Category: Walter Scott Prize

Book Review – The Mare by Angharad Hampshire

whatcathyreadnext5 Comments

About the Book

Hermine Braunsteiner was the first person to be extradited from the Unites States for Nazi war crimes. Hermine was one of a few thousand women to work as a female concentration camp guard. Prisoners nicknamed her ‘the Mare’ because she kicked people to death. When the camps were liberated, Hermine escaped and fled back to Vienna.

Many years later, she met Russell Ryan, an American man holidaying in Austria. They fell in love, married, and moved to New York, where she lived a quiet life as an adoring suburban housewife, beloved friend and neighbour. No-one, not even her husband, knew the truth of her past, until one day a New York Times journalist knocked on their door, blowing their lives apart.

The Mare tells Hermine and Russell’s story for the first time in fiction. It explores how an ordinary woman could descend so quickly into evil, examining the role played by government propaganda, ideology, fear and cognitive dissonance, and asks why her husband chose to stay with her despite discovering what she had done.

Format: Paperback (320 pages) Publisher: Northodox Press
Publication date: 19th September 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find The Mare on Goodreads

Purchase The Mare from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

Given its subject matter, The Mare is a book I may not have chosen to read had it not been shortlisted for this year’s Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. How glad I am that I did though because, for me, it was the most impressive book on the shortlist. I even tipped it as the winner although, in the end, it lost out to Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter (also a terrific book).

The Mare is the fictionalised account of the life of Hermine Braunsteiner who served as a prison guard in two concentration camps during WW2. It alternates between the points of view of Hermine herself and her husband, Russell Ryan. Each gives us a very different impression.

Russell meets Hermine in 1957 at a hotel in Austria where she is working. From the very beginning, he is besotted with her. She takes the driving seat in their relationship, whether due to genuine affection for him or because he offers a convenient gateway to a better life. He navigates the complex process of obtaining a marriage licence and facilitating their move to America. Their conventional married life is upended in July 1964 when they are confronted by allegations about Hermine’s past. Russell is unwavering in his support even as damning evidence is revealed during her trial for war crimes. You ask yourself, did he so want to believe the woman he married was not capable of such evil that he accepted her assurances she didn’t do the things she was accused of?

Hermine’s first person narrative takes us through her early life to the annexation of Austria by Germany and the outbreak of the Second World War. She takes a job in a brewery, then in a munitions factory before learning from a German officer with whom she is besotted about a job in a newly built women’s prison. The prison is Ravensbruck. She’s told its purpose is to ‘re-educate criminals through hard work,’ an explanation she naively accepts. (She’ll later tell Russell she only took the job because it was better paid.) Initially, she is shocked by the violence meted out to prisoners. Soon, though, it’s she who is threatened with punishment if she doesn’t ‘toughen up’ and praised for physical violence against prisoners. Eventually, she willingly carries out the acts of brutality that earn her the nickname ‘the Mare’.

One of the most chilling thing about Hermine’s account is her increasing nonchalance about the things she is witnessing and doing. She complains, ‘It doesn’t matter how many prisoners we gas, more just keep on coming’, as if they are a logistical inconvenience rather than fellow human beings she’s consigning to a horrific death. Acts of unspeakable brutality are treated as commonplace or justified as ‘necessary’. And as time goes on she even takes pride in being recognised by her superiors for her ‘efficiency’. It’s disturbing to enter the mind of someone capable of such despicable acts but somehow you can’t look away. You want to understand how someone could get to the point where they lose all concept of humanity. The author makes you confront that question.

The brilliance of the book’s structure is that we get to see the contradictions between Hermine’s own account of her actions and motivations, and what she tells Russell about her wartime experiences: the omissions, the obfuscations, the downright lies. Even more so at her trial when she continues to dispute the evidence of multiple individuals who witnessed her cruelty although we know what they are saying is correct because she has already told us so herself.

It’s possible I overuse the word ‘thought-provoking’ in my book reviews but I genuinely think it’s justified here.

The Mare is an unflinching exploration of humanity’s capacity for violence.

In three words: Powerful, dark, compelling
Try something similar: The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis

About the Author

Angharad Hampshire was born in Manchester in 1972. She has worked as a producer for BBC Radio 4 and the World Service in London, honorary lecturer in journalism at the University of Hong Kong and regular contributor to the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. She has a Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Sydney. Angharad currently works as a research fellow at York St John University and teaches on the Creative Writing MA. She lives in York with her family.

Book Review – Tombland by C. J. Sansom

whatcathyreadnext1 Comment

About the Book

Spring, 1549. Two years after the death of Henry VIII, England is sliding into chaos.

