It's been some time since I've written any kind of a book report here. Let me amend that lapse now. I know that's what you're all have been clamouring for at the backs of your minds, without really even knowing it.
I won't go through all the historical books I read last summer - for after checking my reading diary I noticed that there is quite a number of them, most dealing with the Austen/Napoleon period, most appropriately. The memory of most of those, however, has now been blocked by Wolf Hall - which I'm reading now, and which is every bit as fantastic as they say it is. The (perhaps only) problem with a book of that stature is that it tends to overshadow everything else I'm reading at the time, diluting the pleasure of other books by reminding just how good prose can get.
Fortunately Wolf Hall is facing some fierce competition; one of the books I read about a month ago refuses to be blotted out by another. I'm talking about Stella Tillyard's Aristocrats, a real-life story of four Lennox sisters whose lives spanned the latter part of the 18th century. The book has been made into a TV series, and that's how I first became aware of the lives of these quite amazing women some years ago. The splendour of the setting is one thing (after all, Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox were aristocrats born and bred, and wed into well-connected and wealthy families), but what strikes me most is the sheer tenacity of the Lennox women and their strong mutual affection and loyalty, which must have carried them through some hard times.
I mean, if you've given birth to 22 children (like Emily did), you'll be mighty glad of some family support.
Tudor times were also an era when family connections paid off; this at least was emphasised in Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl. I really liked the novel, especially Gregory's effortless depiction of Renaissance England and the court of Henry VIII, as well as her frank descriptions of the ribaldries that went on there. Placing Mary Boleyn in the centre of the story (instead of her more illustrious sister) is a good choice, as it gives the plot an element of suspense (after all, we all know what happened to Anne Boleyn). Yet I was somewhat disappointed in the rather straightforward solution of making Anne the scheming shrew and Mary the motherly lady-in-waiting who is all heart and loving tenderness. The Career Woman vs. the Mother debate in a nutshell = one gets her head chopped off, another gets to settle down with a good man of her choice.
Another book which gave me some ambivalent feelings is Mrs Caliban and Other Stories by Rachel Ingalls, which I just finished. I liked the slightly twisted starting points of the stories (including people being kidnapped by grannies in Switzerland, cheating their wives with a lifelike doll, or getting caught in a rain of frogs), but their solutions were depressingly rather similar. Most of the men (boyfriends, husbands, bosses) were portrayed as heartless bastards who only use women for their own gratification and start slapping them around when they show some character. That may work well to illustrate an important point in one novel, but after seven or eight of the same, the reader (or at least I) begins to feel the need of some more life-affirming stuff.
Perhaps that's why I've been listening to a lot of Monty Python lately.
