"Bones Beneath Our Feet" by Michael Schein

As a teacher of history and expert in the past of the Seattle area, Michael Schein is eminently qualified to write about the “pacification” and settling of Washington Territory. “Bones Beneath Our Feet” proves this.

As in any ambitious historical novel, “Bones Beneath Our Feet” is set just as epochal changes occur, in this case, in the Puget Sound area of Washington state. We get sketchy biographical data on the principal players (who are also historical figures), like the rapacious and indomitable first governor of the territory, Isaac Stevens, and his main antagonist, Leschi of the Nisqually. Detail abounds in this straight-line narrative, as the author uses the omniscient viewpoint to unfold the series of skirmishes, murders, arson, aggressive criminality, and treachery that marked the conflict. Certain features of this history are quite predictable: aboriginal natives who chronically underestimate the threat, and who behave in such a way as to inadvertently maximize it; prejudiced white settlers, who unfailingly believe God is on their side, and are quite comfortable with the idea of annihilating the natives; unbounded greed and ambition of early settlers and politicians.

The book, while not overly long, nevertheless seems ponderous. It bends and groans under the weight of the detail, unfortunately, and Mr. Schein could comfortably have glossed over perhaps a third of what he presents, in favor of a little more depth in the characters. I grant that this was not his design; I have no doubt that readers can rely very confidently on this book to present the facts of the matter, but I don’t think it succeeds as a real historical fiction.

It does, however, succeed in capturing the natural grandeur of the unspoiled Puget Sound – the climate is represented vividly – and the author wrings out the inexorable sinking despair that overcomes the defeated Leschi, quite effectively.

Mr. Schein attempts a historical novel, but what emerges are loosely-connected historical tableaux set to dialog. Many battles and skirmishes are effectively and graphically done, but the whole does not hang together very well. I sense clearly the author’s intense commitment to the history, but not his craft for drawing out a true fiction from it.

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Throughout History: My Pet Mystery Series

The occasion of finishing “The Dove of Death” by Peter Tremayne makes a perfect time to review three detective series I have enjoyed over the years, but have not included here. An ancient setting recurs through these three series, which is a complete coincidence, a thing that evolved from simple preferences. Let’s start with the series the entry from which I finished just today. Each has its devoted followers (this is not a discovery piece, this is an appreciation).

Sister Fidelma, by Peter Tremayne

Set in Ireland in the seventh century CE, this series features a youngish nun who exercises the powers of a duly appointed investigating officer and advocate in the Five Kingdoms on the Island of Hibernia. Tremayne, real name Peter Berresford Ellis, studies English and Irish history professionally, and builds his rewarding stories around the customs and conflicts of the time, which to me is a wonderful extra spice in these pieces. His scholarship shows in such themes as the spread of orthodoxy of the Roman Church. Many professionals, particularly in the legal system, joined the Church as a way of pursuing their careers without interference, and Fidelma is no exception. You will not read of her in any sort of cloister or silent meditation; she does in fact marry a Saxon monk and have a son. However, a series of focused and fervent churchmen work tirelessly at spreading the celibate orthodoxy espoused by Rome. This doctrine is very slow to take hold in ancient Ireland.

The books stand very well as mysteries, and Fidelma is a memorable, intrepid character. These mysteries keep you guessing, often until the last dozen or so pages. Fidelma always guards her secrets well; often there is a reason she can’t even tell her husband Eadulf whodunit, because it could endanger him. One or two quibbles on these. The writing, particularly during conversation, can run a tiny bit stilted, as though Mr. Tremayne does not want his characters to sound vernacular or familiar. And he finds it too frequently necessary for Fidelma to cop an attitude about what she does, often putting a stuffy or prejudiced official in his or her place. Small quibbles, no doubt. A very worthwhile series, I have thoroughly enjoyed it.

For more information; click http://www.sisterfidelma.com/


Roma sub rosa, by Steven Saylor

Beginning late in the life of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, (d. 78 BCE) and extending through the collapse of Republican Rome and the establishment of the Empire, Gordianus the Finder finds murderers, thieves, conspirators, and more in a series of superb-down-to-the-details mysteries set in ancient Rome. Highlights in this series include intimate fictional portraits of Cicero, the famed advocate and statesman of Rome (for whom Gordianus does a series of tasks, sometimes grudgingly), and the cunning, charming, and ruthless Julius Caesar. The principal attraction of this series lies in the engrossing verisimilitude of Rome at its height. The sights, smells, commotion, attitudes, backroom political ruthlessness, and religious traditions all flow from the extensive knowledge of Mr. Saylor, who, like me, remains entranced by all things ancient Rome.

