The Best Books I’ve Read (in the first half of 2023)
It says here that the year is half-way done? Well, almost. That’s… a concern? Anyways, I’ve read some books this year, as would be expected. And some of them have been good. Some have even been really good - good enough that I gave them 5/5 on goodreads. To be exact, six have attained that coveted prize and I want to talk about them.
I’ll just say by way of an aside that my approach to rating books on goodreads is that if I liked it but it wasn’t perfect, it gets 4/5. This encompasses maybe 80-90% of everything I read. Something that was dead average - I don’t dislike it but neither did I really like it, gets 3. If it’s actively bad it gets a 2. To get a 1, a book would have to, I don’t know, actively punch me in the face or something. What I’m saying is I’m reasonably generous with my 4s but 5 gets held back for books I was truly blown away by. Books I can’t stop talking and thinking about. These are those books, from the first half of 2023.
Lastly I’ll just say that these aren’t meant to be formal reviews and I’m not avoiding spoiler so reader beware.
Ninety-Three (Victor Hugo)
The first 5/5 of the year is the book I was reading over the 2022-3 transition. A historical fiction even when it was written (in 1873), it revolves around the War in the Vendee and more generally the state of the French Revolution in 1793. This is my first Victor Hugo read and, while he’s more famous for Notre Dame and Les Miserables, I decided to read his book about the first French Revolution rather than the second, as it is one of my favourite periods of history. One I have been doing extra research into - both historical and in terms of the fiction that has been written about it - in preparation to eventually write a series of fantasy novels heavily inspired by the period.
The War in the Vendee, if you don’t know, was the bloodiest conflict of the French Revolution. A brutal civil war fought in western France between the blues - the revolutionary French Army drawn from all over the country - and the whites - the Royal and Catholic Army made up of nobles and local peasants supported by the British. The entire Reign of Terror officially executed about 17,000 people over a little under a year. The War in the Vendee killed 200,000 over a three year period, including 170,000 locals - somewhere between 1/5 and 1/4 of the total population of the region. It started as a local rebellion against conscription and anticlericalism but ballooned into the most vicious, most awful, most ignoble chapter of the Revolution’s history. Mass execution and other practices that today would be considered the worst of war crimes became day-to-day events. Both sides committed the worst of atrocities and all for what they believed in. A heavy topic, especially for a Frenchman to tackle only two years after France’s final bloody popular revolution, that of the Paris Commune in 1871 which, much like the Vendee, ended in French citizens shooting and killing their fellow citizens over their respective visions for the future of France.
The book is certainly of its time. It begins rather explosively with a republican battalion finding four refugees - a mother and her three children - in the middle of the Vendee War and then with a local émigré noble (those who fled France during the revolution) returning by ship to lead the Royal and Catholic Army. I love this character - basically think Stannis Baratheon. In his first appearance, a sailor incorrectly ties down a cannon leading to it running lose and almost destroying the ship. That same man saves the day and so our nobleman gives him a medal for his bravery before ordering him killed for his negligence. He’s then rowed to shore by that guy’s brother who plans to kill him but, after a long heart-to-heart, the noble reveals who he is - the local Marquis de Lantenac - and his cause, turning his would-be assassin into his most loyal soldier. The first section ends with our first atrocity - the massacre of that republican battalion on the orders of the Royal and Catholic Army’s new commander. The two children are taken as hostages. Their mother is left for dead but is found by a local man and nursed back to health.
It’s an amazing start, capturing both the nobility of the soldiers - the way Lantenac was willing to die when he thought he was being caught by republicans and used his words to turn an enemy into a friend - and their brutality - the way that same man ordered hundreds of soldiers executed along with every civilian who was staying with them. It also does not neglect the civilians of the Vendee and their position - trapped between two armies willing to shoot on sight. If they refuse to give one side refuge, they’ll be shot. If they’re found to have given the other side refuge, they’ll also be shot.
