Tag: historical fiction

#BookReview The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry @riverrunbooks

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The ChosenAbout the Book

One Wednesday morning in November 1912, the aging Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she is gone.

The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words – leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other. His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’. He discovers what Emma had truly felt – that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for forty years. Why did they ever marry?

He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.

Format: Hardback (304 pages)      Publisher: riverrun
Publication date: 14th April 2022 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Chosen is one of the books on the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023. It gives the reader an insight into Thomas Hardy the husband, not just the renowned author. It has to be said, he comes up wanting.

Emma once assisted Hardy in his writing – in fact, the author shows her contributing to the plot of Tess of the D’Urbevilles – but Emma’s role as his helper has gradually dwindled and been supplanted by a far younger woman, Florence Dugdale (whom Hardy later married). This along with Hardy’s rather offhand response to Emma’s own literary ambitions, and their childless state, has only fuelled her sense of resentment and feeling of emptiness. Their marriage has become stale. Although sharing the same house, they live separate lives only coming together at the dinner table, and sometimes not even then. In Emma’s own words, they have become ‘bricked up alive’ in a ‘make-believe marriage’.

Emma pours out her frustration, anger and sense of injustice in her diaries. ‘I am an irrelevance, a clog on his real life. He forgets that I believed in his gift when no one else did, that I saw from the very first what he might be.’ She rails at his neglect of her, noting ruefully that ‘he belongs to the public and all my years of devotion count for nothing.’  (Hardy destroyed Emma’s diaries after her death so the author has recreated them using a combination of her own imagination and Emma’s surviving letters, as well as the manuscript of her memoir.)

As the book progresses, we discover what happened (or didn’t happen) over the years to leave them in this state of virtual estrangement as well as the nature of their final exchange of words the night befome Emma’s death.

Hardy initially comes across as self-absorbed, totally engrossed in the process of writing his novels and poetry and unable to, or unwilling to, read the obvious signs of Emma’s unhappiness. It seems baffling that someone so skilful at communicating love and passion in his writing, should fail so lamentably when it comes to communicating with his wife.  As Emma notes in her diary, ‘T. understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’

However, it’s impossible not to be moved by Hardy’s utter distress at her death, his sense of regret and guilt, even if it does come many years too late. ‘This isn’t the beginning of grief but something worse, an absence without form or meaning, a chaos in which everything that was once certain is cancelled. Wherever she’s to be found now, it isn’t here.’ It’s only the stalwart Kate, Hardy’s sister, who gets him through the dark days.

So immersed did I become in the lives of Hardy and Emma that I moved between wanting to give them both a hug or a good shake and say, ‘For goodness sake, talk to each other!’. That and grabbing another tissue from the box.

The Chosen is a beautifully written portrait of a marriage that could have been so much happier if only the flame of passion had remained alight; instead, it was allowed to flicker and die. The book’s wistful, melancholic tone is perhaps best summed up by Hardy’s reflection, ‘Too late, he sees it all.’

In three words: Emotional, intimate, moving

Elizabeth LowryAbout the Author

Elizabeth Lowry was born in Washington DC and educated in South Africa and England. She is a frequent contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books and other publications.

Her first novel, The Bellini Madonna, was published in 2008 to great critical acclaim. Her second novel, Dark Water, appeared in 2018 and was longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2019.

The Chosen is her third novel. A Guardian Fiction Book of the Day and a Times Best Historical Fiction Book of the Year, it has just been shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Elizabeth lives and works in Oxford. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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Book Review – The Warlow Experiment by Alix Nathan

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The Warlow ExperimentAbout the Book

The year is 1792 and Herbert Powyss is set on making his name as a scientist. He is determined to study the effects of prolonged solitude on another human being, though before now Powyss’s sole subjects have been the plants in his greenhouse. He fills three rooms beneath Moreham House with books, paintings and even a pianoforte, then puts out an advertisement, hoping for a gentleman recluse.

The only man desperate enough to apply is John Warlow, a semi-literate farm labourer who needs to support his wife Hannah and their six children. Cut off from nature and the turning of the seasons, Warlow soon begins losing his grip on sanity. Above ground, Powyss finds yet another distraction from his greenhouse in the form of Hannah, with whom he rapidly becomes obsessed. Does she return his feelings, or is she just afraid of his power over her family’s lives?

