in the Attic, published in 1961, is an historical novel divided into three sections linked by the central character. Augustine is a young World War I veteran struggling with the unsettling fact of not only having survived the war, but also having inherited a massive estate in Wales. It is he whom we meet carrying the dead child.

The first part of the book, “Polly and Rachel,” is set in England and Wales. Long stretches of it combine lyrical British writing about country life with cool scrutiny of peculiar characters, not unlike J.G. Farrell’s unsettling novels. Part Two, “The White Crow,” sends Augustine to visit remote cousins in Germany. Though Hughes makes a point of contrasting Augustine’s naive notions of the “new Germany” with the bitter facts of stupendous inflation and poverty, this part of the book is really an account of the events surrounding the “Beer Hall Putsch.” The third section concentrates on Augustine’s sudden passion for his beautiful blind cousin Mitzi, and his own blindness to, or misinterpretation of, almost everything he sees in the von Kessen family’s castle. There is an actual fox in the attic in this part, but there is also a character called “Wolff” who has lived in hiding in the attic for a year, on the run after getting involved in an unsuccessful coup attempt.

The novel is very uneven. Hughes seems most interested in his characters’ incomprehension of each other or their circumstances. This trait can be annoying (in Augustine’s naivete) or rather magical (when Hughes narrates from the point of view of a small child). The “White Crow” section felt very tedious: it’s hard to set up the political background for the Putsch because there are so many complicated circumstances and Hughes is hampered by his narrative technique of seeing it only through the eyes of marginally-involved characters. And then at the end of the book, Augustine simply tosses his clothes into his bag and departs from the German castle, with no destination in mind. I suppose I ought to be curious about where he’s going next, but vague irritation is not a good basis for a further relationship.

Julian Fellowes, “Past Imperfect”

I really enjoyed Julian Fellowes’ Snobs, though it was something of a guilty pleasure. (Slavish American anglophilia: just not that attractive.) Past Imperfect puzzled me, though. It’s another visit to upper reaches of English society, but this time it shuttles  back and forth between present and past. Our narrator, unnamed (any particular reason for this?), is contacted by an old enemy who is dying. He is charged with a mission that will require him to look up a group of women who were all debutantes in the London season of 1968. Because of the dreadful doings at that fateful evening in Estoril in 1970, he has seen none of them since then, so this is a voyage back to the past.

One by one, the narrator picks them off, visiting these women he had known as girls to ask them some very personal questions. He is clearly deeply preoccupied by the puzzling way the past intersects with the present, especially for a group of people (the upper class) whose way of life was anachronistic, even forty years ago. I hope the narrator is not identical with the author, because there’s a lot of dyspeptic complaint about the present day: public drunkenness, cacophonous music, the incivility of the young. Thing is, I could never be sure. The book is billed as a satire but only one scene (involving some frozen strawberries) was actually funny.

In his favor, the narrator does ruefully soften his youthful judgments of many of the people he did the Season with as a young man, and he justifiably regrets his own profound, reflexive snobbishness. But this all seems pretty simplistic. And Fellowes, who after all has written some pretty good screenplays, draws some formless characters. Lady Serena Gresham, the love interest, never seems like more than an agglomeration of pleasant attributes like beauty, money, high rank and a faintly mysterious manner.

From time to time an episode (like a disastrous party held at Madame Tussaud’s) snaps into sharper focus but most of them feel less than fully imagined. And the payoff, the dreadful night in Portugal that severed the narrator from his friends, is a complete anticlimax. Worst, Fellowes’s style is to interrupt action and dialogue for long paragraphs of the narrator’s reaction or opinion. The ratio of telling to showing is way off. Clearly this is not a Law of Fiction but if you’re aiming for readability, it sure helps.

Hilary Mantel, “Wolf Hall”

Winner of the 2009 Booker Prize, no less — and a model of what an historical novel can do. After all — who would have thought the world needed another book about Henry VIII? What Hilary Mantel does, though, is tell us much more than what happened at the English court in 1527-1533. She tells us why we should care.

One of the challenges/thrills of reading historical fiction is that it sets up a conversation between the era it’s written in and the era it’s set in. The normal convention is that the narrative voice partakes of the target period. The narrator might use prose with a flavor of 16th-century formality, for instance. As an author you would certainly try to avoid anachronisms, not only in your vocabulary but more importantly, in your characters’ actions, emotions, perspectives.

Not so Mantel. She uses a contemporary voice: “… the king is cutting a deal.” (I confess, that jarred.) A chapter early in the book starts, “They are taking apart the cardinal’s house… They are bundling up parchments and scrolls…; they are taking even the ink and the quills.” Who wrote that, David Byrne?  Yet what I’ve left out, in the ellipses, is the concrete business, the “missals and memoranda and the volumes of his personal accounts.” (Beautifully written, no?) What’s more, the characters have relationships very similar to our own. None of this attempting to understand how people thought and acted Way Back Then: they are just like us. They are friendly, venal, warm, direct, intimate, insecure… everything. Just on a very big stage, with very big implications.