Then the book gets slow. We go to Paris and it turns into somewhat of a history textbook for a while, with little in the way of narrative and lots in the way of describing the atmosphere in Paris at the time. It tends towards the dramatic and, if a fantasy writer (especially a modern fantasy writer) wrote it, it would be called an exposition dump. Weave your worldbuilding through the story, would be the modern advice. As much as I love the novel, it’s advice I wish had been around when this novel was written. Still, I kept thinking as I was reading of how much Hugo and his contemporaries would have understood what he was writing. Many of them had been in Paris just a few years earlier during the last period of revolutionary upheaval, after all. Under that lens, the whole section takes on a much sadder and more desperate colour.
We see Robespierre, Danton, and Marat, considered at the time an unofficial triumvirate, debating the multitude of threats assailing France. Invading foreign armies at the frontiers, rebellious insurrectionary armies in the provinces, and political dissidents in Paris. They dispatch priest-turned-revolutionary-hardliner Cimourdain to the Vendee to oversee the conflict and especially an apparently far too lenient commander named Gauvain, a noble-turned-revolutionary who is both related to the Marquis de Lantenac and was raised and educated by Cimourdain.
Turning back to the Vendee, the novel has another long descriptive section before we get into the meat of the rest of the book - the military confrontations between Gauvain and Lantenac and the personal, moral, and ideological tensions between Gauvain and Cimourdain. Gauvain is the revolution at its best - idealistic, compassionate, and perhaps a little naïve. Cimourdain is the excesses of the Reign of Terror made flesh. All the while, a mother searches for her children in the middle of a warzone, simply trekking from place to place, relying on the kindness of strangers to sustain her as she searches every inch of Brittany for her babies.
The novel is driven as much by its themes as by its plot and its characters. None of the three are neglected and all three complement each other beautifully. The best and worst impulses of humanity are fully on display.
Our final confrontation happens at the Marquis de Lantenac’s old home - a castle in which the last of his forces are holed up under siege. The few survivors of that republican battalion - who are Gauvain’s best soldiers, driven only by the desire to recover those children still held hostage by Lantenac - risk everything for their charges. In a wonderfully written section, we see the siege from the perceptive of the children themselves, confused as to what is going on in the tense moments before battle starts.
After heavy fighting, the royalists escape through a secret passageway, rigging the castle to blow on their way out. But, when his escape is assured, Lantenac remembers the children and driven by something primal and human and good, goes back to save them. Three young lives are saved - reunited with their mother - and the Marquis is captured, surely to be executed summarily.
Gauvain, seeing how Lantenac put aside his own life to save others, refuses to condemn him. He argues passionately for the ideals of the revolution. When Cimourdain won’t listen, he sneaks his enemy out of prison, switching places with him. Putting aside his own life for his ideals. Cimourdain, however, cannot forgive, and condemns a man he sees as a son to death. Gauvain is executed by guillotine and, at the same moment, Cimourdain shoots himself rather than live with what he felt forced to do.
It’s heavy. So much so that I did not know what to write about it beyond a synopsis. Truly, the novel stands alone better than I could ever try to distil it or explain it. I’m a sucker for stories in which the main character or characters die at the end, it’s just a weakness I have, but putting that aside it’s a beautiful and horrific take on this brutal period of French history. One that does not shy away from the evils and terror of the time, nor from its idealism and at times even its nobility - on both sides of the fight (though both Hugo and I, I think, lean towards the republicans). Gauvain is the only one of the main three characters who could really be considered a good person but also the one least equipped to deal with the situation he finds himself in. And, ultimately, maybe things would have turned out better in the long-run if he had just let Lantenac die - perhaps the war would have been cut shorter (though, I must stress, these are all fictional characters and Hugo does not speculate on events outside the novel).
Historically, the War in the Vendee was only ended when both sides had been bled so dry that they could not go on. The main royalist force was destroyed by the close of the novel’s eponymous year. A terror campaign against civilians by the republican forces was instigated - the so-called ‘infernal columns’ - and smaller scale fighting continued. In 1795, with nothing left to give, the sides negotiated a peace whereby the beleaguered royalists could put down their weapons and (mostly) keep their heads. The post-Terror government instituted in 1794 relaxed anti-Catholic policies as part of a wider effort to curb the extremities of the Committee of Public Safety’s rule. But that had little to do with the war itself and everything to do with factional fighting in Paris. In the end, what was it all for?
