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.

Delicious (Historical) Death: The Devil in the White City

Another day, another book about historical crime. This time it's the turn of fact instead of fiction, and the Victorians instead of the Tudors: I'm reviewing The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson.

The Devil in the White City is set in Chicago, a place where I spent a lot of time as a child watching chicks get born in the Museum of Science and Industry. And that story is even vaguely relevant to today's review. The book's chosen moment is the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was very important for America and History and so on, and directly led to the Museum of Science and Industry being built, allowing me 100 years later to stand and watch chicks get born while my mother and grandmother failed to get me at all interested in any of the other exhibits.

It was also important for a man called H. H. Holmes. This charming human being decided that the World's Fair was the perfect opportunity for him to build a murder hotel and kill large numbers of young women, and so he did, while everyone around him totally failed to notice that anything shifty was going on.

And that, essentially, is the story told by this book. It's a gallop through two parallel stories, the creation of the World's Fair by visionary architect Daniel Burnham, and the criminal rise and fall of visionary murderer H. H. Holmes. The World's Fair happens (good!) and people get murdered (bad!). The end.


The Devil in the White City has at least a tenuous link to reality, in that all the things in it did actually happen, but at the same time it reads like particularly ridiculous and racy fiction written by someone who's got a strong sense of a good story but a very bad idea of how to put that story into words. It is the true-crime equivalent of really seductive but bad quality junk food: a double-chocolate whipped-cream Tesco Value cake in novel form.

My feelings on the subject of populist versus scholarly historical writing are sort of contradictory. While on the one hand I believe fervently that history is extremely interesting and should be written about like the crazy epic blockbuster it is, I also believe that bad writing - and bad research - makes the gods weep.

In this case, the research is there, but the writing's just not up to it. Larson can, at least, string a sentence together, but that's the least of his problems. Knowing that he is writing A FUN BOOK FOR NORMAL PEOPLE seems to have sent him off his head with self-importance, and The Devil in the White City is comically over-egged, filled with sparkling 'scene-setting' turds like

As [Holmes] moved through the station, the glances of young women fell around him like wind-blown petals

and

his eyes deposited a bright blue hope.

How I wish my eyes shed coloured emotion. Alas! All they do is allow me to see.

This is the moustache of a murderer

I admit, I do perversely enjoy this kind of thing. Bad writing can be delicious (there's my cake metaphor again), and as bad writing goes, this one's a winner. It's possible to ignore it and focus on the story, but if you do choose to be cruel (and I did) you're in for many hours of riotous amusement of the sort not at all intended by Larson.

On to the content. Larson obviously means Holmes to be the dark side of Burnham - Burnham's building the White City while Holmes is building the black; they both have blue eyes but one has the blue eyes OF A KILLER, etc, etc - but he's not really good enough to pull the comparison off, and so the book just ends up being about two very interesting and not particularly connected lives. And that's fine. History is amazing enough (and awful enough) to carry this one on its own. Fires, Ferris Wheels, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill, tornadoes and torture chambers all make starring appearances as everything that could go wrong for the Fair does, and everything that could go wrong for Holmes... doesn't, and the whole thing is rounded off with a nice cross-country manhunt for your reading pleasure.

There are also lots of fun Facts About the World's Fair to pick up for future use at boring parties. Did you know, for example, that it brought belly dancers to America for the first time, that Walt Disney's father worked on it and that it was the reason the Pledge of Allegience, the Ferris Wheel and that annoying snake charming music were invented? Well, now you do. See what this book has given you already!

I can't be a total snob about this. I can absolutely see why The Devil in the White City has sold all the copies it has - it's completely addictive reading, historically fascinating and presented in a way that's gloriously awful. It's cake! Delicious historical murder cake! And I ate it all. Oops.

Despite the best efforts of history, though, this gets 2.5 stars as a form of post-binge guilt, and also for that sentence about the petals.

Two super-speedy reviews while I am supposed to be writing my essays

So, the essays are going well, as is the internship. I was let out on day release to go to the London Book Fair on Monday, at which I felt very junior and unimportant (who knew there were so many men in publishing? Where do they hide for the rest of the year?), but I did wander past the Hachette booth, which, in honour of The Casual Vacancy, had a GIANT POSTER of J K Rowling's face staring down at passers-by like a benevolent dictator and/ or a mid-level deity.