Holbein's portrait of Cromwell

In fact I couldn’t help thinking that Wolf Hall provides a way of looking at modern politics. Thomas Cromwell, the central character, is Henry VIII’s fixer, a lawyer who has knocked around the world and knows how to get things done. His morals are — flexible. He understands, as Henry and his aristocrats do not, that the world is run “Not from castle walls, but from counting houses.” And Henry, well, he reminds me of someone we used to know: “Sometimes he seems hapless, sometimes feckless, sometimes a child, sometimes master of his trade. Sometimes he seems an artist, in the way his eye ranges over his work; sometimes his hand moves and he doesn’t seem to see it move.” Am I the only person who thinks that sounds like George W. Bush? One of the narrative threads of the novel is the conflict between Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, a courteous battle between the two cleverest men in the realm, one of whom ended up a saint.

I have only one complaint. The book is entitled Wolf Hall. That is the home of the Seymour family, as in Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s third wife. Jane is a character in the book and her family home is cited as something of a den of iniquity. But we never see it. (A visit is planned on the last page of the novel.) So why is the book not called “Austin Friars,” after Cromwell’s home for most of the story? Giving it this title casts the reader’s thoughts forward, to Henry’s marriage to Jane… but it was the marriage to Anne of Cleves that precipitated Cromwell’s fall from favor. Does Wolf Hall stand for disorder, for the ruin of Cromwell’s success, which depended on Anne Boleyn’s support? The title has the strange effect of projecting the fiction into the character’s future, somehow extending the narrative beyond the actual book. But it’s very odd.

Arturo Perez-Reverte, “Captain Alatriste”

I love capes. And swords. And boots that go over the knee. Swashbuckling, gallantry, melancholy heroes. I don’t even object to villains in black. Now it’s true that Arturo Pérez-Reverte does not specifically mention the boots in Captain Alatriste, but everything else is there, and it’s just delicious.

Captain Alatriste is a soldier of fortune, wounded in the Lowlands during the Thirty Years’ War and obliged to earn his keep by performing miscellaneous acts of violence back in Madrid. The tale is narrated by Iñigo Balboa, his youthful hanger-on. (Despite the first-person voice, the point of view shifts into outlooks that Iñigo could not know about: normally I’m pretty picky about this kind of thing but Pérez-Reverte is so firmly in charge that I just went along with it.) Alatriste is hired by two masked men and a sinister priest to kill a pair of travelers in a lonely alley. However, he is so impressed by their courage that he lets them go. Complications ensue, many of which appear very threatening to Alatriste. At the end of the book, we are clearly nowhere near the end of the saga. Which is a good thing if you read as fast as I do.

This is another one of those cases where the author is overqualified for his job. Is that what I mean? It’s like Patrick O’Brian, translator of Simone Weill, writing the Aubrey/Maturin books — he doesn’t have to be as smart as he is to write what is known in the trade as “category” fiction. But when a really intelligent, knowledgeable author takes on one of the ostensibly less ambitious forms of narrative, you often get a really great result.

It’s not that Pérez-Reverte mocks the genre, not at all. But — oh, gosh this is hard to explain. O’Brian creates a formal, omniscient narrator whose primary concern, despite all that salt water and gunfire, is his characters. What’s more his pacing works against the conventions of the genre. He doesn’t slow down to prepare for the big scenes; sometimes he spends ages on nothing at all then drops Maturin in a cannibal’s canoe. Pérez-Reverte, by contrast, works very much within the traditions of historical fiction. It’s as if he’s wearing an Alexander Dumas Hallowe’en costume. The gestures — I mean, he really leans on those capes and swords — are emphatic. There’s frequent acknowledgment of the artificiality of his project, but it’s very graceful. At one moment the narrator says that Alatriste was tempted to laugh “but the stage was not set for comedy.” This plot even links up with The Three Musketeers. Most importantly, the author is having a perfectly wonderful time. Dancing a waltz is artificial and archaic, too, but if you’ve got the right partner it can be intoxicating.

Best of all — there are five more novels in the series.

Rumer Godden, “Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy”

I’ve loved Rumer Godden ever since someone gave me Miss Happiness and Miss Flower to read around 1963. In This House of Brede is one of my all-time favorites but then, I am a total sucker for a novel about nuns. Unfortunately Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy is a somewhat thin retread of Godden’s favorite themes.

The novel is set in France, largely in a Dominican convent that draws some of its sisters from criminal backgrounds. Heroine Lise (born Elizabeth Fanshawe, religious name Soeur Marie Lise du Rosaire) was once a prostitute and ran a brothel in Paris before killing one of its proprietors and going to prison. From prison, she goes to the convent where she experiences healing and forgiveness and also encounters the stubbornness of evil. The stitching between fact and fiction is a little bit obvious and there were some loose ends: characters who seem at first important fall away, while other events are clumsily foreshadowed.

Still, second-rate Godden is still pretty good. She is earnest about the tale and I’ve always found her interest in redemption very attractive. She also combines the smooth, effortless English narrative technique of the late 19th century (think George DuMaurier, or Daphne D for that matter) with her own unmistakable fractured time-frames. Now that I think of it, that was a little avant-garde. Oddly, though, this book is more dated than her earlier ones, precisely because she tries to bring it up to date. When a postulant brings her radio into the chapel to play a song from “Godspell” for Jesus, you have to wince.