Tag: historical fiction

The Vizard Mask (1994): Diana Norman

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★★★★½

Occasionally, entirely by chance, you come across a book so delicious, so full of serendipity, that you can hardly believe your luck. I bought The Vizard Mask entirely on the title and the précis – I haven’t read any of Diana Norman’s other books, nor her popular Mistress of the Art of Death series written under her pseudonym Ariana Franklin. It turned out to be a rare gem: a sprawling, meaty, bawdy slice of Restoration drama underpinned by one of the most wonderful romantic pairings I’ve come across in fiction. The overall flavour made me think of Forever Amber crossed with Stage Beauty, finished off with liberal dashes of Much Ado About Nothing (rather appropriately).

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The Golden Mean (2009): Annabel Lyon

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★★★★

A Novel of Aristotle and Alexander the Great

The Golden Mean was an automatic Goodreads recommendation and it certainly caught my eye although, after admiring the cover, I wasn’t quite sure what I was letting myself in for. When I realised that it was a novel about the relationship between Aristotle, as tutor, and the young Alexander the Great, as student, I really couldn’t resist. I’ve been saying for months that I mean to reread Fire From Heaven and this promised to be a fun way to lead myself back to that. But the book proved to be more than a handy diversion: its language by turn thought-provoking, poetic, inspiring and casually vulgar. Initially I found the characters rather flat, and thought that I didn’t much like it, but as time went on I began to appreciate it more; and, now that I’ve finished it, it’s still lingering at the edge of my mind. Let me try to explain a bit more.

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Bitter Greens (2012): Kate Forsyth

8 Comments

★★★½

Once again, it’s been far too long since I last posted, and I apologise for that. Work continues to be frantic and, since so much of my job involves writing, I can’t quite get my head around handling more words when I come home in the evenings. Plus, I’ve been travelling again. But the good thing about hanging around in airports is that there’s a lot of time to read and so I’ve got several interesting books to share with you in the next few days.

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Frog Music (2014): Emma Donoghue

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★★★★

Having enjoyed Slammerkin so much, I was very much looking forward to Emma Donoghue’s new book (all the more so because I’m currently stranded halfway through her Sealed Letter, which I had to give back to the library). Once again the novel is inspired by one of those wonderful pieces of ‘found’ history that she keeps turning up, plucked from the newspapers and scandal-sheets of history, and once again it’s a masterful piece of storytelling: more so, I would say, than Slammerkin in that it manages to keep you absolutely riveted all the way through. It’s a murder mystery where not only the murderer and motive but also the intended victim are uncertain, and you don’t get the full picture until the very final pages, by which point you feel thoroughly immersed in Donoghue’s seedy fin-de-siècle world.

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The First Blast of the Trumpet (2012): Marie Macpherson

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★★★

John Knox made a brief cameo appearance in my GCSE History course, mainly to demonstrate that many people in the 16th century thought female monarchs were A Bad Thing. As part of a monstrous regiment of my own, in my girls’ school, I never had the chance to learn much more about him than the title of his most famous work, which naturally made me regard him with slight disapproval; and now, fifteen years later, it’s time to finally redress the balance. Marie Macpherson’s novel – the first in a proposed trilogy – turns him from merely a name on a history syllabus into a much more rounded and appealing figure, set firmly in his time.

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The Bull from the Sea (1962): Mary Renault

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★★★★½

Published four years after The King Must Die, this book picks up the thread of Theseus’ story once again. Having brought down the ancient Cretan house of Minos, he comes home to Athens flushed with glory, accompanied by his loyal team of bull-leapers, the Cranes. But the joy fades quickly: Theseus is greeted by news of his father’s premature death; and, for all the Cranes, the Athens they return to seems smaller and more provincial than the city they left.

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Winter Pilgrims (2014): Toby Clements

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★★★★

Kingmaker: Book I

Toby Clements’s novel opens in the bitter cold of the winter of 1460, in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, in a country teetering on the brink of anarchy. In the wake of the battles of St Albans and Ludford Bridge, the weak and unstable King Henry VI and his wife, the virago Margaret of Anjou, cling to the last threads of their power, while the armies of the Duke of York and the Earl of Warwick winter for safety in Calais and plot their next move.

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The King Must Die (1958): Mary Renault

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★★★★★

Although I’m only posting about it now, I finished The King Must Die before embarking on Gates of Fire. My planned project this year is a reread of Mary Renault’s classical history novels, which had such a huge impact on me as an impressionable teenager. Two books stood out particularly strongly in my memory: The King Must Die and Fire From Heaven, and I was delighted to hear that Heloise was also keen to read the former. Our very informal joint reading was punctuated by excited whittering about myths (from me) and fascinating comments about narrative patterns and the question of consent in sacrifice (from her). I’m pleased to report that I’ve infected her with my Renault enthusiasm and in fact she’s already finished the sequel, The Bull From The Sea.

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Gates of Fire (1998): Steven Pressfield

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★★★★

Before I begin, a note of warning: this post assumes that you’re familiar with the outcome of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. I’m leaping to the conclusion that, if you haven’t already read this book, you’ll probably have seen the film 300 or come across this stirring story in a history book or documentary. If you don’t know what happened, then my recommendation would be to simply buy this book and plunge in: don’t read any further, and don’t go looking up anything on Wikipedia. It’ll be even more dazzling and gut-wrenching if you don’t know what to expect.

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Kristin Lavransdatter (1920-22): Sigrid Undset

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★★★★

This is not the longest book I’ve ever read, though it comes close – trailing just behind World Without End and War and Peace, and probably The Lord of the Rings too, if we count that as a single book – but it certainly feels like the longest. I started it back in October, and since then it’s been flowing quietly along beneath the other books I’ve been reading like some great leviathan. Now and then I’ve put it aside for a bit, but its shadow has always been there, flickering at the corner of my eye. Finishing it feels like a major accomplishment. If I had a spare bottle of champagne, I’d be tempted to open it.

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