This made me quite suspicious, probably because I just finished reading Wild Swans by Jung Chang and now I am seeing cults of the leader everywhere (including in North Korea, but that's not just me).

Wild Swans is one of the only non-fiction titles on the 1001 books list, a biography/autobiography combo about three generations of Chinese women who collectively lived through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, World War II, the rise of Communism and the increasingly crazy machinations of Chairman Mao. Their historical CVs are amazing - Chang's grandmother was one of the last warlord concubines (a dubious honour), Chang's mother was one of the first Communist party sympathisers after World War II and her father was a high-up party official who governed a couple of provinces. As you do.

I have to say, Wild Swans isn't particularly well written - most of the time, it's perfectly functional, but sometimes she lapses into a badly-done contemplations of the beauty of the universe and the result is just tiresome. But it's a bestseller not because of the way it's written but because of what it's written about. It's an incredible (and totally terrifying) inside record of what went wrong with Chinese communism and why.

Before I read Wild Swans I had only vague background knowledge about recent Chinese history, so I sort of knew that the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had happened, and were Bad Things. Well, now I know the details, and it turns out that Bad doesn't even begin to cover it. At one point, for example, Mao decided that China should make more steel, so he got everyone in the entire country (including children - as a six year old, Chang had to pick up scrap metal on the way to school) to stop what they were doing and obsessively make steel, with the result that the crops failed and millions of people just died of starvation. And everyone had been so indoctrinated by Mao that they honestly believed it was all for the best.

The number of people who are tortured and killed in this book is staggering, as is the number who just committed suicide out of sheer shame and horror at what was going on. At times I actually felt like I was reading a dystopian sci fi novel - the mind control, the street gangs, kids beating up their teachers, families forced to live separately and so on. It's almost unbelievable to me that what she's writing is - or very recently was - all true. (On that note, the writer part of me thinks that if you are considering publishing your own dystopian novel, Wild Swans is a must-read background text. You don't even have to make this stuff up.)

My only warning is that if you want to be at all surprised by the fate of Chang's family DO NOT FLIP TO THE PICTURES in the middle of the book, because you will be horribly spoiled by captions like 'The last picture of Blah Blah, who died unexpectedly in 1949'. I did, and I was, and I was cross.

Long as it is (and I admit, it is somewhat over-long), it's absolutely worth a read. Mind-blowing and extremely eye-opening, both from a historical and a human-nature point of view, it's everything you never knew about Communist China and didn't think to ask because it didn't occur to you that human beings could possibly do those kinds of thing to each other in the real world.

3 stars.

After all that heartbreaking suicide, I wanted some more light-hearted death (I typed that sentence and realised what an awful person I am, but there's no other way to say it), and so I moved on to P D James's The Murder Room.

I'm always on the fence about James as a writer. On the one hand, she's a good mystery writer, she makes up interesting cases and her detective is, you know, a perfectly fine individual - but on the other, she is the most gloomy person in the world. I grew up on Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, so I have a baseline assumption that written murder should be jolly, a nice minty after-dinner puzzle with body parts for effect. It's a point of view I think crime writers are coming back to more and more these days, but there was obviously a time in the 70s and 80s, when James was forming herself as an author, when everyone was reacting against silliness and trying to show how very serious the business of death really is, etc etc.

As a result, everyone in a P D James book runs around tiresomely contemplating THE YAWNING HOLE AT THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE and their INABILITY TO BE HAPPY. It gives me a stress headache. Yes, yes, the world is very terrible, but it's also quite funny and stupid, and there's no acknowledgement of that in a James mystery. Every single one of her characters feels alienated and unfulfilled and has family who are awful and they hate. One or two such people might be understandable, but an entire book full of them leads me to believe that something Freudian is going on. I'm willing to bet the James family is not a barrel of laughs at Christmas time.