In 1799, the government that overthrew Robespierre fell to Napoleon and, in 1815, Napoleon finally fell (for the second and last time) and the Bourbon monarchy was restored. France had further successful popular revolutions, though never as bloody, in 1830, 1848, and 1871. There’s a line in Night Watch by Terry Pratchett: ‘Don’t put your trust in revolutions. They always come around again. That’s why they’re called revolutions.’
Ship of Destiny (Robin Hobb)
I swear I won’t be writing as much as that for the rest of these books. I’ll try, at least. After this one. I swear.
Ship of Destiny is the perfect end to the perfect trilogy. The trilogy is a curious little structure and fantasy is full of them. In this genre, if it’s not a stand-alone it’s probably a trilogy or an epic series of some stupid number of books, often double digits. Those are just the structures fantasy seems to default to. And, of all the fantasy trilogies I’ve read, I think Liveship Traders may well be my favourite.
In my view, the principal theme of the first novel is masculinity. Wintrow and Kyle’s conflict is the most obvious expression of this, as Wintrow fights for his own vision of masculinity - one that is caring and open and very much opposed to Kyle’s understanding of the concept. Althea struggles against the limitations imposed on her as a woman in a patriarchal world, even living as a man to try to overcome them. It’s all very centred on masculinity and what it means to be a man.
The second book’s primary theme, again in my opinion, is femininity. This is most clearly seen in the dynamic between three generations of Vestrit women: Ronica, Keffria, and Malta. Malta is the stand-out character of the novel and her journey is the clearest expression of this exploration of femininity. She despises the matriarchs of her family and hopes only for her father’s return so he can put everyone in their place and treat her as she ought to be. When she learns of her father’s capture, she attempts to do a femme fetale - understanding of essence of female power as the ability to manipulate men, who hold the real power. When it turns out that the men in her life aren’t going to help her, she finally unites with the other women of her family and takes her destiny in her own hands. She learns by the end of the novel that she can have the self-sufficiency her grandmother so values without abandoning what makes her personally feel feminine - such as the clothes her grandmother dismisses as frivolous. Ronica herself also learns a thing or two about femininity from her pert granddaughter.
But I’m supposed to be talking about the third novel and that one, by my understanding, is centred on trauma, especially cycles of and intergenerational trauma. Kennit and Paragon are the centre of that theme but, by this point in the trilogy or during the novel itself, almost everyone has some trauma to deal with. Althea, of course - a trauma delivered by Kennit’s inability to deal with his own trauma and subsequent continuation of its cycle. Serilla, whose response to her trauma is to push everyone away and try to insulate herself from any further pain. Wintrow, who was betrayed by his father, latched onto a surrogate one, and then had to learn that Kennit is nothing like he imagined him. The list goes on.
Trauma, memory, and cycles are at the centre of the novel. The serpents/dragons are a powerful expression of that. Their whole lives are cyclical and their whole existences revolve around memory and its preservation. Memory is what makes them who they are. Without it, they lose the very essence of their beings and turn into feral and bestial creatures. Their cycle is broken and that, combined with the captivity of their guide and prophet, defined entirely by her capacity to remember, and the mutilation of the corpses of their unborn siblings to create the Liveships, creates a trauma shared across their whole species. In their case, the cycle must be completed once more to allow their species to go on, guided by She Who Remembers, Vivacia, and Tintaglia, each of whom were some of my favourite characters. I was just awed by Hobb’s ability to make who empathise with these very alien creatures and I look forward to picking back up with the dragons in the fourth Realm of the Elderlings series.
But back to the humans. Kennit is a character I have a lot to say about. He is, of course, awful. Just the worst. From the get-go, it was really interesting to see this character who is an absolute bastard, unrepentant, selfish, just the worst - and who thinks that everyone else is like that too. In his POVs, we learn just how broken he is and how warped his perception of the world is, as well as how everyone around him, trying to see the best in him, completely misunderstands him. At times in the first two books I wanted to slap him and explain to him that actually people are generally pretty decent and he could be happy if only he stopped looking for the worst in them. I kept wanting Kennit to be the man everyone thought he was. To shed the insecurities at the core of his being and learn to see other people as more than just tools.
