Andrew Miller, “Pure”

If I describe Andrew Miller’s Pure as a novel about excavating a cemetery in 18th century Paris, you’re not going to want to read it. And maybe if you’re really, really squeamish the subject matter is going to be problematic.

On the other hand, if I present Pure as a coming-of-age novel set just before the French Revolution, in which an engaging  young engineer faces a great challenge, that may sound more attractive, and it’s equally true. The novel opens with Jean-Baptiste Baratte kicking his heels in an anteroom at Versailles, waiting to see a minister who has a job for him. Baratte is a farmer’s son from Normandy who has been educated at the elite Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées and thus that useful fictional figure, the socially mobile protagonist. We see him, in Pure, as a supplicant, a boss, a lover, a son, a rube, and above all a man growing into his natural authority.

19th century print of the Cemetery of Les Innocents in Paris.

The task assigned to Jean-Baptiste at Versailles is the demolition of an overcrowded cemetery in the center of Paris. Les Innocents had been in use since the Middle Ages and by the 1780s presented serious health hazards to the neighborhood. Miller is pretty eloquent about the aesthetic issues as well — olfactory for the most part. The cemetery did indeed get demolished, the bones removed to a new location in what is now Montparnasse. The neighboring church was also destroyed, and Miller lingers over the irruption of light into the filthy dark medieval interior:

Once inside the church, they go in single file. The sun has risen above the roof line and where the roof is gone, the light breaks in a shallow angle on the facing wall, picks out, with a kind of unnecessary perfection, the fluting of a pillar, the bevelled edge of an arch, a stone face staring goggle-eyed at some wonder in the middle air…. Something falls, flickers through light into shadow and hits the piled pews with a noise of thunder.”

Light, purification, education, social mobility — you see where Miller is going. A secondary character in Pure is an affable forward-looking doctor named Guillotin whose future invention would remove so many heads. The opening scene at Versailles is matched by a closing scene that foreshadows the coming irrelevance of the Ancien Régime. We even see a cameo of the firebrand Camille Desmoulins delivering a rabble-rousing speech at the Palais-Royal (homage to Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety?). But these themes are woven artfully into the trajectories of the characters. This is not one of those historical novels that feels studded with facts, like an overloaded fruitcake. Instead it feels like a seamless, illuminating experience. And here’s the clincher: I finished it two days ago and it lingers in my mind — enormously satisfying.

Ken Follett, “Fall of Giants”

Over the years Ken Follett has established a reputation as a terrific story teller, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of his books. I’m a big fan of some of the early thrillers and I even enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth. I mean — a thousand pages about the construction of a medieval cathedral? Anybody who can make that into compelling narrative is really good at his job. So when two friends in a row recommended Fall of Giants, I was delighted. I had a cross-country plane trip to face, what could be better than Follett on the early 20th century?

French lookout in a trench near the Rhine, June 1917

It started really well, with a clever Welsh boy being sent down a coal mine in 1911. Follett’s technique isn’t inventive, but it’s effective: focus on a string of characters, each in a different walk of life, and let their tales interlock. So young miner Billy Williams’ sister is the housekeeper at the local aristocrat’s country house. Earl Fitzherbert, hosting King George V, is so impressed by her beauty and poise that he lusts after her. His Russian-princess wife, not so much. She’s inclined to think English servants are uppity. Bit by bit Follett introduces his other main characters: an appealing American egghead who’s a great admirer of Woodrow Wilson, a pair of St. Petersburg factory workers, a German aristocrat in the diplomatic corps. Fine. I’m not in this for literary innovation. But somewhere in the second 500 pages, the personal quality of these characters thinned out. They became what they always had potential to be — stock figures inserted into historical situations. The language got sloppier, more anachronistic (one man is afraid he won’t be able to “hack” battle and fears his men in the trenches will think he’s a “wimp”). And maybe some events, like infighting after the Russian Revolution, just can’t be dramatized. (If Hilary Mantel couldn’t do it for the French Revolution in A Place of Greater Safety, I’m not sure anybody can.) Yes, I did read to the end, but more out of curiosity than emotional involvement. And, you know what? It’s not like we don’t know what happened. Next up in Volume 2 of this trilogy? Da-da-da-dum…. dinner table scene in which the Beer Hall Putsch is mentioned. They’re going to have to fight that war without me.