Gordianus must navigate his way through the shark-infested waters of Roman power politics. He must find murderers and unearth conspiracies, freeing his slave and marrying her along the way. In his life he must balance the interests of the state, his clients, and his personal life, and he does it all with a rigid personal moral sense. Much of the brutality of the time leaves him aghast, but he doesn’t question slavery, or the preeminence of his homeland in the world. The rogue’s gallery in this series is a highly entertaining one, whether it involves historical characters or the anonymous gladiator/thug. This series remains a prized favorite.

For more information: http://www.stevensaylor.com/RomaSubRosa.html


Brother Cadfael, by Ellis Peters

Portrayed through 22 novels published between 1977 and 1995, and brought to the small screen in a terrific BBC series with the divine Derek Jacobi in the title role, Brother Cadfeal ranks as one of the best-loved and most-followed detectives in all of mystery literature. These novels feature the eponymous Benedictine monk, who serves his abbot and neighboring nobles by investigating murders and other crimes. This series shares with the Gordianus novels a highly charged political backdrop, which allows for all kinds of machination and skullduggery. Cadfael’s time encompasses the civil war that raged in England in the 1130s and 1140s, between adherents to two contenders for the throne, Empress Maud and King Stephen.

Edith Pargeter, self-taught scholar and translator, published well-researched fiction and non-fiction after World War II. Under the name Ellis Peters, she published her first Brother Cadfael book, “A Morbid Taste for Bones,” in 1977, beating by three years Umberto Eco’s very well-received “The Name of the Rose,” a novel that famously deals with similar material. In her Cadfael series, Peters maintained an excellence in her plots and in her renderings of a far-off world. Her mysteries contain anything and everything the reader hopes for in this genre: distinctive sets of suspects, games of high-stakes political shenanigans, plenty of physical danger for our hero and other virtuous souls, and plenty of surprise twists and gratifying endings. There are a lot of reasons for Cadfael’s popularity, and I’m sure it will endure for generations.

For more information: http://www.steveconrad.co.uk/cadfael/

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"John Henry Days" by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead follows up the brilliant "The Intuitionist" with another strong effort. This story recounts the trip an independent journalist (hack? flack?) makes to the small hill town where they will celebrate the legend of John Henry, the mythic steel-driving man who died in competition with a machine. The novel takes us through different historical stages in which the legend takes root and grows. The author also effectively lampoons present-day journalism, bringing up the ridiculous effort of Sutter, the hack, to break the record for traveling on consecutive press junkets.

The inventive recounting of the railroad employee himself is vivid and immediate. We see superhuman effort and very human emotion. Also memorable is a segment set in Tin Pan Alley, portrayed as squalid and noisome, where the classic folk song was written. The present-day sections of the narrative contain a realistic, non-blinking expose of the cynical efforts communities make to attract visitors, and the way the media use and abuse those efforts.

Not as cerebral or as haunting as "The Intuitionist," this novel shines in its own vivid way, nevertheless. I recommend it, and I will be moving on to Whitehead's other work.

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"The Abyssinian" by Jean-Cristophe Rufin

This fun and interesting adventure story features some sure-fire elements to pique our interest: desert caravans, forbidden love, an audience with Louis XIV, wonderful secondary players. But it also plays a game with the old formula, changing things up a bit. Our hero's lady love is not a virgin, but engages in an assignation with a rich, self-centered libertine, who eventually comes to a timely end through his ignorance and arrogance. Our intrepid hero, Jean-Baptiste, a part-time healer, does not succeed in his quest until he forsakes the society which he formerly intended to win over.

A fun, witty read, with an intrepid hero, a devoted lady love, and a delightful couple as sidekicks, Maitre Juremi and Francoise. Lose yourself in this one; I guarantee a good time.

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"The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon" by Richard Zimler

"The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon" deals with the horrific 1506 pogrom in that city, and it deals with it at some length. The detail and the lengthy, lengthy recounting of it wore me down. The narrative follows Master Abraham, who is murdered, and his nephew Berekiah, who works assiduously at finding his uncle's killer. Amid all the death, furtiveness, and horror, who can tell where to look?

Unfortunately, I also had trouble keeping the suspects straight. The book contains some philosophical musings about the Kabbal, God, persecution, and the coming secular world. I understand praise for this book - certain scenes are vivid (although for the most part descriptions are sketchy and inadequate) and powerful, and a sense of injustice is the lifeblood coursing though this novel. I found it weighty and wearing - so much so that I considered putting it down halfway through.

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"The Pale Blue Eye" by Louis Bayard

I was very much looking forward to this book: a murder mystery featuring Edgar Allan Poe as a character, set in the early years of the 19th century at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point - what's not to love?