But as the walls Kennit has built up around himself start to crumble in this last novel, we see why that could never be the case. Kennit is more defined by his trauma than any of the other characters and, given the situation he was in, never stood a chance. All his insecurities come from that unresolved trauma and lead him to continue the trauma he felt, continue the cycle, and traumatise Althea (and, to a lesser extent, a myriad of others). He’s a character you can understand but nonetheless the things he does are so awful that any kind of redemption would have left a sour taste in the mouth. In the end, Kennit’s story ended in the best way it could have. If anything, he got off lightly. He is one of the best character studies I have ever read in the fantasy genre and one of the few I can understand completely even as I condemn them.
Kennit couldn’t deal with his trauma. The other characters still have to.
Althea’s story hit especially close to home. Without wanting to get too personal I’ll just say I’ve been in Brashen’s position before and it was harrowing seeing all that on the page. I think an argument could be made that, ultimately, the book does a disservice to Althea’s trauma by having it just magicked away rather than showing her deal with it as real people would - slowly and imperfectly over the rest of her life. However, I think Hobb is doing something a bit cleverer here. She uses magic to show the ultimate goal of dealing with trauma - Althea is left remembering her trauma, that isn’t taken from her, but without all the visceral reaction to it that we would today call PTSD. In other words, with Althea we see the destination but not the journey.
The journey, or at least its beginning, Hobb shows us through another character: Serilla. By the novel’s end, Serilla has gone through various unhealthy ways of dealing with her trauma and ultimately realises that she can trust and lean on other people to help her in her journey. With Ronica’s help, we see her take the first steps.
So, Hobb shows us both the journey and the destination, she just uses multiple characters and POVs to do it, which is one of the thing you can do with a multiple POV story - explore your themes in aggregate, rather than needing each character individually to fully explore each theme. Althea alone is an imperfect vision of dealing with trauma, but Althea and Serilla together (with the other characters added in for good measure) completes that vision.
Lastly, I’ll just talk about the Fool/Amber. I didn’t realise until the third book and I’m kicking myself for not working it out sooner. I’m not a very visual reader is the thing, so I didn’t pick up on the skin tone thing, but I should’ve picked up on the wood-working given carving things out of wood was also the Fool’s favourite pastime. I did sort of realise she must be a white prophet but not that she was our white prophet. I finally worked it out when she carved Paragon’s new figurehead. It was described as a northern looking young boy with a scar, if I remember correctly, and Amber was distressed when the eyes were the wrong colour. I assumed it had to be a reference to something else and the only person I could think of was Fitz. As soon as I worked that out, I immediately realised. The hints come thick and fast towards the end, with the ultimate nod-and-wink being that last conversation with Paragon. Paragon says something to the effect of ‘you’d have to be a Fool to think you could change the world’, to which Amber does everything but turn to the camera and wink. I think her line is something like ‘you don’t know how right you are’. Anyway, it was a fun little connection. I wonder if the Fool will tell Fitz what they were doing while he was moping around in a cottage writing his life story in-between the Farseer trilogy and the Tawny Man trilogy.
Anyway, it was a great book and a great series that cemented Hobb as one of my favourite fantasy writers of all time (behind Terry Pratchett and Susanna Clarke and maybe tied with Robert Jordan, if anyone cares).
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie)
Ok look, I guessed the ending. Spoilers coming, by the way. If you haven’t read the novel, please stop now and go in blind.
I want to make clear - I didn’t guess the ending because I’m some kind of genius detective. I’ve been reading the Poirot books in order of release and, when I was looking up what the next one in the series was, I saw that it was especially well known for its crazy twist ending. An ending you couldn’t possibly see coming. That turned some cogs in my brain. It’s a detective story. You’re supposed to suspect everyone. So, my writer brain went to work: how could a detective story have a twist no-one could see coming? Well, I had two ideas. One: the murder didn’t actually happen. But Christie has basically already done that, or at least that the murder was very different from how it was originally presented. Murder on the Links is that, basically. So, my second idea: the detective themself was the murderer. But Poirot can’t be - he has dozens of more books to be in. But maybe Hastings could be? The POV character doing the crime? That could be it, I thought, as I opened the book.