Margaret Mitchell, “Gone with the Wind”

Yes. It is still fabulous.

You’ll notice I’m assuming that you have read Gone with the Wind at some point, which may be a generational thing, but everyone has seen the movie, right? Sure, both book and movie are long, but with Hilary Mantel tearing up the best seller lists, I don’t see that length is a big objection. And, yes, Margaret Mitchell takes a patronizing view of blacks and her perspective on some aspects of post-Civil War Georgia politics is repugnant. But the plus side is that Gone with the Wind is a thrilling read, for all 1025 pages. You could look far and wide to find a better summer beach book, even if you think it’s old hat. From “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, though men seldom realized it…”  to “‘After all, tomorrow is another day,’” I was captivated.

Just in case you need a refresher: Scarlett is a headstrong Georgia belle whom we meet in April of 1861, as tiresome male war-mongering begins to interfere with her incessant flirtations. She is madly in love with Ashley Wilkes, a classic Southern gentleman of the bookish variety, fond of poetry and music, but the best horseman in the County. As war bears down on the South, Scarlett sees only her own tragedy when Ashley announces his engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton. In a private moment she declares her love for Ashley, who admits that he “cares” for her, but will marry Melanie nonetheless. This tender scene is unwillingly overheard by Rhett Butler, the bounder from Charleston, who is amused. In the first ten percent of the book, Mitchell has set up the conflicts that keep us turning the next 900 pages.

Of course Scarlett is the key to the whole thing. My goodness, what a piece of work she is — a monster-character along the lines of Angelica Deverell in Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel. Mitchell is very clear about Scarlett’s selfishness, obstinacy, limited intellectual gifts and poor judgment, but we remain fascinated. And not in a train-wreck way; somehow at the end of the book, when she meets a real defeat, we’re still rooting for her. I don’t remember where I read this but some writer recently pointed out that the great power of fiction is to make readers identify with the characters’ desires. We just can’t help it. So with a character like Scarlett who is all desire, we’re completely hooked.

Mitchell also does a great job managing the various levels of conflict in the novel. The Scarlett/Ashley/Rhett triangle separates and re-forms repeatedly as Scarlett marries, first out of pique, and second out of practicality. The war, of course, keeps the tension high, especially as Union troops approach Atlanta. But there’s also consistent confrontation between the Old South and the New, which Mitchell sees in rueful, elegiac terms. The cultivation and aesthetic charms of the old South, along with its essential values of hospitality, loyalty and gentility, are embodied in Ashley’s wife Melanie, who shows courage under pressure and kindness to all. She dies, of course, leaving the world to Scarlett, with her relentless energy and drive. Rhett has just delivered his deathless line — “‘My dear, I don’t give a damn” — but Scarlett is indomitable, and maybe that’s why we follow her through the book with fascination and a tinge of envy.

Barry Unsworth “Losing Nelson”

A few weeks ago, around the time of the publication of Bring Up the Bodies, Newsweek published Hilary Mantel’s list of five excellent historical novels. Naturally I paid attention. Losing Nelson was the first of them to arrive at my local library and I found it exhilarating. Some critics think historical fiction is somehow lame, or lazy, or unoriginal, and often that’s true. (Also true of literary fiction, though.) Maybe what attracts critical fire is the occasional predictability of the historical novel’s structure. I bring this up because Barry Unsworth so successfully avoids it.

Lemuel Abbott’s portrait of Lord Nelson. Idealized, of course.

Losing Nelson is narrated by a middle-aged Englishman who has dedicated his life to the late-Georgian naval hero Lord Nelson. This narrator — whose name, Charles Cleasby, is barely uttered in the course of the novel — is one of those lonely weird people who populate the novels of Barbara Pym or, more alarmingly, Ruth Rendell. It’s clear from the start that Charles is immensely damaged and part of the novel’s suspense is generated by sheer curiosity: what the heck happened to him? He is aware of his own peculiarities, but only in part. So he’s one of those tricky unreliable narrators. Especially unreliable because Barry Unsworth pierces narrative convention and has Charles’ story not only shift back and forth in time but also in person, from “I” to “you” to “I” again, only often the “I” is Nelson. One minute we are in Charles’ head, discussing a sea battle, the next minute we are on the deck of a ship, nearly deafened by cannon fire. In effect, Charles in in such psychic distress that he retreats into this alternative identity he has so carefully constructed: Horatio Nelson. He even, it’s clear, has imaginary sex with Nelson’s mistress Emma Hamilton.

