Bring Up The Bodies

I think that I have proclaimed my deep love for HilaryMantel loudly enough and often enough to qualify me as her a stalker. So I was all prepared to adore her new novel Bring Up The Bodies and guess what? I did! ~~Sigh~~ Happiness complete.

So…first there was the superb, award winning Wolf Hall. Has everyone heard of this? Good. Has everyone read this? If not go do so we’ll be here still heaping accolades on Ms Mantel when you get back. If the rest of you have had the great good sense to read Wolf Hall we’ll move on.

In Bring Up The Bodies Thomas Cromwell is older, more seasoned and more pressured than ever. Marriage number two for his liege Henry is not working out. Queen Anne’s personality and son-less womb are not winning her any support at court and is alienating Henry. Henry’s eye is roving. He’s sees greener grass and it will fall to Cromwell to make it all happen. You knew that much before you got to page one but of course it’s the telling that makes Bring Up The Bodies so absolutely divine.

Hilary Mantel somehow produces magical writing with the same ease that it takes the rest of us  to open a can of tuna. Writing that all at once makes familiar facts suspenseful, creates humanity and understanding in the traditional bad guys of history and builds ambience and setting with brief, well placed descriptions of an object or a smell or the cut of a dress. At the same time Mantel is inside of Cromwell along with all the dead friends, family and foes he cannot shake loose of writing through him.

The amazing marriage of Hilary Mantel and Thomas Cromwell has already produced two magnificent novels: Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. The final book in this trilogy is in the works and it cannot arrive fast enough for me.

P.S. You could absolutely read and adore Bring Up The Bodies without having read Wolf Hall? Yes, but why would you want to?

Arlington Park

We all understand that you never know what goes on behind your neighbors’ curtains, right? We’ve learned this from relationships, novels and every Lifetime TV movie ever made. We got it. The yards in the neighborhood might be beautifully groomed, the car in the driveway the latest model, the children all smiles at the bus top but peel back the veneer and voila! The seamy underbelly of suburbia. This is the territory that Rachel Cusk covers in her novel, Arlington Park.

Have you read anything by Ms Cusk? She has the surgeon’s skill of cutting away and cutting away until the entire tumor is exposed and it serves her well in Arlington Park.  Cusk dissects the lives of four women who are far from old but whose youth is gone. They are all wives and mothers. Over the course of day, Cusk's plot illustrates the  varying states of unhappiness, paralysis, nursing slights and general discontent of her characters. Arlington Park is  where those whose dreams have always included an element of being “on the way up” discover the emotional cost of that life.

Cusk writes with uncompromising honesty about her characters. Yes she opens that older than dirt curtain idea  but that is only her first step in dissecting the relationships, choices, home lives and society of her women. Arlington Park is not a feel good novel of friendships tested among disparate women while they chew the fat over endless cups of tea. It’s a much darker story about not always likable people by a very talented writer

Blue Asylum

If I’m poking around for something new to read and the words Civil War pop up, I move on. My interest in historical fiction from that period began and ended with Gone With The Wind. Then because I hearted the cover on Blue Asylum  so much I disregarded my embargo and read on. Once again judging a book by its cover has led me to reading happiness. Shallowness has so paid off for me over the years!

Essentially Blue Asylum is the story of a young wife, Iris, with abolitionist beliefs married to a southern slave owner who has her committed when she acts on her beliefs. Once at the island asylum of Sanibel Iris is subject to the treatments of an egotistical doctor, the fantasies of his son and is herself attracted to a traumatized Confederate soldier. There are unique touches to the whys, wheres and hows but emotionally it’s the usual pile on of drama after drama for a hoop-skirted heroine.

You could take that basic plot description and check Blue Asylum off as romantic soap opera. It is but it’s that and more in the hands of a strong writer like Kathy Hepinstall. This makes all the difference in the world my friends. Within the theater of the true to life  historical elements, the war, slavery and marriage laws Hepinstall is able to create interesting, period-accurate characters (Halleluiah!) whose personal dramas unfold engagingly and realistically against a well researched ambiance. The union of all these parts without any one component over powering the other makes for a rich, smart read.

No I In Team? Who Cares?

Sometimes I am just the super proud Aunt who only has good will towards one. I am not always willing to be one of the spectators  clapping for every single kid participating--- and pretending to care about them.

Today was one of those days. I had no ill will towards any other competitor but I wanted only one to reign supreme and she did!

 Niece S had a spectacular meet and I am THRILLED for her!

There is no I in team but there is one in win my friends.

The Secret River

It was the best of times it was… jail or Australia for William Thornhill. That’s the way the cookie is crumbling in author Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River. Set in 1806, The Secret River is the story of a convict settlement in New South Wales. Forced by circumstances to steal, William is caught and wins the all expenses paid, one way cruise to an Australian penal colony. William’s life sentence is the re-making of him. He has been a petty criminal since childhood and avoiding the gallows in exchange for a new life for himself and his pregnant wife has the potential to take him from no-hope poverty to a chance.

