Book Review: City of Wisdom and Blood (1977) by Robert Merle; The Eyes of Venice (2012) by Alessandro Barbero

Once upon a time I didn't like historical fiction, or perhaps it's better to say I simply ignored it. I reasoned that if I wanted to learn about period x in history, why not read a history book? Far better, I thought, to read a novel that was written in the time it describes, rather than some contemporary writer's idea of what life might have been like in the long ago and far away. And then after reading a long and laudatory piece on Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of novels set in the Napoleonic wars, I decided to take the plunge into historical fiction. I haven't looked back.

City of Wisdom and Blood is the second in a 13-volume series set in France during the religious wars of the 16th century. The first volume introduced the de Sioracs, a recently ennobled Protestant family living in the Perigord region. This volume follows Pierre and Samson, the youngest sons of the family, as they move to Montpellier to study medicine. Merle's grand theme in this novel is the problem of religious intolerance. Catholics and Protestants are always itching to have at each other, although both can agree it's equally enjoyable to persecute Jews, atheists and, of course, witches. Merle's theme is religion, but his muse is Errol Flynn. Yes, the swashbuckling dial is set to 11 here, and some of the dialogue sounds as though it comes directly from Captain Blood or The Adventures of Robin Hood. And the plentiful episodes of shagging feel like they've been inspired by the memoirs of Casanova. If this makes the novel sound schlocky, it isn't. Merle knows his history and makes it live and breathe like few writers have done, and he definitely knows how to show his readers a good time. This series is just being translated into English and the publishers appear to be putting out two volumes a year, with the third coming out in June.

Alessandro Barbero's novel is set in Venice and the eastern Mediterranean in the 16th century. It's just as entertaining as Merle's, but Barbero is a more sober storyteller. There's no swinging from chandeliers and landing on banqueting tables with a hearty, hands-on-hips laugh. This story follows Michele and Bianca, working-class newlyweds who are separated by bad luck and evil intentions. Michele flees Venice on board a galley, and Bianca, having no idea what's happened to her husband, begins a succession of menial jobs to keep body and soul together. Barbero is as good as Merle when it comes to evoking a distant time and place, but where he differs is in his narrative style. If Merle is a swashbuckler, Barbero leans towards melodrama. His separated lovers are eventually reunited, but only after a series of very fortuitous coincidences. Where Barbero earns extra credit is for his depiction of Bianca's struggles after she's left to her own devices. It's normal in this kind of story for the man to go off and have all kind of adventures while the woman waits patiently at home, her boredom only enlivened by the occasional unwanted suitor. Barbero divides the focus of his story in half, and uses the Bianca sections to show the hardships endured by the poorest women of  Venice. Michele sees the world and has some manly adventures, but Bianca's story is equally dramatic and tense. She even has a brief affair, while poor, old Michele remains chaste throughout the several years they're apart. Now there's a role reversal.

Book Review: Jamrach's Menagerie (2011) by Carol Birch

For those of you thinking that Patrick O'Brian can't be equalled in the field of naval historical fiction, let alone historical fiction in general, introduce yourself to this novel. Jamrach's Menagerie would leave O'Brian green with envy, and possibly green with nausea after reading the climactic final section of the novel, but more about that later. With this novel Birch isn't simply trying to one-up O'Brian, she's bringing an intense emotional and spiritual richness and lyricism to the story of an adventurous voyage to the Far East in the mid-Victorian era.

The protagonist is Jaffy Brown, a Dickensian urchin living in the slums of London. At the age of eight an escaped tiger picks him up in its jaws and holds him like a toy until Mr. Jamrach, the owner of the tiger, rescues Jaffy and returns the tiger to his menagerie. Jamrach is a dealer in exotic animals, and out of a sense of guilt he gives Jaffy a job at the menagerie. Jaffy prospers at the job and becomes a close friend to a boy his own age, Tim, and Tim's twin sister Ishbel. At the age of sixteen, Jaffy and Tim are sent by Jamrach on a voyage on a whaling ship that's heading to Java. Dan Rymer, Jamrach's second-in-command, is in charge of the boys and he's also tasked with capturing a Komodo dragon. Jaffy and Tim are to help with the capture and will then mind the beast once it's on board ship. The dragon is captured, but a few weeks later the ship is sunk in a storm and the surviving crew, including Jaffy, Tim and Dan, find themselves in lifeboats in the middle of the Pacific. Things go from bad to worse to unbearable. And those with delicate stomachs are advised to lay in a supply of Gravol before reading this lengthy and gruesome part of the story.

