March was the month of historical fiction. The inspiration struck after I watched The White Princess, a historical drama series based on one of Philippa Gregory’s novels, one of the most renowned writers in the genre. I’ve never read much historical fiction before, but enjoyed the couple I had (The Scroll of Seduction and The Girl from Berlin). However, I played pretty fast and loose with the definition. Instead of merely reading historical fiction, I chose to expand the definition to mean books either written in or set before 1935. This was also because I really wanted to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as the Shedunnit book club pick.
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
Set in the 19th century, published in 2013
This was a completely random pick that I found when I searched historical fiction on Audible. Kent is an Australian writer, but her book is inspired by the true story of the last person put to death in Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir. It was an interesting read – or listen, I should say. The story switches between first- and third-person narration, with the former covering the story from Agnes’s point of view. It was hard-hitting and while I was listening I did not know it was a true story. I really thought Agnes would be exonerated and it was tough listening to her final realisation that she was going to die. The Audible narrator, however, got on my nerves towards the end. She used quite a husky, simpering voice – especially as Agnes – making the story and main character come across as melodramatic, when the writing isn’t.
Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory
Set in the 17th century, published in 1998
I bought two books by Gregory: Earthly Joys and The Lady of the Rivers. I started with the former because it focuses on plants and gardening, subjects that interest me. And I would have been interested had the main character’s gardens been planted with practical purpose and function. There is mention, here and there, of planting herbs for medicinal purposes, for example, but for the most part it’s just about planting a pretty garden, forcing flowers and trees to bloom out of season, and shipping invasive species into England. Furthermore, the main character, John Tradescant, is spineless and irritating. I couldn’t wait to finish, yet the book insisted on dragging on for almost 500 pages. Despite this, months and years are skipped between chapters (now I understand why the series adaptations do the same), as if Gregory couldn’t be bothered to write about what happens in between – although thank goodness she doesn’t because it would have made the book even longer and more annoying. I did not appreciate, and found it incredibly tacky, that she blatantly sets up future events which, it turns out, are only covered in the sequel. I’m making it sound utterly awful, which it’s not: I enjoyed her descriptions of the gardens and most of her other characters are very likable. But I won’t be reading the sequel; and while I’m willing to try one of her royal court dramas with a female protagonist, I’m unlikely to read Gregory after that.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Contemporary, published in 1928
I loved this book. I read Lawrence’s Women in Love a few years ago, so I was keen to read Lady Chatterley’s Lover too. It’s renowned for the controversy that swirled around it since its publication, becoming banned and subjected to an obscenity trial due to how explicitly it wrote about sex. But I think the book was actually banned due to its astute commentary on how ugly and doomed society and the human race is, and the sex just gave people an excuse to cover up the real reasons. Although there is a lot of sex in the book, and it’s described a lot more graphically than I expected for a book of this time, to me it was much more about Oliver Mellors’ (the lover of the title) despair at society. He’s an intensely philosophical and introspective character, as is Connie (the Lady Chatterley of the title), even though he ruminates on society’s failings and she tends to focus on how we fail ourselves. It’s a poignant, devasting, and still relevant reflection of how we’ll probably never find meaning or purpose in life thanks to the material and superficial trappings of society. It’s definitely made its way onto my “top ten books of the year” list.
“It seems soon there’ll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it’ll all be machines.”
Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay
Contemporary, published in 1935
This was the Shedunnit book club pick for the month. The theme was “writers new to us”, which Hay certainly is to me, having never heard of her before. I really enjoyed Death on the Cherwell, but was let down by the end. What I found unusual is that the investigating protagonist, Detective Inspector Braydon, reveals the killer towards the end and then spends the rest of the story merely going about gathering evidence against that person. Maybe I’m just living in a time of movies and series that love having big twists. But then I think about what Agatha Christie (or any number of other detective fiction writers) would have done. When Poirot, for example, figures out who the killer is, Christie will keep the audience in the dark (just as Poirot might keep Hastings or Ariadne Oliver in the dark) so that everyone still gets a chance to figure it out for themselves. I suspected an entirely different person as the killer, and I think the ending could have been a lot more exciting for it. However, I loved the setting of this book, a girls’ college. In the beginning, it felt a bit Enid Blyton-ish. If it was not stated that this was a college, I could easily have pictured the girls as 16 or even 14. Nevertheless, I enjoyed that aspect of it, which made the girls’ eventual waning in the story disappointing. They form a central part of the first half of the book, but then fade out during the second half. We don’t even get to read about them finding out who the killer is. It’s like Hay got tired of writing the story and just quickly finished it off because she had to.