The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Italy: The Midwife Of Venice by Roberta Rich

Roberta Rich’s debut historical novel, The Midwife of Venice, is a page turner. Whether that is an unquestionable merit depends on the preferences of the reader. The narrative has the quality of a folk-tale quest in that the series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles thrown in the paths of the underdog heroine and hero are invariably overcome by the same through cleverness and luck. In the last two-thirds the narrative never stops to catch its breath, and anti-Semitism, death, and slavery become a blur against the race-against-time of the separated couple to puzzle out the next challenge so they can be re-united. Still, absorbing details of sixteenth-century midwifery abound, the descriptions of life in Venice and Malta are savoury, the plot is mildly suspenseful, and the characters engaging. The Midwife Of Venice is a simpler story than its trappings suggest, but its warm-hearted energy gives it a rosy glow.

 

1575. The reputation of Hannah Levi as a midwife of outstanding skill leads to a midnight call for help from an unexpected source. The Contessa di Padovani is in labour and hovering between life and death, and Hannah is the Conte’s last hope for delivering an heir and, if possible, saving his wife. The request is illegal, however: as a Jew, Hannah is forbidden, on pain of torture and death, to administer medical treatment to Christians. But the reward the Conte offers is too consequential to dismiss: enough money to ransom Hannah’s husband, who has been captured and sold into slavery.

Isaac Levi’s lost his life savings when mercenaries in the service of the Knights of Malta attacked his ship and put him on the auction block. The inhospitable island of Malta offers few options for survival, and every day he manages to stay alive only pushes him closer to becoming a galley slave, a brutal fate that means certain death.

When greed and prejudice intervene, threatening the lives of not only Isaac and Hannah but the entire Jewish population of the Ghetto of Venice, desperate measures are required.

 

Three days after finishing The Midwife Of Venice I am having difficulty recollecting the details of the story. I bought the book purely on the basis of its settings and Jewish characters, having only a dim impression of the plot. The novel turned out to be popular historical fiction of the spare but atmospheric type, with an unfussy plot and plenty of suspenseful hooks and cliffhanger chapter endings that encourage speed-reading at the expense of reflection. I found it to be the fiction equivalent of chocolate, and while I enjoyed the book while it lasted I am now a little regretful that so many of the calories I consumed proved empty.

 

On the positive side, The Midwife Of Venice fulfills the first criterion of historical fiction: to transport the reader to another time and place. The story develops out the setting with deceptive effortlessness, fresh and believable at the same time. The senses are excited by sights and smells and textures as the author possesses a flair for conjuring up the physical surroundings inhabited by her characters with robust, deft strokes: the greasy waters and slimy steps of the canals, the sound of the Maltese dialect – “all spongy vowels and harsh fricatives”; the exertion of hauling a cart you are harnessed to in place of a draught animal when you are weak from starvation. The conflict between Jewish and Christian practices and beliefs round out a full and convincing portrayal of Renaissance midwifery, and Hannah and Isaac movingly embody the fears and vulnerability of Jewish protagonists in a Christian world where the two groups are essentially strangers to each other, and where the superstitions of the period exacerbate dark suspicions about each other’s race and religion.

 

It is a climate of otherness and repression that breeds dangers from one’s own people almost as easily as from traditional enemies. When Hannah chooses love and compassion over law and safety, the cost of the consequences becomes at once different and steeper than anything she could have foreseen. It is here that I most missed the depth and substance that could have turned a good story into an outstanding one, in this painful intersection of individual morals versus responsibility toward the common good, and personal faith versus religious and secular law. Fear and suffering and violence swirl heavily around Hannah, but she seems, if not unconcerned, then remarkably unscathed by their weight except on the level of pounding pulses, aching hearts, and sweaty palms. Her ability to get herself quickly out of jams means she is never truly on her knees, never actually trapped at the mercy of forces beyond her control. While that makes for brisk storytelling, it also diminishes the emotional impact and softens what historically would have posed an acute, overpowering menace into a cozy sort of suspense where the nice guys trump evil as a matter of course. A case in point is the resolution. A principal character is presented with an unexpected fait accompli which s/he accepts and even welcomes without protest, discussion, or concern, making a narratively slack ending woefully simplistic.

 

Warning: end spoiler

After finishing the novel I went to the author’s website and found out that she is writing a sequel. Had I known about this when I began The Midwife Of Venice, it would have removed the remaining edge of real tension and shaped my view of the story into a simple puzzler about exactly how Hannah and Isaac are going to meet again. While I now know that the book is being branded as a thriller, and the mood of the first chapters of the book inclined in that direction, I have to say that the tension, despite elements that should be chilling, evaporates into adventure instead of tightening into psychological suspense.

End of spoiler

While dual storylines simultaneously follow Hannah in Venice and Isaac in Malta (with some differences in timelines), the strong contrast between the increasingly risk-filled adventures of the former and the latter’s preoccupation with the basic necessities of food and refuge means that the Maltese sections form a steadying background rhythm to the dramatic urgency of the Venitian chapters. After first being jarred by this split I gradually began to perceive it as enlivening. The stony, bleached landscape of sun-baked Malta complements the earthy language and dry humour as well as the straightforward problems and uncomplicated world view of the characters there. The elegance and grace of Venice but also its more sophisticated, insidious perils are reflected in the lifestyle of the wealthy (and stereotypical) Padovanis and the secrets, threats, and intrigues that assail Hannah from every quarter when she steals out from the night-time confines of the Ghetto Nuovo (Gheto Novo). Socially as well as physically, Venice is more fully realised than Malta, which, while getting my vote for vigorously-drawn secondary characters, is represented by dusty, nameless streets and simple, ordinary people; don’t expect the Knights to stride onto the page or to get a tour of Valletta, for example. Plotwise, their enforced separation and drastically changed circumstances prepare Isaac and Hannah for the possibility of other changes in their lives, although this growth process is outlined rather than explored.

 

A prominent plot element is predicated on the invention of obstetric forceps (pdf) or birthing spoons, as they are named in The Midwife Of Venice. Although the Chamberlen family (pdf) of doctors/male-midwives are usually credited with the invention of the modern obstetric forceps (or the rediscovery of a forgotten tool) sometime in the seventeenth century, the author suggests that the notion that Venitian midwives in this period may have used a similar birthing aid is not beyond the realm of possibility. I am inclined to agree. Islamic medicine was familiar with the use of forceps in difficult deliveries already before the tenth century, when Abul Qasim Khalaf ibn al-Abbas al-Zahrawi (Albucasis/Abulcasis) wrote his famous textbook of surgery. While these types of tongs may have been employed to pull out a dead fetus as were, it is believed, the tools illustrated in a 1554 Western tome by Jacob Rueff, why should not skilled and intelligent and pro-actively-minded midwives have considered alternative ways to reach or turn a badly positioned baby? Why should they have believed to a woman that God would condemn the manufacturing of a tool to assist them in their life-assisting trade?