Well, this book is pretty much not to love. I don't usually let a pervasive emotion put me off a book, but this hits me as a very sad book indeed. I don't want to spoil anyone's enjoyment of this novel, but there is NO ONE in the book who should be above suspicion. Some of the descriptions of the area are quite effective, and the protrayal of Poe rises above the pedestrian - I liked it - but overall, you might want to spend your valuable time elsewhere.

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"Zorro" by Isabel Allende

This could more properly have been titled "The Origins of Zorro"; it is a fine adventure story, and in this retelling has considerable psychological depth. Deep, too, is the sorrow flowing from some of the clearly-told depredations in the story, like the rape and murder of Bernardo's mother - the event which marks the onset of his lifelong mute nature. This book does have a fun and interesting run-in between Don Diego and the pirate Jean Laffitte.

I wasn't sure what I expected when I opened this up. What I got was a brightly-told, quickly-paced, realistic telling of one our favorite legends.

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"The Last English King" by Julian Rathbone

In "The Last English King" we get a close, graphic portrait of the Battle of Hastings and its devastating effect on the Saxon royalty and gentry in England. It's told through the eyes of Walt, a member of King Harold's vanquished bodyguard. Walt loses a hand in the battle, and after it's over he leaves on a pilgrimage for the Holy Land.

Perhaps he's looking for redemption of some sort; he meets up with a sleight-of-hand artist and a lapsed monk, among other questors. The various conversations he has with this wise-to-the-world monk begin to erode his faith. A young girl, just coming into womanhood, restores his dead and stunted arm to life and feeling again, simply by caressing it. Along the way we get a lovely passage on the Hagia Sophia - its awe-inspiring architecture and its interior spaces, colors, and icons. Walt gets as far as the south coast of Asia Minor, when his land and its newly-defeated people compel him to turn around and return home. What we are to make of this failure to complete the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, I'm not at all sure.

Rathbone has fashioned a vivid picture of a critical moment in Anglophone history. This book works rather well on several levels, not the least of which is an allegory of devastating change. The Norman Conquest wreaked upon English speakers wrenching alterations - the only result possible of broken promises and a doomed determination to survive as a culture and a nation. Even if you don't take an interest in the Norman conquest, this book is well worth your time for its vivid portraiture of a long-ago time and the timeless human cadence of hope, aspiration, and conflict.

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"The Old Man Who Read Love Stories" by Luis Sepulveda

Perhaps because he sees so little love in his life, an older man in a village in the Ecuadorian rain forest insatiably reads stories about it. Sepulveda sets up his protaganist as an isolated man, whose cleverness and wisdom separate him from even the folks in his native village. So, this man's true worth is even more unknown to an interloping Gringo, whom the man does not want to fight, but must nonetheless.

In fact, the old man is forced through a strange circumstance to do something utterly distasteful to him - something injurious to the natural fauna of his land.

Thematically, we have encroaching development, clash of culture (even between generations within the small village), and the coarseness that governs so much of modern interaction.

"The Old Man who Read Love Stories" gives us the loneliness of a man who dreams of love. This book has a good translation (don't have the name, sorry), and gives us a glimpse of an unusual milieu, and lessons of interactions that arise there. I stop short of giving a ringing endorsement, but do not regret having read it.

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"Farewell my Queen" by Chantal Thomas

Told from the point of view of a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, this story captures the mindset of the French gentry, insulated at the palace of Versailles, on the eve of the revolution.

The lady writes bitterly decades later from her home in Vienna, of the times and events. She made it out by purest luck, and it's clear she still reviles the revolutionaries.

I don't recall the exact prize this novel won in its native France. I presume it won for some social or political reason, or it reinforced some popular idea of the nobility at the time. The translation is workmanlike for, in the way of translations, its language seldom adds adornment to the narrative it serves.

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"Icefields" by Thomas Wharton

Twenty-five years before, a doctor fell into a crevasse, and was trapped there, losing his backpack and all the objects in it. Currently, someone finds it, the doctor perhaps, on his return visit, and the orchids in the cans still survive after all these years.

I'm reviewing this book from memory. A principal incident in the book occurs when the doctor tumbles into a massive crack in the glacier, and becomes disoriented - is he rightside up, or upside down? - in the all-encompassing white of the ice. The book involves the strife of developers and nature as a main theme, but seems to hang its hat on the glacier-rules-everything peg.

This book will transport you. This book will set you to wondering.

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"An Imaginary Life" by David Malouf

David Malouf creates the life of Ovid in his exile by the Black Sea. This is the story of a lost spirit - Ovid no longer has Roman society to entertain and embarrass. His spirit flies from him when he's exiled, and shows upsymbolized in a little boy. Ovid's soul gradually comes back to him as he becomes more a member of the foreign community.

