Rizzio - Denise Mina

 

Polygon have launched Darkland Tales, retelling of Scottish history from contemporary Scottish authors.   Rizzio, by the fabulous Denise Mina, is the first.   It is very short - 117 pages in big, well-spaced print - and it is breathtakingly good.   Mina revels in the artifice of it all, cutting to and fro through the limited timescale and describing her characters with cool detachment.  The whole episode is a sort of pageant, albeit deeply brutal and, as all readers will know, ultimately pointless.

It introduces me, not especially versed in Scottish history, to people like Lord Ruthven, roused from his deathbed to lead the conspirators.   The first question everyone asks him is, "What are you wearing?"   Then there is Lennox, whose descent I knew about but not his personality.   He is apparently the most hated and distrusted peer in Scotland, which is some going considering he is the father of the appalling Darnley.   The standout character is probably Henry Yair, a Calvinist conspirator and thug who is unhinged by the slaughter of Rizzio and finds hunself standing over the body of a murdered priest.

Mina is right to cut her tale short with Queen Mary's escape from Holyrood.   We don't need to explore what happened after.   That is another story.

The Royal Succession - Maurice Druon

 The Royal Succession is the midpoint of The Accursed Kings sequence (The Strangled Queen, the second installment, is also reviewed on this blog, but my reading of The Iron King predates it).  Louis X, the strangler of queens, is dead, poisoned by his brother's mother-in-law, the giantess Mahaut, Countess of Artois.  Louis's second queen, Clemence of Hungary, is five months pregnant.  The late Louis already had a daughter by his first wife.  If a healthy son is born, the succession is clear.  If there's a second girl ... what then?

In the interim, someone must take charge.  The someone who succeeds is Louis's senior sibling, Philippe, Count of Poitiers.  Philippe is twenty-three; he has the political skills of his father and namesake, the Iron King, but not the military.  Philippe the younger is known as the Myope - he is acutely short-sighted.  On the plus side, he has the backing of his murderous mother-in-law.  By bricking up the cardinal electors in a cathedral, he is also able to secure the backing of the new pope, John XXII, formerly Cardinal Jacques Dueze - a pontiff so notorious that it was over 600 years before Rome dared allow John XXIII.

Most of Philippe's enemies are within the royal family, and therefore controllable.  Most are simply buyable.  But there are others, like Robert of Artois, whose lands have been appropriated for Mahaut and who is not even permitted to be in his nominal county.  Robert is the anarchic backbone of The Accursed Kings and his appearance always livens up proceedings.

Druon is the absolute master of historical background.  His knowledge of political wrangling through the ages is second to none.  His subject matter is so dark, so twisted and amoral, that it is only the rock-solid foundation in fact that makes it credible.  Frankly, it's no wonder that Druon was the literary hero of Republican France.  Not to everyone's taste, then, but certainly to mine.  My only reservation - I'm not entirely sure about the translation by Humphrey Hare.  It's a bit old-fashioned.  I wonder, are there are other translations?

The Strangled Queen - Maurice Druon

Book Two of what is said to have been a series which had enormous effect on George R R Martin. You can see why. Bloodshed, intrigue, adultery, and inbreeding between great royal and ducal houses, all of them closely related. Droun has either the advantage or disadvantage of it all being more or less historical fact.

Droun wrote The Accursed Kings (Les Rois maudits) between 1955 and 1977. The starting point is the destruction of the Knights Templar by Philip IV of France and his tame pope. The Order was accused of blasphemy but really the king and the pope just wanted their wealth. The Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, is burned at the stake. With his dying breath he curses the royal family - hence the title.

Inside a year Philip IV (the 'Iron King' of the first novel) is dead and his useless son Louis the Hutin (the 'hesitant') is on the throne. Louis and his younger brothers have all been married off to cousins who have all betrayed them with servants and attendants. Two of the sisters are still imprisoned at Richard the Lionheart's ironically-named Castle Galliard.  One of these, Marguerite, is now technically queen. But Louis is more than capable to embarrassing himself without her assistance. He wants the marriage annulled, and to achieve that he needs a pope. His great minister, Enguerrand de Marigny, naturally claims he can fix the problem. He had better, because King Louis's uncle, Charles of Valois, is after Marigny's head, and has the support of the giant Robert of Artois, friend and cousin of absolutely every member of the dynasty.

That is essentially the plotline of The Strangled Queen - in as near a nutshell as the tangled affairs of the House of Capet circa 1320 allow. The thing that makes Druon special among historical novelists is not merely than he can handle so much information, it is the lightness and ease of handling. Standard novelists would need 600 pages (we can only imagine how many massive volumes George R R Martin himself would require) bur Druon uses less than 300. To read him is a joy, and we should be grateful to Humphrey Hare for the expert translation. I have The Iron King here somewhere. I'm definitely going to re-read it.

The Silence of the Girls - Pat Barker

I was a big fan of the Regeneration Trilogy, not quite so keen on the Life Class Trilogy, although I still enjoyed it. Neither prepared me for this. The Silence of the Girls is a masterpiece - it's as simple as that. Barker takes the exact same episode of the Trojan War that Homer does, the 'wrath of Achilles', and does it from the woman's point of view. Given that Agamemnon's depriving Achilles of his prize slave Briseis, the captured queen of Trojan Lyrnessus, prompted the long sulk, this is an even better concept than Homer's. We see everything from all sides, Greek, Trojan, man, woman. And the change that Briseis brings about in Achilles, after the death of Patrocolus, is beautifully done by Barker and utterly convincing. I also loved the way she depicted the hero's eerie mother, the sea-nymph Thetis. That said, all her characterisations worked for me: the aged Priam, the simple Ajax, the individual enslaved women, and best of all, ever-patient Patrocolus. There is nothing more I can say. The best book I have read this year. A true work of art. I relished every single word.

The Wolf and the Watchman - Niklas Natt och Dag

An extraordinary achievement, fully deserving all the hype it has received, The Wolf and the Watchman is certainly the historical novel of the year, possibly the best since The Name of the Rose, back in the Eighties.

The story itself is startlingly original. In Stockholm, in 1793, the one-armed watchman Mickel Cardell pulls a dead man from the water. I was originally going to say body but that is somewhat of an overstatement in the case of this man. His arms, legs, eyes, tongue and teeth have all been removed, in stages, before death. The under-pressure police chief summons his friend and sometime investigator Cecil Winge. Winge has solved potentially unsolvable cases before, and if he doesn't succeed this time, he has nothing to lose, given that he has already outlived expert estimates of death from consumption.

Cardell and Winge join forces, the former providing the physicality to the latter's brains. Of course they eventually find out the dead man's identity and who killed him, but not before the author has opened up the story in an amazingly bold way.

The story starts in Autumn 1793 but then goes backwards in time, first to the summer. This is the story of the teenaged surgeon's assistant Johan Kristofer Blix, who we are meant to assume is the mutilated victim. Blix falls foul of the wastrel elite and builds a substantial debt which is then sold on to a nobleman who carries Blix off to his remote castle. Blix ultimately escapes and becomes part of the next section which begins in the spring of 1793.

This is the story of Anna Stina, an even younger teenager who is taken into 'care' by the authorities when her mother dies. The house of correction is really a torture chamber. Girls are whipped to death for the amusement of their guards. Anna escapes and takes on the role of one of the girls who died, the daughter of an innkeeper. She is, however, already pregnant by the guard who helped her escape. It is then she meets Blix, who redeems his sins by doing her a favour. After Blix is lost Anna plans to change her appearance with acid. At this point the story catches up with itself and we are back on the edge of winter.

The story is incredibly dark. Stockholm is corrupt, debased, and stinks to high heaven. The author is himself a member of one of Sweden's oldest families, so we must assume he has access to all the insider knowledge.

Hard to believe, but The Wolf and the Watchman is a debut novel. And what a debut it is. Again, I can only compare it with the arrival in fiction of Umberto Eco.

The Late Mr Shakespeare - Robert Nye

Nye (1939-2016) was one of those poets who, like Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove, fed their imagination with the deep dark mythos of the British Isles, often as channelled through Robert Graves's concept of the White Goddess.

Like Hughes, Nye was also fascinated with Shakespeare. Hughes crammed all his Shakespearean considerations into the vast and dense Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Nye found what I suspect was a much more lucrative outlet in rumbustious fiction. His career-changing hit was Falstaff (1976); he also wrote Mrs Shakespeare and, late on in his career this, which we can consider to be his final word on the subject.

The novel purports to be a life of the poet compiled, fifty years after Shakespeare's death, by the octogenarian Pickleherring (real name Robert Reynolds), the bastard son of a bishop and a bawd, discovered as a boy in Oxford by the great man himself and enlisted to play the female roles in his greatest plays.

Some seventy years later, Pickleherring subsists in the attic of Pompey Bum's whorehouse on the South Bank of London, sucking pickled mulberries and spying through his peephole on the girl in the room below. He clings to life purely in order to finish his life of Shakespeare, the researches for which he keeps in a hundred boxes. His life is, as it always has been, inseparably bound up with his subject, so we ricochet around the decades with little seeming order. Pickleherring has lived long enough to know all the barmy theories that have sprung up since Shakespeare's death. He has visited Stratford many times and been on terms, of a sort, with the great man's widow and daughters, though he did rather disgrace himself at the bard's funeral, when he dressed up in Ann Hathaway's clothes and became intolerably aroused.

They are all here, discussed in detail. Mr W H, the rival poet, the various Dark Ladies. Nye flaunts his scholarly researches through Pickleherring's scandalmongering pen. And great fun they are - Lucy Negro, 'Rizley'. The description of Christopher Marlowe and his wretched murder is profoundly moving. John Florio, the source of so many Shakespearean plots, springs from the shadows of centuries and the notion that John Shakespeare was his son's inspiration for Falstaff is resoundingly made. What the fat butcher may or may not have got up to nine months before Will's birth scarcely bears thinking about - nor indeed what Mary Arden might have done to the boy in infancy.

By having in effect two settings - the Elizabethan Golden Age and the early years of the Restoration when the censorious hand of puritanism still weights heavily - allows a play of stark contrasts: licentious pleasure versus bluestocking constraint. Nye makes the absolute most of both. His romps are Rabelaisian, the darkness of the 1660s sometimes very bleak indeed (for example, what are we to make of the actions and fate of Pickleherring's late wife, Jane?).

The Late Mr Shakespeare is a book of enormous richness. I loved it because I am a scholar of such matters. Four degrees in drama - you can't avoid Shakespeare no matter how hard you try. Importantly, though, I loved it because of its style, the characters, the brilliant way he establishes the famous gentleness of Will whilst at the same time revealing nothing of what really goes on in his head, because Nye is clearly of the opinion that genius is unfathomable.

Essential reading and great entertainment. Nye is now very much on my reading list.

The Ides of March - Thornton Wilder

So what have we here? An epistolary novel by an author who was highly respected in his lifetime but who has since fallen into total neglect. A history which the author admits, on page 1, has been dicked about with - to the extent that the outrage which hangs over everything else here, actually happened a decade and a half earlier. The author even goes so far as including anonymous attacks on Caesar which actually come from the Spanish Civil War - a slight anachronism of a mere two thousand years. The result?


Brilliant. I loved it. There is so much going on here. We have the arrival of Caesar's lover, Cleopatra, in Rome. We have the connivance of the local femme fatale Clodia Pulcher and her crazed brother. We have Caesar's fortnightly journal-letter to his old friend Turrinus in self-imposed seclusion on the Isle of Capri. I have never heard of Turrinus - is he perhaps another invention? In the novel, though, he becomes a constant, slightly eerie presence. It is hinted that he was horribly mutilated during Caesar's Gallic campaign, hence his seclusion - yet during the novel it becomes apparent that he is willing to receive visitors, some of whom he hasn't seen for decades. We see nothing of his replies to Caesar though the contents of letters to others are referred to. Does he really exist or is he another of Caesar's devious, secretive schemes?


The letters tend to be formal, and Wilder adds notes to enforce the illusion they are real. Yet he manages to create vivid characters in them. Cleopatra comes across very well, her exoticism demonstrated, and Wilder has fun with the women of Rome trying to decide if she is beautiful or not. Also stunningly brought to life is the young iconoclast poet Catallus and his premature death.


For me, the final perfect touch was the use of a direct quote from Tacitus - the only 'real' document in the dossier - to cover Caesar's assassination.


I don't know about other works by Thornton Wilder, but Ides of March is good enough in his own right to warrant restoration to the canon of great Twentieth Century American literature.

John Aubrey: My Own Life - Ruth Scurr

What Ruth Scurr has done here is create a biographical collage from the voluminous papers of the Seventeenth Century antiquarian, best known today for his Brief Lives. For those who only know Aubrey through the brilliant one-man play, also called Brief Lives, created by Patrick Garland for Roy Dotrice, the result is very different, not at all funny and in fact indescribably sad.


Aubrey was a Wiltshire gentlemen, educated at Oxford before and during the Civil Wars. He became addicted to collecting information - I'm quite sure it was an obsessive compulsion for him. He lost his home, his moderate fortune, and his chances of matrimony, all for the sake of piling up topographical, biographical, astrological and historical 'facts'. In his personal papers he goes on and on about the need to get his work published, but those of us with similar problems will recognise early on that he will never compromise the compilation process in order to secure a hard-copy legacy. In fact his only publication, printed just before his death at the age of seventy-one, was little more than a scrapbook of trash and leftovers. He had entrusted everything else to fellow antiquarians who ripped him off for their own work without ever giving him credit.


Aubrey did in fact achieve things of lasting significance. He is the first to relate Avebury to Stonehenge (albeit William Stukeley hijacked his research and passed it off as his own). If we want to know about significant figures of the Commonwealth period - written out of his history by the Monarchists - Aubrey is often the only source.


Scurr has achieved a brilliant book. Her rare and subtle interpolations (all flagged up as "On this day" and used to provide a general context for what Aubrey was writing at a particular time) merge seamlessly. She has modernised Aubrey's prose without losing any meaning, simply to allow him to speak to us directly. Hugely impressive but, like I say, very sad.

The Strangler Vine - M J Carter

The Strangler Vine is the first novel by Miranda Carter, biographer of Anthony Blunt and author of The Three Emperors, an account of Queen Victoria's grandsons and how their relationships contributed to World War I.

For a first novel The Strangler Vine is an astonishing achievement.  Carter says she knew nothing about India in the 19th Century before starting the project.  By the end, clearly, she knew more or less everything.  The level of detail is just right.  We never get any sense of contrivance, avoidance or - just as fatal in a novel - showing off.

The story inevitably has hints of Kipling and John Buchan.  The blurbs cite Sherlock Holmes but it is much better than that (Conan Doyle is a martyr to contrivance and bodge).  The year is 1837 and young William Avery, a neophyte and impoverished officer in the private army of the East India Company, is paired up with lapsed agent Jem Blake to go in search of Xavier Mountstuart, the Byrom of India.  Avery is a huge fan of Mountstuart, whose work inspired him to seek his fortune in India.  Blake was Mountstuart's protege back in the days before he trading spying for literature.

The quest is multi-layered.  Nothing is as it first seems as Blake and Avery probe to the black heart of corruption in the Company.  The revelations keep on coming, alongside rip-roaring adventure and a sensitive portrait of India clinging to its last vestiges of independence.

I can't wait to lay hands on the second Blake and Avery, The Infidel Strain.

The Devil in the Marshalsea - Antonia Hodgson

For a first novel, this is a cracker, a welcome addition to the ranks of historical detective fiction in the generally underwhelming sub-category of early Georgian.

Tom Hawkins (not, I have to say, the most imaginative name) is a theology student gone to the dogs in the best Hogarthian manner, the friend of bawds, a menace to his true friends, and an unsuccessful gambler.  The latter, and an anonymous allegation that he was been enjoying the favours of his landlord's wife, lands him in the notorious titular debtors' prison.  The Marshalsea in 1727 was at the height of its notoriety under the auspices of the butcher-turned-gaolkeeper Thomas Acton.

Another fallen gentleman, Captain Roberts (Hodgson really does have to spice up the names of her fictional characters) has recently died in the Marshalsea.  The coroner has declared it suicide but the captain's friends and family insist he was murdered.  The captain's widow has come into money since his death and has friends in high places.  It is in everyone's best interests to have the matter cleared up.  In the absence of a police force, it falls to Tom Hawkins to win his freedom by unmasking the killer.

Every good detective needs an amanuensis and Tom's is the imprisoned publisher and part-time spy Samuel Fleet, who just happens to have shared a room with Captain Roberts and is himself the prime suspect.  This is where Hodgson's story really takes wings.  Fleet is a wonderful character, utterly untrustworthy, surprisingly free with his cash.  He is the Devil in the Marshalsea and revels in the notoriety.

Hodgson's other great strength is plotting.  There is a quote from Mark Billingham on the cover - "Fiendishly plotted" - and he is spot on.  There are so many twists and turns in the narrative, set against the ticking clock of the two days Tom is ultimately given to solve the case, that you really don't like to put the book down for fear you miss something.  Who cares who really did it?  That's never the critical factor in a whodunnit so long as someone did it.  The denouement is acceptable, the way it is delivered exemplary.

A stunning debut, then.  It says in the back that Hodgson is working on a successor.  So where is it?  Her website says nothing - in fact the site is useless and she really ought to take it down before it does harm.