Then I read the first lines and it became clear that Hastings wasn’t the POV character. Some new guy called Sheppard was. A new POV character? Uh oh. So he, this new guy we know nothing about, could be the murderer and then Christie could bring Hastings back for the next book. As a writer it seemed obvious: Sheppard had to be the murderer.
So, I ended up spoiling the book for myself based on knowing that it was going to have some crazy twist and using my writer brain to work out what that twist would have to be. For the rest of the novel, the way I was reading it was quite different from the way you’re ‘supposed’ to read it. I was at least 50% sure it was Sheppard from the word go so I was constantly looking for ways he could have done it; for inconsistencies in his story or convenient gaps in the narrative (especially once I realised that, like a lot of detective novels at this time, including all the previous Poirot books, the book itself is epistolary - in world, it was written by the POV character rather than being their actual thoughts and feelings in the moment, allowing a greater scope for selective truth telling and even out-and-out lying).
I still hadn’t worked out everything - a few things in the parlour scene were new to me as I couldn’t work out quite how he had done it (I had some thoughts; they were mostly wrong) - but I was fully convinced as we went into that scene that I knew at the very least who had done it. Afterall, everyone but the secretary and the step-son had already had some revelation come out about them or been cleared of the murder beyond a doubt and ‘it was the secretary or step-son, the most minor and uninteresting suspects in the novel’ would hardly have been the unforeseeable twist I was promised. See, I’m a terrible detective, but a half-decent analyser of fiction.
After everything was laid out, I looked back over the novel and was just blown away by how well it was all crafted. If I had gone in blind, without being told about this twist, I’m sure I would have been completely fooled. Well done Christie, I tip my hat to you and this masterpiece. You’ve raised my standards for detective fiction moving forwards. I’m sure you’ll continue to meet that bar - it’s all the other authors I’m worried about.
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
No-one told me Austen is funny.
As I mentioned with Ninety-Three, that period around the turn of the 19th century is of particular interest for me. Given Austen is the most famous English writer of that period and I wanted to get an understanding of Regency social mores in the upper classes from someone who lived through the period, I felt I had to give her a try and started her with most famous work.
A thing I hate about ‘classics’ is how they’re presented: as an artifact to be understood rather than a story to be enjoyed. Modern printings always start with an introduction that completely spoils the novel, as if experiencing it as a first-time reader is much less important than knowing all of the secondary analysis that has been produced on the novel in the subsequent centuries or how it fits into the history of literature. Then you get a biography of the author. Finally, almost as an afterthought, they actually include the novel in case you actually wanted to read the thing. I assume at least part of this is purely mercenary - you can’t keep a two-hundred year old novel in copywrite, but you can keep your introduction to it and all the other trimmings in copyright and then copyright the whole thing. But that doesn’t explain all of it, in my opinion. And, as a reader, it primes you to read the novel in a certain way. As an almost academic exercise rather than a pleasurable one. You know, for entertainment, like it was written. Presumably at some point we’re going to do this with movies too and there’ll be a pause after every scene to let an academic explain why what you just watched is integral to the history of cinema, or you’ll have to sit through a two hour lecture before being allowed to watch the damn film.
All that is to say that I read a few pages of that introduction, got annoyed at it, and skipped to the novel. I would recommend that approach.
Engaging with the novel as an actual story, I was instantly hooked. Mr Bennett is hilarious, for the most part, and I really enjoyed the whole Bennett family dynamic. Jane was a stand-out character - I love how she works to see the best in everyone and the whole dynamic whereby Lizzy would present two people at odds and Jane would look for someway they could both be the good-guy. In general, I just loved the elder Bennett sisters.
I also assumed that, as a romance novel, it would be filled with yearning - the thing that most puts me off of fictionalised romance. Pining and yearning and all that seems the mainstay of every fictional romance I read or watch and I just hate it. If you like someone, go ask them out. If they say yes, great. If not, move on. If you don’t want to or feel you can’t ask them out, again move on. Is that too brutal an approach? Maybe? But, to me, yearning feels like the domain of teenagers and, by the time you’re an adult, I think you should have learnt to be upfront with your own feelings and respectful of other people’s feelings. Regardless, its endemic to the genre and, as perhaps the most influential romance novelist ever, I assumed that lots of that originated with Austen. I went in prepared. And quickly realised how wrong I was.
In fact, the first half of the novel is hardly a romance at all: Lizzy hates Darcy, she doesn’t pine for him. The way their two opinions of each other change and end up at extreme opposites seemed almost like a Shakspearian comedy: each character completely misreading the other and neither taking the time to just talk it out before it all comes to a head. Now, it’s easy to be annoyed at a story in which the main conflict could be solved by the characters just talking, but that’s where the two things come into play. First, the characters who, based on their pride (on the one hand) and their prejudice (on the other) would never think to talk to each other like that. It would be quite out of character if they did. The ‘idiot plot’ works because, in this instance and on this issue, Lizzy and Darcy are idiots. Second, the social mores of their society. That’s where this being Regency England with everything that comes along with that works heavily in the book’s favour. I can see why so much romance fiction is historical in setting, and often Regency specifically.
I especially appreciated - and here a lot of modern fiction involving romance could take note - how genuinely dislikeable Darcy was throughout much of the novel. Their first interaction is him insulting her looks. He’s snide and cynical and, if we didn’t get his own perspective, would seem utterly without charm. Even during his proposal, he says basically that he’s overlooking Lizzy’s background because, unfortunately, he accidentally fell in love with her. Early on, it’s very hard to cheer on the romance and hope it all works out because, well, Lizzy has better options (including, frankly, spinsterdom). If your romance plot needs the readers to root for the romance throughout, you couldn’t do this. The best you could do is make the love interest a bit of an arsehole with a heart of gold just begging to turn into a sweet soft-boy for the right brown-eyed every-girl. But Austen has the strength of her convictions to make Darcy genuinely awful and rely on her strength as a storyteller to pull you through the novel.
It’s wonderful and it makes Darcy’s growth feel real and earnt once he’s used Lizzy’s rejection as a springboard to analyse himself and change into a better man. I especially love how, having done that, Darcy doesn’t expect anything of Lizzy. In fact, he assumes she still hates him and continues to be a better man purely because he has realised what a smug little so-and-so he was. Yet, it is that genuine and honest growth that causes Lizzy to eventually fall for him, leading to another little comedy of errors in which both characters are now in love with each other but each assumes the other hates them - either for rejecting their proposal or for all the reasons the proposal was initially rejected. That’s when you start rooting for them to get together; hoping they can get over the mores of their society and their own worst instincts to remove the obstacles to their happiness.
Anyway, the narrative was wonderful, the characters were lively, and the prose was exquisite. I look forward to future forays into Austen’s body of work.
A Song for Arbonne (Guy Gavriel Kay)
By the way, I happened the read Pride and Prejudice, this novel, and the next all in the month of May. It was a good reading month. The only other novel I read that month, Dune Messiah, also almost made this list. Anyway:
I’ve discovered a new favourite. Every other Kay book has just shot to the top of my TBR. I saw him randomly recommended on Reddit, I think it was, as a fantasy author who is low on the magic and high on the historical inspiration. Interesting, I thought, given that’s more or less what I write myself. Then I was listening to a random episode of Writing Excuses and Brandon Sanderson called him the best epic fantasy author currently writing. Quite a claim from probably the most successful writer in the genre right now, so I decided to give the guy a go.
Going in with A Song for Arbonne as my first Guy Gavriel Kay was a bit of a random choice but I heard it takes a lot of inspiration from the Cathars in southern France and the Albigensian Crusade that was launched to suppress them. Modern history is more my wheelhouse but I’m also fascinated by pre-Lutheran movements to reform the Catholic Church and the Cathars specifically. So, I decided to pick this one up ahead of a more famous novel like Tigana.
