More moving reviews: Beautiful for Ever and Sea of Poppies

The move progresses. I would not say it was done. That would be far too optimistic, and not take into account the extra mattress and bed frame currently reposing in our hallway. This upsets me so much that if someone, at this precise moment, were to ask me which I would prefer, mattress removal or world peace, I would have to really struggle with myself for a long time and I STILL can't guarantee I'd come out for world peace at the end of it.

The good(?) thing is, though, that I now live in a town with a large population of second-hand bookshops. I keep seeing signs that say things like ALL BOOKS 75P, and then my brain short-circuits with delight and I come back to myself five minutes later clutching three history books and the complete works of C. J. Sansom. I also keep nearly buying a complete set of the Forsyte Saga books, even though I know perfectly well that I WILL NEVER READ THE WHOLE OF THE FORSYTE SAGA (except that I might! I could! I could do that instead of getting a job! I COULD JUST SPEND THE REST OF MY LIFE READING AND THAT WOULD BE MARVELLOUS). These are the dilemmas in my life right now.

Anyway. I have read two books. If I'm perfectly honest, neither of them lit up my mind with joy, but they were both extremely comforting in that neither of them were about furniture at all.

Shall we?

First up is Helen Rappaport's Beautiful for Ever. It's the history of Madame Rachel, Victorian quack cosmetician extraordinaire, who rose from the depths of a London slum to become beautician, moneylender and (maybe) pimp to the rich and famous. Madame Rachel was practicising at a time when make-up was frowned upon, and women had no control over their own incomes (if you happen to be a woman, look up the 1882 Married Women's Property Act and bless every one of your lucky stars that it exists), but despite those apparent hindrances she cheerfully managed to become extremely rich. She tricked, coerced and blackmailed her way through several fortunes, and then she got spectacularly done for fraud by a particularly aggrieved customer.

It's an extraordinarily fun story, and one that we're lucky to be able to read at all - according to Rappaport, it had been largely forgotten about before she came across a newspaper mention of the trial hearing and began her investigations. All the same, though, I feel like Madame Rachel might deserve a better narrator. Rappaport is neither an exceptional story-teller or a particularly rigorous academic. She has a slightly lackluster and unimaginative writing style, and what she's got to say feels incomplete and a bit off. Loose ends are left hanging, the thread of the story is dropped and picked up again at random and she leaves out explanations that would have been fascinating.

We never hear, for example, exactly how Rachel carried out her beauty treatments, or what the day-to-day life in her shop was like. Rappaport hints that it might have been used as a brothel, and then doesn't really elaborate. Come on! When you're writing the history of a scandal, there needs to be some scandal. That's why your readers have bought the book. They want to hear juicy things about the Marquis of Gosh and Lord Ooh's daughter frolicking in a canopied bed while people peer at them through the keyhole. I got the sense that those stories might have been there, but for some reason Rappaport decided not to elaborate - and without that her tale falls flat.

Given its material, this book could have been a whole lot better than it was - but it wasn't, and on the basis of what I actually read I have to give it

2.5 stars.

Next, we have Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. It was nominated for the Booker the year that White Tiger won, and I still hear people complaining that Sea of Poppies should have taken it. To which I say: no. No, it should not, because Sea of Poppies is not a particularly great book.

That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. I totally did. It's a big fat comfortable story, with an interesting setting (India in 1838, with the Opium Wars about to kick off) and lots of exciting and slightly awful things happening in it. All the characters start off in unpleasant circumstances, and then more unpleasant events occur, but they are the sort of unpleasant events that leave you knowing in your heart that Everything Will Be OK and everyone will evenually rise through adversity to happiness and riches and lots of attractive babies.

Sea of Poppies could be described as epic in that it's very long (it's the first volume in a proposed trilogy; the second book, River of Smoke, came out last year and the third is presumably gestating) and full of stuff. But unlike fat tomes by, say, Tolstoy or A. S. Byatt, its contents don't stand up particularly well to careful examination. Ghosh's writing is perfectly good, but there are no fireworks of verbal wonder, and if you wipe away all the unpleasant attempts at 'gritty realism' from the book's plot (attempted sexual abuse with a horse; bloody whippings; the consumption of animal dung), you're left with a story that's pretty much all about gooey wish-fulfillment romance.