Meanwhile, the servants are brewing up a rebellion inspired by recent news from across the Channel. Powyss may have set events in motion, but he is powerless to prevent their explosive and devastating conclusion.

Format: Audiobook (10h 31 mins)  Publisher: Serpent’s Tail
Publication date: 4th July 2019     Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I don’t consume many books in audio format which probably explains the long period between me acquiring this one and actually listening to it. It took me a while to get through it because, although there are only twelve chapters, each is about an hour’s listening time.

Amazingly, the story at the heart of The Warlow Experiment is rooted in historical fact. A Mr Powyss of Moreham in Lancashire really did publish an advertisement offering a reward of £50 a year for life to any man willing to live for seven years underground without seeing another human face. And, as in the novel, the successful applicant was required to “let his toe and fingernails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard”.

John Warlow is a complex character. He is a violent man who physically assaults his wife, Hannah. As a farm labourer living close to poverty the idea of earning £50 a year for life is something like a dream and it is his sole motivation for undertaking the assignment. A man of little imagination, he has no conception of the toll the experiment will take on his physical and mental health.

The social gulf between Warlow and Powyss is illustrated in the accommodation Powyss has prepared for Warlow in the cellar of Moreham House. It’s filled with books but Warlow is barely literate, struggling to make sense of a few pages of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, another individual enduring isolation. But there’s no Man Friday to act as a companion to Warlow, unless you count a frog that manages to enter the cellar or, latterly, a cat.  Warlow’s accommodation has a bath but he never uses it and he is puzzled by the frequency of the delivery of clean linen. His meals (a replica of what is being served to Powyss) are lowered to him in a dumb waiter but are rarely to his liking. He’s happy with the beer and tobacco, though. Ridiculously, Warlow’s rooms are also furnished with a chamber-organ, Powyss’s thought being, one supposes, that Warlow can while away the time learning to play it  – when he’s not reading Voltaire that is.

One of Powyss’s requirements is that Warlow keep a daily journal, expecting it to contain insights into Warlow’s experiences that can be used in the scientific paper he intends to write. The entries Warlow manages, before he gives up keeping it altogether, are brief and definitely not full of insight.

Warlow’s descent into madness is disturbing to witness but unsurprising. He quickly loses track of time. Unable to tell night from day, his only clue is the meals delivered to him. His discovery that Powyss has installed a listening device only increases his sense of paranoia. Ironically, Powyss becomes increasingly disturbed by the noises he hears, contributing to his growing doubts about the morality of his experiment.

I mentioned earlier the gulf between Warlow and Powyss but, in fact, there are similarities. Powyss’s life is one of solitude, albeit luxurious solitude. He appears emotionally repressed, welcoming no visitors to Moreham House. He has little social contact aside from his servants, the exception being occasional visits to a London brothel. He is an obsessive collector of plants and spends much of the day in his study immersed in his books or dreaming of the fame his experiment will attract. Like Warlow, he appears to have no conception of the impact the requirements of his experiment will have on his subject.

No record exists of the outcome of the real life experiment so this element of the book is entirely the product of the author’s imagination. The concept that actions have consequences is dramatically played out as Powyss becomes infatuated with Warlow’s wife, with disastrous consequences. Mayhem, melodrama and murder follow against the backdrop of an age of popular revolution as parts of the citizenry, including some within Powyss’s household, rise up in pursuit of the same rights as their counterparts in France.

I thought Mark Meadow’s narration was absolutely superb. He created distinctive voices for each of the many characters – both male and female – so I was never confused about who was speaking. His voicing of Warlow was particularly memorable, especially during Warlow’s periods of madness, really bringing to life the author’s evocative writing.

The Warlow Experiment explores many issues – social, economic, scientific, psychological – as well as being a really engrossing story. And in case you thought experiments in social isolation were a thing of the past, a Spanish extreme athlete recently spent 500 days in a cave with no human contact in pursuit of a world record.

In three words: Dark, dramatic, compelling

Alix NathanAbout the Author

Alix Nathan was born in London and educated there and at York University where she read English and Music.

She has lived in Norwich, Munich, Philadelphia, Birkenhead and now in the Welsh Marches where, with her husband, she owns some ancient woodland.

She has published three children’s books and written about Christina Rossetti and the 18th century writer and notorious beauty Mary Robinson. Since 2006 she has been writing adult fiction and her short stories have been published in Ambit, The London Magazine, New Welsh Review and read on BBC Radio 4. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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