The Romantic Armchair Traveller

Italy: Prince Of Foxes by Samuel Shellabarger & Web Of Lucifer by Maurice Samuel

 

Samuel Shellabarger’s 1947 bestseller, Prince of Foxes, is a swashbuckling adventure novel in the tradition of Alexandre Dumas (père). Set against the vibrant panorama of the Italian Renaissance it chronicles the fortunes of a young and ambitious artist-soldier in the midst of conquest and resistance as the Borgias are plotting to subject central Italy to their rule. Like Shellabarger’s previous historical novel, The Captain Of Castile, Prince of Foxes, too, was swiftly adapted for the silver screen, once again with Tyrone Power¹ in the lead role, and with Cesare Borgia portrayed by Orson Welles. Sumptuous though the cinematography looks, the production having been shot on location in Italy (though regrettably not in colour), the film does not rival the verve of Samuel Shellabarger’s novel. Sixty-five years after its original publication Prince Of Foxes remains top-notch historical escapism, bursting with romance, adventure, wit, and one brilliantly entertaining twist after another.

 

1500. Italy is in turbulence, torn apart by strife between independent city-states and overrun by mercenaries in the pay of invading foreign powers. Convinced that Italy’s only hope of survival lies in unification, military captain Andrea Orsini serves as political agent for the increasingly powerful Borgias. Armed with cunning, charm, and a flexible conscience, Andrea faces his most dangerous assignment yet as he heads to Ferrara to persuade the hostile House of Este to concede to an alliance by marriage with the notorious Lucrezia Borgia. If successful, Andrea is to be rewarded with the city-state of Città del Monte and his choice between two high-ranking noblewomen for a bride. There is just the minor matter of ridding Città del Monte of its current ruler first.

That is, provided Andrea manages to stay alive that long in a political climate rife with assassinations. And provided the secret of his past does not leak out – a secret guaranteed to consign him to ignominy and strip him of everything he has worked for. For loyalty is a commodity, and secrets the coin in which everyone trades.

Even the wiliest fox cannot fool fate forever … or can he?

 

A few months before Prince Of Foxes began climbing the bestseller lists a historical novel titled Web Of Lucifer was released to smaller fanfare. A now largely forgotten work by Maurice Samuel, it provides unusually pertinent comparison reading.

 

Web Of Lucifer

Both Web Of Lucifer and Prince Of Foxes chart the career of a gifted young man in the service of Cesare Borgia and the moral dilemmas this employment eventually corners them into confronting. The two heroes come from the same region, Romagna (Mussolini’s birth region, as pointed out by Maurice Samuel in his account of writing the book), and from a similar family background. Both have lost their fathers. Samuel’s hero is named Orso, Shellabarger’s, Orsini. In both cases, love becomes an education in honour and decency. Several of the same historical figures appear in the books, including Lucia of Narni. Both authors dedicated considerable effort to grounding their plots in significant historical events and used a timeline spanning several years. Yet for all these similarities even a cursory glance presents no difficulty in ascertaining why one novel has remained a perennial favourite and the other sunk into oblivion. It boils down to a single issue: readability.

 

Consider the following paragraph, the opening of the first chapter of Web Of Lucifer: “Giacomo Orso of Picina, with whose adventures this book is chiefly concerned, was a lad when the story opens and not much more than a lad when it closes. He was seventeen years old at the time of his father’s death, he was twenty-three when he returned to his native Romagna from his service with Cesare Borgia; and he is introduced in this fashion precisely because in the Italy of those days – four and a half centuries ago – one was no longer “a lad” in the late teens, let alone the early twenties, if one had, like Giacomo, received an education. Cesare Borgia, for instance, was Governor of Orvieto at twenty. Cesare’s friend, Ippolito d’Este, was a cardinal at fifteen*. Lorenzo the Magnificent, who died at forty-two (when Giacomo was a boy of twelve), succeeded his father in the rulership of Florence when he was twenty-one – and at twenty-one he was already a master in the subtle manipulation of power which made him for two decades the key-stone of Italian politics. But Giacomo was still a lad when, at the age of twenty, he swore eternal fealty to Cesare Borgia, and only beginning to be a man when he retracted his oath three years later.” (Alfred A Knopf hardcover, 1947, p. 3)

 

In his foreword Romanian-born Maurice Samuel acknowledges his admiration for his former compatriot, Ferdinand Gregorovius, a historian of the Renaissance. Having made a decade-long study of the Renaissance for the purpose of writing Web Of Lucifer the author carries over his conscientiousness about historical substance into his stylistic choices, which amalgamate moralising nineteenth-century textbooks and the Victorian Gothic of Sir Walter Scott. As indicated by the above quote, the result is dense exposition, author intrusion, and foreshadowing, but also deliberately archaic dialogue: “’Why playest thou the saint with me? Knowest thou not well that I am as heartsick as thou? But what wouldst thou do with the Gianbattista? Didst thou not hear that they are worse than traitors?’” (p. 252).

 

As their titles suggest, where Web Of Lucifer and Prince Of Foxes diverge most significantly is tone and intent. The reader who is able to look past prose that by today’s standards is excruciatingly ponderous or who accepts the stylised dialogue as a nod to the period it attempts to recreate will find in Web Of Lucifer a solemn take on the uses of history in fiction. In Samuel’s novel the Italian Renaissance becomes a parable for the atrocities of World War II. Discursive and digressive, it invites sober reflection on grim, harrowing concerns, not least the corrupting effect of power and personal responsibility when faced with evil. An atmosphere of existential despair haunts the narrative, a despair held at bay only by hope in the few who fight to keep the candles of reason and justice burning in a world darkened by indifference, denial, and selfishness. Patient reading ultimately rewards one with an earnest character study in Giacomo Orso, out to avenge the murder of his father, and a minutely detailed, critical portrait of an era.

 

By contrast, Prince of Foxes is the amusement park version of the Renaissance, where you strap yourself into a seat in expectation of a fun diversion and are flung, gasping, into a break-neck thrill-ride. It is no struggle to appreciate the aims of Web Of Lucifer and the personal dimension these particular themes at that particular time may have held for the author (much of Maurice Samuel’s oeuvre, including translations and lectures, centred on Jewish cultural themes and Jewish-Christian relations), but I must admit to skimming heavy-handed passages on more than one occasion. While accessibility of style and charm of content are debatable measures of literary quality they undoubtedly make Prince Of Foxes a smoother read. However, more than a (biassed) case of popular fiction providing amusements literary fiction does not, this novel’s enduring popularity testifies to solid merits of it own.

 

On rereading

When I reread Prince Of Foxes some months ago it was the first time in two decades. Most readers, I expect, dust off a long unvisited favourite with some trepidation, hoping the magic its pages once contained will flare back to life as brightly, as warmly as it did all those years ago. A short while earlier I had gone back to a classic that, like Prince Of Foxes, had amazed me in my teens. My admiration for the author’s achievement certainly grew during that reread and cemented my love of the book. At the same time, the emotional disparity caused by intellectual maturation and memories of my excitement at the mind-expanding discoveries back in my teens continually interfered between me and the text, keeping me at an intangible, unbridgeable remove from the story – too much an observer instead of a participant. So I was wary about reacquainting myself with Prince Of Foxes. This time, I chose to try to trick memory by reading the book in another language (the original English).

 

The shake-awake freshness I had been unable to recapture with the other book – The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson – was there in full force with Prince Of Foxes. Perhaps my experiment helped a little. Perhaps a visit in the intervening years to Italy, including Venice and Rome, proved a stimulating support for imagination. But after puzzling about it I believe the determining factor lay in the different expectations I brought with me to the rereadings, expectations based on my original responses to the books.

 

In my teenage years it was the provocational capacity of The Long Ships that impressed me the deepest: the story affected my outlook on the world by challenging me to rethink notions of what is absurd. Since then I have come full circle: I consider many of my youthful beliefs folly and concepts which then seemed outrageous, if intriguing, self-evident. The most memorable element for my younger self had, through the years, lost that edge of the deliciously radical. In contrast, the appeal of Prince Of Foxes never rested on its ability to stretch the limits of my mind. It was always the characters that beguiled me with their spiciness and their cat-and-mouse games that make a point of confusing just who is holding the upper hand. The only surprise now was rediscovering how sharp and smart this incredibly enjoyable swashbuckler continues to remain.

 

Prince Of Foxes

Prince Of Foxes is historical fiction with flair. The storytelling crackles with vitality as arts, politics, religion, and warfare mingle in a twisting plot, sly verbal sparring, daredevil action, nefarious skulduggery, and plenty of picturesque pageantry. Fascinating characters make it all come together in a lively, brilliantly choreographed whole. (The people of Shellabarger’s Renaissance are like mosaics in a dazzling kaleidoscope, re-arranging themselves in ever-shifting configurations.) This book features not only one of my favourite fictional couples in the hero and his lady love but one of my all-time favourite characters in literature, the assassin Mario Belli.

 

In common with Alexandre Dumas’s swashbucklers the humour and adventure in Prince Of Foxes is not empty buffoonery. The at times ironic, even sarcastic, attitude to honour and devotion masks a search for ideals worth defending and thus an unmistakeable moral core informs the plot. Like Maurice Samuel, Shellabarger, too, found in the shadowy aspects of the Renaissance a mirror for the events that had recently ravaged Europe. (One of Shellabarger’s sons was killed in WWII). The historical framework of the novel consists of the move toward unification under an able and charismatic leader, a man who exploits popular hatred of the nation’s designated enemies as a rallying point for people to unite under a single banner.