Once in New South Wales, William begins the arduous process of going from convict/slave to freeman with help from his wife Sal and their children. Still struggling with the poverty that has dogged him all his life, he eventually stakes a claim to land along the Hawkesbury River. Alas even working himself up to being a landowner does not bring smooth sailing for William and Sal. His claim brings him in conflict with the native aborigines.  The uneasy coexistence between the white settlers and aborigines is in constant danger of tipping into violence. This relationship is the real heart of the novel.

Grenville has hit one out of the park. She has taken the classic settle the west novel and made it new and powerful with wonderful writing. The Secret River is a novel of escalating struggles and discord told in nimble and penetrating writing. I am hearting this riveting novel.

One Big Damn Puzzler

One Big Damn Puzzler. The title says it all doesn’t? It’s got mod all over it. You know you are in for a circus of eccentric characters with some sort of bad government or evil billionaire or organization that secretly rules everyone’s lives hidden away at the center of the storyline and by the end of the novel Aunt Betty’s goat has been reunited with his childhood friend chicken (who barks) and Dimitri the bus driver/Greek immigrant has had his musical based on the life of Woodrow Wilson produced---and it’s a hit! The thought of it makes me wince tiredly.

But guess what? I was right and I was wrong.

This novel by John Harding is a circus of eccentrics and it does have bad government at its heart but I am happy to say that the likes of the goat, chicken and Dimitri do not materialize and therefore neither does my tiredness.  Instead One Big Damn Puzzler is a rambunctious but controlled adventure with a great deal of wit.

On an island paradise in the South Pacific, American lawyer William Hart has arrived. He has decided that the islanders are owed reparations from the U.S. government. The British had beat the Americans to the island and left behind pigs that now ruled the jungle, unfinished buildings, the English language and Shakespeare. The Americans hadn’t been such benign tourists. They left behind guns, land mines and a taste for soda. The island culture that resulted from natural development, the British and the Americans is unique. The evolution of the islanders could alter dramatically once again based on Hart’s law suit and would that be a good thing?

As Hart gets to know the island and its’ citizens author Harding keeps everything broad but still human. By doing this Harding saves One Big Damned Puzzler from being pure farce. His creation of the islands’ history has enough reality to be accepted as possible so that when he places his peculiar characters within it their behavior and lookout become on one level a natural progression of their historical experience.

I did enjoy One Big Damn Puzzler. Occasionally Harding seems a little too eager to point how amusing he can be but that is a minor complaint. This novel is a clever, well imagined look at a trampled over society that survived anyway.

Island of Wings

Do you follow the Orange Prize? I do. Of all the literary prizes that I take note of the Orange Prize consistently yields me the most interesting things to read. I did used to have this same relationship with the Man Booker as well but that love affair has cooled recently. Anyway. This years’ Orange has given me a couple wonderful treats including Island of Wings by Karin Altenberg.

In 1830 the Reverend Neil MacKenzie and his wife Lizzie arrive on the island St. Kilda to do missionary work. The MacKenzies are hopeful, in love and happily expecting their first child. They are full of vigorous believe that their efforts to educate the populace of the island on all topics but especially God will set them all on the right path. And. If the island happens to turn more British during the process? So much the better. Don’t think that because the topic is religion and the island is in Scotland not Africa or Asia  that Island of Wings isn’t also about colonialism.

 St. Kilda was settled a thousand years before the MacKenzies arrived to do a makeover by Gaelic speaking Norsemen. Arriving at St Kilda the young couple is shocked to discover a place that seems medieval compared to the luxuries they left behind. Although only 40 miles off the coast of Scotland, the island might was well be 400 miles away for all the comfort that is there.  A few times a year the taxman would come to the island to collect revenue and to drop off supplies otherwise the islanders provide for themselves what they need. This is a hardscrapple place to live. The islanders are raggedly dressed, their homes are filthy, malnutrition is rampant and one in three newborns does not survive their first week.  

These challenges that met the MacKenzies are quickly compounded. Only Neil speaks Gaelic so Lizzie’s isolation is immediate. Lizzie’s child is still born and the wretched bleakness of the lives around her further forces Lizzie into her own world. Neil’s efforts to convert the natives are hardly successful and his plans to reorganize how they do their farming have dire consequences.  

In a spare writing style Karin Altenberg has done four things very well in Island of Wings: history, geography, people and politics.  She has given us intriguing historical details, a world impossible to imagine, characters that change not because they grow older but because of circumstance and experience and a powerful lesson in the politics of faith. Island of Wings is an impressive, thoughtful novel.