Appropriately enough, many of the characters have distinct Mary Sue tendencies. Granted, the book is all about people whose life in India is so nasty that they are forced to emigrate to Mauritius, but I found myself marvelling at just how special every one of the characters turned out to be. Several of them have astonishingly coloured eyes, one has prophetic visions, and there is even a free-spirited white girl who just wants to wear saris and learn science. If I was playing Stereotype Bingo she would be a full card all on her own.

But that really doesn't matter. In Sea of Poppies, characters are just there to hang plot on, and it's the plot that keeps you going. I read it so fast that you could have used my eye movements to produce energy, because even though I logically knew that Paulette was going to get on the boat (I kept looking up from my reading to yell SHE IS TOTALLY GOING TO GET ON THE BOAT at my boyfriend) I had to make absolutely sure she did it. I was skim reading so hard that by the end I think I actually saw three words a page, but that was pretty much all I needed (spoiler: she gets on the boat. In other news, the Pope is still Catholic).

Sea of Poppies is pretty much enjoyable highbrow trash, a blockbuster novel for people who like to think of themselves as serious, educated readers but still want a good bit of forbidden love on a boat. And who can blame them? We all like a bit of forbidden love, especially when it is aquatic.

All the same, though, in terms of what the book actually is vs. what was promised to me, I've got to give this

2.5 stars.

Review: She-Wolves by Helen Castor

POWER!

By a nice (but self-engineered) coincidence, the day I started reading Helen Castor's She-Wolves was the day I saw Canterbury Cathedral for the first time. Canterbury is a low-slung and dainty city, with lots of nice little buildings apparently arranged by random happenstance. And then you turn down one particular alley and BOOM THERE'S A STONE-COLD MOUNTAIN OF HOLINESS IN YOUR FACE.

Canterbury Cathedral is a beautiful visual metaphor for the medieval concept of power. In the days when kingdoms were, although small by our standards, huge when you consider that the horse was the fastest way of moving around, and when most subjects couldn't read and didn't tend to go anywhere either, rulers had to keep on making GREAT BIG MANLY STATEMENTS, like castles and battles and heads on sticks, to remind everyone that even if they didn't seem to be there at that time, they could still turn up at any moment, ready to throw down some severe punishment.


And that, as Castor explains, was the fundamental problem for any women who tried to be in power. The idea of leadership in medieval Europe was so tied up in people's minds with the concept of masculinity (even the word queen literally meant 'the wife of the king') that a female ruler was just met with total incomprehension and the suspicion that she was Not Being a Proper Lady. If you were a woman and you wanted to run things, you had to pretend to be doing it on behalf of somone male who was either too young or too busy to act for himself, and if you didn't do that... well, you could be in trouble.

Elizabeth I was the first queen of England to rule totally on her own, as the sole and complete top dog of everything, but before her (and Mary, her immediate predecessor) there were four women who, according to Castor, were supreme rulers in all but name: Matilda (of Stephen and), Eleanor (of Aquitaine and several Henrys), Isabella (of Edward II), and Margaret (of Henry VI, aka One Of The Pointless Kings). She-Wolves is a series of potted biogs of the political rise and fall all four.

Empress of the universe, etc

Now, as far as her first two subjects go, I buy Castor's project utterly. Matilda and Eleanor define badass. Take Matilda first. In her youth (we're talking 12 years old, here) she married the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and essentially helped him run Europe for a while. This gave her a real taste for power: even after he died she insisted people keep on calling her Empress. She also liked being called 'Lady of the English' and 'Domina' (which means 'mistress' in the sense of 'she-who-must-be-obeyed', rather than 'don't tell your wife'). As you can tell, Matilda was a big fan of titles.

When her father Henry I died, and her cousin Stephen usurped her claim to the throne, she embarked on a decade-long fight to get her kingdom back. This involved a lot of daring escapes from surrounded castles (my favourite is the one she managed in Oxford, my home town: at night, in the middle of winter and with snow everywhere. It never occurred to the people besieging her that she would even try it. She pulled it off flawlessly) and a lot of great tactical thinking, and culminated in her son Henry II being crowned king in 1153. She ended up ruling Normandy for him (weird to remember, but it was part of English lands then), as well as advising him on how to rule England and being in general a better king than most male kings could ever even hope to be. I would be scared to be in the same room with her - that woman was FIERCE - but I think she was brilliant.