 

Andrea Orsini admires Cesare Borgia as a genius, a political realist with the power and foresight to bring progress and prosperity by strong-arming Italy into unification. While violence and conspiracy are regrettable they must, Andrea reasons, be accepted as natural parts of revolution. And if the goal of unification at the same time profits the private interests of the House of Borgia – including Pope Alexander VI, Cesare and Lucrezia’s father – then that is the privilege of princes. Yet as in Italy from the 1920s onward and Germany from the 1930s onward, so in Borgia Italy: once the worthiness of a common goal is determined to make ruthless means acceptable allegiance enables not the sought-for liberty but tyranny.

 

If Shellabarger’s Cesare Borgia brings to mind the tyrant associated with Machiavelli’s The Prince, his portrait of the virtuous Marc’ Antonio Varano is surely influenced by Castiglione’s The Courtier. A counterpoint to the arbitrary exercise of power by the Borgias, Varano is an aging statesman whose guiding principle is to consider the common good, not private gain, and whose peaceable city state, Città del Monte, exemplifies government based on the rule of law. Judging Varano deluded as well as decrepit, the ambitious Andrea is predisposed to holding him in contempt as an inept prince and impotent ruler. Expecting Città del Monte to yield to the Borgias like wheat before the scythe, Andrea is perturbed when an obstacle he never saw coming suddenly endangers his own future: a battle with his conscience.

 

The narrative is unambiguous about the decision the righteous person must make when the time comes to choose between submission to injustice and rebellion against it. A major character who endorses the idea of Italian unification but opposes Cesare Borgia’s oppressive methods explains: “’It may be urged that if I favour the end he seeks, I should support him; that treachery and craft in a good cause are justified. Not so. If good at times springs out of evil, to God’s almighty dispensation, not to evil, be the praise. He makes man’s villainy to serve Him: that is His perquisite. But let no man believe that he serves God by villainy. The kiss of Judas brought Our Blessed Lord to the Cross and, thus, salvation to mankind, yet Judas hanged himself’” (p. 306).

 

Prince Of Foxes depicts a society in which religion is closely allied with politics, exemplified by the unscrupulous tug-of-war over Lucia of Narni². A historical figure, the Blessed Lucia Brocadelli was a nun and holy woman who at the time the novel covers was greedily fought over by cities and princes eager to enhance their fame and reputation by securing her permanent presence as a spiritual guide. The Savonarolan background of the historical Lucia is not directly referenced in the novel (if I recall correctly), nor is the persecution his followers eventually suffered. Instead her fortitude and piety are made to serve as reminders of truths no conscience can escape. Girolamo Savonarola was a Florentine preacher who is now principally remembered for organising a bonfire at which books and artworks judged immoral were burned. But his vocal condemnation of Church corruption and belief in the superior authority of the Bible over ecclesiastical bodies also made him one of the cogs that eventually produced the Protestant Reformation. He was executed in 1498; ironically, through burning at the stake. Unlike the controversial zealotry of her teacher, Shellabarger’s Lucia of Narni is the gentlest of visionaries, a sufferer whose understanding of the human psyche nurtures her empathy even as she encourages reform. In Prince Of Foxes religious faith is a tempering, humane influence, not the darkly fanatical and destructive force so common in historical fiction set during the Renaissance or the Middle Ages. It would be going too far to say that this is a spiritual novel, but the inspiration the novel’s philosophy draws from faith and agape is, I think, a fundamental part of the story’s power to uplift.

 

This was also a time when everyone and everything were thought to have their own, proper place in a grand, divinely ordained structure. Conforming to that place was essential for the maintenance of harmony. To upset the proper order of things was therefore more than a simple personal rebellion: it was considered an attack on the Divine, an act of destruction that carried moral and religious consequences for everyone else in the now weakened structure. Andrea’s ambitions therefore force him to hide the truth about himself beneath layers of artfully constructed pasts. Luck he does not believe in, but destiny, it is known, can change with the wheeling of the stars across the sky – and Andrea is bent on helping his stars rearrange his life in major ways.  Belief in the influence of celestial bodies is, in fact, so common that prudence induces him, at a defining point before a crucial undertaking, to bribe an official astrologer into drawing up a favourable horoscope in order to boost the courage of the people he is leading.

 

Andrea’s opportunism is fortunately timed. Italy is in upheaval and the normal workings of society are out of joint. But while the success he is enjoying as the novel opens is based on genuine achievements as a soldier and diplomat those same achievements would have been impossible without the springboard of deliberately created but dangerous illusions. Significantly, our introduction to Andrea and his adventures takes place in Venice, a city rich in symbolism associated with masques and disguises, in the studio of a master craftsman and artist (the famous instrument-maker Lorenzo Gusnasco da Pavia). It is a scene steeped in hidden agendas, in deceptions involving identity and provenance, in transactions with ulterior purposes, all while the key players conduct themselves as if nothing except elegant manners, quick wit, and courtly generosity is of any consequence. Unlike the anonymity and freedoms associated with Venice’s Carnival the masks in Prince Of Foxes, whether literal or metaphorical, are neither liberating nor an aid for indulging in irreverence or licentiousness. On the contrary, masks are worn as confirmation or proof of identity. They are a deadly serious and necessary political and social armour. Having a mask torn off – being exposed – means death, either ritual death through loss of social and/or political status or literal death.

 

Masks worn to deceive, conceal, or to impress are adapted to the different personae one is required to play in a given situation: ardent lover, obsequious servant, loyal ally, honourable soldier, indispensable diplomat, humble artist, etc. (Crafted by the author to represent an ideal Renaissance man, Andrea is uniquely suited for the versatility his career demands. His proficiency with brushes and paint (he is, literally, a second Mantegna), music, and metallurgy complement his skills as a soldier and diplomat. These attributes are no mere shorthand for character perfection. They serve the plot and enrich the portrait of the age. Fortunately, too, Andrea displays the intelligence required for readers to believe in his polymathism.) Simplicity is associated with a lack of social graces and therefore as appalling as lack of breeding. Nobility and respectability are recognisable in sophistication – elegance of manners, gallant valour, educated tastes, the arts of diplomacy – backed up by raw power and bold ideas.

 

No wonder Andrea thinks Varano is an easily oustable, rustic simpleton, just like the Chevalier de Bayard’s³ insistence on honour above all causes Andrea to detest the Frenchman as an annoying pest. In a social milieu sustained by show and illusion nothing is more unsettling or subversive than sincerity and authenticity. Once Andrea begins to suspect that Msrc’ Antonio Varano is actually not the fool he had assumed and that the man’s courtliness merely follows different norms than any known to celebrated society it throws the younger man off his practiced game. His manipulative habit of always playing a part leads him to mistake and misread intentions every time the castle inhabitants at Città del Monte fail to respond to ritual cues and signals in the accustomed manner. Consequently, he mistakes hospitality and politeness for threats and hypocrisy, then is confused when the dangers he expected fail to materialise. As long as he continues to dissemble he also absurdly misjudges and misunderstands the two women he courts. Only when he drops his artificial persona, voluntarily in one case, inadvertently in the other, is he able to discover their true natures and to understand them. Interestingly, neither woman has ever attempted to mislead him about their feelings albeit one is discreet whereas the other wears her heart on her sleeve.

 

In mediaeval thought physical appearance was an outward manifestation of the soul. Beauty or perfection of body implied purity, ugliness or deformity or disability, vice. Faces and bodies in Prince of Foxes therefore constitute another mask. Lucrezia Borgia’s angelic countenance acts like a glamour that effectively disarms resistance; Alda’s intellect and ethics are commonly inferred to be proportionate to the smallness of her stature; and Mario Belli’s macabre visage, “the spitting image of Judas Iscariot” (p. 22), enhances his fearsome – and well-earned – professional reputation through the falsehood and devilry people read there. The sardonically exaggerated elegance Belli flaunts is found to be grotesque, and the same marks of breeding that in other men would be considered proof of nobility earn Belli angry suspicions of insolence. His very smile causes people to shiver and cross themselves. Belli’s ambiguity is one of the trump cards of the plot: are we supposed to side with him or against him? Some readers may feel no doubt (I saw signs this time around that I missed when I was a young reader), but Shellabarger still manages to pull a surprise twist at the end.

 

Not much room is given to the female characters to be protagonists. The men are the doers and facilitators. Likewise, the principal male/female relationship has a sly charm that contributes sparkle and brightness to the story, yet the dynamics between the various male characters follow more surprising courses and probe tenser depths. Women’s roles are essentially confined to being givers and receivers of love who exert either a positive or negative moral influence on the men in their lives. Within that narrow definition, however, they possess individual spirit and shrewd intelligence. Angela Borgia is no one’s fool but she loves passionately and sincerely; her cousin, Lucrezia Borgia, who hates discord and tries to make everyone happy has learnt to be pragmatic, accepting what she believes she cannot change; Costanza Zoppo, the only one who felt a bit distant to me because the plot sidelines her at a couple of points where a direct spotlight on her would have been warranted, is a worrier yet refuses to trade her integrity for fame and fortune; Alda dei’s Nani’s vanity protects her from being diminished by stereotyping and she turns prejudice into a blind that screens mutiny; the gamine Camilla Baglione cannot resist an opportunity for mischief but is brave and loyal to the core; and Lucia of Narni’s weakened body houses a burning inner gaze that shies from nothing. Every single one of them engaged my interest and several, including an antagonist, also elicited my sympathy.

