Book Reviews: 22 March
OUT NOW
HIS DARK LADY by Victoria Lamb (Bantam Press, £14.99; offer price, £13.99) There is a long tradition of wondering about the identity of the enigmatic ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Here she becomes Lucy Morgan, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ladies-inwaiting, and she and William Shakespeare are passionately in love.
From this basic premise, Lamb creates an engaging historical romance at the ageing Elizabeth’s court in the 1580s, which successfully evokes in its power and splendour. However, Lamb is just as good on the hazards lurking in the corridors of power: the whispered questions of who might succeed the unmarried Virgin Monarch is on everyone’s lips, as is the very real fear of Phillip II’s Spain, before the routing of the Armada in 1588.
I thought the romance between Shakespeare and Morgan was somewhat less convincing than the historical depiction of Elizabethan espionage and counterespionage epitomised in the character of Master Goodluck, or for that matter the representation of London in the 1580s. Shakespeare really comes across as shallow, callow and opportunistic, while Morgan is immature. However, the characterisation of Elizabeth I herself is a powerful portrait of the pain incurred by the queen who turned herself into a living legend.
Steve Barfield
SCHRODER by Amity Gaige (Faber and Faber, £14.99; offer price, £12.99) Amity Gaige’s third novel is an unconventional delight: a beautifully written, thoughtprovoking and empathetic account of a flawed and regretfilled life. It is a daring idea for a novel as the diffident first-person narrator, Erik Schroder, is not an easy man to like and it is a measure of the writer’s considerable gifts, that against all odds, she succeeds in making us understand him. Schroder is a first generation East German immigrant to America and carries the pain and fear of his previous country folded up inside, hiding from himself as well as others by adopting a new name, Eric Kennedy, after the President who once said: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.
Caught in a bitter divorce battle with his wife for custody of their six-year-old daughter Meadow, the only person he has ever really loved, he kidnaps and goes on the run with the child in New England. Written in lyrical and luminous prose, this is an unsettling contemplation of how devotion can spill into desperation, and a simultaneous charting of the estrangement and hurt that can lie deep in the immigrant experience.
SB
WHO OWNS THE FUTURE? by Jaron Lanier (Allen Lane, £20; offer price, £16) The radical, often anarchic vision of the original cyber geeks has largely disappeared from view in the massive commercialisation and incorporation of Silicon Valley. So it is very welcome to see this dystopian but trenchant political argument by one of the original thinkers of that period.
Lanier coined the term ‘virtual reality’ and has been at the bleeding-edge of creating technology that can help transform our lives. In this book, however, he warns us that the digital revolution is disempowering ordinary citizens economically and creating a new technocratic elite of big companies, where wealth is increasingly concentrated, much as it was in feudal society.
The new paradigm he sees being created and which he exhaustively details and explains is not just leading to a collapse in living standards, but is also potentially devastating for the operations of social democracy in the west. I was impressed by the depth of his coverage of new technology, which he explains in ways that as a scientifi c layman I found easy to grasp as well as his astute analysis of the social consequences. This is the stuff of which future nightmares are made. However, Lanier’s book is a call to arms.
SB
BOOK OF THE WEEK
A quilt of hopeTracy Chevalier’s new book covers an iconic part of American history, says Sarah Crowden
THE LAST RUNAWAY by Tracy Chevalier (HarperCollins, £14.99; offer price, £12.99)
To visit the American Museum in Bath and see quilts on display is a revelation. Intricate stitching, brightly coloured fabrics and the varied shapes of the templates used to form distinctive patterns make each one a unique, individual work of art. They are things of great beauty and, conversely, utilitarian household objects, providing warmth in winter and a cool cover over the summer months. Though many craft forms, such as tatting and fretwork, have all but disappeared, there have been resurgences in making (and mending) in recent years, with knitting and embroidery at the forefront, and quilting groups forming, like the 19th century ‘frolics’, where women met to sew a quilt for a wedding. Tracy Chevalier suggested in a recent interview that her fans rush through her books ‘to see what happens’. There will be plenty of takers for this latest, and almost certainly more converts, given the subject matter – quilting. But it would be a mistake to read The Last Runaway at speed, as it is full of small, crucial nuances easily missed by anything other than close reading and it improves immeasurably after a shaky start. Chevalier made her own quilt in the course of her research, and describes her heroine Honor Bright’s sewing lovingly and sympathetically.
Honor is defi ned by the brilliance of her handiwork. A Quaker from 1850s Bridport, she is modest and demure, as befits her religion. A broken engagement propels her to America, accompanying sister Grace to join her fiancé in Ohio. The arduous sea crossing leaves Honor sick in heart and body and, when Grace quickly succumbs to yellow fever and dies, Honor finds herself alone in a land that feels alien in every conceivable way.