Because of all this, I never end up enjoying a P D James as much as I really should, given the ingredients involved. The Murder Room is all about someone copycatting 1930s murders (James, like me, is clearly the most enormous historical murders geek), it takes place in a museum and a girls' school, and it's a murder mystery. All my favourite things! And yet, at its heart it's joyless and a bit functional. The most interesting bits for me were (unsurprisingly) the descriptions of the original '30s murders. They made me want to ring James up and talk to her about my dissertation, which happens to be about real Victorian murders and their influence on 1930s crime novels. I think we'd get on better through the medium of fact than we do with fiction - no coincidence that my favourite James book is her true-crime recreation of the Ratcliff Highway Murders, The Maul and the Pear Tree.

But anyway, The Murder Room was fine. Acceptable. Functional. It passed the time. And it made me crave a nice bit of Agatha Christie. Now there's a woman who knows what to do with murder.

2.5 stars.

Review - Constance

The wives of great men are boring.

At least, that's the opinion of Gertrude Stein in her book The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Allegedly by her wife-in-all-but-name Alice and apparently the story of  'the wives of geniuses I have sat with', it's actually a biography written by Stein, and what it's really about is the geniuses themselves, because those are the people readers actually find interesting. So says Stein, anyway.

Stein's enormous ego aside, she does actually have something of a point. While she's in one room, hanging out with Picasso and Matisse and working out Cubism and Modernism (as you do), Alice is next door with Fernande Picasso, talking about... hats. Unfortunately, I know where I'd rather be a fly on the wall.

But at the same time, it's not only the geniuses who deserve to have their stories told. History isn't just big men in little rooms, and as both a historically-interested person and a woman I like hearing about women who took the bad historical hand they were dealt and made something of themselves despite the restrictions they had to operate under. So while, sometimes, I think the feminist reclamation initiative is reaching slightly (as in the case of Catherine Dickens - I've written about her in my blog for Litro), I do think it's an incredibly important project, and one that can yield some awesome results. And so it is for Constance Wilde, wife of the more famous Oscar.

The lady un-vanishes

The more I read of Constance, the new biography by Franny Moyle, the more I felt like I not only approved of Constance, but actually liked her. Constance, as a person, was great. She was smart (she put herself down on the 1871 and 1881 censuses as a 'scholar'), she was funny (her letters are masterpieces of sass), she committed herself to everything she could (including the 'healthy' dress movement, several cults and the beginning of women's lib) and all in all she was supremely uninterested in sitting on her behind and doing nothing.

In her own time, she was actually almost as famous (or notorious) as Oscar himself. If Hello! magazine had been around, she would have featured in it every week in a new and completely mad outfit. A slightly reluctant but very visible public figure, she was also - which I did not know - a fairly well-known children's writer. She published quite a few fairy-tale-style short stories, and there's even new speculation that she might be the real author of 'The Selfish Giant'.

Constance was maybe a little whacky (witness the cults and her obsession with Spiritualism), and somewhat obtuse when it came to her husband's extramarital relationships, but I can imagine meeting her and finding that we genuinely had a lot to say to each other. (Contrast this to my imaginary meeting with Catherine Dickens, which would involve me saying "My, what a lot of children you have! Your husband is an awful man," and then the two of us staring at each other awkwardly until it was time to leave.)

A few months ago I read Richard Ellmann's tome of a Wilde biography (aptly entitled Wilde), and, exhaustive as it was, I couldn't help but feel that it missed something crucial. Wilde was an outrageous exhibitionist, mad, bad and fond of turning up places looking like a cello or a sunflower. Ellmann's book, though, manages to make him, and the life he led, seem boring. After Ellmann, I wanted a book that'd tell me the story of Oscar Wilde with as much shock and gossip as possible, and that's exactly what Constance does. Moyle's got a chatty, scandalous style that'll drive you mad if you want serious scholarship, but if you're looking to have fun with history you'll be delighted by it.

I think Moyle gets a good balance between showing Constance as an individual and talking about the experiences she shared with her husband. Constance, in Constance, isn't just a presence in the background, but neither is Oscar - and neither, interestingly, are their two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. If Ellmann largely forgot the wife, he most certainly forgot the children - Cyril and Vyvyan are just walk-on blobs in Wilde. In Constance, though, we get to hear more of how they felt, and what, as children of such weird, brilliant parents, their lives were like, and the result is fascinating.

Not that Moyle doesn't have her faults. At times she's a fairly lazy writer - you get infuriating sentences like

It would be a cause that in the fullness of time Constance would espouse more fully and formally.