Proudly wearing some scarlet

I also love Eleanor of Aquitaine. I first heard about her in E. L. Konigsberg's A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, an American kids' book about her life that's somewhat clunkily written but totally charming. (I reread it last month in preparation for this book, and I still love it.) Eleanor was amazing. She started by marrying the king of France Louis VII and going on crusade with him (unwillingly - Eleanor liked parties much more than holiness). This involved crossing the Alps a couple of times (with a large retinue, of course, the woman rolled deep). She then divorced her first husband to marry the much sexier Henry II (this was genuinely unheard of: divorces did happen, but women were never the ones to start off proceedings. Eleanor did it anyway), had eight children with him, rose up against him, got imprisoned, got released by her son Richard the Lionheart, ruled England for him while he was on crusade, helped spring him from jail and then when he died ruled England for her useless son John. I told you she was amazing.

Castor tells the stories of Matilda and Eleanor wittily and well, with just the right mix of historical fact and educated extrapolation, digging out the awesome reality of their exploits from all the rude discredit that got poured on them by their contemporaries.

However, She-Wolves is not without its issues. Castor's clearly got a brain as high-powered as her subjects. This is why she's such a great historian, but it can also lead to difficulties: her historical accounts rip along at such a terrifying pace that if you lose concentration for a second you're lost. Part of this is an intractible problem with her source material: there was always a Kent, a York and an Essex, and they were always different people, but partly Castor's just trying to cram in too much here. There's so much material (five biographies!) to get through that each event can only be given half a page at most. This is exhausting enough when you know the gist of the story she's telling, but when you're coming to it completely fresh it's almost impossible. And so it was with me and Castor's third and fourth subjects.

Gaviston REALLY needs a new cloak

I'd only ever heard of Isabella from Marlowe's play about her husband, Edward II, which can be best summed up if I tell you that its most recent TV adaptation was by Derek Jarman and essentially boiled down to naked men wrestling in tunnels for an hour and a half. Edward II is most famous for being very much in love with a man called Piers Gaviston and very much not interested in anything else, ie the country he was meant to be ruling.  

His story is fascinating and slightly hilarious (his lords would come to him and say "WILL YOU PLEASE RULE YOUR COUNTRY?!", and he would say, "Doesn't Gaviston look lovely in his new cloak!", and then the lords would exile Gaviston and Edward would throw a fit until he got brought back, and then the whole cycle would start again) but I really found it hard to be convinced by Castor's claim that Isabella was much of an political enitity in her own right. Even with Castor's best efforts to reclaim her, the impression I got was that for most of her life, Isabella... just sort of stood there, probably kind of annoyed but not really prepared to do much about it.

In fact, I was so unconvinced by Isabella as heroine, and so boggled by the number of people appearing on each page, that I had to put down She-Wolves for about a week out of sheer desperation. I only came back to it in the hopes that Margaret might be more interesting. And she kind of was! Once again, though, her husband was significantly more hilarious than she was. Henry VI apparently had grave difficulties simply functioning. He tended to trot happily after whoever looked like they might be in control, and he had one year-long spell where he went completely unresponsive. Even when he was displaying basic motor functions he was totally incapable of making rational descisions, and this, as might be expected, caused the Wars of the Roses. Margaret spent years frantically battling one person called York after another (all the while, of course, pretending she was doing it on Henry's behalf), but ended up being foiled by Edward IV (aka York), who was helped by the fact that he was not only male, but extremely attractive. People then, as now, liked their rulers to be sexy.

And that, apart from a brief bit about Mary, is the end of the book. PHEW. Do you see what I mean about Castor cramming too much in? This blog is a potted history of four potted histories, and look how LONG it is. My typing fingers are numb. It's ironic that She-Wolves, a celebration (with notable exceptions) of some exceptional women who really deserve a lot more space and credit than they're usually given, is forced to give each of its subjects so little time. To be honest, I think Castor should have written four books (no Isabella, please) instead of one. It all feels a bit too hasty, a half-done job instead of a complete one. Yes, the material is (mostly) fascinating, but there's just too much of it.

Nevertheless, when She-Wolves works, it's a great and much-needed refocusing of history, and one that, like all the best history books, makes a subtle (and depressing) point about the time we're live in. Even though Castor is saying that these are medieval attitudes to women in power, many of them are sadly similar to our own. Rational objections to figures like Margaret Thatcher aside, a lot of what's said about women in power comes with a distinct underlying flavour of, "SHE WAS A WOMAN WHO DID NOT ACT VERY WOMANLY! BAD." We never learn, do we? Because what Matilda, Eleanor, Isabella, Margaret and many others ought to have proven by now is that woman can be just as good (or as bad) at ruling as men.

She-Wolves may not be perfect, but at least someone's bothering to point that out.

3 stars.