Category: Books

Secrecy (2013): Rupert Thomson

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★★★

Secrecy has been drifting on the edge of my radar for some time, as you might expect of a book set in Medicean Florence. I finally got around to reading it last week, and found it a rather unusual piece of work: it deals with both a period and a subject that don’t crop up very often in historical fiction. The Medici in this novel are not, as I’d initially expected, the glittering Laurentian Medici of the Renaissance. On the contrary, these are the Medici left over at the dwindling end of the family’s great trajectory through Italian history: a fading dynasty of Grand Dukes, weakened by inbreeding and debauchery, their ancestors’ political acumen frittered away, their virility and vitality exhausted.

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The Sea Road (2000): Margaret Elphinstone

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★★★★½

I haven’t read any of Margaret Elphinstone’s books before, but came across this novel shortly after finishing Nancy Marie Brown’s The Far Traveler. That book examined archaeological and literary sources about the life of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, one of the most widely-travelled and adventurous women in the years around 1000. It’s no surprise that I leapt at the chance to see what a novelist could do with the same material; and Elphinstone’s book has proven to be a remarkable thing.

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Rupert of Hentzau (1898): Anthony Hope

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★★★

It has been three years since the events of The Prisoner of Zenda and, although Black Michael has been defeated, a threat still hangs over the heads of our Ruritanian friends Colonel Sapt, Fritz von Tarlenheim, King Rudolf and the beautiful Queen Flavia. Michael’s nephew, the disgraced and devil-may-care scoundrel Rupert of Hentzau, is still at large somewhere in Europe. More to the point, he is one of the few people who knows about Rudolf Rassendyll’s impersonation of Rudolf I while the king was imprisoned at the castle of Zenda. Armed with this information, Rupert skulks in exile and waits for his chance to turn his knowledge to his advantage, but a greater secret soon falls into his lap.

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Eromenos (2011): Melanie McDonald

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★★★

A novel of Antinous and Hadrian

I’m really having difficulty figuring out what I think of this book. It raises so many interesting questions in light of my recent reread of Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. For one, it gives Antinous a voice of his own, which is fitting considering that his fictional existence, like his memory, has been dominated by Hadrian’s idealised gaze. On the other hand the tone of the writing is uneven and in many places it’s weighed down by a desire to show how much research has gone into this depiction of the Roman world. It is a striking, unsettling, flawed book but the way that it acknowledges and fences with Yourcenar’s all-conquering vision of these historical figures is quite fascinating.

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The Mapmaker’s Daughter (2014): Laurel Corona

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★★★

Shortly after finishing In the Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree by Tariq Ali I was inspired to seek out other books about 15th-century Spain. I wanted to understand more about this period, in which the last shreds of the convivencia of Al-Andalus disappeared forever (if it had ever truly existed). In its place arose the orthodox Catholic Spanish state, with its Inquisition and its autos-da-fé. Laurel Corona’s novel offers a perspective which perfectly complements Ali’s: while he tells the story of Reconquista from a Muslim point of view, Corona looks at the experience of the Jewish people in Spain and Portugal at the same date. It was only at the end of the book that I came to realise how cleverly she has woven her protagonist into the history of two real and very distinguished Jewish families.

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The Last King of Lydia (2013): Tim Leach

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★★★★

It is just before dawn one morning in 547 BC. The Lydian king Croesus is taken from a cell in his capital, Sardis, and led to a great wooden pyre where he is to be burned to death in the presence of his conqueror, the Persian king Cyrus. As the smoke begins to curl around him and the fire’s first heat warms the soles of his feet, Croesus remembers a conversation he had, many years before, with the Athenian statesman Solon. They had argued about happiness.

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Prince of Foxes (1947): Samuel Shellabarger

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★★★★½

Shortly after I finished the excellent Blood & Beauty, this historical novel about Renaissance Italy popped up in my automatic recommendations. The author and title were both unfamiliar and, when I realised that it was again about the Borgias, I was tempted to pass: I had no plans to read another novel on the subject so soon. However, as the reviews were glowing, I persuaded myself to give it a chance; and I can honestly say that I’ve loved every minute of it.

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The Phoenix Guards (1991): Steven Brust

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★★★★

The Khaavren Romances: Book I

Young Khaavren is a gentleman, a Tiassa, who has neither land nor titles but who dreams of making a glorious name for himself in the service of the Empire. Heading to the city in order to join the Emperor’s elite force of Phoenix Guards, he falls into company with three similarly ambitious young people: a proud, belligerent Dzur named Tazendra; a discreet, contemplative Lyorn called Aerich; and an elegant, chivalrous Yendi called Pel. When these four are sworn into the Red Boot Battalion of the Phoenix Guard, they become firm friends, sworn to protect the good of the Empire and, more importantly, one another.

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The Sea Hawk (1915): Rafael Sabatini

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★★★

First things first: I hope you all had a marvellous Christmas and a very happy New Year. I’ve spent a thoroughly self-indulgent few weeks with my family and am now looking forward to getting my teeth into 2014. End of year review posts and New Year’s resolutions are popping up all over the place and it’s been great to see which books captured everyone’s imagination (or failed to), and the various challenges people have in store for the coming months. Here at The Idle Woman there aren’t any planned challenges, which is to say that life will tick along much as usual: a mixture of the characteristic and the utterly random. And so: to the books!

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Memoirs of Hadrian (1951): Marguerite Yourcenar

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★★★★★

Like a traveler sailing the Archipelago who sees the luminous mists lift toward evening, and little by little makes out the shore, I begin to discern the profile of my death.

With these words we are drawn into one of the great modern examples of historical fiction: a book which was first published in 1951 but which had been taking shape in the author’s mind for thirty years before that. It was a reread for me – a treat before Christmas – and in my opinion it ranks with Renault and Dunnett as an example of how magnificently a writer can immerse you in the conviction of a vanished age.

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