pretty_plant

From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea by Jo Stanley (2015). Very various history of the many different things women have done on ships, particularly outside the Royal Navy on cruise ships, cargo ships and so on. A lot of it is about the later half of the period, the recent feminist context in which women are openly working to do a wider range of jobs and get paid and treated properly, often recent enough that Stanley got her information by talking to the people involved. Interesting, as learning about parts of the world one doesn't often think about can be interesting, but there's not much on the earlier period I most wanted to find out about, and much of what there is comes from Suzanne Stark's book which I'd just read. (Also Stanley is oddly insistent on referring to crossdressing sailors as 'boys', as if many of them didn't pass successfully for/as adult men for years at a time—and it's not like she doesn't acknowledge and describe these cases, so I don't know what that was about.)

Wakenhyrst by Michelle Paver (2019). A Gothic horror novel, of sorts, set in the Suffolk Fens in the Edwardian period. At the start of the book we learn, via a framing story taking place sixty years after the main events, of a horrible murder committed there by a hitherto-respectable local gentleman and witnessed only by his teenage daughter; we then go back in time and see events over the years leading up to the murder, via interspersed chapters of the daughter's third-person POV and the murderer's diary. As modern historical fiction goes it's good; it is hammering the message of Patriarchy Is Really Bad pretty hard but not as far as I could see unrealistically (though the handling of Ivy's character lets that down somewhat), and the diary sections in particular, barring a few lapses into modern vocabulary and sentence structure, were really a decent pastiche of actual Victwardian epistolary horror. I was increasingly irritated by the artificial drama of the prose, especially in the third-person sections; Paver is very fond of rather contrived dramatic chapter endings and of what you might call emphatic redundancy. She repeats the same information in a new sentence so you know it's really important.—which takes away from the power of what might sometimes have been a good single dramatic reveal. (I thought the repeated twists as to the identity of the intended victim(s) were especially weak, and the final twist right at the end was pathetic. Speaking of the former, I also thought it was rather obvious which pieces of information the opening framing story was carefully not giving us in order to preserve drama later on.) I do like a book that combines disparate influences in interesting ways, which this book does—fenland history and folklore, medieval mysticism and beliefs about demons, various pieces of the author's own family history and experiences—but, reading over her detailed explanation of them all in the afterword, it did strike me that she perhaps hadn't done enough fictionalising and recombining of them. (The medieval churchy bits in particular seem hardly to have been altered at all; why change one letter in a real saint's name and then repeat his story exactly as-is? Either make up a character properly or just use the real saint!) I was also very disappointed by

some spoilery details:

the way the eventual resolution of the story collapses almost all the supernatural elements down to nothing but patriarchal/religio-historical madness. Also, while we're doing spoilers, my mild-to-moderate dislike of the third-person prose got worse on the reveal near the end that it's intended to be Maud's own narrative; sure, it's the sixties now, but I don't believe a recluse with a 'cut-glass accent' raised and educated in a strict Edwardian household would use so many sentence fragments!

Hmm, I did like a lot about the book despite the weaknesses I'm complaining about here. It's just flawed and generally not very subtle.

Micah Clarke by Arthur Conan Doyle (1889). Hey, ACD, look! People ARE reading your non-Holmes historical fiction! :) Anyway, some people on Tumblr were talking about this adventure novel set during the Monmouth rebellion (a Protestant/Whig uprising against James II in the southwest of England in 1685) and ratuszarsenal said it was reminding him of Kidnapped, so of course I had to check it out. Narrated in first person by the title character talking to his grandchildren years later, the story follows Micah's decision to join the rising, the course it takes, various adventures he and his friends get into along the way and its eventual end. There are, loosely speaking, four main characters: Micah, a young man from Hampshire; Reuben Lockarby, his slightly bumbling BFF; Decimus Saxon, a morally dubious career mercenary who brings them the news of Monmouth's rising and then decides to join it; and Sir Gervas Jerome, a London fop fallen on hard times who also joins in for an adventure. I think this is one that wants thoughts in list form:

• Having a group rather than a pair of main characters means there isn't one single central relationship like in Kidnapped. There is one sequence between Micah and Saxon early on which strongly recalls Alan/Davie, but I don't think Saxon and Alan really have that much in common (Alan shocks Davie by having a moral code very different to his own; Saxon shocks Micah by not having much of one at all), and while his memory lingers in a significant way at the end, Saxon isn't as important to Micah personally as Alan is to Davie. Sir Gervas also has some of Alan's comical vanity, but not the rest of his personality! On the whole I liked the dynamics between the four main characters, if none of them really grabbed me. They're a good complementary set.
• There's not very much romance. Obviously Micah has married at some point in the time since the events he narrates, and he occasionally refers to 'your grandmother', but she's not a character in the story at all. Reuben falls in love with a side character and ultimately marries her, but it's mostly in the background.
• I knew very little about the Monmouth rebellion before reading this (he was an illegitimate son of Charles II who decided that the accession of his unpopular Catholic uncle was a good chance to pretend to be legitimate and try to seize the throne), and it was interesting to learn more about this episode in the pre-Jacobite Stuart wrangles period. It is kind of eerie how closely the events as portrayed here recall those of the '45, with the sides swapped: a rising led by a charismatic but undependable prince who comes over from the continent; the ranks filled by admirably loyal peasants from one particular region, often motivated by religious belief; its defeat after an ill-judged and disastrous attempted night attack on the government army's camp; horrific cruelty by the government army towards both captive soldiers and random people from the surrounding countryside; show trials of the prisoners, hundreds of whom are executed or transported. One fairly important difference, of course, is that the Jacobite cause didn't go on to triumph three years later, and it is an interesting choice to set a historical novel during an unsuccessful rising by a cause that was to succeed so soon afterwards.
• Is it a good adventure story? Yes, I think so; it doesn't stand out as one of the most memorable, but it's pretty solid.
• A substantial part of this book's Wikipedia page is devoted to a debate over whether or not Oscar Wilde liked it. Good priorities there.
• Apparently alchemy is real??