Igenlode Wordsmith

This was billed as 'a Gothic novel' and I suppose it is. The main protagonist is a young woman who has just lost her fiancé in the Crimean War, and who is seeking to distract herself with a suitably exhausting labour; the one she takes on is the education and civilisation of a feral small boy, who happens to be the neglected heir of a horrible old aristocrat living in a crumbling and sinister mansion surrounded by overgrown woods to which local superstition attributes monsters (or at least vicious guard-dogs). Lord Stanyon was once a dissolute Regency buck, who in his crippled old age has defied his family by marrying an uneducated peasant and producing a son to spite his heirs-presumptive, but the boy --thanks as much to the equally evil manservant's malignity as to his father's scorn for his wife and child-- is not only filthy and illiterate, but half-deaf and backward in his development as a result.( Read more... )

I was a bit sceptical at the end of my review of "Ninth House" as to how desirable a sequel was likely to be, but I went to the trouble of seeking out a copy of "Hell Bent" and then paying repeat visits to the library until it was finally back on the shelves for me to borrow. Unfortunately, as I had feared, this book isn't nearly as successful as its predecessor; it's not *bad* as such, and as with the previous volume I consumed it more or less non-stop in a couple of days of breathless reading to find out what happened next, but on its own it definitely wouldn't have inspired me to go looking for more in the same vein.( Read more... ) I'd probably still be up for a sequel to see if the author can recapture the spirit of discovery from the first book, but overall this one felt more like generic urban fantasy, and from the indications in the final chapters I'm not optimistic that a concluding trilogy volume is likely to be any less so.

This book is a prime example of what Josephine Tey memorably stigmatised as the Victorian art of "writing forsoothly" ("Friend Dickon, ye have certain matters on hand, unless I err? Well, prithee be about them incontinently. For here I be with the choice of all good company, two tough old shipmen; and till that ye return I will go warrant these brave fellows will bide here and drink me cup for cup"). The dialogue of the entire novel -- although mercifully not the surrounding narrative -- is constructed in this laboured cod-Chaucerian style, and while it's easy enough to get your eye in, provided you are already familar with this sort of language, it's pretty obvious why it fell out of fashion. ( Read more... )

But the adventures are thrilling, even if they are episodic in nature and rather convey the impression of having been made up with every installment. One thing that feels very realistic is the completely arbitrary nature of any York/Lancaster allegiance for most of those involved; Dick ends up fighting for the Yorkists more or less at random, having started off by following his guardian to the Lancastrian side, and by the end of the book has already had enough of battle and ambition.

This is... pretty good for a self-published book, but it does look and feel indefinably like a self-published book. (After finishing it I looked up "Godstow Press", and it is indeed owned by the author, which confirmed the impression I'd had from the moment I first picked it up. )

The protagonist, Togidubnus, is a man caught between two cultures, the son of a British client king who was sent off in childhood to be brought up in Rome as a hostage with the promise that he would become a proper Roman citizen. Conveniently for the historical narrative he rubs shoulders with Seneca, Claudius and Vespasian, beds Messalina (about whom the author appears uncertain whether she ought to be revisionist or not) and is then sent back to Britain with the mission to persuade the local rulers to surrender to Claudius' intended invasion without a fight. He has before him the example of Vespasian, who comes from thoroughly Romanised Iberian stock, and the dubious example of his Gaullish grandfather, who may or may not have betrayed both sides according to whose bards you listen to.( Read more... )

Judith lives in a dismal industrial town as a member of an apocalyptic cult, but that is the least of her problems. She is being bullied at school, her father doesn't seem to love her any more, and worst of all, when she speaks to God, God has started speaking back. And having access to divine powers, however much it may initially have seemed like the answer to her prayers, turns out to make matters much, much worse. ( Read more... )

"The Elusive Pimpernel" in an odd sense serves as a sequel in parallel to *both* the original novel "The Scarlet Pimpernel" and to its follow-up, "I Will Repay"; it is far closer to the former in setting and content, being a return to the familiar characters and tropes of the original hit, and yet the beginning of the story directly references the events of "I Will Repay", and uses Juliette Marny and her family jewels as a trigger for the main plot. ( Read more... ) Orczy evidently decided that Chauvelin was far too good a character to waste; it is hard not to feel a certain sympathy for him (small and slight in build, highly intelligent, isolated among his colleagues, and vulnerable not to physical danger but ridicule) and while the format of the genre means that he is always doomed to lose, one feels that this tug of appeal is almost certainly intentional on the part of the author. In the opening scene with Robespierre we are given quite a new perspective on Chauvelin, being told that he had once been part of the ruling group alongside Robespierre, but that the latter had subsequently consciously attempted to sideline him as a potential threat because he was not only "keen and clever", "trusted and respected", but "possessed all those qualities of selfless patriotism" which the other, characterised as "the most ambitious, self-seeking demagogue of his time", conspicuously lacked: in other words, Chauvelin is a danger because he genuinely embodies those virtues for which Robespierre, famously dubbed 'the sea-green Incorruptible', is known in public.
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"Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord-- I will repay."