The Burning Sky - Jack Ludlow

The first volume in the Roads to War trilogy, Ludlow has created a gentleman adventurer in the manner of Buchan's Richard Hannay (Cal Jardine even has a Scots heritage) but has updated the genre.  Jardine is not always a gentleman (see the eyebrow raising scene with a very different M) but largely so.  He is footloose and fancy free after an equivocal divorce and occupying himself by smuggling Jews out of Hamburg in 1935.  He is approached by a former comrade to get involved in smuggling arms to Abyssinia, which Mussolini has just invaded.

Ludlow is one of the pen names of David Donachie, who has knocked out several historical series under several names.  Given the number of titles we cannot expect high literature, but his prose is just about acceptable (far too many subordinate clauses for my liking).  His characterisation is good, though, and his research impeccable.  He gets to the nub of 1930s atrocities and his judgement is sound.  I especially enjoyed the ambivalent ending.  For Buchan everything was always sorted by the end, good always won, and the British way triumphed.  That is not the case here and it is that authorial choice that has me keen to read the next volume of the trilogy.

The Scent of Death - Andrew Taylor

Andrew Taylor has to be one of the best writers of historical crime.  His strengths lie in the unusual choice of setting - in this case New York City in the limbo period when it was briefly the last British outpost in post revolutionary America - brilliant characterisation, intricate plotting and, above all perhaps, scrupulous research.  When a writer includes a period map, you can be confident he knows what he's talking about.

Edward Savill is a middling English civil servant who has landed himself a prestigious post in the American Department by marrying his patron's unlovely niece.  The only downside of the post is that involves being in America.  Thus we arrive in New York with our hero.  He has barely stepped ashore when he discovers his first murder victim in the Canvas Town shanty that has sprung up to provide some sort of shelter for loyalist refugees without friends or funds, tumbled in with the usual human flotsam and jetsam of shanties worldwide since the beginning of civilisation.

During his stay Savill is billeted with the Wintour family, loyalist gentry who are sliding gently towards hard times.  In Warren Street live Judge Wintour, his gently senile wife, the beautiful Mrs Arabella Wintour (wife or perhaps widow of the missing Captain Wintour) and their various slaves.  Savill's associates in official business include Major Marryot, who has a fondness for Mrs Arabella, and Mr Townley, a genteel local fixer and social gadfly with a stay-at-home wife and a growing fortune founded on the vicissitudes of a city under effective siege.

More murders ensue, Savill's fortunes rise and fall (there is a marvellous twist concerning his wife), he travels through the Disputed Lands (now upstate New York) and resolves crime and his own fate out on the frozen River Hudson.

A marvellous book, a worthy winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Dagger 2013, and as good an introduction as any to Taylor's extensive oeuvre.  Personally I began with the captivating Anatomy of Ghosts (another winner of the Peters Dagger) and followed that with Bleeding Heart Square.  I gather The American Boy is one to look out for.  So I shall.

Templar's Acre - Michael Jecks

The thirty-first, latest, and - for the time being at least - last of Jecks' novels featuring Sir Baldwin, the crusader-turned-coroner.  Actually, Templar's Acre is not a medieval mystery but a prequel in which the teenage Baldwin travels to Outremer to purge his guilt by preserving the city of Acre, the last Christian city in the Holy Land.

I've commented before on this blog that Jecks' attachment to his hero seems to have been weakening.  One recent novel didn't have him appear at all until well into the action.  But here Baldwin is well-served and central.  Jecks knows his stuff and is not afraid to show his knowledge.  The siege is expertly handled, making us feel the tedium of days and nights on the city walls without ever subjecting us to similar tedium.

I enjoyed it hugely and hope Jecks is soon back on home turf.  It will nevertheless be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

Augustus - Allan Massie

I'd previously read Massie's take on Caligula, which was OK, but this is much better - a character, I feel, that Massie is naturally more comfortable with.  The novel presents as two separate tranches of autobiography, one covering Octavian's triumph over Antony and Cleopatra, the other a more sweeping account of everything else.  The free-form style of the second half compensates for the awkward structure and, being essentially about what comes after a forty-year benign dictatorship (a question more relevant today than when the book was written in 1985/6), is more about Tiberius than Augustus.  Certainly, I am keen to read Tiberius, the next in the sequence.  Another that caught my eye is Nero's Heirs.

Massie is a novelist in the classic tradition.  In Augustus and Caligula he ventures into territory comprehensively staked out by Robert Graves a generation earlier.  But, without in any way shaking the reader's faith in the historicity of his narrative, Massie manages to bring a fresh and distinct take to a relatively familiar story.