It sounds jarring, but Unsworth is so adept that I found the effect magical instead. Both worlds, the contemporary and the historical, are vividly imagined and described but the way they unexpectedly penetrate each other is both original and effective. What’s more Unsworth keeps the narrative tension taut because Charles has made a hero out of his alter ego. Yet as he works on his book about Nelson (of course he’s writing a book) he has to confront a disturbing, anti-heroic episode in Nelson’s career. It’s clear to the reader that the Nelson fetish can’t hold back the tide of Charles’ psychic agony forever. Will the influence of his part-time secretary Miss Lily offer him a steadying hand? Or will Charles come apart as he investigates the truth about what happened in Naples in 1799? As he stands in a shadowy Neapolitan church he thinks, “I felt the same sorrow, the same helplessness that I had so often felt at home in my study. Whatever one made of the documents, the truth of the past was beyond grasping — it lay in the looks exchanged, the tones used, and the eyes and voices had left no trace.” Okay. Maybe we can’t get to THE truth of the past. (The very idea that there is a single truth is a symptom of Charles’ fragile, absolutist view of the world.) But in Losing Nelson, Barry Unsworth gives us a provocative version of it.

Hilary Mantel, “Bring Up the Bodies”

Aaaand he’s back! “He, Cromwell.” Hilary Mantel’s improbable protagonist, first met in the magisterial and brilliant Wolf Hall. Let me bring you up to date. It is September, 1535. Henry VIII has been married to Anne Boleyn for two and a half years. She has given him a daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, but not yet a son. He is becoming restless and testy. The royal eye has fallen on the anti-Anne, mild-mannered and modest Jane Seymour. Do you remember how the rhyme goes, to number Henry’s six wives? “Divorced, beheaded, died…” So you know where Bring up the Bodies is going, don’t you?

Tower of London, with the Traitor’s Gate from the river Thames. It all ends here.

Like Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies is a substantial book, over 400 pages. But it covers a much more compressed period of time. Did this denseness make it drag a little in the first half, or was that the need to recapitulate? More likely the fact that I was on a plane — Mantel has an extremely deft hand with exposition. Anyway the conflict in Bring up the Bodies is more dense, too. Thomas Cromwell’s character and his role in Henry’s court is established. Likewise Henry’s dilemma, which is beginning to sound familiar (“divorced, beheaded…”). What actually happens in this novel is more fine-grained than the action in Wolf Hall. Cromwell’s handy utilitarian philosophy takes on an ugly edge as he works to grant the king’s desire in a way that won’t blow apart the country. Mantel describes the great Holbein portrait of Cromwell clutching a document, and thereafter you may find yourself counting references to Cromwell’s fists. There’s a mood of suppressed violence in the novel that pays off magnificently in the end.

Henry himself, who had a certain, well, majestic charm in Wolf Hall, verges on the petulant at times. The Court walks on egg shells. And I find I missed some of the great, complex characters of Wolf Hall, like More and Wolsey. Finally, because Cromwell is widowed, he has become something of a business machine. Mantel does her best to give him friendly moments but there is a lot of procedure without much respite in this novel.

But oh! the writing! Mantel’s narrative voice, as in the earlier novel, straddles eras. There are contemporary constructions and vocabulary, easily sharing sentences with phrases that take us back in time. The result for me was like perceiving the action on two levels, or hearing it in stereo — Now and Then, more closely related than we’d ever thought.

Writing isn’t just about words, though, it’s also about imaginations and this may be where Mantel really excels. Time and again, I’d read a passage with delight as a metaphor or an image took me right to her scene, placing me in the heart of the action, at Cromwell’s velvet-clad elbow. I’ll leave you with the opening lines of the novel:

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horseback, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze. Grace Cromwell hovers in thin air. She is silent when she takes her prey, silent as she glides to his fist. But the sounds she makes then, the rustle of feathers and the creak, the sigh and riffle of pinion, the small cluck-cluck from her throat, these are sounds of recognition, intimate, daughterly, almost disapproving. Her breast is gore-streaked and flesh clings to her claws.”