 

Major spoilers:

If one prominent female character erodes into stereotype it is because the plot eventually squeezes her into a worn mould as the other woman. Whereas Camilla Baglione represents love that breeds loyalty, Angela Borgia is the personification of passion that warps into hatred. The latter woman’s sexuality is the subject of all too familiar misogyny, yet Shellabarger cannot be accused of making her a cardboard villain. She is a convincing character and her storyline develops organically. One of the very rare characters who are open about their feelings, she does not seem to understand the need to wear a mask. She gives of herself to the man she loves, faithfully, without holding anything back, for which she is at first exploited, then scorned by her lover, and punished by the storyline. As convention once stipulated, although the perceived breaches against morality for which Angela is shamed are actually mutually committed, Andrea’s offenses are measured according to a different scale. These include Angela falling pregnant and using an abortifacient (off-page - blink and you'll miss it). The affair is soon superseded by a violent act that frames Andrea as a victim deserving of sympathy and, by implication, forgiveness, while simultaneously removing any doubt about Angela’s innate depravity and, also by implication, voiding her claim to fair treatment. For Angela does not take Andrea’s betrayal sitting down. When he ends their relationship with callous, casual words, she retaliates by severing him from herself with a hot-blooded physical act. What remains of their storyline is a jilted woman whose subsequent storyline is filled with humiliations and an anything but sinless hero who to the end is not above deriving satisfaction from those humiliations. Whether she deserves sympathy or whether she truly has gone beyond the pale the narrative at first seems to leave to the reader to decide: the last glimpse of her is accompanied by an acknowledgement of her suffering. But it is immediately countered by a comment I presume is an allusion to Dante’s Inferno⁴. Prince Of Foxes is a story that probes beyond facades and finds reason for tenderness and forgiveness. Arguing that redemption is conditional, however, the conclusion firmly rejects amnesty, tallying with Christ’s parable of the ten foolish and wise virgins (“virgin” is figurative here and does not denote gender, either).

End of spoilers

 

Instances of unexpected insight afforded by a couple of secondary characters supply poignant subtext to sensitive but seemingly ignored themes. Slavery, which included the breeding and sale⁵ of little people (dwarfs/midgets in the novel’s terminology) by nobles such as Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua (mentioned in passing in the book as wanting to buy Alda), was a feature of Italian Renaissance society. As the novel comments, the “beloved little monsters of Court, dwarfs and other human curios, trotting about in attire no less eccentric than themselves, added the gargoyle touch” (p. 67). In a society where slavery is as commonplace a part of the fabric of everyday life as portents and signs, characters display attitudes believable for their time. People like Alda (Camilla Baglione’s dwarf companion) and Seraph (Andrea’s “blackamoor” page) are spectacles like Belli, and usually irrelevant except as entertaining pets and human collectibles (Like unmasking implies loss of power among higher classes, having their nude appearance publicly speculated on by others emphasises Alda and Seraph’s slave status, pp.14, 168.). The omniscient narration frames character beliefs and actions in this cultural context and the reader will have to pay attention to subtle clues to realise how carefully the authorial critique is realised: in the fizzy presence of irony in plot twists and characterisations, in subversive autonomy. One will find no denunciatory lectures being mouthed by a culturally sensitive hero or heroine.

 

The narrative continuously juxtaposes physical abnormality and spiritual deformity. One is judged or shunned without testing, the other goes undetected or is admired and rewarded. Even beloved “human curios” are regarded as things apart from ordinary humanity. Camilla, who clearly loves (and is loved by) Alda and considers her “twice as clever” as herself (p. 166) nevertheless treats this “Princess of the Dwarfs” (dei Nani) like a dress-up doll and a showpiece who must perform at command. At the same time it is in this character that we are quietly made aware of the differences between public and private reality. The patronising assumptions underlying the amusement Camilla and Andrea derive from Alda (and Seraph) is pointedly absent from her interactions with Mario Belli. Scarred by a society that equates worth with physical standards they can never meet, Alda and Belli instantly develop a sympathy for each other that others do not comprehend. Their alliance is seen as “proof positive that dwarfs had no souls; or rather that they were imps of hell, who would naturally find the company of Satan congenial” (p. 385). But “[in] each other’s company, they were off stage, no longer outsiders on the defensive, but snug in the comradeship of a point of view” (p. 295).

 

It is the unprocessed attitudes of his own time and milieu that on a few occasions cause Shellabarger’s judgment to slip as he negotiates historical fact with concessions to entertainment. The old stereotype that little people are prone to vanity is on display in the portrayal of Alda, but Seraph, on the other hand, is a clear-cut example of myopia. A slave child of African heritage whom Camilla acquires on a whim from Andrea, his character and personality are sheer caricature. “An ebony cherub, a jet cupid” (p. 14) he is made to strut self-importantly through his few scenes “like an infant sultan” (p. 167). Like Alda’s, his personal history is omitted but he is moreover deprived of the de-stereotyping benefit of an independent voice. The implied intention that readers’ laughter be affectionate makes the objectification even more souring because it so blindly neglects the value accorded in the novel to the concepts of justice and freedom.

 

On balance, it is one of the few blots and flaws in an otherwise astute and riveting historical novel. Prince Of Foxes goes into the past and collects advice for the future, imparting inspiration and warnings with such panache that the resulting story can be enjoyed as pure escapism. To borrow the peerless and extremely fitting description of S. Morgenstern’s classic tale of True Love and High Adventure⁶ it has “Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Poison. True Love. Hate. Revenge. Giants [okay, dwarfs]. Hunters. Bad Men. Good Men. Beautifulest Ladies. Snakes [several Borgias surely count]. Spiders [with so many castles, they must lurk in a murky corner somewhere]. Beasts of all natures and descriptions. Pain. Death. Brave men. Coward men. Strongest men. Chases. Escapes. Lies. Truths. Passion. Miracles.” Plus: Cannons. Astrology. Madness. And More. In short (I know, I know), Prince of Foxes is as entertaining as historical fiction gets. Do give it a try.

 

1. Although he seems to have been too much of a professional to ever deliver less than his best, Tyrone Power was at a point in his career where he must have been tired of parts that required little more of him than to look debonair as he struts around in period costume. In Prince of Foxes he cannot help looking too jaded for the youthful, optimistic vitality of Andrea.

2. Narni was long known as Narnia. According to Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis's literary executor,  Lewis found out about Lucia Brocadelli and Narni when he was fourteen and it helped inspire his own creation, including a heroine who is not believed when she sees and experiences supernatural things.  (Lucia Brocadelli, along with other Savonarolans, was hounded by disbelieving Church authorities and eventually fell from public favour.) Isn't it marvellous how the world of books is full of unexpected revelations and connections around every corner?

3. Two decades earlier, Samuel Shellabarger had published a biography of Pierre Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard (1928).

4. The line “Look at them and pass by” (p. 421) is, I am guessing, a reference to those in Dante’s Hell who are guilty of indifference regarding good and evil: "The world does not remember them at all;/ Mercy and justice treat them with contempt:/ Let us not talk about them – look and pass on." Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto III, translated by C.H. Sisson, Oxford University Press paperback 1993, p.57.

5. See for example Fools Are Everywhere: The Jester Around The World by Beatrice K. Otto, The University of Chicago Press, 2007, page 29: “According to a miscellany of 1670, dwarfs could be created by anointing babies’ spines with the grease of bats, moles, and dormice, while more palatable descriptions used drugs such as the aptly named dwarf elder, knotgrass, and daisy juice and roots mixed with milk to stunt growth. Children were kidnapped or bought to be turned into artificial dwarfs, and it was in Italy and Spain that the practice was most common, its perpetrators in Spain being called comprachicos or “child-buyers”. The practice was clearly known in England, as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600) testifies […] (3.2.327-29)”. Isabella d’Este owned several little people, mentioning Morgantino and Delia in her will. Her correspondence records the transfer of child dwarfs, as noted in Julia Cartwright's biography: “"I promised Madame Renée to give her the first girl who was born to my dwarfs. As she knows, the puttina is now two years old, and will no doubt remain a dwarf, although she hardly gives hopes of being as tiny as my Delia. She is now able to walk alone and without a guide, if the Duchess wishes to have her." Another " bella Nanina" was sent by the Marchesa to Ferrante Gonzaga's wife in October 1533, and the young princess wrote a grateful letter to her mother-inlaw saying that the dwarf was the sweetest and gentlest creature in the world, and afforded her infinite amusement."” (In Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua 1474-1539, Vol.II, 1923, p. 364, available at the Internet Archive.)

6. The Princess Bride, you philistine. (By William Goldman. Pan Books paperback, 1976, p. 9-10.)

 

 

Excerpt

(Little, Brown and Company hardcover, 1947, pp. 23, 24):

“Amethyst had yielded to azure in the square, the deep azure of Venetian night, which has its own starry radiance. Torches began flaring on the piazza. An echo of music sounded from the lagoon.

Orsini got up at last and strolled to the Columns of St. Mark, where the gondola lanterns bobbed up and down like tethered fireflies. He deliberated on the evening. Of course he would be welcome at the Papal Legate’s, but he had called there that morning and wound up his official business. An excellent establishment in the Giudecca, kept by a certain Mona Giulia, had been recommended to him if he required a buona compagna; but he reflected that he must leave at dawn for Chioggia, the starting point for Ferrara, and he was in no mood for a white night.

Selecting a gondola and settling down in the cushions, he instructed the boatman: ‘Anywhere, friend. The Canal Grande – an affair of an hour – then back to the Riva degli Schiavoni.’

They glided away through the spangled water, and he filled his lungs with the haunting sea air. Other gondolas slipped past with lovers or merrymakers. A delicious languor filled the night, lapping of water, wandering of music. He felt a longing, sweeter than possession, for the indescribable, the unattainable. He would return here someday with her; he would occupy one of these palaces; they would live in terms of color – sapphire and silver – in terms of a casement open on the sea-scented night.

[…]

It had grown late when finally the gondola, following the Riva degli Schiavoni, glided into the Rio della Pietà, upon which the entrance of the tavern, the Star, opened. Having paid his fare, Orsini stood a moment, drawing a last breath of the sea breeze and watching the lantern of the gondola until it disappeared beyond the next curve of the canal. Half drowsily he realized that it was a night he would always remember, the more perhaps because he had spent it alone. Then, turning back into the dank passage between house walls that led to the front of the inn, he found that the lamp marking the tavern door had been allowed to go out.