 

The other point of history the plot induced me to ponder is a trifling matter unless one is interested in the geography and political relationships of the Mediterranean at this time. The year is 1575 and the author sends two Venitian-owned (this is explicitly stated) ships from Venice toward the Ottoman Empire. The first ship is Isaac’s and is attacked by mercenaries in the pay of the Knights of Malta, who drag their captives and loot back to their island. Fair enough: the Knights roamed the Mediterranean waters as privateers, and slave-trading was a profitable enterprise for everyone in the area, including the Venetians. But the second ship is destined for Constantinople yet makes a scheduled call at Malta to replenish provisions. Despite the story’s assurance that Malta was the victualling port every long-distance Mediterranean ship visited, I am doubtful. It seemed to me a case of contorting facts to suit various plot purposes. Not only is Malta out of the way, but the island of Crete, or Kingdom of Candia as it was known at this time, lies along the direct route, was the prosperous and acknowledged gate to the Eastern Mediterranean, possessed an excellent harbour (present Heraklion) and, most importantly of all, was ruled by Venice. (See, for example, Geography, Technology, And War: Studies in the maritime history of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 by John H. Pryor and Catholic pirates and Greek merchants: a maritime history of the Mediterranean by Molly Greene.) Travelling on board that second Venitian ship, furthermore, are at least one wealthy Ottoman family. I suppose it is feasible that they would not have chosen an Ottoman-owned ship, but in my mind kept playing the knowledge of the destructive Ottoman siege of Malta a decade earlier, and the Fourth Ottoman-Venetian War (a costly peace was negotiated in 1573, only two years before our story starts). There is no mention of discomfort or tension or even the slightest awareness of these hostilities, which went well beyond the merely diplomatic and continued to erupt on and off far into the future. (The Ottomans wrested Crete from the Venetians in the next century.)

 

An aspect of The Midwife Of Venice I wholeheartedly appreciated is that its characters are fictional. I enjoy the broader scope for the imagination and the unpredictability of events it allows for when compared to the restrictions imposed on the accounts of lusty love lives of queens, kings, and nobility that have hijacked the current historical fiction market. Very rarely do the latter offer insights or satisfactions for the person interested in the study of history that cannot be found and more intricately explored in scholarly works of non-fiction. Of course there are exceptions, and splendidly accomplished ones at that, which flesh out and fill in gaps and speculate with possibilities in the most gripping manner, but on the whole, unless one gains most of one’s knowledge and understanding of history from novels, it is the fictional characters who are free to surprise and take the reader to previously unvisited, unpredictable places and shed light on neglected subjects.

 

I enjoyed The Midwife Of Venice. It is an absorbing, breezy debut from a gifted storyteller whose assured handle on what makes popular fiction compelling will, I hope, develop into books with more mature (or at least less impatient!) narratives. Meanwhile, I am going to clear shelf space for Roberta Rich’s next historical yarn. I am, clearly, a chocoholic.

 

A note on the cover art, since my edition does not name the paintings: The upper picture is a detail of Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting, (Study) Head of a Woman. The colour of the scarf appears to have been manipulated to reflect the red headdresses Jews were required to wear by law. The lower picture is a painting of the Rialto Bridge on the Grand Canal; it looks like a Canaletto that has been altered.

 

Books of related interest: While it was fun looking up these reference works, some of which I plan to familiarise myself with, please note that I have only browsed through them haphazardly at the time of writing this. A Time To Be Born: Customs and Folklore of Jewish Birth by Michele Klein “draws upon a wide range of Jewish sources, from folk remedies and tales to biblical and mystical literature and reference works, to portray childbirth within a Jewish context”. Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology by Helen King examines “a range of different uses of the [Gynaeciorum libri, a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, first published in 1566] in the history of medicine from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century”. The Court Midwife by Justine Siegemund (1636-1705) – a “spokesperson for the art of midwifery at a time when most obstetrical texts were written by men” – edited and translated from German by Lynne Tatlock, “contains descriptions of obstetric techniques of midwifery and its attendant social pressures”. The Art of Midwifery: early modern midwives in Europe by Hilary Marland, “[draws] on a vast range of archival material from six countries, [showing] the diversity in midwives' practices, competence, socio-economic background and education, as well as their public function and image”before the nineteenth century; it includes a chapter on midwifery in seventeenth-century Italy by Nadia Maria Filippini. And for an exploration of the history of the obstetric forceps, try The Obstetrician's Armamentarium : Historic Obstetric Instruments and Their Inventors by Bryan Hibbard.

The Ghetto Of Venice by Ricardo Calimani and The Ghetto on the Lagoon: A Guide to the History and Art of the Venetian Ghetto by Umberto Fortis, translated by Roberto Matteoda look like sound introductions to the topic. In The Jews Of Early Modern Venice, edited by Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid, various “specialists from many fields of Jewish studies provide an introduction to the history of the ghetto of Venice and up-to-date scholarship on the subject from the perspectives of various disciplines—including political, economic, women's, institutional, social and cultural history, religious studies, and musicology”; its main focus is on the early sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, “when Jewish life in the city was at its most vigorous”. The Midwife of Venice touches only fleetingly on Jewish conversion to Christianity, but as Brian Pullan’s The Jews of Europe and the Inquisition of Venice: 1550-1670 notes, “Venice in the 16th and 17th centuries was on the frontier between Christianity and Judaism, being one of the principal points of departure from Europe to the Levant, and of re-entry from the Ottoman Empire.” The book may help shed clearer light on why the risk taken by both Hannah and the comital couple was so extremely dangerous, through his examination of “the social and political purpose of the Inquisition: its composition, procedures and legal entitlement to judge Jews. He explains the origins of the new Christians of Portugal and the neophytes of Italy, and describes those Christians who, though having no Jewish ancestry, nevertheless were attracted - at some risk to themselves - by the doctrines and customs of Judaism”.

Working Women of Early Modern Venice by Monica Chojnacka, attempts to show that “many [working women] headed households and even owned their own homes; when necessary, they also took in and supported other women of their families. Some were self-employed, while others had jobs outside the home. They often moved freely about the city to conduct business, and they took legal action in the courts on their own behalf. On a daily basis, Venetian women worked, traveled, and contested obstacles in ways that made the city their own”.

Last but not least, a list of reference works for further reading is included at the back of the Doubleday Canada 2011 trade paperback edition of The Midwife Of Venice.

This is my fourth entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.

 

France: Liszt’s Kiss by Susanne Dunlap

 

French Romanticism reached its zenith in the 1830s, an era of political revolutions and artistic re-invention. In Liszt’s Kiss by Susanne Dunlap a handful of the luminaries of that age mingle with fictional protagonists in a story of infatuation and deception in the shadow of the catastrophic cholera outbreak in Paris in the spring of 1832. A novel dressed as historical fiction with a dash of mystery, its immature and self-centred principal character frequently derails an already precarious plot into a narrative style reminiscent of Young Adult romance. Although sections that demonstrate the effects of music on the characters’ emotions contain a scene that held me spellbound, such psychological insight is not carried over to the larger story, which too often is flattened by the author limply telling the reader what characters are feeling. In the final analysis the book’s greatest mystery, to me, is how a setting so charged with dramatic opportunity can be rendered so pointless.