Anyway, I loved it. Like Hobb and Jordan and I suppose Martin as well, Kay seems to be in that class of fantasy authors who mostly started publishing in the ‘90s and combine the best of the classic and modern form of the genre. They have all the epic worldbuilding and well crafted prose associated with classic fantasy combined with a focus on character that would go on to define the modern genre. The plots also trend much more towards the political, which is a more modern fantasy thing. They still mostly write European inspired and medieval inspired stuff, where the modern genre is more varied in its settings, but they make up for it through their prose especially, where modern prose sometimes falls a little flat for me.
My one criticism would be that the level of extreme misogyny displayed by the king of Gorhaut seemed excessive to the point of being exploitative. He’s not supposed to be likeable, fine, and we’re drawing a distinction between (sort of) matriarchal Arbonne and (definitely) patriarchal Gorhaut, but it was still a little much (though not on the level of, say, Martin, whose ASOIAF books I flat out cannot re-read at this point for those reasons).
Anyway, I loved the historical parallels - high medieval France’s Courtly Love and Troubadour cultures were fully on display, complete with the Court of Love and Countess Signe as a kind of Eleonor of Aquitaine figure. It wasn’t quite on the level of, say, the Poppy War as far as directly paralleling history went, given that series was actively going through specific events in Chinese history (though out of order and in a very different setting), but I if anything preferred Kay’s approach, in which he used a very historically inspired world as a sandbox for him to craft his own stories and events, more loosely inspired by history. It’s an approach I also take in my writing, so it was lovely so see it on display here.
In general, I found this novel quite affirming for my own writing. Kay writes very historically inspired secondary worlds, as do I. Kay (at least in this novel) writes basically no magic, I write none. On the magic front, in this novel literally one character has supernatural abilities and they use them to: a) see out of the eyes of an owl, which is cool but hardly plot relevant, b) detect the main character’s emotions one time, and c) get a vision of where the big battle will go down. You could take all that out without changing the story one iota, which furthers my argument that fantasy doesn’t need magic to be fantasy. I mean, to argue that taking that stuff out of this novel would completely change its genre to something else (and go ahead and try to name that something else, I dare you) makes absolutely no sense to me.
Anyway, I’ll get off the soap-box.
Blaise was great. The typical fantasy gruff sword-boy but with a lot more personality than you tend to find. Bertran was a lot of fun too. And Signe and Ariane and Lisseut. Basically the whole cast was wonderful - not a single weak link amongst them. I prefer more subtle character arcs and here Kay excelled. Blaise, for example, learns to stop running, take responsibility, and eventually become the man who can be the next king of Gorhaut, but it’s also very slow and feels very natural for him. I have to say I prefer that to some of the arcs you see in fantasy, where characters are dragged kicking and screaming down a path that feels very unnatural for them based on where they started. Sometimes that works, especially when that’s the point (eg Rand in Wheel of Time) but often it falls flat for me.
The plot was good, though it felt slightly rushed towards the end, at least for me personally. Maybe it’s because I have a penchant for military fiction but I found the whole campaign section a little too brief and hurried. Gorhaut makes a probing attack, Blaise launches his usurpation, Gorhaut launch their invasion, there’s a battle and Arbonne/Blaise wins. I was yearning for a little more to be honest. But I can’t criticise anything else plot-wise; from start to finish it was well crafted and well paced, taking place over a series of set-pieces as we moved through the year.
It was good, it what I’m trying to say. FIN.
Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
I read A Place of Greater Safety last year and it instantly became one of my favourite novels… ever? As mentioned with Ninety-Three and Pride and Prejudice, I’m a sucker for the turn of the 19th century broadly and the French Revolution specifically so I was already predisposed to lose my actual mind over that book, which I promptly did. And, of course, Mantel’s other historical fiction - her trilogy on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell - went onto the TBR.
Wolf Hall is a very good book. It is written in a very similar style to A Place of Greater Safety, which I’ll admit I preferred but only because of the setting and my greater familiarity with it. The prose was just wonderful - so fluid and evocative, it highlighted everything that is good about the written word as a medium of storytelling.