He groped his way through the pitch darkness, cursing the carelessness of the inn servants; but he could see vaguely the space between the mouth of the alley and the inn, which stood in a tiny campiello surrounded by houses. The scuttle of a rat startled him as if it had been a footstep, and he was glad to reach the end of the passage. He determined to have a word with the landlord about that lamp.

A metal click sounded, and at the same moment he was dazzled by the light of a dark lantern turned full against his eyes.

‘Gran Dio!’ he exclaimed. ‘What’s up?’

‘This,’ answered a voice, coupled with the ripping, stinging blow of a knife.

Yemen: Like Nowhere Else by Denyse Woods

 

A drama about love, friendship, and obsession, Denyse Woods’s romantic contemporary novel, Like Nowhere Else, examines belonging and boundaries through the lens of a woman who has lost her course. Set in Yemen and Ireland and drawing subtle parallels between them, Like Nowhere Else delivers an alternative take on a country long subjected to overwhelmingly negative media attention. The destination of the heroine’s lifelong dreams, Yemen exerts a pull on her that further complicates an impulsive love affair, pushing her into choices she isn’t ready to make. Crisp, slightly quirky, and sincere, the novel got off to an enjoyable start for me with an airport transit hall encounter that demonstrates the author’s facility for dynamic dialogue. Although the heroine’s clueless shilly-shallying tested my patience and the rest of the story never quite maintained the wit and bounce of its beginning, the character dilemmas engaged my sympathy and kept me interested to the end.

 

Circa 2002. To Irishwoman Vivien Quish, Yemen is a repository of dreams but also of broken aspirations. Once a wannabe adventurer, she is now an art gallery manager whose travelling is crippled by a fear of the unknown.

She is shocked when she runs into Christian Linklater, an English anthropologist and travel programme presenter whom she has a secret reason to avoid. Temporarily working in Yemen, he seems charming and strangely different from her expectations. Far away from her ordinary life it is all too easy be swept away by emotion, for a country, for a man. Only when she is unexpectedly joined by her friend, Gemma Colbert, does common sense take hold, forcing wrenching realisations as she tries to reconcile love and friendship.

But when Vivien’s three weeks’ holiday comes to a close and she returns to Ireland the consequences of her actions follow her. Truths begin to appear different than they did in Yemen, causing her to question what she thought she knew and where she belongs. As Christian and Gemma pull her in opposite directions, she stands to lose the spirit she renewed in Yemen. Yet one more journey awaits, the most important of her life.

 

Denyse Woods’s unadorned writing and the confessional nature of Vivien’s personal journey lend the storytelling a documentary immediacy. Supported by first person point of view (Vivien is the narrator) the prose has a directness and clarity that quickly connected me with the main characters, particularly through the crisp, distinctive dialogue. Descriptions are pencilled in as by a minimalist; sensory cues are scant. They tend to consist of sparely worded impressions that block out the general surrounding or flash on one or two specific details. Eventually the accumulated elements, like the plastic bag litter Vivien observes in Wadi Dhar or the chewing of qat, begin to build up a more layered atmosphere, helping to distinguish the landscape and people as specifically Yemeni versus “Middle Eastern”.

 

The novel presents a non-judgmental perspective on Yemen. Vivien arrives there during a time of international unease but prior to renewal of explosive events, and the fears that have kept tourists away from a country that has thrown its doors open to them are gently mocked. The Irish heroine’s familiarity with how a troubled country is viewed by outsiders and how those perceptions differ from the everyday eperiences of those who actually live there lends weight to her empathetic point-of-view and paves the way for perceptive comparisons. (Denyse Woods – who also writes as Denyse Devlin – herself lives in Ireland and is a self-professed lover of Yemen, which she has visited at least twice.) For the majority of the story, regional politics are cautiously skirted as something distant and vaguely detrimental to the health and consciences of Westerners – a pro-Palestinian demonstration in which Vivien inadvertently gets swept up being a case in point – but in the last section of the book international developments are directly exploited for the narrative climax, briefly moving politics to the forefront in a manner that satirises expectations bred on fat headlines.

 

Thus, while socio-political topics are hinted at they are generally kept in the background. Like Nowhere Else firmly remains light fiction and thus is not the story for those wishing to dig deep into complex truths. Much travel literature, both fiction and non-fiction, dwells on the beautiful and the quaint; I assume most of us have seen photos that make poverty look aesthetic. This novel’s Yemen is no exception, very much an Arabia Felix. It is easily likeable but undeniably two-dimensional: principally a destination for romantic sightseeing and self-fulfilment. The descriptions often represent an idea fixed in Vivien’s mind – a remembered anecdote by one of the foreign travel writers she admires, for instance – rather the contemporary reality of a place. To the author’s credit, once Vivien has returned to Ireland (just over halfway through the story) she is the first to acknowledge that her impressions were those of a holidaymaker who has “only skimmed the surface” (p. 235) and that anything deeper remains to be learned and experienced. This realisation is the root of the friction in the rest of the story.

 

Since this is women’s fiction I had, however, hoped for more from the representation of the Yemeni women Vivien learns to know. Unlike the nuanced individualism of Vivien, her friend Gemma, and Christian’s ex-wife Diane, local Nooria and her compatriots are treated to a homogenous group portrayal that is as promotional as a puff piece. They come from the same slice of society and to a woman are cheery, well-adjusted, driven, inclusive, articulate, and informed. A school-room didacticism permeates their scenes. As in the notes made of Yemeni hospitality to strangers and the proud confidence of the population in themselves, brought forward in a way that appears to diminish the meaningfulness of statistics, the narrative’s intention appears to be to challenge impressions about Yemen and its people formed by newspieces and publications that foster bigotry and ignorance by selective reporting, sensationalising differences, and inflating exceptions¹. Like Nowhere Else sets up the contrast of reality as personified by the everyday women and girls whose opinions and actions defy popular media images of female disempowerment.

 

But debilitating these characters with an absence of complexity that would illuminate their individual selves, their inner lives, seems to be missing the point. Mouthpieces have a hard time stimulating emotional connections that open avenues to understanding. Does the average reader really need to be told that women in Yemen are as intelligent, capable, and passionate as anywhere else (if the answer was yes, it is to be hoped that the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Yemeni activist Tawakkol (Tawakul) Karman encouraged reassessment), or that the deprived tend to grasp at opportunities to improve their lot with an enthusiasm and a gratitude that puts the complacency and complaints of the privileged to cringing shame? Why not invite reader engagement by showing the strategies these women have worked out to deal with the problems and challenges of their specific circumstances, or the unique advantages and solutions that their backgrounds and perspectives enable them to bring to the table?

 

On to the main character. Vivien’s conflicts are vividly drawn. Lightly neurotic, a bit lost, and possessed of an instinct to flee, she is a waif who longs to be a free spirit (her heroines are Freya Stark and Doreen Ingrams). Unfortunately for her, she tried to spread her wings before she was ready and her life since has been defined by that failure. Fear of facing up to past defeat has shrunk her travelling to what is familiar, safe, and comfortable, but it has also held hostage her longing to follow in the footsteps of her idols, the adventurers and travel-writers who explored Yemen, a country that has called out to her since she first saw pictures of its mud cities in her childhood.

 

In common with much of the genre fiction that centres on women’s issues, Like Nowhere Else is about the heroine’s journey of self-rediscovery. The first-person point of view of such intimate, character-driven stories means that if the reader cannot connect with the narrator’s personality she may find herself cornered as by an exasperating acquaintance. I think that first person POV heroines of plot-driven books have an advantage that to some extent protects them, and as a result readers, from what can seem like self-indulgent introspection: when they fall into self-pity the requirement for external action at least intermittently forces them to snap out of self-absorption.

 

The fits-and-starts plot of the emotion-driven Like Nowhere Else does not demand this of Vivien Quish. Her character is so focussed on her own troubles that she remains severely myopic in the company of others. Apart from Christian, Gemma (Vivien’s oldest friend), and Christian’s ex-wife, Diane, the reader learns surprisingly little about the characters who interact with Vivien.We are shown only the parts of them that directly reflect Vivien back to us. For example, mellow Dutch cartographer Theo Klaassens is a prominent secondary character whose only narrative function seems to be to act as a human confessional booth for Vivien. We know virtually nothing about him beyond his nationality, relationship status, and profession (illustrated by his constant fiddling with a GPS). Vivien’s self-absorption also affected my relation to the story’s physical surroundings: somehow I felt too distanced for the sort of immersion that truly transports. Too often I felt relegated to watching Vivien act enthralled over some scenery instead of sharing her feelings of wonder and awe. Her responses to the settings are far more clearly etched than the places themselves, and this turned her into a wall between me and the setting, instead of a bridge.

 

This may sound as if I found Vivien unlikeable when in fact I empathised with her more often than not. She seems naïve and searching, not purposely selfish, and I began by admiring how acutely insightful the author’s portrayal of her inner conflicts are. Paradoxically, once Vivien’s connection with Yemen grows stronger than past trauma and she begins to re-evaluate her life path, there came a point at which I began to understand her behaviour less and less. There are times when one can only understand a person or a character by applying emotion; rational logic will not do. I am afraid my ability to cope with Vivien’s indecisive behaviour eventually dried up. Her incessant changes of mind and switches between trust and distrust gave me whiplash.

 

Christian Linklater’s portrayal succeeds in building layers of intrigue. As bits and pieces Vivien did not know about him emerge into light he grows from an interesting puzzle into perhaps the most rewarding character in the book. The revelations are skilfully handled and constituted the most entertaining part of the book for me. He surprised me and I liked that. Because his character has been so well-established, however, I found the book’s frantic climax transparent, which of course ruined the suspense. Saying more about it and Christian would spoil things, because a good part of the reading consists of figuring out whether he is decent, deplorable, or problematically flawed.