 

1832. When the cholera pandemic reaches Paris and sweeps away the life of her mother among its thousands of victims, seventeen year-old noblewoman Anne de Barbier-Chouant’s former courtier father locks the room in which the family piano stands and forbids Anne from practicing her music. Already locked out from his affections, Anne gratefully seizes the friendship extended by her mother’s friend, the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult, a music lover and hostess of famous salons. When the Comtesse arranges to secretly have young Hungarian virtuoso Franz Liszt become Anne’s piano teacher, the girl’s romantic imagination soars. She barely notices medical student Pierre Talon, thinking of him only as the saviour of her cousin Armand’s life.

To Pierre, however, Anne is a vision of loveliness he cannot forget as he toils day and night in the overflowing cholera wards of the Hôtel-Dieu. So when the Comtesse d’Agoult asks him for an unusual and dangerous favour for the sake of her protégée he complies, hoping it will help clear up the mystery surrounding Anne’s home and family life. For while the formerly splendid mansion is crumbling into poverty, misery, and oblivion under the despotic rule of Anne’s bitter and taciturn father, the marquis, it begins to appear as if the very lives of those who inhabit the mansion are threatened by its secrets.

 

If one is looking for a sentimental romantic drama breathlessly played out against a piquant historical background, Liszt’s Kiss may very well satisfy and indeed thrill. I have read my share and often enjoyed them, and as the name of my blog shows I have yet to tire of romantic themes. But I picked up this novel based on its claim to be “a rich evocation of a remarkable period as seen through the eyes of a sensitive young artist”, a story set “at the height of the Romantic era in Paris...with the ominous presence of Paris’s most deadly epidemic looming over every turbulent event” (back cover blurb). I hoped that the author’s past as a pianist would bring a unique dimension to her treatment of the artistic psyche and interpretation of a fascinating artistic climate. On these points the novel failed dismally to convince or compel.

 

If a story turns out to have compensations, disappointed expectations are not necessarily cause for lasting discontent. In this case, I perceived that Susanne Dunlap has plenty of raw talent that bodes well for her growth into a popular storyteller. One of her most obvious strengths is the ability to develop a complex yet neatly designed mystery plot that even far-fetched motivations and character naïvetés did not ruin for me. And when she takes her characters out of their heads and propels them into physical action she often does so with verve and a great instinct for relevant and lively detail. Happily, too, her approach to historical authenticity anchors the plot in historical reality, fleshing out the bones of her story with judiciously applied tidbits based on in-depth research. Regrettably, my appreciation and even admiration of these qualities was not enough to make this run-of-the-mill coming-of-age story that has nothing to say about the time it is set in more than periodically enjoyable.

 

When the cholera pandemic reached France in early 1832 it struck a country that was already in turbulence from food shortages and rising costs due to years of failed harvests and other economic factors. A revolution two years earlier had replaced the newly restored Bourbon monarchy with another, more populist branch which favoured the bourgeoisie and was bitterly resented by republicans and Legitimists (supporters of the Bourbons) alike. Abroad, France fought for an increased share in the colonial onslaughts, and orientalism captured the imaginations of people at home. Artists and intellectuals, too, were in transition, breaking the bonds that formerly had defined them as servants of the aristocracy and re-inventing themselves as free entrepreneurs. The Romantics espoused the idea of “art for art’s sake” and saw genius in originality and individuality. It was a period where extraordinary creative vitality, extravagance, and eccentricity mingled with social and political instability and violence. Meanwhile, Paris retained a mediaeval, maze-like, damp and unsanitary town plan in which sewage emptied into open street drains – in other words, perfect conditions for disease, particularly with the onset of warm weather. In the months the cholera ravaged France it claimed 100,000 victims, a fifth of them in Paris, where in April alone 13,000 people perished.

 

This, roughly, is the complex context for the Paris in which Liszt’s Kiss is set but of which the story gives only a threadbare hint. For example, the Marquis de Barbier-Chouant, Anne’s father and a Bourbon courtier, is out of favour with the new monarchy. That is literally all we learn of the political situation. When the story concludes we are in June 1832, but despite the prominence in the novel of a protagonist who is a medical student, there is not one word about the student-led uprising in Paris in the first week of June that attempted to overturn the government.

 

Doctor-to-be Pierre volunteers in a hospital and through him we see the what cholera looks like and the helplessness of a medical community that had no idea of the cause, cure for, or prevention of the disease. In the Reading Group Guide at the back of my edition (Touchstone trade paperback, 2007) it is stated that “love and death are major themes in Liszt’s Kiss”. It is true that the (off-page) death of Anne’s mother from cholera sets the story in motion, that the mystery thread involves the possibility of impending murder, and that sensitive readers may flinch at the descriptions of the cholera wards. Yet the storyline more often seems to exploit cholera as a spicy background instead of a running foreground commentary on society or death. It is correct that people continued to attend parties and charity concerts, but Parisians also left their city and country in droves – apparently, 120,000 passports were issued at the town hall. In Liszt’s Kiss, not one character cowers in their house, afraid of being infected through contact with strangers. On the contrary, less than a week after her mother’s death, Anne pouts about being shut up in the house and runs off to a concert. She goes for walks and drives during which we neither hear of nor see the epidemic. It is explained that the poor suspect they are being poisoned, for it is mainly the lower classes who are affected, and the characters discuss newspaper articles which describe mob violence against scapegoats. The characters themselves, however, never experience any of this frantic atmosphere of panic and paranoia and so for this reader “cholera” became an abstract concept that was paraded for emotional effect when the plot made it convenient but otherwise ignored.

 

But the biggest problem, to me, is the way the novel takes one of the most famous Romantics and one of the most infamous affairs of the period and reduces them to a vehicle for giving a teenager cause for puppy love angst. There is nothing wrong with choosing a narrow scope for a story – for example, the romance genre specialises in tight focus on the developing emotional relationship of a couple. But in order to give such a story substance, it is, I think, generally a good idea to delve into the chosen themes with all the more intensity and depth. The central obsession of the principal characters in Liszt’s Kiss is “love” or more accurately, infatuation and lust. The exploration of it, however, is as superficial, cool, and vague as a reflection in a foxed mirror. Likewise, we learn nothing about what the Romantics stood for, what they wanted to convey with their art, why the movement flourished at this time – even though Dunlap blends several famous names into her story: writers de Musset and Heine, painter Delacroix, musicians Liszt and Chopin, salonnière d’Agoult. These are artists and intellectuals who revolutionised the concept of art and created, debated, loved, and fought their way into the Western cultural canon. What does Dunlap have to say about them? That Liszt was able to write down other composers’ music scores from memory, that Chopin played so quietly that audiences had to strain their ears, that Musset had a flirty way with words, that Heine wrote down his impressions of the cholera-ravaged city, that Delacroix smoked opium, and that d’Agoult’s jealousies got the better of her sense of compassion. Oh, and how a pianist places her hands on the keys. Nice trivia, but far from “a rich evocation of a remarkable period”.

