Tag: Historical Fiction

The Newer World by Sebastian Barry

Irish writer, Sebastian Barry.

For an Irish writer in the 21st century, to write a first-person narrative set almost 200 years ago of a coloured slave in Tennessee, before, during and after the Civil War takes a lot of self-confidence, skill and audacity. What impressed me most in the first opening chapters was the tone. When a writer establishes the right tone, wrapped around with vocabulary, of time place and person, and syntax they create the feeling of truthfulness. There’s a word for that: verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, created truth. It’s what every writer strives for.

This is the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, in his own words. Don’t skip his name. I know some readers skip names that may appear challenging. Tennyson Bouguereau, TEh ni sun BOO ga roh. It’s almost a story in itself. It’s certainly a song. He’s a slave in the American south trying, mainly, to stay alive each day in expectation of the next. This is not easy. To look at a white person, let alone brush passed them in the street, can get you killed. There is shocking violence in this book, not detailed, but it’s the inference that takes your breath away. If violence, even tacit violence, on a page is not your thing, this book is not for you.

One of Barry’s formidable skills is creating vivid and often alarmingly truthful prose of someone who has had very little education and so a limited vocabulary. Tennyson expresses himself with the vocabulary he has, gleened mainly from the natural world. He finds himself part of a choir that, surprisingly, tours England. They are warmly received. This is so astonishing to the singers, all black and all from Nashville, that one of them remarks, ‘Oh! So we are not lepers after-all.’ It is Barry’s descriptions of, via Tennyson’s voice, not only their concerts in England, but the music itself that is one of the many writing highlights of this book. After many adventures, even as a soldier, he finally makes it back home to his twin sister, Rosalee … and to the man who raped her. There is still revenge in his heart. But a lot has changed. No spoilers here.

There has been a lot of critical backlash against Barry for, as a white Irish man in the 21st century, writing from the perspective of a young19th century black slave. Is it cultural appropriation? But this is fiction, and if the writer convinces the reader of the truthfulness of what he writes – and for this reader he does – you won’t spend time and effort researching the 19th century Black American Slave milieu to see if Barry is ‘truthful.’ It doesn’t matter if he is, or isn’t, truthful. He has created truthfulness for the purposes of telling this story. Again, this is fiction!

Highly recommended.

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Summer by Edith Wharton

American writer Edith Wharton 1862- 1937

Edith Wharton usually wrote about the privileged upper middle class white Americans from Boston and its environs. Her tribe – and she was usually scathing about them. 

She was a friend of, and mentored by, Henry James, twenty years her senior. Both wrote about that same upper-crust American; Wharton strictly wrote from the inside looking out; James from the outside looking in.

This Wharton novel, Summer (1917) is different. It is the story of a lowly born young woman, from a tribe of mountain people, poor, ostracised, and stigmatised. Her speech clearly defines her status. Charity Royall, who is taken in and named, by Mr. Royall, an ageing lawyer from the valley, well-off, sophisticated, privileged.

She is pretty and fiercely independent, ashamed of her origins, tolerant but indifferent to her guardian’s attentions to her, so seeks very little communication with him. Their meals together are in silence.

Her wish for romance and passion is put to the test by a visiting scholar, Lucian Harney. She knows from their first meeting that this handsome stranger is attracted to her, but her realistic attachment to her lowly state keeps her expectations and dreams in check. But he keeps showing up!

Their romance is a joyous experience for her, but her tribe and guardian cannot be ignored. Her fate is not predictable … no spoilers here.

It’s always a good idea to read a classic every now and again, when novels were written very differently. It not only gives you a novelistic reference it also reminds you how our lives, society, freedoms and atitudes of today in 2026 have radically changed, yet some have stayed the same. 

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A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood, British born
American writer, (1904 – 1986)

If and when I’m asked about literary fiction, this is the book I will name to explain it. Don’t be put off by that, nor its first short sentence. Its meaning will be clear by the end of the first short paragraph. What an opening! It’s so apt … for every reader, for everybody … because we all know about it: getting up in the morning.

Christopher Isherwood is described as “a seminal 20th century Anglo-American writer, a chronicler of Weimar Germany, a pioneer of autofiction, and a monumental icon of the Gay Liberation movement” brought to prominence again by the fashion icon, Tom Ford, who produced, directed and cowrote the screenplay – along with David Scearce – of his 2009 feature film adaptation, and his debut, of this Isherwood classic.

A little piece of trivia: Isherwood’s partner, the portraitist, Don Bachardy is still alive (aged 92) and worked as creative consultant on the film and has a tiny cameo non-speaking role in it. He lives and works in the same Santa Monica home he shared with Isherwood for decades.

It’s 60’s beachside California when the word ‘old’ is a new dirty word, but the word ‘queer’ has been around, but whispered, for years. George, late fifties, with a kind face, is suddenly alone. His much younger partner, Jim, is gone. He is a single man again. Two men living together in a romantic relationship is rare, but made to look otherwise: for the sake of the well-meaning neighbours and the cashier at the supermarket. They know of course but it’s all hidden behind propriety and the wish for no unpleasantness.

The action takes place over a day and well into the evening. George tries to make this day as normal as possible, appearing remorseful for refusing a last minute dinner invitation from a neighbour who, pointedly, refuses his suggestion that they dine together the following evening; teaching his students the finer points of the work of Aldous Huxley, emphasising societal norms and how they affect the outsider; refusing to give into the sexual tension between himself and his favourite student Kenny; keeping at bay the amorous advances of his best friend, Charlotte. She seems more insistent now that he is single again.

Published in 1964, A Single Man is often considered Isherwood’s masterpiece and groundbreaking for painting a queer life as authentic, normal and representative of something simple, and as difficult as being human.

It’s a small book but with a big heart, and for those interested in writing as a craft, a must read.



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The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

American writer, Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961

I haven’t read Hemingway since I was a boy. Note his simple language, short sentences:

No one was up before noon. We ate at tables set out under the arcade. The town was full of people. We had to wait for a table. After lunch we went over to the Iruña. It had filled up, and as the time for the bull-fight came it got fuller, and the tables were crowded closer.

Hemingway’s stark prose style is often referenced in writing guides and prose guru’s online posts. Despite The Sun Also Rises (1926) having a first person narrator, Jake Barnes, an American expat, journalist and WWI injured veteran, his recording of a trip to the running of the bulls of Pamplona with his Yankee mates and an English Lady, is starkly objective. His particular war-injury is significant to the theme – no spoilers here. This group, often likened to the ‘lost generation’, seem to be searching for meaning in the bars and the bottles of southern France and northern Spain where they observe the locals getting on with their ‘ordinary’ lives but seem blind to the meaning staring them in the face. The bull fighting festival is the climax of the piece and described in blistering but, of course, in his stark prose. If squeamish about such ‘sport’ you could skip it. These lost souls either with money or without who have ignored the ‘roaring twenties’ milieu of the cities, seem helpless to know where to turn or what to do. Hemingway’s theme: the damage of war. Although it received mixed reviews at its first publication it has become known in some circles as his greatest work. There aren’t too many contemporary novelists who write like this any more as this style requires the reader to supply a lot of detail, but it is nonetheless surprisingly effective. (Come to think of it, it is similar to that of David Szalay and his Booker Prize winning novel Flesh – 2025). And all the more effective by describing a time and place that would be unknown to most readers. Fiction can do that: take you to the unknown. If you haven’t read Hemingway, do; there’s a lot of his work to enjoy including a lengthy list of short story collections.

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CHRISTOPHER & HIS KIND by Christopher Isherwood (1904 – 1986)

Christopher Isherwood, British born American writer, (1904 – 1986

This book is fascinating for its use of a split narrator: Isherwood as he is when he wrote it in the 1970s, the first person ‘I’ and Isherwood as he was then 1929-1939, the third person ‘he’ – Christopher. This gives the older writer ease to write objectively about his younger self which he does with critical abandon. The other fascination is his life-long friendship with Wystan Auden (W. H. Auden 1907 – 1973) about which he writes with alarming, but pleasing, frankness. They were never ‘a couple’, in fact in today’s jargon it would be described as ‘friendship with benefits’. His and Auden’s sexual relationship … ‘[was] unromantic but with much pleasure … they couldn’t think of themselves as lovers … [but] it was of profound importance … it made the relationship unique for both of them.’ Isherwood was far more promiscuous, would fall in love at the drop of a suggestion, and Auden would lament with wild self-deprication at not being able to find someone to love him. They both found their life partners in America where they migrated to in 1939. Auden with the poet Chester Kallman (1921 – 1975) and Isherwood with the portrait artist, Don Bachardy, who is still alive and living in their Santa Monica home. Of course Isherwood remains famous for his Berlin Stories, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin – insights into these works are of great intetest. These provided the material for the play I am a Camera and ultimately the musical Cabaret, which Bob Fosse hacked to pieces in his 1972 movie version: Sally Bowles was NOT a talented performer (the whole point of the story). Stage productions – there’s always one playing somewhere – have reinstated this important fact as well as all the songs Fosse cut. Isherwood, in his later years, concentrated on auto-fiction producing many auto, and semi auto, biographical works. These I am eagerly seeking out. This one is a good start. Highly recommended.

It was filmed in 2011 by Geoffrey Sax.

by Categories: Auto-fiction, Book review, British LiteratureTags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

the Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian/British writer, Tan Twan Eng

A Straits Chinese retired judge, Yun Ling Teoh, returns to spend her last days in a house in the Cameron Highlands in Central Malaya during the Communist guerrilla war with the British in the early 1950s. It was here, as a young woman, she was apprenticed to Aritomo, a famous Japanese gardener, who once was the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. This back story, their working and emotional relationship with the backdrop of WWII and the Malaya Communists against the Japanese, is THE story.

This is the second novel by Tan Twan Eng after his successful debut, The Gift of Rain (2008) which was long-listed for the Booker. His third novel, The House of Doors (2023), was also long-listed for the Booker. This one suffers from the cliched ‘second novel syndrome’. In this case, not as original and complex as the first, and not as imaginative and assured as the third. This is a personal opinion despite it being short-listed for the Booker. I enjoyed reading it but without that thrill of attachment. Like all three Tan novels, they transport you to a time, place, threats, joys and sensibilities that are completely alien, but therefore fascinating, to a contemporary reader. Of course, the raw human emotions we all know about. This one also has that Eastern flavour of wisdom and sage-like belief in elements of the world that we can’t quite grasp but which may guide or steer us in directions we haven’t planned.

Her sister, enamoured by Japanese gardens, disappeared during the war and Yun Ling wants to built a Japanese garden in her honour. Aritomo refuses to design one but offers to teach her how to design it herself. Yun Ling’s internment by the Japanese, her apprenticeship to Aritomo and her relationship with him form the spine of the narrative. The events, conversations and relationships appear ‘soft’ and incidental. I knew this work had been made into a movie in 2017 and although my interest wavered I reasoned that if there was cinematic interest in this work there must be a pay off. I continued reading and I am so glad I did. This is a ‘slow burn’ of a book … war, imprisonment, romance, intrigue, a tattoo! – there is so much I haven’t mentioned – but all will be revealed in a very satisfying climax. Highly recommended. I wait patiently for book number 4.

Here is a short video of Tan Twan Eng talking about this book.

by Categories: Booker Prize, British Literature, Historical Fiction, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Temple by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995)

This book began as an early attempt by the British poet to write a memoir about a holiday in Germany in 1929. It was unpublishable because of its libellous and pornographic content according to the law at the time. Many books were banned then, including Ulysses by James Joyce, The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall and paintings by D.H. Lawrence. During a particularly lean period in the early sixties, Spender, by then an established, but poor, writer, sold the first draft manuscript and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward to 1985 when a friend told him about the manuscript he had read in the rare books section of the University of Texas. Spender wrote for a xerox copy (remember Xerox?) and re-wrote it between 1985 and 1987 turning it into “a complex of memory, fiction and hindsight”. He changed his own name to Paul Schoner and faintly disguised W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood as Simon Wilmot and William Bradshaw respectively. It is, what we now call today, auto-fiction. It is also one of a rare group of autobiographies that is written in the third person. Another example of this is James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Temple, its original title, was finally published in 1988. Germany between the wars had a reputation of being very liberal, emphasising personal freedom. Nothing at all was happening in England. Young Englishmen went to Spain for politics and to Germany for sex. The story is indeed an account of Paul Schoder’s holiday in Hamburg 1929 – 1931, the people he meets, the cafes and bars he frequents, the senses he explores, and the danger he foretells: the rise of the extreme right in the form of the Nazi Party. Only a few understand the danger; most are complacent, believing that their first parliamentary democracy, The Weimar Republic, will withstand the threat – it will pass. The parallel to our parliamentary democracy today and the rise of the Right, almost 100 years later, will not be lost on you. Part of the attraction for the young Englishman is the German youth who idolise the human body, praising it, showing it, using it, hence the title, The Temple; ironically from a biblical quote. It is full of ideas, conversations about ideas and characters and events that portray these ideas or are in contrast to them. I loved this book, and will undoubtedly read it again. There is so much to be gained from it, not just as a reader but as a writer: his use of the nameless, but god-like, narrator and his unjudgemental descriptions of feelings and experiences that are heightened, exaggerated, and sometimes invented in order to make a point, explore an idea; these are all part of the writer’s varied and colourful palette. Highly recommended.

by Categories: Auto-fictionTags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian/British writer, Tan Twan Eng

This book is the best of what fiction can do: it takes you out of your time, your place, your beliefs, your expectations, and your complacency. Its appearance of truth, verisimilitude, is so strong it’s hard not to feel that this is memoir – how does he do that? – yet Tan Twan Eng, the Malaysian / British author, was born in Penang 30 years after the action, 1941-46.

The novel is written in two parts. The first and longer is a slow burn of friendship, self-awareness, family, and discovery. The second is a rollercoaster ride as WWII decimates the contented and almost healed world of the protagonist, Phillip Hutton, the Chinese / British son of a wealthy English businessman whose completely English family seemed complete before he came along.

Phillip’s Chinese mother was his father’s second wife. Although the youngest, he feels he is in the middle: in the middle of everything, being pulled this way and that, fielding heavy demands on him from every angle: the Malay locals, his Chinese forebears, his English father, and, most importantly, his Japanese instructor in the ancient Japanese martial art of aikijutsu, testing his loyalty, his responsibilities, his obligations, and his sense of self. Phillip gathers all these strands of himself into one comprehensive knot and so is able to finally understand himself and his place in the world, or so he believes. Then the war arrives in December 1941 and everything unravels. But young Phillip discovers that all those strands of his life that he thought were fighting him, pulling him, were actually teaching him; he does the unthinkable, then recants, then … no, no spoilers here.

For anyone interested in the mysterious art of writing fiction don’t bother with all those vlogs on YouTube giving free writing advice from ‘experts’ most of which look like they’re just out of high school; you’ll find out more about writing fiction by reading this book, but read it like a writer: search for the ‘way’ and ‘how’ he writes and understand how he makes it so real.


The Gift of Rain (2007) was Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel, and it was long listed for the Booker Prize as was his most recent, The House of Doors (2023). I’m now searching for his second, The Garden of Evening Mists (2011), also a prize winner – it won the Man Asian Literay Prize – and which has been adapted for big screen by HBO.
Highly recommended.

Here Tan Twan Eng talks about the perils of being a new writer.

Listen to Tan Twan Eng’s advice to new writers here.

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The Hidden Force (De Stille Kracht) by Louis Couperus; translated by Paul Vincent

Dutch novelist and poet, Louis Couperus (1863-1923)

Colonialism in the 17th century depended upon the European Doctrine of Empire which was for some time heading in the direction of normalising (i.e., sanctioned by God) the formal extinctions of native people and governance and enslavement of those that remained.

Nowhere was this doctrine more monstrously carried out than in the Banda Islands in 1621 where forty four Bandanese elders were beheaded and quartered, by Japanese swordsman especially imported for the task, and their bodies were displayed on stakes. At a meeting seven days after the massacre Jan Coen, the Dutch commander, announced “all towns and fortified places of Banda had, by God’s grace been taken, erased, burned down and about 1200 people caught.”  Coen’s sole plan: the destruction of the Bandanese world was achieved in the space of 10 weeks. 

All this was done in the name of the Christian god because of a nut.

This massacre, and many others, as well as land appropriation of thousands of islands, subjugation and enslavement of the Indigenous people for the sole purpose of controlling the extraordinary valuable spice trade – profits of 3000% were common – were carried out by a private company: Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) – the Dutch East India Company. Governing over ten thousand islands and over 50 million people for over a century and a half destroyed this private company but it was too big to fail; it was nationalised into the Dutch Government in 1800.

One hundred years later Louis Couperus’s most famous novel, The Hidden Force, was published. It depicts the height of white supremacy (with three centuries of experience) with a subjugated population who bowed and scurried on their haunches keeping their brown heads below the level of white ones. Couperus’s band of Dutch and Eurasian characters assumed these times would never change (in less than 50 years the Dutch would be gone) but the Dutch were proud of their system of colonialism and thanked God for giving them the right to set an example of what civilised people believed and how they lived.