Leaving aside the fabulous conceit that Thomas Cromwell named his falcons after his daughters, leaving aside the dextrous prefiguration of violence, I have to wonder — how does Hilary Mantel know what a raptor sounds like? Oh, wait — that’s what the best novelists do. They make stuff up, and make you believe it’s true.

Caroline Moorehead, “Dancing to the Precipice”

Lucie Dillon de la Tour du Pin has been vaguely on my radar for a long time; her memoirs show up in  bibliographies when you’re reading about pre-Revolutionary Versailles, or for that matter, about the revolution itself — or even Napoleonic France. To write Dancing to the Precipice, Caroline Moorehead used Lucie’s memoir as a primary source, but the memoir takes us only up to 1814, and Lucie lived until 1850 — yes, her life spanned the reigns of Louis XV to Napoleon III (as president). For the later years, Moorehead refers to Lucie’s many letters. Throughout the book she provides not only historical context, but also the kinds of details I need to help me imagine history: weather, clothes, food, pastimes. For instance, in one of the happiest times of Lucie’s life, when she was farming outside Albany, New York during the Terror, she milked and made butter wearing a black and blue-striped woolen skirt, like the other Hudson County housewives.

Versailles: one of Lucie de la Tour du Pin's worlds

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I wished that I was reading just Lucie’s own words; Moorehead quotes liberally but her subject’s voice is necessarily diluted. And sometimes I had the feeling that the tale just goes on a little bit too long, but I think that’s an inveterate novel-reader’s complaint. Authors of biography don’t get to tidy up the long, uneventful years. Since I just finished the book, and it ends with many years of Lucie’s life becoming sadder and narrower, I have to make a little effort to reconstruct the exhilaration I felt in reading the first half.

Henriette-Lucie Dillon makes an ideal chronicler of her era. On the one hand, as a grand aristocrat, she had perfect access to the grandeur of her era. Daughter of a count, wife of a marquis, she served as one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting and frequented the salons of Napoleonic France. But she’s also appealing to our democratic age: despite her belief in the aristocratic system, she judges individuals and herself according to ideals familiar to us, like courage, humor, intelligence and lack of vanity. She can be grand, but she can also be funny. (Talleyrand, the arch-schemer who keeps recurring throughout her era, comes in for barbed admiration.) She adores her family and handles loss with enormous fortitude.

The most vivid part of the book, of course, is the first section when Moorehead and la Tour du Pin in tandem depict the years leading up to the revolution. Lucie looks back with hindsight on the splendor and waste and heedlessness and beauty and cultivation, while Moorehead adroitly follows the saga of the forces and characters who produced the revolution. (It was probably helpful that I’d read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.) Just one detail to whet your appetite: The Duc de Chartres, nephew of Louis XVI, was a wastrel prince who spent his days before the revolution in the Palais-Royal, and developed a system for rating all the women he knew. The available grades were “beautiful, pretty, passable, ugly, frightful, hideous, and abominable.” A bas les aristos!

Ariana Franklin, “Mistress of the Art of Death”

Here they come. From down the road we can hear harnesses jingling and see dust rising into the warm spring sky.

Pilgrims returning after Easter in Canterbury. Tokens of the mitered, martyred Saint Thomas are pinned to cloaks and hats — the Canterbury monks must be raking it in.

I won’t quote any more of the opening of Mistress of the Art of Death, but you get the idea: exuberant, irreverent, clever. (I loved “mitered, martyred Saint Thomas.”) It’s a catchy economical form of exposition and if the handwriting of Geoffrey Chaucer pokes out here and there, I didn’t have a problem with that. Ariana Franklin can hold her own.

Yet I had reservations. The bone I have to pick with Franklin is not really the issue of anachronism. As she points out in the Author’s Note, you can’t write a novel about the 12th century without it. For one thing, the narrative voice as we know it didn’t exist at the time, nor did most of our storytelling techniques. I do wonder a lot about imposing contemporary understandings of character and motivation on people who lived 1000 years ago but Hilary Mantel’s handling of Thomas Cromwell didn’t bother me. So I should at least be consistent about this.