Where was her editor? Never mind that, where was her brain?

She certainly isn't a rigorous academic. I suspect that Constance herself could school her biographer on study skills. Moyle has a habit of randomly generalising for the sake of her plot, and even though it didn't bother me unduly I had occasional raised-eyebrow moments. But, as I said, this book is meant to be fun, a razzle-dazzle joyride through an interesting woman's interesting (and ultimately very sad) life, and it succeeds in being exactly that.

Moyle's close to being the perfect biographer for the Wildes. Naughty, funny and irreverent, she conveys their scandalous lives in delicious (if not exacting) style, and ultimately managed to convince me that Oscar and Constance really did, in their own strange ways, love each other. I know! I was surprised too. But that's the nice thing about Constance. It's telling you a story you know, but in an entirely different way, one that, as I've said before, definitely deserves to be told.

Wives of geniuses, despite what Gertrude Stein may think, can be very interesting indeed.

3 stars.

Review - The Man on Devil's Island

HOUSEKEEPING:

- The kind people at Writersdock have struck again, and this time they've done an interview with me. I'm immensely flattered, although I still think they may have gotten a little confused and actually meant me to interview them. Regardless, it's up on their site and you can read it here.

- I've done a review of the new NT production of She Stoops to Conquer over at Litro, and also blogged about why you ought to be able to bring up Terry Pratchett in a university seminar.

REVIEW:

I've been on a historical non-fiction kick recently, possibly because I want to read books that my English-lit-crit brain won't automatically start analysing for theme and word choice and Deeper Meaning, but also because I do love history. I once almost read History at university, before I realised that I was being influenced by my father coming into my room several times a day and saying YOU SHOULD READ HISTORY AT UNIVERSITY, whereas what I really enjoyed about history was that it was like literature, except with real people.

I've always loved stories, and the real stories that history spits out not only tend to be madder than most fiction but also give you opportunity to get fascinatingly intricate with the detail of what happened on the night of August the 7th. Obviously, my favourite sort of history is crime, but really, there's not much that doesn't interest me.

Certain bits of history, though, seem to come up again and again in my reading. One of those is the Dreyfus Affair. It just keeps on being mentioned in passing, as something very important, but not important enough to explain - there's a tiresome assumption with these sorts of things that the reader knows all about them already. So when I saw Ruth Harris's book, The Man on Devil's Island, I decided to lay my ignorance to rest and find out who Dreyfus was and what the hell happened to him.

Now, before we go any further, I'm going to explain as briefly as I can what did actually happen, not only because it's very interesting, but because even the Wikipedia article is horribly obtuse.

In 1894, the French government was about as paranoid as the American government is today. They'd begun their terrible run of losing every war they fought (one of the worst results of this was having to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans in 1871), and they saw enemies lurking about everywhere, ready to take more of their land. So when they discovered a letter in the German embassy proving that someone was spying for Germany, they went slightly insane. They needed a culprit, and after an extremely short and completely rubbish investigation they more or less settled on a random man, artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus, because he was a bit stuck up and odd, and also (probably) because he was Jewish.

Dreyfus was swiftly convicted in military court on completely trumped-up and falsified evidence and packed off to a prison island, but while he was languishing people back home in France started noticing that he had been falsely charged, and a movement began to get him exonerated. About half of France (including Zola) were violently for Dreyfus, and the other half (including most of the military, who had been the big movers behind the original conviction) were violently against him. The whole thing brought up a lot of buried issues, like anti-semitism and national identity, and by the time the Dreyfusards managed to get a re-trial in 1899 it wasn't really about Alfred Dreyfus at all, but what he mystically represented.

Alfred was finally pardoned - although never actually exonerated, even though the actual culprit (a man called Esterhazy) was fairly open about having done it - in 1900. It was a fairly sad and inconclusive end, and no one (apart from Alfred) came out of it looking impressive at all.

And that's the very, very potted history of the Dreyfus Affair.