 

In fact, the success of the book’s main conflict hinges on who the reader believes is fooling whom, and whether more than one person is engaged in deception. Vivien, far from innocent herself, is in a state of constant confusion, being unable to decide whom to trust, if anyone. I found her interpretations incredibly silly and her judgment appallingly poor, but in her defence she has a history that explains her bias. Still, I experienced tedium because I felt ahead of the plot, drumming my fingers while waiting for Vivien to figure out the obvious. I also found it hard to accept her prolonged unwillingness to act at all after the evidence had grown incontrovertible and her passiveness was causing pain to an injured party.

 

The tensions in the book’s principal relationships stem from transgressions, misunderstandings, and crossed purposes. Tangles that have been slightly loosened are repeatedly retightened, never fully straightened out, which meant that three pages from the end I did not know who felt more frustrated, I or the characters. It must be said that the way the author intertwines the various relationships between friends, ex-friends, lovers, and ex-lovers mines the messiness of human emotions very realistically. However, in a work of this genre – light women’s fiction – I do expect major baggage to be sorted out sooner and more satisfactorily than it was here. Although the ending brings Vivien’s quest full circle and her choices made narrative sense, I was missing the evidence that she had wisened, that she felt as much compassionate understanding as she demanded. Without the final sentence of the book, which touched me with the meaningfulness of its poetry, the last chapter would have lacked emotional resonance for me.

 

Finally, the author uses a number of ploys to manipulate readers, none of which sat well with me. For example, the source of Vivien’s secret knowledge about Christian is coyly withheld for a full third of the book, long enough for the teasers to strain my curiosity into acute irritation, only for the author to pull the storyline as we know it to a jarring stop and proceed to dump page after page of nonstop, belaboured backstory (about seventeen in all, they felt double the amount). An interlude that contains important information, it cannot be skipped by the reader and is a mood-breaker. It felt like having the pacing wheels stuck in a sand dune when all I wanted to do was get back to Yemen and the flow of plot. A second example is the use of narrative ellipses. At a few key points the author employs chapter endings like film fadeouts to mark the passing of time. The crux is that when the next chapter opens, not only has the scene changed but the configuration of the emotional landscape has also changed as a consequence of events that are not shown. These gaps are, I assume, intended to be meaningful, implying inevitability. To me they were clumsily handled and came across as another cheap trick to manufacture twists. The off-hand manner of a major revelation (p. 324) after one such fadeout came close to making me chuck the book over my shoulder.

 

But in the end, this was a story that kept me reading even when I felt irritation at the vacillating heroine and annoyance at smug storytelling techniques. On the whole, I was nicely enough entertained by the onion-peel character revelations, insightful dialogue, and journey to a country I hope more novelists will discover.

 

¹Ironically, the only real-life, contemporary Yemeni who is named represents exactly the things the novel attempts to dismiss as not being what Yemen is about. The other famous person is Biblical: Bilqis, or the Queen of Sheba, whose legend outpaces the sources. Yemen is a front contender in efforts to determine her historical identity and home. Like Nowhere Else gives a tour of Yemeni antiquities associated with her.

 

Excerpt

(Penguin Ireland trade paperback, 2005, p.180-1)

 

“On the rim of a bend, I asked Fadhl for a photo stop. He beeped to alert the other vehicle and we pulled in. I got out, camera in hand., Theo beside me and Yemen all around. Everything loomed over me, graceful and patient. The solitary towers on the pinnacles, the mountains, even Theo. Where I had once been intimidated by this landscape, it seemed now to have eight arms to hold me. While I was in disarray, it was solid and still. Like a cat, sure of its charms, comforting if I would only reach out. There was arrogance in the way this country looked at me, from high windows in Sana’a, from the peaks of Jabal Nuqum and from the dwellings in these hills. No other country watches as Yemen does.

‘What is it about this place?’ I asked Theo. ‘Why do certain people feel a deep connection to a particular place? It’s almost like the chemistry between lovers.’

‘Maybe it dates from a previous life.’

‘Yeah, and maybe I’m Queen of Sheba.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I have a Belgian friend who feels this way about Ireland. It holds her soul, she says, and there’s nothing she can do about it except return whenever possible.’

‘Come on,’ Gemma called from the car. She hadn’t even got out. We were on two entirely different journeys. I only wished we weren’t making them in the same vehicle.”

 

Novels of related interest: A more famous novel about Yemen is of course Salmon Fishing In The Yemen by Paul Torday. A film version was released in March this year featuring Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, and Kristin Scott-Thomas; it is directed by Lasse Hallström (of Chocolat, The Shipping News, etc.). As yet, I have neither read the book nor seen the film. My favourite travel blog, A Traveler's Library, reviews the film here. Anyone hoping to experience a bit of Yemeni scenery through the film may be disappointed, though: the filming location for the non-British-Isles sequences was Morocco, a country 6000 km/3600 miles distant from Yemen. It is perhaps fair to note that when filming commenced in August 2010 Yemen was one of the countries headed toward the Arab Spring, although one may just as reasonably ponder why a story set in the southernmost part of the Arabian Peninsula should be filmed in northwest Africa.

Alternating between an Australian woman’s struggles as a student of Arabic in Yemen and her memories of a fraught relationship with her mother, a Vietnamese boat refugee, The City Of Sealions is a melancholy, grimly beautiful literary novel by Eva Sallis about disconnectedness and the discomfort and disconsolation of being an outsider. The sense of place is distinct and evocative, as is the description of being a stranger.

Among novels recreating the life of the Biblical Queen of Sheba is India Edghill’s Wisdom’s Daughter, in which the Queen carries the Yemeni appellation, Bilqis, and comes, if I understand correctly, from the area of present-day Yemen.

 

Non-fiction of related interest: Several travel writers associated with Yemen are quoted or otherwise mentioned in Like Nowhere Else. Some of Freya Stark’s travel writings are available online, including The Southern Gates Of Arabia: A Journey In The Hadhramaut (1936). An interview with her from 1977 can be read here. Arabist Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who resides in Yemen, even shows up, briefly, in person. His Yemen: Travels In Dictionary Land is reviewed by the British-Yemeni Society. Doreen Ingrams’s A Time In Arabia (1970) draws on her diaries and describes life in Ḥaḍramawt (Hadhramaut) in the 1930s and 1940s. Arabian Sands (1959, but reprinted many times) chronicles Wilfred Thesiger’s journeys in the largest sand desert on earth, the Rub' al Khali (The Empty Quarter). It is considered a travel literature classic.

 

Japan: The Last Concubine by Lesley Downer

 

After finishing The Last Concubine I came across a (spoiler-filled) video in which Lesley Downer, the author, likens her novel to “a Gone With The Wind set in Japan”. The parallel is awkward, not to say unfortunate. Beyond the surface similarities – a 19th-century civil war, destruction of a way of life, and a heroine-centric narrative – any real comparison is disadvantageous for The Last Concubine. Gone With The Wind is epic – big and complex and ambitious, a Pulitzer-prize-winning, love/hate classic, all things The Last Concubine, with its thin plot, skimpy characterisations, and tentatively developed themes is definitely not. The unflattering contrast draws away attention from the latter’s unique appeal for lovers of romantic historical fiction: a rare, carefully researched historical setting, likeable characters including a halberd-wielding samurai heroine, and a love story with a HEA. And while Downer’s historical non-fiction roots show, frequently overwhelming story in this, her 2008 fiction debut, she also won me over by compellingly bringing to life the spirit of a bygone era.

 

1861-1872. Picked up from a village* on impulse by Princess Kazu whose bridal entourage is passing through the Kiso valley, eleven-year old Sachi, the adopted daughter of rural samurai, enters service in the women’s Inner Palace of the vast Edo Castle, the residence of the Shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, ruler of Japan. At the age of fifteen, Sachi is offered as candidate to be the one and only concubine to the Shogun by the Princess, his childless consort. Her beauty and free spirit earn Sachi the young Shogun’s favour in spite of a rival faction, led by Retired Lady Tensho'in, who despise her as a peasant upstart. When Sachi is moved into her own apartments as the Shogun’s second wife – the honourable lady of the side chamber – she seems destined for a brilliant future.

But outside the many tall, thick walls of the strictly secluded palace there is rumble of war. Distant at first, the uprising by southern rebels seems too insignificant to have any effect on the centuries-old traditions and rarefied atmosphere of the Inner Palace. Then catastrophe strikes. Soon, Sachi is given a mission that sends her straight into danger – and the discovery of something wildly joyful for which her culture knows no word. Foreigners may call the concept love, but Sachi realises her forbidden passion for a ronin can only lead to the ruination of them both.

Yet winds of change are shaking Japan to its foundations. Amid the destruction, secrets are blown open. Are they a warning – or a reason to hope?

 

Nineteenth-century Japanese society is unknown territory for me but Downer’s apparent familiarity with the era is so comfortable and comforting that I was never left to observe customs and attitudes with a distancing sense of foreignness. The Last Concubine managed to pull me into a culture very different from mine with an ease that made even the strange (to me) feel natural and understandable. That is a great gift to a reader like me who enjoys exploring differences and samenesses in cultures and values through the medium of fiction.

 

The Japan stereotyped in Europe and America can be found in the novel, too: the one of poetic delicacy (plum blossom petals and autumnal maple leaves) contrasted with blood-dripping feudal cruelty. But Downer does guide readers beyond the wall of exotic imagery and gently familiarises them with the daily realities of both the haves and have-nots during the later Edo period. For example, we meet rural samurai whose lives revolve around practical and administrative chores unrelated to fighting, such as inn-keeping; delicately scented and exquisitely dressed palace ladies whom decorum requires to be sealed off from contact with commoners but who are trained in lethal battle techniques in order to be able to protect the shogun; we see the rigidly ritualised religious and administrative formalities, all performed by attending female functionaries, surrounding every moment, both public and private, of the shogun’s dealings with his wife, concubine, and any other lady; and we experience the honoured and important role adoption plays among both high and low.

 

Obviously I cannot judge the degree of historical accuracy although the wealth of often minute detail suggests dedicated research. According to Lesley Downer’s website she has spent fifteen years in and out of Japan and wrote several non-fiction books with Japanese subjects before this novel. In The Last Concubine’s interesting Afterword (in which it is noted that any translations from Japanese are Downer’s own) she outlines some of her research, discussing for example how she strove to create authenticity by trying to get the thoughts and feelings of her Japanese characters right. She indicates that she used her imagination where documentation left gaps, as is the case with certain details of life in the women’s palace in Edo (whose inhabitants were sworn to secrecy).

 

Because the events in the book are seen from the point of view of politically partisan characters and the story does not always present evidence to back up their claims, it is sometimes unclear whether what the reader is told about the war is reliable. This nagged at me especially in the matter of the history of the power struggle between the Emperor and the Shogun. Since I was travelling without my laptop at the time I had to wait to fact check, and when I finally did it increased my discontent with how the subject is handled in the novel. Worth mentioning is that the terminology used in the novel consigns the opposing side to the status of rebels, not revolutionaries. Last but not least, whereas Sachi is a fictional character her fairytalesque life is constructed from the circumstances of two different sets of real-life people including a tragic drama involving well-known persons of the time (who also are made to figure in the novel). This setup involves a dramatic license I dislike, but I appreciate that the author made the effort to acknowledge the liberties taken (including a date change). Another sweetener about my edition (Corgi) of The Last Concubine is the generous supplementary material, which to the five-page afterword adds a three-page bibliography, a note of (informative) acknowledgements, and a fourteen-page article** about the architectural layout and hierarchy of the Ōoku, the women’s palace inside Edo Castle, with some additional biographical details about Princess Kazu (Kazunomiya Chikako/Seikan’in) and Lady Tenshō’in (Atsu-hime).

 

The story is told in third person limited point of view, i.e. entirely through Sachi. The intimacy thus gained prevents the disjointedness I suspect would have followed had more viewpoints been added since the storytelling already struggles with sprawl. In any case, as this happens to be my preferred POV it enhanced my engagement with Sachi and fed my curiosity, but those who have already been made restless by the simple plot may find the device too negatively limiting. In addition, while The Last Concubine falls into the category of romantic fiction – and was on the Romantic Novelists' Association's shortlist for Best Romantic Novel in 2009 (Julia Gregson won) – the love story does not follow the romance convention of a tight narrative focus on the couple. The relationship development is perfunctory, with long separations and an initial meeting that takes place well into the book. Far more time and depth is allotted to Sachi’s friendships and rivalries with the ladies of the Ōoku. On the other hand, the handling of the love relationship mirrors the respectfulness the hero and heroine show each other and subtly underlines that theirs is a culture with its own rules and behaviours that do not necessarily fit into the format which rests on a European or American understanding of romance.

 

Sachi is an uncomplicated character and, refreshingly, too pragmatic for introspection to lead to brooding or bitterness. The author also allows her and her fellow palace ladies to be products of their period and circumstances. This includes attitudes to class, gender, and race. A world view in which people, especially women, are property is the norm to Sachi and no cause for neurosis. Physical revulsion is shown toward peasants (animal-like), foreigners (ogre-like barbarians), and others (butchers, who deal in death) deemed not quite human, contact with whom is believed to taint and whose lives and worth are valued accordingly. It follows that there is the opposite being, also not quite human: the Emperor, who is revered as godly for his religious mediation between heaven and earth. Even when he joins the opposition against the Tokugawa shogunate the deferential reverence remains stronger than resentment. All this is dealt with in a matter-of-fact yet nuanced fashion, showing that prickling intersection of the real and the imagined without either finger-pointing or hand-wringing. Downer does not explain her characters, allowing the reader space and opportunity to draw her/his own conclusions from their actions and thoughts.

 

As mentioned in the introductory paragraph of this post, characterisation is not one of the book’s stronger points. Most characters remain sketchy. This includes Sachi’s love interest, whom I will refrain from naming since a couple of other candidates briefly emerge as alternative possibilities. He is a suitably heroic and romantic figure but hardly a uniquely memorable hero: there is simply too little substance to his portrayal and no psychological exploration of his feelings for Sachi. That said, the author paints her characters with a compassionate brush, adding dashes of humour and largely avoiding black-and-white, and so reading about their interactions with Sachi brought amusement and even some moments of poignancy. For example Taki, Sachi’s maid and closest friend, endeared herself to me despite the stereotype through the stubborn quality of her loyalty, which bows neither to threats nor to authority. Among the historical personages, the representation of Princess Kazu, sister of the Emperor and wife of the Shogun, is tender but somewhat wooden, emphasising passivity and sadness. While that may reflect her circumstances at Edo, the novel seems to simplify her personality: the story does not, for example, give the reader an idea of her political voice in succession matters or negotiations concerning the fate of Edo Castle and by extension the Tokugawas.

 

A prominent theme is that of emancipation as Sachi’s changed circumstances propel her into growing into someone who must think and decide for herself and learn to assume responsibility for herself. In the war that threatens to destroy life as she knows it lies opportunities many people accustomed to a feudal society never could have dreamt of, because the enemies from the south are spreading ideas shocking to the old order in the north. A victory for the Shogun and the northerners, longed for though it is, would snatch those opportunities away from Sachi. As the city of Edo (now Tokyo) teeters between a feudal society where caste determines fate and family members owe obeisance to their clans, and the modern age in which barriers are being questioned and foreigners bring iron ships and trains onto the sacred soil from which they have long been forbidden, the novel juxtaposes the thousands of isolated women who have only ever known the confines of the Inner Palace with the crowds outside the castle walls. Where once commoners prostrated themselves at the mere approach of members of the nobility, and looking into the face of a lady was forbidden on pain of death, an unsettling refrain begins to be chanted by the displaced, by the poor, by the war weary: “who gives a damn?”

 

But while the historical backdrop looms large – civil war, foreign intrusion into Japanese politics, the destruction of a way of life – The Last Concubine looks at upheavals and transformations mainly from the sheltered perspective of a small handful of socially privileged characters. The novel does not, for example, tell us whether the palace’s lowest ranking servants, called honourable pups or honourable dogs, maids who “lived on leftovers”, shared the aristocratic women’s nostalgia for the pleasures of daily life at the Shogun’s court. And although Sachi experiences loss and danger, ultimately, in keeping with a romantic tone, her journey is told in the brisk style of an adventure instead of being a fatalistic account of wartime trauma. Here and there we glimpse other destinies, misery and hardship, but the focus remains closely on Sachi’s development from innocent girl to a young woman forging a path for herself through uncertain times and falling in love along the way, reasonably insulated from the deprivations of the masses. In other words, the portrayal of war is mostly reduced to an exciting or stirring backdrop for Sachi’s escapades, including some nice action sequences showcasing the fighting skills of female samurai. (In case anyone is curious: although some women warriors participated as active combatants in the civil war battles (including at Aizu (Wakamatsu), which occurs off-page but is described in The Last Concubine), Sachi does not.) Expect some graphic violence in the descriptions of these smaller-scale clashes and fights, and detailed gore in one scene depicting the aftermath of a major battle.

 

A debut novel, The Last Concubine is not without considerable narrative awkwardness, particularly before the story warms up. As stated before, Lesley Downer’s first foray into publishing was on the non-fiction side and it shows, most notably in the disparity between confident subject-matter expertise and deficient novelistic techniques. The author has so much information to share that the story bursts onto the pages of the first chapter in a jumbled sprawl that pulls in all directions and includes both substantial flashbacks and a hefty dose of exposition. Those reading principally for plot may need to draw a long breath as they pick through the haphazard threads; in fact the first quarter or so of The Last Concubine will probably require the reader either to exercise patience or to be a devoted armchair traveller: not much happens in terms of story development and the pacing is languorous. The setting is not mere backdrop or a character in itself; it is the unruly star that runs away with the show. Every so often, particularly in the first quarter of the book, it felt to me that Sachi was not so much a character as a facilitator for a guided visit to a place and a period. The historical material out-proportions and can be more interesting than the story, which is sparse enough in the beginning to read like a non-fiction example of a palace woman rising through the ranks. The plot remains simple and low in tension throughout book, not much beefed up by a couple of drawn-out, rather wan twists. The author’s tendency for repetitive imagery, wording, and flashbacks stood out to me as rough spots in the editing. Most disappointing, however, was the execution of the climax. It is a setback in Sachi’s character arc, undoing her growth in robbing her of agency.

 

In view of these problems, what kept me reading? Without question my fascination with the intricate historical setting was the main factor. The author rolls her story into so much that was unknown to me that while I registered the flaws I was usually kept too pleasantly busy to have the problems drag down the reading experience. Beyond that, however, Downer’s warm, vigorous voice is smooth and this was instrumental in helping to offset the flawed narrative structure. Happily, too, The Last Concubine is a novel that improves as it progresses. As Sachi slowly grows into her own as a heroine and ceases to feel like a generic inhabitant of Edo palace, a more personal and persuasive story unfolds from its non-fiction-style wrapping. When the world the palace women have known comes crashing down, the story, too, begins to stir. The later parts of the book are significantly better balanced in regards to story versus setting. And despite its chaotic structure even the opening chapter makes for fun armchair travel because Downer displays an observant eye, reassuring subject-matter knowledge, and an engaging voice. The author is deft at visuals, often to pretty effect, and knows how to stimulate the senses with smells and sounds. (By the way, here is an article on food during the Edo period.)

