Murder Most Unladylike (2014): Robin Stevens

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★★★★

A Murder Most Unladylike Mystery: Book I

Were you a Malory Towers or St Clare’s type? For me it was always Malory Towers. As a child I dreamed of going to such a boarding school, with a saltwater swimming pool at the base of a cliff, midnight feasts, a French mistress called ‘Mam’zelle’, san, tuck and lacrosse. Never mind that such a school hadn’t existed since the 1950s: my comprehensive school seemed thoroughly dull in comparison. And so I fell completely in love with this delightful book – allegedly for children, but really just as enjoyable for grown-ups – which taps into this nostalgic strain of British literature with its tongue firmly in cheek.

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Oreste (1734): George Frideric Handel

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Handel: Oreste

★★★½

(Royal Opera House at Wilton’s Music Hall, 9 November 2016)

This was my third Handel pasticcio, after Elpidia and Catone in Utica, but it differed from both of these in that Oreste is made up purely of Handel’s own earlier work.  It hung together much more successfully as a result, with melodies that tickled my memory but nothing that shouted its origins elsewhere. It’s the fourth of the Royal Opera House’s Baroque productions that I’ve seen in other venues and, after the immensity of the Roundhouse’s Orfeo and the intimacy of the Sam Wanamaker’s Playhouse’s Ormindo and Orpheus, Wilton’s Music Hall offered an appropriately faded setting for this tale of love and madness at the end of the world.

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Comus (1634): John Milton

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Milton: Comus

★★★

A Masque in Honour of Chastity

(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 26 October 2016)

Comus is the first of several productions I’ll be seeing at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse this season and it proved to be a curious kettle of fish. It was commissioned from John Milton by the Earl of Bridgewater, who had just been appointed Lord President of Wales, and was performed on Michelmas 1634 at the Earl’s new seat of Ludlow Castle. The three main roles of the Lady and her two Brothers were performed by the Earl’s own children, and the masque trumpeted the family’s honour, virtue and chastity. Of course, such trumpeting only hints that there was something to hide, and this production cleverly puts Comus back into context. But even the excellent team at the Globe can’t overcome the issues of the text, and Comus never quite stops feeling like a historical curiosity.

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The Incarnations (2014): Susan Barker

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★★★★

This is a slightly retrospective post, as I read The Incarnations shortly before I went to China in September. I’d never heard of the book before, but I spotted it one day in the library and was intrigued by its elaborate cover. While I’m not usually all that keen on the ‘past lives’ school of historical fiction, this tale of reincarnation and rivalry echoing down the centuries proved to be very engaging. Unfolding among the grey blocks and smoggy air of 21st-century Beijing, it also offers a fictional primer to the last two thousand years of Chinese history, as one very ordinary man finds himself dogged by an insistent – and intrusive – ghost from his own past.

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Grotesque (2003): Natsuo Kirino

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★★★★

I’ve been meaning to read more Japanese fiction, but nothing quite prepared me for Natsuo Kirino’s twisted tale of female bitterness. It has made a great impact. Brutal and crude, it’s told in a detached manner that verges on the soulless. It’s also a sobering story of three young women fighting for empowerment and recognition in a world where the only accepted currency is beauty. The tale is grotesque; the setting is bleak; there isn’t a single sympathetic character in the whole damn book and yet, despite all of this, Kirino manages to create something completely gripping.

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Demetrio (1740): Johann Adolph Hasse

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Ray Chenez

★★★

(Opera Settecento at Cadogan Hall, 21 September 2016)

Another long-overdue post finally surfaces from the drafts folder! This time it’s Hasse’s Demetrio, to which I’d been eagerly looking forward. We don’t hear much Hasse in London and Opera Settecento had managed to gather a truly exceptional cast, featuring many of the singers I enthuse about repeatedly on this blog. Erica Eloff, Rupert Charlesworth and Michael Taylor were joined in a casting coup by Ray Chenez, whom I last saw as a manipulative and ultimately tragic Marzia at Versailles. On paper, it couldn’t fail. On the night, however, unsympathetic cutting of the opera resulted in a fragmentary show, which I felt didn’t do justice either to its splendid cast or to Hasse himself.

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A Princely Knave (1956): Philip Lindsay

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★★½

In the past year, Endeavour Press have republished at least seven historical novels by the Australian author Philip Lindsay (1906-1958). A Princely Knave, which follows the fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, pretender to the English throne in 1497, is the only one I’ve read, but Helen has reviewed two of the others, Here Comes the King and The Devil and King John. Just to make matters more confusing, Endeavour are also publishing A Princely Knave as an ebook under its original title They Have Their Dreams, so be warned. First published in 1956, it’s very much of a novel of its time, in which some beautiful writing is ultimately stymied by stiffly two-dimensional characterisation.

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Cousins (2016): Salley Vickers

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★★★★

Despite having read only three of Salley Vickers’s earlier books, I’ve always had a soft spot for her work. I read Miss Garnet’s Angel at an impressionable age when I adored anything about Venice (as I still do), was intrigued by the romantic tension of Instances of the Number 3 (my edition had Leonardo’s Virgin and Child with St Anne on the cover: a surefire hit) and remember devouring Mr Golightly’s Holiday one Christmas beside a roaring fire. Her books always seem to have come to me at the right moment, veiled with a certain sense of enigma and spiritual mystery that has always appealed. Her new novel Cousins is cut from rather different cloth, stripping away the gentle religious undertones of these earlier novels and replacing them with a sensitive, probing exposé of a family’s secrets, unmasked in the aftermath of a terrible accident.

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And I Darken (2016): Kiersten White

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★★★½

The Conqueror’s Trilogy: Book I

Finding myself without a book to read on Halloween, I tracked down something with appropriately dark credentials. This recent novel, set in 15th-century Wallachia and the Ottoman capital Edirne, promised to do the trick. Aimed at a young-adult audience, it’s a surprisingly enjoyable alternative history, full of harem intrigue, scheming pashas and unspoken desires. And, at its heart, is a plain, vengeful, vicious girl named Ladislav or Lada Dragwlya. In another universe (our own), where Lada was born a boy, she was named after her father Vlad and grew up to become known as the Impaler and to spawn a whole genre of blood-soaked legends. Based on this first novel in a planned trilogy, Lada herself looks set to make an equally indelible impression.

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Winter Raven (2016): Adam Baker

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★★★★

Path of the Samurai: Book I

When I began reading this book, my heart sank. The first couple of chapters were nothing but historical exposition, with no dialogue or attempts at characterisation. I feared it was going to be one of those lifeless, over-researched attempts at a novel, and prepared myself for a hard slog. But I plodded on nevertheless and, presently, the characters began to speak, and the story unrolled in front of me, painted with the spare, spartan beauty of a Japanese landscape on a scroll. Soon I realised that in fact, far from being a penance, this book was going to turn out to be my favourite kind of adventure story, full of dignity, honour and grey areas of morality, revolving around a central conflict between two equally brilliant and equally doomed men. I’m happy to say I got it wrong. This isn’t a slog at all but really a stonkingly good book.

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