Tag Archives: Historical Fiction

Loot: Imperialism Gets a Slap on the Wrist

Tania James’ Loot opens in Srirangapatna, Mysore in 1794. The French are its colonial rulers. Abbas is 17 and a gifted woodcarver. He’s sent to Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace to apprentice with Lucien Du Leze, a brilliant French engineer and watchmaker. They create a wooden automaton depicting a tiger devouring a British soldier. It’s all good fun, and the finished marvel delights Tipu. Du Leze returns to France.

French rule is weak, and Britain’s East India Company invades with its army. The battle is bloody; Tipu is killed; the city destroyed and renamed Seringapatnam; and its precious artifacts are looted. The automaton is awarded to Colonel Selwyn, who sends it to his country estate in England. His wife collects artifacts taken from all the territories the East India Company had conquered.

Abbas has lost everything. He leaves for France, which is a long journey around the African continent. He makes it and discovers Du Leze is dead. Fortunately, Jehanne, Du Leze’s beautiful, half-Indian, adopted daughter, is alive. Romance buds, but they’re poor. Jehanne learns where the automaton is located, so she and Abbas travel to England to steal it and become rich.

Wow, Gladiola, this synopsis makes Loot sound like an exciting global adventure; historical fiction at its best. Yes, it could’ve been, but here’s the problem. James knows all the necessary elements of the hero’s quest. She mechanically checks them off, as if this is an exercise in a graduate-level creative writing program, but she’s created a heartless automaton, which is a shame because the story does have potential.

Abbas travels around Africa in 1802, but the horrors of the slave trade are fleetingly acknowledged. India is being looted, but imperialism’s greed gets a slap on the wrist. Literally. Loot is a card game Jehanne plays with Selwyn’s widow. When Lady Selwyn, who’s surrounded by all the treasures her husband looted, pulls the winning card, Jehanne reflexively slaps her wrist.

Imperialism’s misappropriation of cultural artifacts has been a hot topic globally for decades. Loot was published is 2023, but James barely mentions the issue, which is all the more surprising because Abbas is Indian and Jehanne is half Indian. Loot dutifully marches to its banal happy ending, but the reader is left with a nagging sense that this is a superficial novel full of missed opportunities.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

TRUST No One – Except Billionaires. You Can TRUST Them

For economic reasons, you should buy Hernan Diaz’s TRUST. It’s four stories for the price of one. For enjoyment reasons, you should also read it.

The novel, which won Diaz the 2023 Pulitzer Prize, asks one question: Who is Mildred Bevel? Four related stories offer answers, but Mildred is different in each. So which one do you trust?

Bonds, the first story, is written by Harold Vanner, a novelist who may have been a friend with benefits. But Vanner obfuscates, because Bonds is about Benjamin and Helen Rask – fictional characters based upon Andrew and Mildred Bevel. In Vanner’s account, Benjamin Rask is a brilliant, amoral Wall Street financier in the early 1900s, and Helen is a kind and generous arts patron who has serious psychological issues.

The second story, My Life, is dictated by Andrew Bevel. He wants to tell his story because a “vicious circle has taken hold of our able-bodied men: they increasingly rely on the government to alleviate the misery created by that same government, not realizing that this dependency only perpetuates their sorry state of affairs.” Mind you, this is during the Great Depression and Andrew is stupendously rich, but the only person he pities is himself. If you have confused him with Andy Rand, Ayn Rand’s dickhead brother, you are forgiven.

Andrew is also offended by Vanner’s portrait of Mildred (disguised as Helen). But mostly, Andrew is outraged by Vanner’s description of him (disguised as Benjamin). He wants to correct the record in an outrageously self-serving and mean-spirited way. To Andrew, Mildred is a saintly woman who dabbled in music and philanthropy. She is no master of the financial universe like him.

The third story is A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza. Ida writes this in 1981 after the Bevels are dead. She’d been hired decades earlier by Andrew to transcribe his memoir (the rebuttal to Vanner) and improve upon it – a euphemism for make shit up.

She sees through Andrew’s self-aggrandizement and makes some informed judgments about Mildred. Her goal is to turn Mildred’s “tenuous ghost into a tangible human being”, but all she has to work with is Mildred’s mostly empty notebooks, Andrew’s self-absorbed account from 50 years earlier, and Vanner’s novel. To Ida, Mildred was a “thoughtful, disciplined philanthropist.”

Finally, in the last installment, Futures, we hear Mildred’s voice. She sees herself quite differently. It’s a refreshing perspective, but is it true?

TRUST succeeds on several levels. It’s absorbing historical fiction. It’s also a brutal examination of how immense wealth enables the super-rich and powerful to “align and distort” reality to their liking. In that sense, it’s not historical at all.

So, considering all the competing narratives, who was Mildred Bevel really? It all depends on who you trust. Me? I always trust the billionaires.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor

Christopher Marlowe in a Bodice

So, Gladiola, I’m looking for a historical fiction-spy-romance novel. And it needs to be a bodice ripper. But the bodices must be worn by men. They should also be ripped off by men. Can you recommend something?

Wow! That’s really specific. But fortunately I just finished reading Allison Epstein’s A Tip for the Hangman, and it has everything you want in the historical fiction-spy-romance-male/male bodice ripper genre. However, the narrative does drag at times, especially at the end.

The story opens in October 1585, and Kit (Christopher Marlowe) is at Cambridge University. He believes the other students think he doesn’t belong there. They do. He comes from a poor family in Canterbury where his father is a first-rate alcoholic and third-rate cobbler.

Though he’s a brilliant student, he’s an outsider – all the more so because he’s homosexual. Fortunately his classmate and best friend, Tom, is too. Their love is the only stable thing in Kit’s life. From the beginning Tom knows Kit is a brilliant poet. Eventually Tom realizes this means Kit is also a brilliant liar.

Kit’s moral flexibility comes to the attention of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster. He desperately needs spies, because Papists across England and Europe are conspiring to depose the queen and replace her with a Catholic monarch. Their leading candidate is Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary (Queen of Scots). That must be awkward around the holidays.

Soon Kit is inside Mary’s household sending vital information to Walsingham, but Kit’s success comes with a cost. “Perhaps he understood, now, what it was for actions to have consequences. None of Walsingham’s agents understood that from the beginning – if they did, they would never sign on. But they all realized, sooner or later, what victory felt like. Hazy and sour, like a half-remembered dream.”

Walsingham gives Kit more assignments, but meanwhile Kit has become the most successful playwright in London. His plays scandalize the censors and the church. He is clearly an atheist, and his relationship with Tom is concerning. Could he be susceptible to blackmail? Could he be a traitor? As long as Walsingham is alive, Kit is protected. Walsingham dies. Kit better watch his back.

The novel is mostly true to the scant historical record on Marlowe. However, the large holes in the record allow Ms. Epstein to conjure an intriguing tale that works best when focused on Papist conspiracies and Kit’s efforts to expose them. And while the love between Kit and Tom is convincingly depicted, it also drifts into melodrama. Overall, however, A Tip for the Hangman is an entertaining read.

Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor