Tag: historical fiction

Review – Nelly Dean: A Return to Wuthering Heights by Alison Case

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nelly-dean

Authentically voiced retelling of Wuthering Heights

About the Book

(Courtesy of Goodreads):  Nelly Dean is a wonderment of storytelling and an inspired accompaniment to Emily Bronte’s adored work. It is the story of a woman who is fated to bear the pain of a family she is unable to leave, and unable to save.

My Review

I started reading this book back in November and the fact that I’ve only just finished it but have read over a dozen other books in the meantime, tells you I didn’t find it as compelling as I hoped or the author deserves given the obvious craft put into it. The book expands on the narration by Nelly Dean, the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights, in Emily Bronte’s original book and introduces imagined back stories for some of the characters, notably Hindley, Hareton and Nelly herself .

However, although it magnifies some aspects of Wuthering Heights (in some instances, quite exhaustively) it glosses over large parts of others, in particular the core relationship between Heathcliff and Cathy and the tragic events that surround them. For this reason, I don’t really see it as a standalone novel for a reader who is unfamiliar with Wuthering Heights.   For example, Alison Case devotes a substantial section to Nelly’s attempts to care for the infant Hareton that are encapsulated in a few sentences in the original book. But on the other hand, leaps forward at points so that key events from Wuthering Heights are merely alluded to.

So I found myself on the one hand thinking, “I know all this from Wuthering Heights” and on the other, “Wait a minute, we’ve skipped several years here – what happened to so-and-so”.  Plus, occasionally thinking, “Whoa, I bet Emily Bronte never had that in mind!”. Having said all this, the author has created a really authentic period voice for all her characters and if it wasn’t that Emily Bronte’s masterpiece is a persistent and relentless echo, this would be a really successful piece of historical fiction.

But…it has made me determined to go back and re-read Wuthering Heights!

Book facts: 456 pages, published February 2016

My rating: 3.5 (out of 5)

In three words: Authentic, descriptive, inventive

Try something similar…Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, tour-de-force reimagining of Jane Eyre

About the Author

Alison Case is a Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts and her academic background has focused on Victorian Studies, Narrative Theory, and Gender Studies. Her first book, Plotting Women: Gender and Narration in the 18th and 19th-Century British Novel, is well-known and well respected. With these interests, it’s not a surprise that Case’s first novel focuses on a well-known literary character from Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

 

 

 

 

Book Review – World’s End (Lanny Budd #1) by Upton Sinclair

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About the Book

worlds-end

Lanning “Lanny” Budd spends his first thirteen years in Europe, living at the center of his mother’s glamourous circle of friends on the French Riviera. In 1913, he enters a prestigious Swiss boarding school and befriends Rick, an English boy, and Kurt, a German. The three schoolmates are privileged, happy, and precocious—but their world is about to come to an abrupt and violent end.
 
When the gathering storm clouds of war finally burst, raining chaos and death over the continent, Lanny must put the innocence of youth behind him; his language skills and talent for decoding messages are in high demand. At his father’s side, he meets many important political and military figures, learns about the myriad causes of the conflict, and closely follows the First World War’s progress. When the bloody hostilities eventually conclude, Lanny joins the Paris Peace Conference as the assistant to a geographer asked by President Woodrow Wilson to redraw the map of Europe.

Format: ebook (922 pages) Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 19th January 2016 [1940] Genre: Historical Fiction

Find World’s End on Goodreads

Purchase World’s End from Amazon UK

My Review

World’s End is the first novel in Upton Sinclair’s ‘Lanny Budd’ series. First published in 1940, the book covers the period from 1913 to 1919 and is the beginning of a monumental 7,340 page novel, the story of a young American, Lanny Budd.

Lanny is drawn to art, poetry and music but, as the son of an American munitions manufacturer, is exposed to arguments of commercial reality,  power-broking and realpolitik.  The conflict Lanny experiences as he struggles to make sense of these opposing forces is at the heart of the novel.   This is a long novel and at times, particularly in Part 5 covering the attempts to arrive at a peace settlement, it seems more straight history than historical fiction but Lanny’s Forrest Gump-like ability to be at the centre of important events and several underlying stories stop it from feeling completely like a college course. 

Upton Sinclair depicts the motives of the countries involved, particularly Great Britain, France and America, with brutal clarity. ‘Now they were here, not to form a League of Nations, not to save mankind from future bloodshed, but to divvy the swag.’  That the war was fought for control of  natural resources (coal, oil, steel) and territory is made very clear and in this sense, the lesson of history is that nothing much has changed.

In three words: Epic, detailed, factual
Try something similar: Any Human Heart by William Boyd

About the Author

Upton Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle (1906). To gather information for the novel, Sinclair spent seven weeks undercover working in the meat packing plants of Chicago. These direct experiences exposed the horrific conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. In 1943, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.