 

While the author has obviously conducted serious research into the aspects necessary for her mystery plot, her grasp of general details is less sure – and historical fiction purists should note that to accommodate her story, Dunlap has moved the first meeting and subsequent affair of Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult from 1833 to 1832. Carriage terminology (broughams, chariots) is off, as is attire (Anne wears hoop skirts), proper address, French etiquette including mourning etiquette, and the age at which French parents were legally able to interfere with any marriage contracted by their children. Things that raised my eyebrows include this statement: “Anne had not been in company enough to understand the subtleties of etiquette and propriety” (41). She is the daughter of a marquis, has been raised for seventeen years by a courtier father and a mother who hostesses brilliant parties and dinners, yet neither parent has instructed her in basics that every child of the nobility would have been expected to know in order not to disgrace their family? Am I to understand that, prior to the misfortunes that hit her family, she never once was introduced to a single adult acquaintance and that she failed to absorb common customs and courtesies? Apparently. As mentioned above, she attends a theatre concert within a week of her mother’s death, not even in a discreet fashion but sitting in a private box with a well-known society hostess. Then, “almost a month” later she has set off mourning and dresses for a party in “a pearl grey satin evening gown” (73). If I recall correctly, in nineteenth-century France a mother’s death called for six months of mourning, the first three in deep mourning.

 

In fact, Anne was in almost every respect a problematic character for me. With the exception of a promising start, whenever the story was told from her point of view my credulity and patience dropped several notches. Seventeen years old, she admittedly has an excuse for behaving like a hormonal teenager, but her shallowness and lack of empathy or concern for others prevented me from seeing her as the wounded character the author intended (according to the interview at the back of the book). Moreover, Anne was not the only protagonist who lost my sympathy. Their various hair-raising thoughts (179, 190) and self-serving actions left me with increased feelings of distaste and disgust for this bunch of dizzyingly callous, silly, and thin characters. I am afraid I began to see Liszt’s Kiss as a comedy of misunderstandings and deceptions that mistakes itself for grand drama, one that treats the emotional travails of its characters with such lack of insight that any chance for genuine pathos slithers into melodrama.

 

Purely for the energy, warmth, and enthusiasm he brings to the often anemic tone of the story, Franz Liszt (Liszt Ferenc(z)) was one of the saving graces of the novel for me. Twenty-one years of age, a brilliant piano player whose genius is yet to be fully discovered, the physical description of him as imposingly tall, handsome, and golden-blond reminded me more of Julian Sands’s interpretation of Liszt in the film Impromptu than of the portraits. Despite his prominence in the story Dunlap’s version of him does not extend to a multi-dimensional portrayal, but she succeeds in sketching an impassioned, reckless, and inspiring nature that makes the other characters seem pale and lifeless by comparison. In a superb scene (which I assume gave the idea for the novel’s title), Liszt is guiding Anne through an E-major study by Chopin. Had the rest of the book been written with the same power and imagination, Liszt’s Kiss would have earned a very different write-up from me. It gave me goose-flesh. I almost forgave the ludicrous plot contrivances to make Anne believe he is in love with her, which make him seem absurdly dense and irrational.

 

One of the virtues of the novel is that it pulls out Marie d’Agoult from the sidelines of history. In the interview section of the book the author says that she “didn’t want to write a fictionalized treatment” of Liszt and d’Agoult’s affair. In inventing her own version of the beginnings of their mutual attraction she does exactly that, however. Tired of Anne, I rather welcomed it. The future couple’s scenes together are on a different narrative plane from those involving Anne, and benefit from the nuances of their more mature characters. D’Agoult was an eminent salonnière who went on to create a career for herself as a reviewer and journalist, authored a remarkable history of the 1848 Revolution as well as a roman-à-clef, and familiarised French audiences with many foreign intellectuals. I thought it a pity, therefore, that Dunlap’s Marie shows no indication of the influential personage she was to become. In Liszt’s Kiss the picture of her as a salon hostess consists of directing servants regarding food and determining the order of appearance of the performers she has invited. Her intelligence, involvement in social issues, and political acumen find no place in the novel since her sole preoccupation is with her forbidden attraction for Liszt (at twenty-eight, she is married with two children). Aurore Dudevant, who in 1832 adopted her famous literary pseudonym, George Sand, does not make an appearance in the book, but Marie d’Agoult’s alleged jealousy and spitefulness against Sand have definitely left a mark on Dunlap’s in other respects compassionate portrayal of the Comtesse.

 

I suspect Pierre Talon is meant to embody the Romantic soul. I thought him a sympathetic character but distressingly naive. He falls head over heels in love with Anne at first glance and it seems there is nothing he would not do for her, including burglary and theft, simply because a stranger tells him this is necessary in order to safeguard Anne who, of course, must not know about it. Since until the end of the novel the pair do not conduct a single private conversation about anything personal I am relieved to report that I liked the way the author resolved the question of how to give their non-relationship a romantic yet believable ending. (No, that is not a plot spoiler unless I have failed to make it clear that I categorise Liszt’s Kiss as romance-y fiction, not literary fiction. In that case, I apologise.) I cannot say the same for the preposterous machinations of other characters to force a different outcome.

 

Dunlap’s prose flows smoothly but if the language is meant to evoke the mood and style of the Romantics, it did not work for me. Some of the character descriptions and phrases may well have been borrowed from actual, surviving correspondence, but expressions that perhaps sounded lyrical back then are today clichés that will only work if the context in which they are used has been carefully framed. “Her presence had been overpoweringly seductive, her eyes deep wells of mystery, tantalizingly liquid, maddeningly obscure” (84) is the kind of purple-tinged prose that detractors of old-style romances enjoy ridiculing. The romantic content displays a similar hue. The first time Anne (“unconscious of her own beauty”) sees Liszt and hears him play the sensations she experiences are suggestive of a girl abandoning herself to sexual ecstasy with a skilled lover, at the climax of which we read, “When his face turned fully in their direction and she thought she saw the smallest glimmer of a smile on it, Anne fainted” (38). Pierre is present and realises she has fainted. The reaction of this medical student is as follows: “the intensity of her response to the performance, her unself-conscious abandonment to the music, convinced him she might be in actual peril” (39). The last time I encountered anything similar in a genre romance was a 1970s Barbara Cartland book I read in my teens. (For anyone wondering, I examined the cover of Liszt’s Kiss. At the top of the back cover the word “fiction”, not “romance” or "young adult", is printed in faint capitals.) An unrelated irritation concerning technique was the author’s habit of repeating parts of the same scene from another character’s viewpoint. To me it added nothing and merely read as lazy writing.

 

In terms of general readability, I thought the novel improved considerably around the 100-page mark. The plot gains momentum as it progresses, and in the second half is often involving. When the mystery thread – which in the beginning consists mostly of Anne’s father scowling and being uncommunicative – moves to the foreground and involves the Office of Records and commissioner Gardive, I began to cheer up. Here is a character who could be developed into the hero of an interesting mystery series. He is sharp, smart, unsentimental, and unexpected, with an unusual job that promises plenty of opportunity for nosing out secrets and surprises. Team him up with Eugène Delacroix, a minor but amiable foil for Liszt in the novel, and Dunlap would have the makings of a Romantic-era historical novel I might actually relish. A few loose ends are left dangling at the end of Liszt’s Kiss, two involving Armand, Anne’s cousin, and as I have indicated before, many of the character actions and motivations are utterly nonsensical, yet overall I think Dunlap writes a much more dynamic mystery than romantic drama.