This book was billed in various editions as 'Further Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel' and 'A Scarlet Pimpernel Story', but in fact as a sequel to the enormous success of the original Scarlet Pimpernel novel it is a somewhat unexpected choice; the Scarlet Pimpernel himself has little more than a walk-on role, and the main character is an idealistic Citizen Deputy in the National Convention who is denounced to the authorities by a young aristocrat in revenge for events that had occurred before the Revolution. It's a bold development on Orczy's part, if nothing else, and I suspect may have disconcerted the contemporary audience as much as it disconcerted me when I first read it as a child, for in her next book she returns to the old set-up of Sir Percy squaring off against a returning Chauvelin in order to save the captive Marguerite. But this one is quite a departure, and I can appreciate it now more than I did on my original reading. ( Read more... )

I originally picked this book up because it promised to cover precisely the material (Royalist resistance against Napoleon between 1800 and 1802) for my current fanfic that I was having trouble sourcing much information on elsewhere. It wasn't particularly helpful in that respect, probably because there really wasn't very much useful resistance going on at that point -- but its very existence is an interesting phenomenon in itself. Unfortunately that doesn't make it a terribly good book, especially considering its inordinate length: 750 pages in paperback plus extra editorial material.

As a long-lost novel by Alexandre Dumas (Author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo! proclaims the cover) it is, I'm afraid, little more than a historical curiosity. ( Read more... )
The youngest survivor of an aristocratic family who were all executed in turn for their Royalist activities, Hector de Sainte-Hermine takes up the cause in his turn and sacrifices the happiness of his impending marriage to renewed hostilities against an increasingly autocratic Bonaparte. He is not, however, a particularly effective guerilla and is rapidly caught, whereupon his sole hope is to follow his brothers into death without bringing further disgrace upon his unhappy fiancée. However, Fouché, the devious minister of police, contrives instead to have him forgotten in jail and finally released once Bonaparte has become the Emperor Napoleon, by which point Hector has seen the error of his ways and consents to serve the glorious new empire, giving his loyalty to France rather than to the exiled Bourbons for whom his family sacrificed their future.

And that is basically the entire plot. The rest of the novel consists of Hector under multiple aliases travelling around the fringes of history and impressing everybody with how incredibly good he is at everything -- he is supposed to be a tragically romantic figure mourning his lost love and doing his best to get himself killed, but unlike, say, Athos, who is likewise noble, handsome, reticent about his past, and emotionally scarred, he remains very much a cipher rather than engaging the reader in any way. ( Read more... )

A brilliantly written evocation of Georgian England, London and its theatre, as could perhaps only have been achieved by an author who was also himself an actor. He writes with enormous skill and understanding, despite the challenge of portraying the talent of a comedian whose side-splitting performances were simply so topical and of their era that if quoted verbatim they are, as he acknowledges, no longer at all funny. Instead Ian Kelly manages to convey convincingly the effect they had upon Foote's contemporaries, and the performer's supreme talent as an impressionist - attending one of his hot-from-the-headlines comedy entertainments, with Foote himself playing multiple roles, must have been like an episode of "Dead Ringers" (one cultural comparison Kelly doesn't actually make, though it is very much his thesis in this book that this era saw the dawn of modern media and celebrity culture).( Read more... )

This book is basically "The Red Shoes" meets "A Chorus Line" or the love-child of Jackie Collins and Harold Robbins, a behind-the-scenes expose of ballet life: ambition, manipulation, back-stabbing, love affairs and friendships gone sour ... and it's really good. ( Read more... ) I think where it really scores, at least for me, is the three-dimensional even-handedness with which it handles the characters - the novel opens in Steph's point of view and she is probably the nearest thing we have to a main protagonist, but we get a moment of revelation where pretty much everyone is concerned in which we see the world through their eyes and understand that they are doing what seems to them the right thing where their own values are concerned.

For the older generation, there are still memories of the Nazis and the Second World War - for the very oldest, the Russian Revolution still echoes, and the lost age of Imperial ballet. Marius Volmar is a 'sacred monster' along the lines of Boris Lermontov (and very probably based on the same real-life model) who deliberately manipulates both Steph and Chris for his own ends, but he does it not because he is a sadist but in a quest to restore a long-lost Tchaikovsky ballet scene which for him is the Holy Grail, a device that in fact forms the framing structure for the entire plot. ( Read more... )