The seafaring sections of this novel rank right up there with the best that have ever been written. Her descriptions of life on board ship, the bloody reality of whaling, and the dynamics of friendships and hatreds on a long and stressful voyage are superb. What makes these sections especially brilliant is that Birch doesn't let historical details get in the way of her storytelling, something David Mitchell couldn't manage in his overly praised historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (review here). Birch tells a spellbinding story, but one that's also imbued with a ferocious attention to the emotional and psychological state of the characters. Jaffy goes through hell and Birch makes us feel every bit of his pain by showing his existential despair at what Fate has done to him. Without this added layer the lifeboat section of the story would be merely horrible instead of the harrowing masterpiece it is.

The novel is richly detailed, which is usually the norm in historical fiction, but it also features some of the finest prose I've read in quite a while. Birch is endlessly inventive in describing the physical world, and, when needed, she can write with brutal realism or poetic dreaminess. If there's one quality that moves this novel into the realm of greatness is its humanity. This is primarily a novel about friendship, loss, love, coming to terms with mortality, and the pain of realizing that life can be cruel and capricious and unfathomable; all the stuff that makes being human wonderful and horrible. The only miniscule flaw I could find in the novel is that in the initial London sections Birch tries a little too hard to create a suitably Dickensian tone. Aside from that, Jamrach's Menagerie is pretty much flawless and totally unforgettable.

Book Review: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) by David Mitchell

It's clear David Mitchell did a Ph.D's worth of research for this novel set in 1799 Japan, and, unfortunately, every bit of it ends up on the novel's pages. Historical fiction requires a delicate balance between creating a rich and believable historical background while at the same time not allowing it to act as an anchor on the storytelling, and in this case the pudding has been overegged.

The novel's plot is not overly complicated. The titular character arrives at the Dutch trading station of  Dejima in Nagasaki Harbour in 1799 as a simple clerk in the pay of the Dutch East India Company. Jacob soon runs afoul of his scheming and corrupt superior and, more importantly, falls in love with a Japanese midwife named Orito. Orito attracts the attention of Lord Enomoto, a powerful noble who controls a mysterious shrine high in the mountains several days journey from Nagasaki. Orito is enslaved by Enomoto and put to work in the shrine, which turns out to be a perverse and evil cult that sacrifices babies. The bulk of the novel is concerned with Orito's imprisonment in the shrine, and an attempt to rescue her by Ogawa Uzaemon, a member of the samurai class who is also in love with Orito. The final quarter of the novel suddenly introduces a new danger for Jacob: a British frigate comes into Nagasaki Harbour and demands that the Dutch surrender their trading rights.

There's a fair bit going on there, and at times the story proceeds at a gallop, but far too often the novel is marred by narrative digressions and anecdotal asides about characters who are not central to the plot. These literary "speed bumps" become maddening after a while. One example: when the frigate arrives, one of the Dutch contingent (an Irishman, as it happens) is terrified he'll be recognized by a particular British officer. The Irishman was a convict in Australia and escaped after killing a guard. The Irishman's story is told in very full detail, and it all turns out to be redundant since the two never even come close to meeting. This is only one of many speed bumps in the book. Some of them are diverting, but most of them feel like a showoffish display of historical research.

Leaving aside the incessant history lessons, Mitchell's prose has a nice rhythm to it, and his imagery and descriptions are lean and effective. He also gives the novel some extra resonance by making it clear that his characters are part of global changes as well as personal ones. The Japanese characters are coping with the inevitable intrusion of Westerns ideas and technology into their hermetically-sealed culture, while the Dutch are coping with their nation and empire being eclipsed by the British.

The main characters I didn't find terribly compelling. Jacob is conscientious, good at his job, fairly pious, and moral. In short, dull. He's faced with all kinds of difficult choices and situations, but that doesn't change the fact that he's not someone you want to spend a lot of time with. The same can be said for most of the Japanese characters, who, thanks to a repressive, status-conscious society, are terribly circumspect in what they say and do. The most colourful characters are minor ones, and they tend towards the cliche. Marinus, a Dutch doctor, is an Enlightened Man of Science™, and as such his orotund utterances are stuffed with rhetorical flourishes, Latin words and phrases, and the driest wit. He's mildly entertaining, but he feels like a stock character. The working class Dutchmen in Dejima are easily indentified: Mitchell makes them sound like a cross between a Thomas Hardy peasant and Geoffrey Rush's Barbossa character from Pirates of the Caribbean. Did they really need to sound like caricatures to let us know they're not of the same social class as Jacob and Marinus? And speaking of dialogue, Mitchell is overly fond of italicizing key words in almost every spoken passage, as though he doesn't trust the reader to figure out where the emphasis lies in the sentences. It's really irritating.

Autumns has received nothing but rave reviews, which I can only put down to critics rewarding Mitchell for his hard work in the library. As an entertainment, as a piece of historical fiction, Autumns is a distant second to anything by Patrick O'Brian. And better still is Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie (review here), which strikes a perfect balance between history and narrative.