 

In summary, Liszt’s Kiss seemed to promise a lot more than it delivered. It is romantic, light historical fiction that offers nothing new, fresh, or insightful to a reader remotely familiar with the French Romantics. It wobbles awkwardly between YA fiction and adult fiction, and confuses sentimentality with emotion. Even so, there are alluring elements that persuade me Susanne Dunlap will be capable of more interesting work when she truly finds her style. This is her first novel for adults, although she has written several books for young adults. Based on Liszt's Kiss, her voice does seem more suited to a younger audience. Still, instead of writing her off as a not-for-me author, I am going to wait and see what happens when her next novel for adults comes out.

 

Books of related interest: Marie d’Agoult’s novel Nélida is said (I have not yet read it) to be a thinly disguised memoir of her relationship with Franz Liszt. French Salons: High Society And Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 by Steven Kale has a self-explanatory title; it is academic and dry but informative. For a novel that explores the effect on the French populace of the 1832 cholera epidemic in much more complex fashion, see Jean Giono’s The Horseman On The Roof (Le Hussard Sur Le Toit), set in Provence. For biographies of d’Agoult and Liszt, Dunlap’s suggested reading list includes Alan Walker’s Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years and The Life Of Marie d’Agoult, alias Daniel Stern by Phyllis Stock-Morton.

 

Films of related interest: One of the best-known films about the Romantics is Impromptu, which paints Marie d’Agoult as petty, insecure, and insignificant. Still, it is a witty comedy I always enjoy very much, especially for Judy Davis’s humorous but unexpectedly touching portrayal of George Sand and her pursuit of Chopin (a very young Hugh Grant). In the passionately emotional and sensual The Children Of The Century (Les Enfants Du Siècle) by Diane Kurys, Juliette Binoche gives a more independent, more intense interpretation of Sand, this time through the author’s stormy relationship with Alfred de Musset (the poet who appears a few times in Liszt’s Kiss). A Song To Remember is Chopin à la 1940s Hollywood – an amusing, romanticised, glittering Technicolor production with a huffy Kalkbrenner, a gracious but forgettable Liszt (Stephen Bekassy), and an unrecognisable Sand (Merle Oberon), poised, elegant, and destructively seductive; Marie d’Agoult is nowhere to be found, alas. Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s adaptation of Giono’s novel (above), also titled The Horseman On The Roof, is a swashbuckling French adventure-romance that pairs Binoche and Olivier Martinez as a married noblewoman and a gallant Italian exile who join forces to break through quarantine barriers and escape the 1832 cholera epidemic. It is one of my favourite films.

 

This is my third entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.

 

The Ghost And Mrs. Muir by Josephine Leslie

 

Having pleasant but vague memories of the film version featuring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison, I snapped up Josephine Leslie’s The Ghost And Mrs. Muir on a whim (originally published in 1945 under the pseudonym R.A. Dick). The paperback edition is about as slim as novels come, and the story, a very readable humorous fantasy, is not much beefier. Famous for the charm of the crisp exchanges between widow Lucy Muir and ghostly Captain Daniel Gregg, the book also offers some surprises: an unsentimental, individualistic assessment of motherhood and a single-minded rejection of the perceived necessity to become a useful member of larger society.

 

To assert her independence after years of submitting herself to the meddlesomeness of others, recently widowed Lucy Muir decides to move with her young daughter Anna and son Cyril to the little coastal resort of Whitecliff. Situated at the edge of green, rolling country that slopes down to the sea, neglected Gull Cottage meets the requirements both of her meagre purse and her longing for solitude. But although the grey stone house has stood vacant for years the real estate agent is curiously reluctant to let it to “a single lady”.

An amateurish but impertinent portrait, an improbably clean brass telescope in the main bedroom, and an uncooperative gas stove are Lucy’s introduction to the irascible sea captain who is believed to have committed suicide here years ago. Haunted or not, the house is exactly what Lucy wants and she refuses to be bullied any longer – especially by a rude-tempered ghost who does not possess the common decency to move on and leave earthly matters to the living.

Neither Lucy nor Captain Daniel Gregg fully grasps the significance of the friendship that buds between them until well-intentioned interference causes a rift of silence that brings a new kind of loneliness to them both.

 

Although The Ghost And Mrs. Muir follows Lucy Muir from her mid-thirties to the end of her life as a grandmother the reader is given few external clues to mark the passing of time. The seasons change, the children grow up, dogs succeed each other, and Lucy ages, but despite minor adjustments in definitions of  modesty or progressiveness, the outside world remains as static as a painting. The mention of cars and mourning attire in the first chapter lets us know we are in the early twentieth century, an England with Beatrice stoves and later, careers for women, but an illusory place, too, from which wars and the Depression are conspicuously absent. This is a fairytale for adults, and an entertaining one at that.

 

The snappy dialogue and comedic interaction between Lucy Muir and the ghost of Daniel Gregg are the stars of the story. The humour is offset by, as Lucy phrases it, “this problem called life”, a shadowy counterpoint that lends the light-hearted drama variety and moments of melancholy and poignancy. Josephine Leslie’s prose has a cheery vintage quality, and particularly in passages that describe nature her imagery shines: “On the beach below the sea was coming in with crested green waves, curving over like powerful steel springs before they shattered themselves in a flurry of white, swirling broth, that sucked and dragged at the grey pebbles, rattling the loose stones back into the hidden engine of the seas” (67).

 

Like many stories, The Ghost And Mrs. Muir can be read on several levels. The most common, I assume, is the straightforward, amusing, occasionally touching tale of two people meant for each other but divided by an unusual obstacle. That is the book I thought I was reading when some of the elements on the way to the last chapter made stumble, pause, and mull. Please be warned that what follows does contain spoilers here and there for anyone who is unfamiliar with the film.

 

I have seen The Ghost And Mrs. Muir labelled as a classic romance, and no doubt it has inspired authors of modern genre fiction. However, while the ending fulfills the conventions of a love story the frank, brisk banter that characterises Lucy and Daniel’s friendship exhibits neither flirtatiousness nor dewy-eyed romanticism. Passionate love does make a guest appearance but the couple in question is not Mrs. Muir and Captain Gregg. The affection between the latter is shown through their companionship, which supports Lucy through the ups and downs of life and mellows Daniel into becoming less selfish and more of a benefactor, but its progress into something deeper is implied, not described outright. The film (1947 trailer) may differ; I cannot recall clearly, but my sense is that it relies a good deal on heightened melodrama and gothic fantasy whereas the book’s mood is more down-to-earth. In the novel, romanticism is not merely under-played: true love is decidedly anti-romantic.

 

Indeed, in the novel romantic love is full of discontent, pain, and repression, and it is questionable whether one is better off for having loved in such a way. The disembodied voice of Captain Gregg seems to underscore that bodily passions, sexual fulfillment, and mortal love have nothing on spiritual affinity. For unlike the film version, the novel’s Lucy cannot see Daniel except in a dream; there are no spectral visions of him floating about to accompany his mischievousness or roared expletives.