Multiple anachronism: JWWaterhouse 1916, illustration for Boccaccio's "Decameron." But you'll admit it's vivid.

And there is a lot to enjoy in Mistress of the Art of Death. Franklin’s mastery of landscape, atmosphere, and pacing absolutely gripped my attention. However, this is basically a murder mystery dressed in historical costume and it’s not a formula that normally works for me. The basic structure of solving a murder is often incompatible with the historical framework. Here, for instance, we have Adelia, a proto-pathologist from Salerno. Proto-feminist, too: abrupt, efficient, outspoken, ultimately earning respect. She is in Cambridge to find out who has been killing small children, and the way she does so is by examining their bodies. Her sidekick is Mansur, the tall Muslim castrato. (I believe Franklin made him a castrato to explain the absence of sexual tension between him and Adelia; there’s no other reason for that quirk.) Finally, working with them, is Simon of Naples. Yes, a Jew. Three outcasts functioning on the outskirts of English society to solve a problem, exposing prejudice and ignorance along the way.

Well, I have a hard time with anachronistically plucky and capable females. Especially ones with white-blonde hair who unwittingly enchant the one highly-evolved male in the story. Sarah Dunant’s books walk this line sometimes, and I am usually ready to overlook the problem. Franklin exacerbated it, though, by giving Adelia advanced ideas about capital punishment: “She was a woman who regarded legislated death as an effrontery by those imposing it… because life, to her, who wished to save it, was the only true miracle. She was a woman who never sat with the judge or stood with the executioner but always clung to the bar with the accused.”

And yet the writing is so good, the dialogue so lively, the secondary characters such fun, that I suspect I’ll find myself back in Adelia’s company before long; Mistress of the Art of Death is the first in a series. One down, three to go.

Hilary Mantel, “A Place of Greater Safety”

Bullet points:

*The French Revolution was very confusing.

*Only the most dedicated readers will persist for 747 pages.

*The Committee of Public Safety was, in some respects, similar to a co-op board or a PTA: factions, alliances, occasional moments of grace.

*Hilary Mantel does, as I’d read in a review somewhere, manage to make Robespierre sympathetic.

*Robespierre said, “History is fiction.”

Well, what novelist wouldn’t want a protagonist like that? As in Wolf Hall, Mantel is very concerned with the power of words. There’s a phrase in the more recent book where Cromwell thinks that writing a law is the ultimate test of the function of the words in it. Here, Danton (a legendary speechmaker) ruminates that “actions are being manufactured out of speech. How can words save a country? Words make myths, it seems, and for their myths people fight to win.”

I had hoped for something a little clearer than A Place of Greater Safety turned out to be. I hoped I would finally be able to slot into place the various forms of government: National Assembly, Legislative Assembly, National Convention, etc. Nope. On the other hand, I will never again forget which one was Danton and which Robespierre, the Incorruptible. And both of these are to some extent outshone by Camille Desmoulins, the volatile, charming journalist who did a great deal to popularize the theory of the revolution. Mantel has him thinking, “Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.” She gives him near-universal sex appeal and flexible sexual morals; a gorgeous wife similarly equipped, and a wicked wit. It’s always nice when an author can make you fall in love with her creation.

Mantel’s contemporary voice was not a surprise this time, and I found it very effective. Managing more characters, she sometimes has them address the reader directly, and sometimes lists dialogue as in a play. The flaw in this book, though, is that it gets hard to wade through. I’m a motivated reader: I finished Simon Schama’s Citizens. But round about page 500, with the length of a normal novel still to go, I flagged. A great deal of the conflict is simply argument. Alliances change, and, sure, lives are at stake but it’s very hard (despite the list of characters at the front) to keep track of who’s who and why being a friend of Brissot’s (or Fabre’s, or, ultimately, Danton’s) was such a bad idea. We know that most of these people will end up on the scaffold anyway.

And then, of course, it’s all pretty depressing. These men began with good intentions and deep affection for each other. They go through loyalty, mutual concern, tolerance, mistrust, suspicion, conciliation, renewed affection, willed indifference. Danton and Desmoulins died on the same day. Robespierre lasted a little bit longer, as one might expect of the cool customer with apparent ice water in his veins. And of course the French Revolution, according to some historians, took another hundred years to play out in its entirety.

 

 

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.