If I can bring the soap-box out again for a moment and set it up on Speakers’ Corner to harangue passers-by, there is a trend in modern prose writing, I think, to seek to emulate the screen. Stories are written basically as if someone were just following a camera and describing what it sees. The benefits of a story being told through prose rather than on the screen is lost. Of all the writers I’ve read recently, Mantel reminded me most vividly of the benefits you get with prose - the things you can do that other mediums can’t. Of course, there’s getting in the character’s head, but almost everyone still does that. But other things - how Mantel fluidly moves from the present to a flash-back from one sentence to another in a way that would be impossible on the screen because you would need a cut and scene change, for example - aren’t done by a lot of other writers (myself included). Taking that example specifically, it really works for Mantel and reflects much better the way we actually reminisce. So, I want more of writers leaning into the advantages of prose over screen please. Thanks.
The attention to historical detail was of course immaculate. My only critique would be that Mantel tends towards the most solacious reading of a disputed event rather than the historically accepted one. In A Place of Greater Safety I already took note of this in how she gave credence to the ‘Danton stole the crown jewels and used them to bribe the Duke of Brunswick into throwing the Battle of Valmy’ conspiracy. That just isn’t true and I you like I can lecture you for an hour on why Brunswick actually made good decisions at Valmy and is unjustly maligned by people at the time and now who don’t understand the military situation he’d accidentally gotten himself into. In this book, the most egregious example was the Mantel accepting the idea that Sir John Seymour (father of Henry VIII’s third wife Jane Seymour) had an affair with his daughter-in-law Catherine Fillol, which Mantel uses to create a rift in the Seymour family. It’s good character drama but there’s no contemporary evidence for it, just some rumours dating to a century after the fact.
Beyond that, however, I love the way history is presented in this novel. No concessions are made to a modern audience - you’re just thrown in and have to sink or swim in this very different world to our own. In that respect I would compare Mantel’s historical fiction to Patrick O’Brian’s (as an aside, his novel the Mauritius Command also almost made this list). One way, besides the world, in which she also refuses to concede anything to her audience is through her cast. It’s common in historical fiction to trim down the cast a bit, maybe combine a few characters or miss some out entirely. From my understanding (though I haven’t watched it) the TV show the Tudors does exactly that when working with a very similar time-period. Anyway, Mantel doesn’t. So there’s a dozen Thomases - get used to it. There’s a cast of scores - deal with it. I really appreciated the way Mantel trusted her audience to just get on with such an unwieldly cast of varied and wonderful characters.
And Cromwell himself - I just love him. Again, Mantel went for the most solacious reading of his early life, but by god - if her portrayal of Cromwell isn’t what the real man was like, it should be. The calculating, brutal, loyal to a fault little bastard is everything I want in a protagonist. I really just can’t praise him enough.
Beyond the setting and the characters, Mantel also doesn’t give an inch of ground on the historicity with reference to the plot. Similar to how historical fiction often wrangles the setting and cast into something more conventional in fiction and understandable to the modern reader, equally the same is often done with plot. Time is stretched or shrunk, events are given a nice linear progression, and such forth. Mantel does nothing of the sort. Where events won’t fit the plot structure she has in mind, she just weaves through time, layering in flashbacks to give her the structure she wants. Beyond that, she replicates historical events with remarkable attention to detail, seamlessly melding her novel onto the history rather than beating the history into a novel-plot. It’s historical fiction as it ought to be written.
That was my primary take-away from the whole novel. It solidified in my mind what A Place of Greater Safety had already suggested - that Mantel was a historical fiction writer without compare. Without any peers on her level. I truly, truly cannot recommend her enough.
So yeah, those are the six novels I rated 5/5 in the first half of 2023. As already mentioned, Dune Messiah and the Mauritius Command were honourable mentions, though so were Leviathan Wakes (very excited to get into the rest of the Expanse series), the Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories (Susanna Clarke, as mentioned, is one of my favourite authors of all time and this is the only work of hers I don’t consider 5/5 perfect, only because of couple of the stories fall flat for me), and Terry Pratchett’s new biography (which made me cry more than any other book so far this year - as mentioned, Pratchett is undoubtably my all time favourite, has been since I was maybe 9, and I’m still devastated by his death). I think I’ll do this again in December, so look forward to that. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you. K. Bye.