 

This leads me to an imbalance in their relationship that never ceased to bother me. Whereas Lucy can only hear Daniel, he is able to both see and hear her as well as access her thoughts. He does so, too, indiscriminately. Initially disconcerted by the conversations he carries on with her in her head, she pays a visit to a psychoanalyst in case she is losing her mind. Paradoxically, while an intensely private person in all her other dealings, Lucy never attempts to block him from her mind, to forbid him from listening to her thoughts or reprove him for “eavesdropping”. A combination of the sensible and the wistful, she seems simply to accept that she is an open book to him, whereas he comments that she is “nice-minded”, and so the narrator appears to imply that the situation is fine because Lucy has nothing to hide or be ashamed of. If anything, this state of affairs is made out to be a convenience since the two can communicate without any outsider being aware of it. Lucy’s inability to reciprocate, to pounce on Daniel’s thoughts unawares or have him at her beck and call is not discussed. And so he joins her in her bedroom in the evenings, on one occasion, when she is undressing and protests at his presence, explaining that ghosts do not react to matters of the flesh in the way mortals do, after he has just complimented her on her figure. His habit of bursting in on her unannounced allows for none of the barriers she puts up against the rest of the world, but the loss of such boundaries is not mutual.

 

This one-sided aspect of their communication style is further accentuated when during their separation from each other Lucy does not reach out and try to re-establish contact with Daniel. She proves the kind of female protagonist who, figuratively speaking, waits for the man to call. She is so entirely passive that I actually began to wonder whether she had genuinely lost interest in him. When Daniel of his own accord decides to “return” after an absence of many years, however, she appears to simply accept that, too. Of course, one could point to the issue of scarred emotions in this context and draw an inference that she is protecting herself by maintaining a distance. If so, I would wish for a turning point, some sort of catharsis or emotional insight that explains what has changed for her and made the subsequent reconciliation possible, but that is not forthcoming.

 

Then again, Lucy Muir is not one to volunteer information about herself. She abhors conflict, which is the reason that in the past she chose to submit rather than fight. Burnt by a marriage during which she stifled her own wishes and desires in order to cope with in-laws and their acquaintances, she craves the peace of mind that she can only find in solitude. Unwilling to conform with the strictures of society, she declines all social life and feels no need to make friends, silently rebelling against her sister-in-law’s insistence that a healthy social life is the mark of a well-adjusted individual. The times in her life during which she is drawn into social activities are shown as periods of dull, weary resignation. Because The Ghost And Mrs. Muir came out in 1945, the question that poses itself is whether wartime traumas/losses  influenced the shaping of Lucy and indeed the story itself.

 

She also keeps her true feelings and thoughts about almost everything a secret from her children, even after they have grown into adults, particularly careful to betray nothing of her inner self to her supercilious son. When the adult Anna surprises her with an unexpected revelation Lucy likewise keeps mum and refrains from sharing a similar confidence. This reticence about oneself in front of one’s children may well have been typical of Lucy’s generation, but on the other hand Lucy’s relationship with Cyril and Anna seems as problematic to her as any other. The narrator does not attempt to varnish Lucy’s ambivalence about motherhood. She loves them both and dutifully tries to treat them equally, but is guiltily aware of her clear preference for one and uncertain whether she even likes the other very much. A mother hen she is not, and her reclusive tendencies wage a fight against a romanticised image of motherhood, one which lays down that children should be the sum total of a woman’s life. (The later mention that she has become a grandmother merely marks a stage in her life; the subject itself is left untouched.) Life has taught her that meddling causes more harm than good and while she is reluctant to interfere in the lives of her children she is even more adamant that they shall not be allowed to interfere in hers. She wonders if she is selfish, because she“[wants] to set nothing and no one right”, her greatest contentment coming from being left to lead her life in peace and privacy.

 

Although events in The Ghost And Mrs. Muir are portrayed from Lucy’s perspective and she is at once sensible and sensitive, making her character interesting as well as sympathetic, I sometimes felt the author’s treatment of the contradictory forces in her nature were portrayed with a superficiality that made her seem strangely wan. At the end of the book she seems unchanged; one can chart no growth arc for her. I also did not get the sense that this is a woman in charge of her life, but rather someone who restlessly scrambles to live life as she wishes but depends on the charitable impulses of others to be able to do so. For example, it is Daniel who comes up with money schemes aimed at supporting her financial independence. Lucy does not develop the confidence to frankly and honestly stand up to the demands of others; the only way she seems to be able to retain control over her life is by relying on secretiveness, evasiveness, and, if all else fails, stubbornness.

 

In Daniel Gregg Josephine Leslie takes another ordinary character, a sea captain of indeterminate age but certainly no longer young, and turns him into a figure to reckon with. He brings an energy to the story that falters in sections where he is absent, notably the less taut, more episodic, latter half of the book. For all his saltiness and ostensible spurning of conservative morality, I would argue that he is the much more conventional character of the two, a predictably alpha male who takes command, is goal-oriented, overbearing, and protective. There would be no story without him, but, as is obvious from this post, it is Lucy’s more nuanced personality that provoked me to think between the smiles and chuckles.

 

The narrative of The Ghost And Mrs. Muir turns inward, away from the world to not simply a domestic sphere but a fiercely defended private space. The rooms in Gull Cottage are dwelt on in detail, with their furnishing arrangements and rearrangements; elsewhere, too, furniture and “home” are recurring motifs. (Lucy's husband was an unsuccessful architect.) The house appears to be located on the South Downs, surrounded by beautifully described countryside and overlooking the sea. Lucy’s interactions with the outside world are extremely stressful to her, and interestingly, this fraught relationship seems to extend to the natural landscape, too. She battles weeds, a freshly dug burrow collapses over her dog, and a wood cascading with bluebells becomes the scene of corruption and pain. Whenever she needs consolation or reassurance she runs back to the comforts of her cottage instead of seeking out nature. Curiously, we never see her in physical communication with the sea. She is neither shown boating nor swimming, and even observes her children playing down by the shore from a lookout point in her garden wall. If the sea/ocean symbolises freedom, life, uncontrollable forces, the unknown, what does it say about Lucy, who chooses to live by the sea but to the end seems reluctant to step outside her cottage (Daniel’s former home), and her relationship with Daniel, who has navigated the world? Is The Ghost And Mrs. Muir really the story of how a recluse finds an alliance that allows her to be happy without ever really going outside herself?

 

When I began reading The Ghost And Mrs. Muir I assumed it would be a cosy diversion that could not possibly leave me with sufficient stimulation to compose a full-length post. I love it when books take me by surprise, and this one certainly did. As for the actual story, I did not enjoy it quite as unreservedly as the initial chapters led me to believe I would, but I was entertained and liked Josephine Leslie's writing style well enough to know I will want to reread the book one day.

 

This is my first entry in Bookworm's inspiringly inclusive Romance Reading Challenge.

 

Excerpt

(Pocket Books paperback, 1974, p.14-15):

 

“‘lI’m beginning to think that there’s something very odd about this house,’ said Lucy slowly.

‘Then in that case there’s no point in going upstairs,’ said Mr. Coombe in a relieved voice. ‘I knew it wouldn’t suit you.’

‘But it does suit me!’ said Lucy. ‘It’s exactly the house I want. But there’s something funny about it, and I mean to find out what it is even if you won’t tell me.’

Without a word Mr. Coombe turned and led the way upstairs. A bathroom and three bedrooms opened onto the square landing above. The back bedrooms were simply furnished under the usual coat of dust, and the front room with the big bow-window was arranged with equal simplicity. There were blue rugs on the stained wood floor, an iron bedstead, a chest of drawers, a cupboard, a large wicker armchair in front of the gas stove, and three pictures of sailing ships on the white-washed wall. What took the eye in this room, and held it, was a brass telescope standing on a tripod in the window, glittering in the afternoon sun.