This is a lovely, artful story, and Malouf has a fan in this reviewer.

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"The Colour" by Rose Tremain

In Rose Tremain's "The Colour" we follow the lives of a man, his mother, and wife, who travel from Victorian England to New Zealand for the newly-discovered gold there. The story starts off slowly, with the rigors of 19th-century round-the-world travel and the cloud under which the trio leaves England. The cloud really hovers over Joseph, the main force behind the move. His wife Harriet's story is told in some detail, and we believe her motivation in marrying Joseph, but we do open with the wrenching change of escape and seeming exile.

Joseph proves to be a secretive, grasping type, and has little consideration for the two women in his life. Living conditions appal us and them, and the two ladies try to put a life together as Joseph goes off to the fields. At length, Harriet goes in search of her errant husband, and at this point, this story really takes flight. We come to a gritty, all-too-real depiction of the raw greed and cruelty reigning at a mining camp, where Harriet meets a Chinese trader. For me, this episode proves that this is Harriet's story. She and this Chinese man become close and, in a soaring, lovely, dreamy part of the book, Harriet learns about herself, the possibilities of life and intimacy, and the full strangeness of the world. This couple secludes itself from prying eyes, and becomes enshrouded in clouds in its lonely mountainside nest. This man has no need of gold; he went to the fields to serve as a merchant to the prospectors. But he's left that behind, and subsists in a separate way. Harriet provides comfort and companionship and theirs is a compelling, devoted relationship. Harriet finds not only the gold of this man's love, but also gold of the more prosaic type, the "colour" so desperately sought by the grasping masses on the lower slopes. In the small stream running through their camp, Harriet spots a plentiful series of true nuggets, which the man has no interest in. The gold comes to those who do not seek it, but seek to give themselves away. So Harriet's manifold gain forms the center of this beautiful story, and when her beloved Chinese partner hears that his wife back in China needs him to come back, he abruptly leaves Harriet, who is nonetheless thoroughly enriched.

Rose Tremain holds a high place in my estimation, one of the highest. This story of Harriet's rewarded quest represents a deeply inspiring and gratifying tale, with sumptuous and vivid natural descriptions of nature and a soaring exploration of one woman's growth. Do yourself the great service of picking it up.

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"The Shadow Catcher" by Marianne Wiggins

This book has everything needed to inspire our awe and gratitude. Not only does it contain two related story lines set a hundred years apart, memorable and sometimes hilarious dialog, and vivid storytelling, it also reverberates with lofty and elegant tropes, one of which is the author's lengthy and convincing intrusion. Marianne Wiggins, the honored author of "Evidence of Things Unseen" hits an even deeper home run with "The Shadow Catcher."

The paired story lines follow Edward S. Curtis, visionary photographer of nature and Native Americans at the turn of the 20th Century, and one Marianne Wiggins, a character in her own book - portrayed as an aspiring screenwriter working on a potential biopic of - Edward S. Curtis. Early in the book, the author describes Curtis's life and how potentially ripe it would be for a screenplay. She seems fairly convinced any film Hollywood would produce on Curtis would miss the mark badly, and then proceeds with the Curtis narrative, which proves why she's right. The Edward-and-Clara Curtis plotline is first-rate storytelling (not quite to the level of Ray and Opal Foster, but then, what is?). We watch as Clara and Edward form a partnership and a marriage; Edward becomes famous and acquainted with early conservationists, and Teddy Roosevelt (for whose daughter's wedding he was the official photographer), and J. P. Morgan. Clara deals with the three children and the household (mortgaged to the eaves by his grand schemes); her lot is nothing as fortunate as Curtis's own (which is in fact not very fortunate at all).

Ms. Wiggins propounds the theme of abandonment in both stories. Curtis leaves his wife and children for years at a stretch, and Wiggins's father left his own lonely marriage to commit suicide thirty-some years prior to the events in this book. She deals very immediately with the syndrome of "lighting out for the territories." Some people - she cites Huck Finn and his bete noir, the civilizing Aunt Sally - find they must run from some monster or other. Eventually, for both Curtis and Marianne's father, it is a loveless, lonesome marriage.

Ms. Wiggins intersperses some of Curtis's classic photographs in the text, and this adds power and immediacy to the book. Her canny tricks and tromps add an echoing depth, and challenge her reader to find the boundaries of belief. This is not gratuitous fun from our dazzling author. This is serious business, in the service of serious ideas. It thrills as it entertains as it makes us reflect on the moral implications. Can't say enough good things about this. I could never get it to the end of my own thoughts. Pick it up and see what you think!

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