The nominal king, Edward VI, is 11 years old. His uncle, Edward Seymour, Lord Hertford, rules as Edward’s regent and Protector. In the kingdom, radical Protestants are driving the old religion into extinction, while the Protector’s prolonged war with Scotland has led to hyperinflation and economic collapse. Rebellion is stirring among the peasantry.

Matthew Shardlake has been working as a lawyer in the service of Henry’s younger daughter, the lady Elizabeth. The gruesome murder of one of Elizabeth’s distant relations, rumored to be politically murdered, draws Shardlake and his companion Nicholas to the lady’s summer estate, where a second murder is committed.

As the kingdom explodes into rebellion, Nicholas is imprisoned for his loyalty, and Shardlake must decide where his loyalties lie – with his kingdom, or with his lady?

Format: Audiobook (37h 41m) Publisher: Mantle
Publication date: 18th October 2018 Genre: Historical Fiction

Find Tombland on Goodreads

Purchase Tombland from Bookshop.org [Disclosure: If you buy books linked to our site, we may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops]

My Review

I’ve been trying to read all the books longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction since I first started following the prize in 2017. This, the seventh book in the author’s Matthew Shardlake series, was longlisted in 2019.

It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading Tombland, not least because it’s a whopper. I listened to the audiobook which would take you three days to complete if you did it continuously. Needless to say I didn’t, so it took me more like three weeks. The Matthew Shardlake series is one of the few series where I’ve read all the books and – crucially – in the right order, starting back in 2013 with Dissolution. Having said that, it’s coming up for ten years since I read the previous book in the series, Lamentation, and it’s the first time I’ve consumed one as an audiobook. (Although very good, I did find Steven Crossley’s narration on the slow side so chose to increase the reading speed.)

The book starts off as a crime mystery with Shardlake tasked by Henry VIII’s younger daughter, the Lady Elizabeth, to investigate the gruesome murder of Edith, the wife of John Boleyn, a distant relation of Elizabeth’s mother Anne. John Boleyn has been accused of the crime and is set to stand trial at Norwich Assizes. He appears to have means, motive and opportunity, especially since his alibi for the night of the murder is questionable. But as Shardlake and his young assistant Nicholas Overton discover, there are others who might want Boleyn’s wife dead or want Boleyn found guilty of her murder, executed and his land forfeited. There’s also the mystery of Edith’s unexplained disappearance nine years earlier. Just where did she go and why did she return after all that time?

At this point, the story goes off at a tangent, a rather lengthy tangent it has to be said. Shardlake, Nicholas and Shardlake’s former assistant Jack Barak find themselves caught up in an uprising taking place in protest against the enclosure of common land and other grievances against the landowners. In Norfolk it’s led by the charismatic Robert Kett and the rebels soon establish a large camp outside Norwich, at the time England’s second largest city. Barak throws in his lot with the rebels while Nicholas, opposed to them, becomes a prisoner in Norwich Castle and Shardlake finds himself legal advisor to Kett, trying to mitigate the penalties inflicted on the gentry tried at the rebel’s makeshift court. Inwardly he has sympathy with the rebels’ cause but dare not make it public and, as he constantly reminds himself, he must ensure John Boleyn receives justice.

The events of the so-called Kett’s Rebellion are described in detail and is obviously the result of much research. I confess my interest waned at this point and I was eager to get back to the murder mystery, which the book eventually does.

There are also secondary plots involving Shardlake’s former servant Josephine and her husband, Barak’s wife’s continuing animosity towards Shardlake, and the increasing frailty of Shardlake’s longtime friend Guy.

The Shardlake of Tombland is feeling his age. There are frequent references to his aching back and the exhaustion he feels after days of travel. There is an elegaic quality to the book, although apparently the author was working on the next book at the time of his death. Although not my favourite of the series, Tombland definitely demonstrates the author’s ability to combine historical fact and fiction.

In three words: Intriguing, atmospheric, immersive
Try something similar: Sacrilege by S. J. Parris

About the Author

C J Sansom was born in 1952 in Edinburgh. He achieved a BA and then a PhD in History from Birmingham University. After working in a variety of jobs, he retrained as a solicitor and practised in Sussex, until becoming a full-time writer. He combined both history and law in his debut novel Dissolution – which took readers into the dark heart of Tudor England in a gripping novel of monastic treachery and death. This success sparked the bestselling Shardlake series, set in the reigns of Henry VIII and young Edward VI, and following the sixteenth-century lawyer-detective Matthew Shardlake and his assistant Jack Barak. C J Sansom died on 27th April 2024 aged 71.