Lucy stared at this object and stared at it again. She had seen telescopes before. What was there then so strange about this one? True, they were not usually considered necessary as furnishings to a bedroom, but after all the late occupant had been a sea captain, and to a sea captain a telescope, even in retirement, might be as comforting as a favourite violin to an old violinist. No, there was something about this particular telescope that had hit her sight with almost physical violence as soon as she had entered the room.

‘Of course,’ she said aloud, ‘you are clean!’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the startled Mr. Coombe.

Lucy scarcely heard him. Another sound seemed to be filling the room and her ears, a deep rich chuckle. She glanced at Mr. Coombe, but that young man was certainly in no laughing mood. He had flushed to the roots of his thin fair hair and was staring at her; his pale eyes seemed to swim out at her, more than ever like a fish in a glass bowl, from behind his thick lenses.

‘Come,’ he said hoarsely and, seizing her arm, hustled her out of the room, down the stairs, and from the house, before she had time to protest.

‘I thought so!’ said Lucy as he helped her into the car and climbed in himself. ‘The house is haunted.’

‘I didn’t want to show it to you – you would see it,’ said Mr. Coombe, and stepping on the accelerator, he sent the car forward feverishly.”

 

Mauritius: Georges by Alexandre Dumas

 

Even now, outside of romances such as the historicals by Beverly Jenkins, it is hard to imagine a novel being written about a man of colour leading a slave rebellion and courting a white woman in the nineteenth-century colonies without the author feeling compelled to formulate a tragic or at least cynical ending. But with the publication of Georges in 1843 Alexandre Dumas, whose paternal grandmother had been a plantation slave in Haiti (then Saint Domingue) and whose father had been sold into slavery at the same time but rose to become a Napoleonic general, managed to subvert literary expectations without re-writing history. Despite its less polished technical handling and potential vulnerability to criticism based on modern values, Georges in its own, astonishing way is as rousing a feat as any of Dumas’s best-known works, and deserves the same classic status.

 

1824. After a fourteen-year absence, Georges Munier returns to the Indian Ocean island he left as a child. Now a wealthy man of the world, the ribbon of the Légion d’honneur pinned to his lapel, he is at first unrecognisable to the islanders, who take him for a British or French aristocrat. But Georges quickly realises that while he has changed, Mauritius has not. Racial prejudice remains the bane of his family and all people of colour. The only difference is that Georges is now equipped to battle it, and he intends to do so with all means at his disposal.

What he had not foreseen is that he falls in love with Sara de Malmédie, a white woman who happens to belong to the family of his greatest enemies.

 

During the 1840s, Alexandre Dumas “wrote [and collaborated on] forty-one novels, twenty-three plays, seven historical works and half a dozen travel books” (Robin Buss in his introduction to The Count Of Monte Cristo, Penguin Classics, 1996, p. viii). The Three Musketeers was published in 1844 and in the same year The Count of Monte Cristo began appearing in serialised form. Their renown have ensured a regular succession of translations into English, a tribute not afforded every work Dumas produced. Tina A. Kover’s 2007 translation of Georges, a novel that originally came out a year before the two aforementioned books, remedies a particularly glaring omission. My hardcover edition (The Modern Library) contains a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid and an informative introduction and notes by editor Werner Sollors.

 

Fans of Alexandre Dumas (such as myself) probably need no encouragement to pick up Georges. For others, particularly those unfamiliar with nineteenth-century literature, it is worth bearing in mind that Georges is a historical text that hints at changing perceptions but does not reflect modern western values. In the context of Dumas’s own time, however, Georges remains progressive. Even today, it is fairly easy to recognise that the plot and topic are admirable for their time and in fact still retain a good amount of freshness. Nevertheless, approached with modern, post-colonial sensibilities, the non-egalitarian attitudes and assumptions displayed by the story do have power to offend. For example, Kover’s translation acknowledges that terms which in Dumas’s time were considered standard grate on modern ears: perhaps because the issue of “mixed blood” is crucial in the story – Georges Munier and his family belong to this group – the word “mulatto” (“mulâtre”) has been retained, whereas “nègres” in most instances becomes “blacks”.

 

Whether one considers the treatment of racial topics in Georges controversial or stimulating, the ambiguous nature of the narrative certainly raises a lot more questions than it answers. The following passage provides a lively starting point: “Fate had reunited the family made up of a man who had spent his entire life suffering from prejudice against color, a man who made his living by exploiting it, and a man who was ready to die fighting it” (125). The men in question are the Munier family: Pierre (father of Georges), a discriminated-against free man of colour who is a wealthy slave owner in his own right; Jacques, (brother of Georges), a corsair turned Indian Ocean slave trader; and Georges, highly educated and well-travelled, a decorated war hero, light-skinned enough to pass for white, and determined to crush prejudice or die in the attempt.

 

Does not this dynamic seem the perfect set-up for lots of angst-filled family drama? But in fact the opposite is the case: even as the world around them comes crashing down, the Muniers calmly pull together, unfailingly loving and loyal to each other. Jacques, for example, is cast as a humane merchant and loveable rogue, to boot. Throughout the story Dumas throws out similar challenges to modern reader expectations by generally avoiding to politicise and moralise. In presenting his characters he explains their point-of-view and motivations, but beyond that he neither defends nor indicts them, letting the character actions supply the rest. Of Jacques he writes, “As for his view of the trade he practiced, he saw it as a perfectly legal business. He had witnessed blacks being bought and sold all his life; it was, he believed, the natural state of things – what they were made for” (135).

 

Thus, while the reader may ask how Georges can lead a slave rebellion without choosing to interfere with his father’s slave ownership and in actual fact going as far as assisting him in illegally purchasing more slaves to improve plantation efficiency, the omniscient narrator praises slave owners who treat their human property with kindness and fairness. Georges vows to take revenge on the whites who perpetuate an oppressive system but while he grieves about his brother’s slave trading, is never shown to try to steer him away from it. The racial injustices and prejudice against mulattoes are eloquently denounced while at the same time blacks, with the exception of Arabs, are spoken of by Georges and the narrator as being hard-working and excelling at “savage” pursuits such as tracking but nonetheless possessing limited capabilities and intelligence. The narrative implies, for example, that black slaves are constitutionally unable to choose liberty over alcohol when offered the choice. The obvious but uncomfortable follow-up question, whether it is education or blood that makes this supposed difference in the world of Georges, is not aired.

 

And yet where Alexandre Dumas is concerned it would be foolish to jump to conclusions too swiftly. Born in France in 1802, the same year that Napoleon Bonaparte reinstated slavery after The First Republic had terminated it in 1794, he presumably encountered racial prejudice in everyday life, but at least outwardly and in his writings handled it with aplomb. An episode described in Alexandre Dumas Ou Les Aventures d'Un Romancier (by Christian Biet, Jean-Paul Brighelli, and Jean-Luc Rispail, Gallimard, 1986) has the author being accosted by a hostile person in a salon. This man challenges him to a debate about “negroes” and persons of colour, saying Dumas must know the subject intimately because of “all that black blood flowing in your veins”. Dumas replies: “But of course. My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a negro [actually, his grandmother], and my great-grandfather an ape. You see, Monsieur, my family tree commences at the point where yours ends.” In Georges he writes, “The same sort of thing happens every day in the colonies. Brought up from infancy to regard white men as a superior breed, Pierre Munier had allowed his proud spirit to be crushed without even attempting to resist. He was fearless under a hail of musket shot, but cowered when faced with the prejudice of the whites” (29).