 

During my ten-day holiday read of The Last Concubine I remained aware of its flaws but in the end was rather charmed despite them. Not surprisingly, I really liked the book for being a light, entertaining travel read that has helped to (somewhat) demystify a culture which while offering much I can intellectually admire has as often presented a challenge to my emotional understanding. I look forward to Lesley Downer’s upcoming, third historical novel, Across A Bridge Of Dreams, which hopefully will show significant maturation in her transition from writing non-fiction to being a novelist. On that note, I feel I must stress that while I came away from The Last Concubine with positive impressions, readers wanting primarily character-driven or plot-driven historical fiction will in all likelihood have a far less satisfying time than serious armchair travellers. But if you are itching for a look inside the Versailles of Japan and the city Europeans called the Venice of the East (pointed out to me by Downer’s article**), The Last Concubine may be just the ticket.

 

*Downer based Sachi’s village on Magome and Tsumago (see Afterword, p.616). Nakasendo Highway: A Journey Into The Heart Of Japan is a website dedicated to the route along which Princess Kazu travelled from Kyoto to Edo. This famous road, along which Sachi, too, travels, figures in The Last Concubine under the translated name of the Inner Mountain Road.

**A slightly altered version of the article, salaciously titled Secrets Of The Shogun’s Harem, is available at the author’s website.

 

Excerpt

(Corgi Books paperback, 2009, p.157):

“For a moment Sachi stood in silence, gazing at this building that had been her home for so many years. If only this too might be a dream. But the freezing cold told her all to clearly that it was not. She shivered. Even the layers of padded silk were not enough to protect her.

Groups of ladies-in-waiting huddled at the doors to the palanquin sheds. They stared at Sachi with wide, envious eyes as the guards bowed and escorted her into the imperial garages.

The princess’s palanquin stood open. Sachi looked at it with a shock of recognition. It was the same one she had seen years before when Princess Kazu and her entourage had arrived in the village. Everything was just as she remembered – the lacquered red walls fretted with gold and marked with the imperial chrysanthemum, the ornate gold roof and the bamboo window blinds hung with fat red tassels. It seemed all too obvious that if the princess was really trying to escape, she would never travel in such a showy conveyance.

An image flashed into Sachi’s mind of the woman who had stepped from this splendid vehicle when she had seen it as a child, back in the village. She remembered her wide terrified eyes. Even then she had guessed that the woman was a decoy for the princess, which was why she had been so afraid. It was Sachi’s turn now. She was a samurai, a warrior. She would not be afraid – or, if she was, no one would ever see it.”

 

Himalaya: White by Rosie Thomas

 

Rosie Thomas’s Himalaya-set romantic novel, White, was published four years after the deadliest mountaineering day in Mount Everest history, when eight climbers perished in a storm on the summit. Although White relates a fictional expedition that culminates in a smaller-scale tragedy it proved impossible for me to ignore historical precedents and refrain from comparisons. Technically, Rosie Thomas possesses more than sufficient credentials to rise to the challenge: this two-time winner of the Romantic Novelists’ Award is herself a climber who has made a trek to Everest Base Camp. The intensity and been-there-feel of the Himalayan sections are easily the most gripping parts of White, ensuring armchair travellers are rewarded. But getting there and on to the ending is like reading a different book altogether: one that requires slogging through tensionless filler since the buildup and flat but outdrawn aftermath are encumbered by flab and weak focus.

 

Unwilling to settle for the routine if luxurious existence family and friends envision for her, Canadian doctor Finch Buchanan rejects a proposal from her boyfriend and applies for the position of medical officer on a three-month Everest expedition. Unlike the other participants it is not primarily the summit that draws her although she, too, is an avid climber, but someone from her past whom she cannot forget. A fighter who chooses her own path and doesn’t believe in the concept of “can’t”, Finch has spent her life trying to prove something even she doesn’t fully understand. But when early mishaps on the Everest ascent drive home the enormity of her medical responsibilities, personal doubts about her abilities begin to gnaw at her, and fear begins to cloud joy.

The son of a famous climber, information architect Sam McGrath from Seattle, USA, has literally been running from the shadow of his now handicapped father’s disappointment in him. He feels trapped in a life that seems narrower each day until a chance encounter at an airport blows fresh excitement into him. On impulse, he jumps at the chance to fill in for a sickened expedition member. Everest becomes the test he never knew he needed to take – one that he realises too late he may not survive.

Expedition guide, Welshman Alyn “Al” Hood has seen friends die on the mountains. Each time he embarks on a dangerous climb his daughter fears the next phone call will announce his death. A loner by nature, Al lives for the mountains, where passionate purpose peels everything inessential away until only purity remains. Only there does he feel alive and at peace. The problem is, he has not been able to figure out how to make love fit into this lifestyle. If he lets it, however, this expedition could prove the turning point.

Spirits soar high as the international expedition converges in Nepal. But when the personal demons, ambitions, and obsessions of the various team members begin to rise to the fore, Everest exacts a heavy price. No one will come down from the mountain unscathed.

 

Had I not been stuck without anything besides safety brochures and duty-free lists to read on a ten-hour transatlantic flight I might have given up on White at the 100-page mark. That would have been a pity, because once the story at long last arrives in Nepal I became engrossed in what suddenly seemed a totally different, fresher book. Yet once the action left the Himalaya my interest again waned so much it took me over a week to finish the remaining 137 pages. While White is about personal journeys as much as it is about the expedition that brings the three principal characters together, I am afraid that the novel’s structure gave the whole a very choppy, disjointed feel. The story segments felt poorly cobbled together, as if one book had been spliced together with a separate book about the same characters but with a different atmosphere, style, and execution.

 

The rambling plotline divides the story into three distinct parts. A central, taut and edgy section fit for adrenaline junkies is bookended by a sprawling introductory account that details the backstories of the principal characters up to the Everest expedition, and a plodding conclusion which follows the slow recovery and rebuilding of lives in the aftermath of the climb. It is a three-part act that mirrors the emotional trajectory of the characters: the restlessness they feel as they go about mundane, unsatisfactory lives built around the expectations of others; followed by the exhilaration and total absorption of pushing themselves to the limit in pursuit of an intensely personal, extraordinary goal; and finally the lethargy and confusion after coming down from a high and dealing with trying to adapt to a former lives that no longer fit their changed selves.

 

A major problem with this structure is that the novel’s climaxing events occur nearly a full third before the end. The trick then becomes to sustain reader investment as the action falls, levels out, and slows. In my case, the numbness of the shocked and grieving characters rubbed off on me, turning empathy into impatience since, after the drama and urgency of the Himalayan chapters, the story separates the principal characters for most of the remaining pages and resumes a pedestrian blandness lacking in both content and tension. In my boredom I idly reflected that bringing the story to a conclusion a hundred pages earlier would have made for a considerably punchier story. It would have changed the genre, though: it is in this last segment that White evolves from a bittersweet triangle drama into romantic genre fiction.

 

White introduces a very large cast of characters, sometimes to the point of clutter. The viewpoint switches between major and minor characters frequently seemed impulsive and arbitrary, disconnecting me emotionally from a protagonist’s experiences and slackening the emotion and suspense of dramatic moments. Counterbalancing this, the author displays a definite knack for creating complex characterisations that have bite and individuality. The principal and many secondary characters feel honest and real, imbued with dynamism and passion which can make them appear selfish or obsessed in their dealings with others but on the other hand helps crystallise their personalities in intriguing ways. There is no attempt to cajole the reader’s sympathy by early proofs of loveability or worthiness; deeper layers are are gradually revealed, particularly in the case of the seemingly stand-offish, self-sufficient Finch. I also enjoyed the development of the bonding of people who live through something extraordinary together. Less convincingly drawn are the romantic relationships, where the motivations for why some of the characters become attracted to each other seem muddled. What, for example, drove Finch to remain enamoured of her first love interest throughout the years, beyond the initial feelings of pity and compassion? On a side note, I was distracted by the decision to give all the principal characters a significant other to leave behind as they form new attachments. As a symbol of breaking with the past the device felt unimaginative and heavy-handed, and the circumstances implied a callousness and self-centredness on the part of the characters that the narrative, which advocates an strongly idealistic sympathy for various debate-worthy actions, tends to brush aside.

 

While the adventure component of White makes up its most dynamic segment, the novel is not a suspense tale but relationship fiction with an emphasis is on the individual journeys of the characters. While their romantic entanglements are the plot catalysts, their gazes tend to turn inward, and the mood this creates is meditative and intensely personal. In the context of setting and locale, however, the introspective narration wastes the numerous international locations by depriving them of personality: wrapped up in themselves or the challenges of the moment, the characters tend to pay scant attention to their larger surroundings. Oregon and Seattle (USA), Vancouver (Canada), Kathmandu (Nepal), Pakistan, Tibet, north Wales, and England become mere names. The Everest chapters saved the day for me by zooming in on the landscape and bringing sharp clarity to visual impressions, even as the nature of the ascent from Base Camp onward inevitably leads to mouse-hole-type focus on the terrain right in front of an exhausted climber’s eyes or feet.

 

Spoiler

In the scene portraing the summiting of Mount Everest the text is busy with the private preoccupations of the climbers, barely pausing to note the view or even the achievement itself. It is perhaps fair in the context of the situation, but after three hundred pages of build-up, I felt short-changed in almost every way on this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene!

 End of  spoiler

 

Yet even where the story is beautifully descriptive the Himalayan setting remains essentially shallow. White will not afford the reader any perspective on Nepal or its people - sherpas are background figures - nor mention the topic of Everest-related adventure tourism issues. While the fictitious expedition is not quite the “all the climbing that money can buy”-type (no one brings an espresso maker), neither does the story even temporarily venture away from escapism to address the commercialisation of Everest. On the positive side, the expedition and the logistics around it feel authentic. Rosie Thomas’s personal familiarity with the gruelling physical exertions and and mental challenges of mountaineering brings an acuity to the climb that filled me with awe for the strength and endurance of a disciplined human body. Nor does specialised terminology or concepts impede understanding as the author does an excellent job of keeping everything clear and understandable within the natural flow of events.