Annoyingly, in The Man on Devil's Island, Harris does seem to some extent to be afflicted by the assumption that her readers already know the story she's telling. Granted, what she's trying to do is less about explaining the linear story of events and more about tracing influences and movements among the people involved in the Affair, but I did still find myself wishing that she wouldn't jump about so much in the timeline. She'll start paragraphs by saying things like 'Although this was not relevant until the second trial...' when we hadn't TALKED about the second trial yet, and I had no idea there even WAS one - but despite this failing, she writes well, if in slightly dense prose, and she conveys the characters of the human beings involved in the drama with great (scholarly) panache.

And my goodness, were there a lot of human beings involved in the Affair. It seemed to me at times, bedazzled by the hail of names I was being subjected to, as though every person in France made some sort of contribution to proceedings. Not only did all the politicians, academics, writers, journalists, officers and lawyers get involved, but completely random people kept popping up to convey their thoughts and feelings on the matter. Over the course of the Affair, for example, Mrs Dreyfus got thousands and thousands of letters from total strangers who either hated her or were under the impression that they were already best friends because they'd read about her in the papers.

The Dreyfus Affair really did seem to have an extraordinary capacity for turning ordinary people into nutters, something that Harris conveys very well. When you hear about two factions arguing, you imagine something quite rarefied and mainly carried out in the correspondence pages of newspapers, but no - grown-up human beings from both sides got so angry about the Affair that they would actually go out into the streets and punch each other in the face. Literally. People got shot, they lost their jobs, they stopped talking to their families - if you want an English comparison, the nearest thing I can think of is the Civil War. It was that bad.

Not that many of the people in question weren't somewhat insane to begin with. The anti-Dreyfus crew boasted a man who wore mandrake root on a chain around his neck to ward off Jewish black magic, and the Dreyfusards had the scientist who first put forward (seriously, I might add) the existance of ectoplasm.

One of the best things about The Man on Devil's Island is how even-handed it manages to be. It's very easy - as Harris says - to think that Dreyfusard=liberal=GOOD, and anti-Dreyfusard=fascist=EVIL, but like all binaries it doesn't really bear looking into. Both sides had their share of anti-Semites, corrupt idiots and philanderers, and both sides did some pretty gross and shady things in the pursuit of what they thought was right.

Many people who joined the anti-Dreyfusard side just thought that it was the only way to protect their country and their society and to hold on to a unified French identity. They weren't really interested in the innocence or otherwise of a single insignificant man - and nor, before you think the other side was any better, were many of the Dreyfusards. They wanted a separation of Church and state and a reduction of the military's powers, and the Dreyfus Affair just turned into something  they hoped would help form a legal precident. When it began to look as though Dreyfus would lose his second trial, for example, his closest supporters seriously considered letting him die in custody, just to prove their point.

So everyone was an ass! That's the basic message of The Man on Devil's Island, anyway. Alfred Dreyfus got hung out to dry by his 'friends' as well as his enemies, and nothing much was accomplished apart from the airing of a lot of issues that keep coming back to bite the French, even to this day. Harris, interestingly, cites the recent ban on the wearing of headscarves as an example of a continuation of fears about the assimilation of different religions into French society that really began with Dreyfus.

It took me a long time to get through The Man on Devil's Island - as I said, it was dense (though I think, with the topic in question, it has to be) - but I'm glad I did. I'm still not convinced I entirely Get the Dreyfus Affair, but I understand a lot more about it, and about French society in general, than I did before, and that's always a good thing. Harris has a lot of interesting and well-argued thoughts about a very interesting case, and though I'm not sure if this is a good grounding in Dreyfus, it's certainly a good book.

3.5 stars.

Review - Mr Briggs' Hat

In Litro news, my first blog of the year is up there, a review of the recent BBC Great Expectations.Which I liked, although I think I was feeling a bit post-Christmas grim when I wrote it. Be warned. Also, Writersdock has very kindly reblogged my review of Birdsong, which is especially relevant right now since the BBC is about to air their remake of that, too. It may be good. The book was a turd.

Anyway. Today my review is non-fiction, and also crime, which is my favourite sort of non-fiction (this probably doesn't imply good things about me). Here goes.

There is a railway bridge that runs right in front of my window. It's one of those heavy red brick ones with arches and built-in storage units (incidentally, the owners of the unit closest to me may have found the entrance to Narnia, judging by the astonishing number and range of goods and people that go in and out of there every morning). Commuter trains rattle across it for 20 hours a day, pleasantly lit up and sounding vaguely like the washing machine. It's a very nice view. I get to stare at the trains as they pass, and presumably the people in the trains get to stare at me staring blankly at a computer screen and drinking coffee. Sometimes they also get to see me putting on my tights.