 

Nor was Georges the first literary instance of Dumas raising the subject of the slave trade (Although France banned the slave trade in 1815, it was not until 1848 that all slavery was finally abolished from France and its colonies). Nelly Schmidt notes that already four years prior he had written about it in Le Capitaine Pamphile, serialised in Le Siècle (see Abolitionnistes De l'Esclavage Et Réformateurs Des Colonies: 1820-1851 : Analyse Et Documents, Karthala, 2000, p. 111 n. 51). Also, according to Lawrence C. Jennings, Dumas expressed his support for La Revue Des Colonies, an abolitionist journal owned and run by blacks. However, although throughout his life he seems to have advocated justice and various social reforms, my personal impression is that after the revolutionary fervour of his youth – he participated in the July Revolution of 1830 – he sought to balance change with peace and order. His contemporaries, at least in the colonies, seem to have been impressed by his reputation and intellect as well as his moderate republicanism: in 1849/50, two electoral committees in the French colony of Guadeloupe proposed naming Dumas as a candidate for the “party of order”, represented by the colonists, against the forces of “anarchy” (Schmidt, 112).

 

Interestingly, despite his family connection with Haiti Dumas chose not to set his story in the location of the one successful revolt that led to the establishment of a state governed by former slaves. (The rebels in Georges reference the Haitian success more than once.) I can only speculate about the reasons. Perhaps it was to keep readers in anxious suspense about the hero’s ultimate fate, since the fact that Mauritius in 1824 remained in the hands of slave-owning colonials would seem to pre-ordain that even a fictional slave rebellion must be doomed? (Britain, which had seized Mauritius – then Île de France – from the French in 1810 (an event described in Georges), formally ended slavery on the island in 1835.)  Perhaps Haiti was still a sensitive issue in Dumas’s France despite the Franco-Haitian accord of 1825, yet he perceived both the necessity and breathing room for racial discourse? (By comparison, Dumas’s compatriot Victor Hugo set his early novel Bug-Jargal during the Haitian revolution; to this day, reviewers continue to disagree over whether it incites racial hatred or is a paean to liberty.) Perhaps Dumas wished to avert the risk that his contribution to the debate about abolition would be hijacked by charges of bias due to his Haitian heritage?

 

Whatever the answer, he evidently deemed it prudent to ensure that Georges Munier, his slave-rebellion-leader hero, is one of the least flawed protagonists imaginable. Indeed, if he has a genuine flaw it is that his near-inhuman perfection leads him into haughtiness that to me seemed rather self-congratulatory and at times quite belligerent. Possessed of a thirst for justice and driven to overcome his childhood weakness of body he unceasingly tests his will and courage until, finally, he begins to think he has bested even God. The way the character is written makes him somewhat impenetrable and wooden, and despite the love he professes for his family and Sara I saw less than I hoped of the generosity and frank kindness that are so typical of Dumas’s characters. Georges is not nearly as diabolical in his need for revenge as the scheming Monte Cristo, but neither is his characterisation half as complex. The plot, however, bestows on him a role more revolutionary than almost anything I have read in nineteenth-century literature, and that assures both the highest interest in him and heartfelt cheers. A European-educated free man of colour in the colonies, Georges, like Claire de Duras's Ourika, finds that he no longer fits into any society he knows. What makes him and this novel so spectacular is that (unlike Ourika) Georges rejects victimhood and takes action to create a society that fits him.

 

Any lingering problems I experienced with the novel have mainly to do with the circumstance that it is less technically polished than some of Dumas’s more famous works. The structure is disjointed, the pacing all over the place, tutor-like commentary sometimes overwhelms the relatively brief story like an ill-fitting frame, and some key characters are types that exhibit more drama than depth. At times my emotional engagement foundered on flat characters and episodes that felt like theatrical set-pieces, and then the main things that kept me going were a sense of loyalty to the author and intellectual curiosity about his intentions. Only in the last third of the book did everything begin to flow for me, the narrative tautening into a heart-pounding, action-filled, cohesive adventure that reminded me vividly of why Dumas père is one of my favourite authors. The ending, alas, can only be described as abrupt, of the type that makes a reader turn a page, confused, thinking a page or two must have gone missing.

 

Even so, the novel packs a tremendous amount of entertainment into its 290 pages. Not only does it combine social drama with swashbuckling adventure; it is also a love story. Granted, the mutual attraction between Georges and the Creole Sara de Malmédie, rich orphan niece of an enemy of the Munier family, is of the take-the-author’s-word-for-it, love-at-first-glance sort. But in view of the history of multi-cultural love relations the outcome of theirs seems hopelessly bleak, for have not we readers also been trained to expect a wholesome measure of tragedy in “good” literature? Nicknamed the Rose of the rivière Noire (Black river), Sara as a character is too ideally conceived to be much more than a symbol, but with what little she is given she manages to show a gratifyingly steely spine and a sense of justice that matches that of Georges.

 

Dumas brings together a vast, international cast of ethnic groups that reflect the island’s trade ties with Asia and geographical position near Africa’s eastern coast as well as the colonial rivalry between France and Great Britain. Again, many characters are mere types, such as Miko-Miko, the Chinese peddler who facilitates messages between the lovers. Some manage to transcend the stereotyping, like the noble Laïza, a slave from Anjouan (now part of The Comoros), without whom the story would lose much of its emotional poignancy. The character who to me seems most severely short-changed, however, is Lord Murray. The (fictional) British governor, a consummate gentleman, it is through his friendship that Georges gains entry into and – during some of the most intense moments in the book – at least temporary acceptance in the highest echelon of Mauritian society. On one hand, the storyline leads Lord Murray in the only logical direction, and I do understand the point of Dumas’s very deliberate plot resolution; on the other, the treatment he undergoes is brusque and feels like an emotionally unfair let-down (insert selfish grumble) when compared to how some of the villains of the story fare.

 

Finally, Dumas excels at scenic description. The opening sequence expertly transported me to his imaginary Mauritius and I remained absolutely enchanted by the sights and smells. The landscape, people, and customs of Dumas’s island setting owe their sumptuous detail to careful research, including (according to Sollors) help from a Mauritian friend. It is a tropically lush paradise, perfumed and mythically bountiful in all seasons. Yet it also holds violent dangers, man-made as well as natural: sharks swim upriver, hurricanes tear up crops and demolish homes, and racial oppression breeds betrayal and deadly conflict. In this untamed Eden the system of slavery is the serpent that tempts and traps everyone, friends and foes alike. When Lord Murray says to Georges, “I hope that for you, as for me, there can be no strangers in this world except brigands, thieves, and drunks; all men of worth are relatives of a sort, and we recognize one another wherever we may meet” (36), I held my breath and prayed.

 

This is my second entry in the Historical Fiction Challenge.