 

The motivations the various characters of White have for daring the life-threatening odds and scaling the highest mountain on the planet varies, but the general philosophy that emerges from the story seems to hold that obsession is simply an alternative form of sanity, that what is involved is not recklessness or arrogance but courage, and that choosing a life of self-fulfillment is worth even the ultimate cost. Whatever the merits of that view, my take on the actions and decisions of the characters did not dispose me to interpret the pivotal events in quite the noble light the narrative would have the reader do. No doubt this negatively impacted my final assessment of the novel, because it unfortunately made me cynical about the most emotional aspects of the story. Still, the drama does inspire some interesting things to ponder regarding reader participation. Does the reader who wills the characters to ascend to the summit in order to enjoy the vicarious satisfaction of experiencing them conquer their goal become complicit in some way with the foolhardy members of the expedition? There seems to be a lesson in there, for anyone surprised or censorious in hindsight, about how guilt and blame go around and how terribly easily ambition can inspire bad decisions. Furthermore, one of the themes in White deals with the question of what is weakness and what is strength, showing, for example, that sometimes giving up and allowing oneself to be weak can be the ultimate realisation of strength.

 

In the end, what I liked best about White were the skilled characterisations and layered relationships coupled with a nicely drawn, dramatic setting. This combination may one day cause me to seek out another of Rosie Thomas’s novels, probably Sun At Midnight, set in Antarctica (another place this globetrotting author has visited in person). I have no problem seeing why other readers might find White a passionate, thrilling novel, but while I, too, very much enjoyed some parts, on the whole this was a surprisingly stale reading experience for me.

 

Excerpt

(Originally published in 2000. My edition: McArthur & Company paperback, 2001, p.143)

 

“The expedition reached the terminal moraine of the Khumbu glacier at 16,000 feet. The wilderness of rock and grit and ice was crusty with winter snowpack – there would be no glimpses of softening greenery from here on. It was a bitterly hard, monochrome world. On a bleak plateau beside the glacier there were dozens of simple stone cairns. Each one of them was a memorial to a climber who had died on Everest.

The highest settlement along the track was Pemba’s and Mingma’s home village. Just outside it there was a stupa, a little shrine built of rock beside the path, and Finch changed her direction to pass to the left of it according to custom. A row of prayer wheels mounted in a recess in the wall were lazily turning and she had set the first one spinning faster before she saw Sam sitting just beyond the shrine. Deliberately she spun the other wheels and moved on. He fell into step beside her and they walked in silence for a way, looking up to the ring of peaks.

‘I couldn’t think of a prayer that wasn’t to do with not dying up there,’ he said at last. She glanced sharply at him. It was impossible to imagine Ted or Rix or one of the others saying any such thing.

‘I know. I felt the same way with the lama.’

‘You’re scared as well?’

‘Yes. Looking up there, how could anyone not be?’ She had been afraid ever since she had seen the mountain riding in its sea of cloud. The scale of it was so fearsome. ‘Why are you doing this, Sam?’

‘Because you won’t have dinner with me otherwise.’”

 

Habsburg Empire: The Pianist In The Dark by Michèle Halberstadt

 

The Pianist In The Dark, Michèle Halberstadt’s simple but elegant historical novella, captures the moment in time when the encounter of young music prodigy Maria Theresia (von) Paradis and animal-magnetism therapist Franz Anton Mesmer sent shockwaves through Viennese society and spun the course of both their lives in directions neither could have foreseen. Halberstadt gives a feather-light treatment of a controversial affair, her style as floaty as the music of the glass harmonica Mesmer plays on the day “the blind enchantress” is lured into his orbit. An innocent among corruption, Paradis is an almost otherworldly character, but in a story that treads the most predictable of paths her painful awakening nonetheless yields moments of poignancy.

 

1776. Inexplicably blinded shortly before the age of three and subjected to agonising and unsuccessful attempts to restore her sight ever since, on her seventeenth birthday Maria Theresia von Paradis extracts a promise from her father to release her from the doctors who compete to cure the Empress’s protegée. He agrees, comforted by the generous stipend awarded by the Empress to provide for his gifted but unmarriageable daughter’s needs. Yet when charismatic society phenomenon Mesmer hears Maria Theresia play and expresses confidence that his painless therapeutic techniques can help her, the temptation to be associated with so famous a name causes her father to engineer an introduction. Maria Theresia is smitten, and moves in with the Mesmers for the course of the therapy.

But as the treatment progresses, jealous rivalry in the medical community and the pecuniary interests of her parents begin to clash with Mesmer’s professional reputation. Trapped in the midst of scandal, Maria Theresia learns the price of seeing the world as others do – and plots escape.

 

The Pianist In The Dark is a story for tender souls. Gentle and slightly melancholy, its appeal lies is in the delicate sensibilities of the principal character as the plot traces the effects of strong emotion on a sensitive young artist. Madame Mesmer’s quiet reflection, “The reality of love matures young hearts. It can also destroy frail souls” sums up the mood and subject of the book.

 

Style is substance here: the prose flows with a musicality that creates a bruised, romantic atmosphere – the literary equivalent of pretty vignettes of fragrant, crushed flowers. It felt like reading a graceful prose poem. At the same time, the language that describes the relationship between Paradis and Mesmer is often indistinguishable from that of a commercial romance: refining a love story to its emotional essence does away with treasured literary demarcations most effectively. What one reader sighs contentedly over as luminous poetry, another deems clichéd and overwrought. I am afraid that one of my eyebrows rose questioningly on more than one occasion.

 

As a fictional introduction to two gossiped-about historical figures, The Pianist In The Dark manages, I think, the feat of making the ambiguous and ambitious character of Mesmer, accused of being a charlatan by enemies and satirists, unexpectedly sympathetic, while Maria Theresia’s relationship with her neurotic parents implies disturbing explanations for the mysterious behaviour of her vision. Even so, any depth to be found here owes rather more to the subject-matter itself than to the author’s exploration of it. At times, character sketches read like straight biographical accounts. I did find Maria Theresia’s painful journey between worlds genuinely affecting, however, and can imagine re-reading the novella for her thoughts.

 

As the story notes, Paradis studied piano and composition with, among others, Antonio Salieri (so (in)famously maligned in the play Amadeus); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (who belonged to the same Masonic lodge as Mesmer) wrote pieces for her; considered a virtuosa, she sang, played the piano, taught music, and composed works from sonatas to operas; and on her European concert tour she performed at Versailles for Queen Marie-Antoinette (the daughter of her benefactress, Empress Maria Theresia, for whom she had been named). It is quite a let-down, then, that music in The Pianist In The Dark is most conspicuous by its absence. Halberstadt’s Paradis worries over her ability to handle the piano keys, hopes to communicate with listeners through music, and goes on tour. But she is not otherwise a character who thinks or talks in terms of musical expression or who possesses the ability to make music come alive for the reader (with one beautiful exception, in the excerpt below). I received no sense at all of what her music sounds like or the characteristics that defined her playing and singing. By comparison, in Liszt’s Kiss Susanne Dunlap captured her heroine’s playing with such exquisite expressiveness that I felt and heard the music as I was reading. Never so here.

 

A romance of feelings above all else, The Pianist In The Dark yields a skimpy sense of place, one that is by and large dependent on the names of famous historical personages. Even then, Mesmer’s wife, Anna Maria von Posch, is promptly pushed away from the centre of the narrative, and several of the names that are paraded never make a personal appearance. As in so many fictional takes on historical women, exclusive focus is brought on Paradis's romantic/emotional life. Thus, in this novella it is only Mesmer who is seen interacting with his colleagues, mentors, and other professional acquaintances, not Paradis. It is a little sad to see this once famous musician, so recently rescued from historical oblivion, reduced to not much more than a tragic romantic heroine, pretty literature notwithstanding.

 

But Michèle Halberstadt's novella is not the first time Maria Theresia Paradis's life has been the subject of romantic adaptations. Most notably, perhaps, she figures in the 1994 motion picture Mesmer, where her role is played by Amanda Ooms and the title role by Alan Rickman (Sense And Sensibility fans, rejoice). In the course of writing this post I also came across a play, The Comfort Of Darkness. As for the real Maria Theresia, her concert tours, compositions, work as a pedagogue at the music school she founded, and involvement in the education of the blind made her a famous and inspiring figure throughout her life. She is buried in the same cemetery as Mozart, but, like his, the exact site of her grave is today unknown.

 

Excerpt

(Pegasus Books hardcover, 2011, p. 27-8. Translated from the 2008 French original, L'Incroyable Histoire De Mademoiselle Paradis; I have not found the name of the translator.)

 

“Maria Theresia was unaware of Franz Anton Mesmer’s medical ambitions. All she knew about him was his reputation as a patron of the arts. She had heard him play with orchestras and remembered him as being a mediocre pianist.

But that evening, sitting between her parents on the bandstand near the gazebo at the left side of the garden, she could only admire the quality of his improvisations on the glass-harmonica.

Was the instrument responsible for the trembling sonority, or was it his way of playing it? A sense of peace emanated from that assembly of air, glass, and water.

Maria Theresia lifted her head, offering her senses a well-deserved pause. She lost the panicky stiffness she felt when surrounded by strangers whose gazes seemed to pierce through her. She no longer felt weighted down by the baubles that encumbered her neck and earlobes. She felt dizzy, as if a wind had risen and blown right through her. Her hands were quivering as they did sometimes at church when prayers overlapped, as if they were taking a shortcut to heaven.

The concert was over, but she was shaking too much to applaud.

She asked her parents to bring her some cold water.

Her temples were moist. She was shivering.

‘I was hoping you might take comfort in the music.’

She sensed a figure leaning over.”

 

 

This is my seventh entry in Historical Tapestry's Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.