My point is, what with that and the Tube, trains make up a large part of my urban day. It's strange to think that once upon a time 150 years ago trains were still a deeply unnatural and quite frightening imposition on Londoners' lives. Even stranger, for those of us used to watching babies and drunkards weaving their way up and down between carriages, is that trains used to be the ultimate locked room scenario. Until the late nineteenth century there were no connecting doors between carriages, just side doors that got locked between stations. Once you were shut in, there was really no way out, and you just had to cross your fingers and mightily hope that you were not sharing your space with a mad axe murderer.

Unfortunately for senior bank clerk Mr Thomas Briggs, that was more or less what happened to him. Poor Briggs, the subject of Kate Colquhoun's book Mr Briggs' Hat, has gone down in history for being the man with the dubious honour of being the first person to be murdered on a train in Britain.

The facts in his case are briefly these:

Just after 10pm on the 9th July 1864, two men trying to board a train carriage at Hackney Wick station in London discovered it empty but slathered in blood. The alarm was raised, and subsequent investigations found Mr Briggs lying upside down on the track between Bow and Hackney Wick, in a coma from which he never recovered. A more thorough search of the carriage and Mr Briggs revealed that he was missing both his watch and his hat. A hat was found under the carriage's seats, but, crucially, it did not belong to Mr Briggs.

SHIFTY FOREIGNER

With the sort of blugeoning fit-the-peg-in-the-hole certainty familiar to those familiar with the police and/or the Victorians, the detectives on the case worked their way via hat and watch to a 24-year-old tailor named Franz Muller, who was German and thus seemed shifty. The only problem was that by the time they were ready to make their arrest, Mr Muller was already en route to America.

I won't give you the details of the rest of the story, which involves intrigue, complex watch- and hat-swapping scenarios, a brilliantly slow high-speed sea chase across two continents and a lot of confusion, but I will say that Kate Colquhoun is quite right to give her book the subtitle 'A Sensational Account'. It's one of those true stories so interesting that it ought to be fiction, and Colquhoun tells it sensationally (with all the 1860s connotations of the word) and at speed. There's a lot of high colour and general jollity, and though Colquhoun obviously has done her research on the era and the case, she doesn't smother the reader with needless superior knowledge (which I like, on the whole, although I do wish she'd found out about quotation marks - as a temporary academic I feel strongly that italics are not how we quote).

There's such a lot of atmosphere and local colour that it can get oppressive sometimes - cockneys hawking haddock, pea soupers, rough waves, sweltering Upper East Side days and so on - but if you shove all that fog out of the way there's an interesting and surprisingly informative account of Britain and America in the mid 1860s lurking beneath it. There's also a fairly interesting and twisty mystery. I was expecting an open and shut case, but the more I read, the more doubt began to worm its way into me. Could there be other explanations? Could Muller's alibi be true? I don't know, and now it's bothering my brain.

I do find it odd that, at the end, after managing to question so much of the evidence against Muller, Colquhoun doesn't come down firmly on one side or the other over the question of his guilt. I think she thinks he didn't do it, or that it was sort of an accident, but she doesn't say, and it left me feeling slightly at a loose end. Sensation fiction is supposed to end with certainty, damn it, and the small matter of this being fact shouldn't prevent a good bit of editorial wrapping-up.

What we do hear is that the Briggs case heralded a new era in train safety, in that it made people realise for the first time that train safety might be a good idea. It also (and I know this from my own crime obsession) was the crime that spawned a thousand books. You can see the shadow of Mr Briggs in countless train-carriage murder mysteries, in hordes of respectable white-haired murder victims, in foreign suspects and thrilling chases and objects that manage to silently tell the story of the crime.

Not, of course, that this would be much consolation to Mr Briggs, or, if he was innocent, to Mr Muller. But it's all very interesting to think about, and Kate Colquhoun's presentation of the Briggs case is also a lot more fun to read than Love and Mr Lewisham was. Enjoyable stuff.

3 stars.