The colour yellow is woven throughout; in the jaundiced face of Honor’s friend, gruff milliner Belle, in the fl attering bonnet Belle makes her and in the corn, a staple crop on the farm where Honor settles after marriage. Honor’s compassion for the runaway slaves she tries to help compromises her marriage, her honour and causes her to question her faith. Belle’s brother, brooding Darcyesque Donovan, slave hunter and potential love interest, and the indomitable Mrs Reed, conduit for escaping slaves, are memorable characters, as is Honor.
Were this book to be filmed, it would be as great a success as Chevalier’s Girl With A Pearl Earring.
MUST READ
Victorians in America
OH MY AMERICA! by Sara Wheeler (Jonathan Cape, £18.99; offer price, £14.99)Sara Wheeler is a travel writer best known for her books on Arctic exploration. Her latest, however, eschews the frozen north for a glimpse into the lives of six middle-aged British women who left England in the 19th century to embark on new lives in America. Rebecca Burlend, who left Yorkshire in 1831 with a husband, five children and £100, to start a new life in Illinois; Fanny Trollope, mother of novelist Anthony; the actress Fanny Kemble; Isabella Bird the explorer; social commentator Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen’s niece, Catherine Hubback. The stories of these feisty women are set against the newly emerging country of America; its steamboats, railroads and churches, springing up from the wilderness – an incongruous collection of mature women in an embryonic society. Their situation is echoed by Wheeler herself, who, while travelling across America in her heroines’ footsteps, is undergoing her own midlife crisis in the form of her 50th birthday. A terrific book.
PAPERBACKS
LOVE IS BLIND by Kathy Lette (Black Swan, £1), A SEA CHANGE by Veronica Henry (Orion, £1), WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE by Simon Kernick (Arrow, £1)Love Is Blind is a satirical validation of the proverb ‘beauty is only skin deep’, which is depicted through the polarity of two feuding sisters: one is beautiful and successful, the other unprepossessing and alone. This novella brims with a glut of mordant wit, hyperbole and acerbic repartee. A Sea Change also explores the currents of feeling and vicissitudes of life when two people meet in a wave of unfortunate circumstances. And, if romantic pursuit doesn’t get you, the macabre enactment of the thrill of the chase in Wrong Time, Wrong Place will have you pacing through the book as quickly as the characters are racing for their lives.
Cara Purvis
ALYS, ALWAYS by Harriet Lane (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £7.99; offer price, £7.59)
Frances is a sub-editor on The Questioner. One night she comes across a car wreck and comforts the dying woman inside. When the wealthy family asks about the victim’s last moments, Frances twists the events to her gain, revealing the worst in us all.
Victoria Clark
ALSO PUBLISHED…
GREAT BALES OF FIRE by Malcolm Castle (Orion, £14.99; offer price, £12.99)
A LATE BEGINNER by Priscilla Napier (Slightly Foxed, £10; offer price, £9.50)
A child’s-eye view of Egypt roughly a century ago. Napier’s father, Sir William Hayter, was legal and fi nancial adviser to the Egyptian government during the Protectorate, so she grew up in pre-war Egypt, transported each summer back to Edwardian Britain. First written in 1966, this reprint of the original memoir is a treat.
WORTHY WOMEN
Courageous captivePhyllis Thom: one of 101 great women profiled in a new book. By Clare Russell
Phyllis Mary Erskine Briggs was born in Bexhill-on-Sea in 1908. She trained as a nurse in Manchester and at King’s College London. Her passion for travel took her to Malaya where she worked as a sister in a hospital at Kedah in the Malay Peninsula. When the Japanese invaded in 1941, she was first evacuated to Singapore, and then put on a cargo ship that was captured by the Japanese. Dumped in Sumatra, she had no food or water for 24 hours before being marched to her first prison camp.
Together with hundreds of other women and young children, Phyllis was held prisoner for three-and-a-half years, nearly dying from illness and subjected to hunger, cruelty, hardship and indignity. She used her medical training to help nurse her fellow prisoners, managing to buy medicines from her guards with pieces of hidden jewellery, hidden in her headscarf.
When she finally left camp on 26 August 1945, weighing only six stone, she was airlifted to New Zealand to recuperate. In 1946, she went back to Malaya to work as a nurse. A year later, she married Robbie Clifton Thom, who became head of the Malayan Police Special Branch. When he died in 1967, Phyllis retired to Bournemouth, where she became a volunteer for Barnardos. She died at the age of 100 in 2008.
The BBC programme Tenko and the film Paradise Road were