The protagonist is a District Commissioner in East Java, Otto Van Oudijck (van ow dyk) who, like the Government, believes he is a good colonial, says he loves his subjects, and is proud of what he has achieved in his career and sees a clear path to the Governor General’s thrown. Van Oudijk, his second wife, their children and friends are vividly created; their luxurious life, long office hours for the men, social manipulation, indolence, petty jealousies and sexual intrigue for the women are intriguingly explored. But everyone is on edge. There appears to be a hidden force. Mysterious stones crash through open windows and land at the feet of Mrs van Owdijk as she’s again about to enjoy her step-son, Theo; anonymous letters litter Van Oudijk’s desk accusing his wife of incest and inappropriate relations with a beautiful local boy – he doesn’t believe a word of them, though they unsettle him; white ants and cockroaches destroy a piano; mould renders a new silk dress unwearable; the local royals smile and kow-tow but their eyes say something very different; unholy noises and human cries litter the darkness; animals scurry up the walls and cry out mournfully; and then there’s the climate, the endless heat in the dry and the relentless rain in the wet; the white faces begin to be unsettled by the brown ones whose smiles are no longer trusted, and then one night with rhythmic banging coming from above the ceiling the Commissioner’s bed is covered in filth . Escalating unease encroaches on the Dutch community who dream of ‘home’ and wonder if they will ever see it again.

Louis Couperus, a towering figure in Dutch literature, has written an enthralling and personified denunciation of colonialism. His message is that all oppressed peoples will ultimately destroy the right of their confident and self-righteous oppressors to control them. It might take three and a half centuries, but in the end the subjugated will triumph. Fiction can take you to extraordinary places, to almost unbelievable times and show you the highs and incredible lows of the human condition; it can also show you truth. This is historical fiction at its best.

This translation, by Paul Vincent, can be purchased in various editions here.

The Dutch edition can be purchased in various editions, including a Kindle edition for free, here.

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Devotion by Hannah Kent

This novel is about Lutheran migrants from Prussia in the nineteenth century given the opportunity to flee religious persecution and settle in the unknown but free colony of South Australia. I was very interested in this novel as my ancestors did exactly that, as did hers. My great grandfather arrived in the colony in 1851.

Kent’s description of life in the Prussian peasantry as tenant farmers is evocative, and totally believable. The story is told in the first person by the daughter of the family, Hanne, who considers herself dull and plain; her close paternal twin brother having been blessed with all the beauty of their mother. Their life and relationships in the village of Kay is austere as is their religion with its undecorated homes, churches, and liturgy. It is indeed a dour Christian denomination, a result of Luther’s revolt against the hypocritical and outrageous wealth and flamboyance of the Roman Catholic Church. But Kent’s greatest achievement is, without actually saying it, the depiction of the Lutheran lack of demonstrative acts of parental affection, by words or deeds. It’s not that the children were unloved, but they certainly felt unloved, but were therefore forced to read and understand the minute signs of affection that, when delivered, or deduced, brought a child’s greatest joy. It is not surprising that Hanne seeks love and all its demonstrations outside the family. Yes, there is a beautiful romance, its full implications unknown to the pair, that sits in the narrative foreground in stark contrast to their bleak, and later, dangerous existence.

Their village life, the trip to the port of Hamburg and the incredibly treacherous voyage on the open ocean in appalling conditions of overcrowding and health risks is testament to Kent’s novelistic ability.

However at about two thirds of the way through, while still on board the crowded ship, and only days from their destination, Kent made a novelistic decision which, in this reader’s opinion, was a big mistake. No spoilers here but anyone who has read this book will understand what I refer to. One of the writer’s major concerns is to keep in place the reader’s suspension of disbelief: that strange mental phenomena that allows us to become fully engrossed in the written situation, the fear, the joy, the laughter, the tears, the tension, etc, or whatever the characters are going through while at the same time being fully aware, but therefore must disbelieve, that we are sitting in our reading chair by the window overlooking our own garden. At this point in the book my disbelief was restored and in more common parlance, she lost me. I didn’t finish it.

Here are personal and moving reflections from Kent about this book.

You can buy the book in various formats here.

by Categories: Adult romantic fiction, Book review, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , 2 Comments