"John the Pupil" by David Flusfeder

 This novel purports to be a fragmentary chronicle, assembled from scraps of parchment, recording the journey taken by the eponymous John, a pupil of the Franciscan monk Roger Bacon, with two other young monks Andrew and Bernard, to carry Bacon's Great Work to Pope Clement IV.

It's a historical novel. Bacon (c 1219 - c 1292), a proto-scientist who studied, amongst many other things, lenses and gunpowder, really did send his Opus Maior to Clement in either 1267 or 1268. Other characters are also historical, including nobleman Cavalcante de Cavalcanti and his son Guido who was a part-time poet and a friend of Dante Aligheri. Other characters are fictional. 

The book attempts to add verisimilitude with a 'Note on the Text' at the start, describing how the chronicle was discovered, reassembled and translated, and endnotes which, inter alia, cast doubt on some aspects of the text (is it a contemporary diary or was it written later, or worse ...). For example, on p52 (St Hubert's Day) John states "In such a way did we affect our first escape from Simeon the Palmer"; had this been written at the time he would not have known it would be the first escape. 

The main text starts with an ellipsis as though the text is incomplete; this is repeated at times. Many of the sections give a potted biography of the saint on whose days they were written, a conceit I found a little wearisome as it was repeatedly repeated.

It is structured as a Hero's Journey. John, who is clever, travels with Andrew who is beautiful and Bernard who is strong. They encounter temptations (alcohol, women, a garden paradise) and dangers. They are befriended and betrayed. Bandits try to steal their possessions, including the book. Like all good heroes on their journey, they have to use their gifts in order to overcome these trials. 

There is a huge amount of historical research which makes it interesting for a student of that period. As the endnotes point out: "All historical novels are failures or, at best, metaphors, dressing up the present day in anachronistic disguise." (p 212)

It is a triumph of re-creation. But, in the end, it stands and falls as a novel on whether you empathise with John and his mates and you like the buddy-journey sort of tale. 

Selected quotes:

• "Brother Bernard ... is always suspicious, he would interrogate the motives on an angel" (St Hubert's Day, p 43)
• "Beauty speaks to beauty." (St Edgar's Day, p 62)
• "The Devil tempts only the very good and the very bad." (St Ephrem's Day, p 70)
• "They had a kind of priest among them, a man with a wildness about him, as if he had stared for too long into a consuming fire." (St Silverius's Day, p 79)
• "To go to Rome, much labour, little profit." (St Bartholomew's Day, p 85)
• "Lines rounden, loop, droop, curve." (St John the Baptist's Day, p 88)
• "You are the seal of the image of God, full of wisdom and perefect in beauty." (St Swithin's Day, p 96)
• "Hunger is too hard a stepmother to learning." (St Swithin's Day, p 97)
• "We walked towards the mountains and it was as if they refused us. They grew no larger, although it appeared to me that we were getting smaller." (St Thomas of Canterbury's Day, p 100)
• "Pope Clement, in a larger voice than I would have thought his body could contain, invited me to stand." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 188)
• "My master has enumerated some of the accidents [Flusfeder uses words in their mediaeval meaning] of old age, grey hair and pallor and wrinkled skin and excess mucus and stinking stool, the sickly bleariness of eyes, low blood and low spirits, crabbiness and absent-mindedness, and Pope Clement seems to exhibit them all." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 196)
• "Pope Clement's voice, profound and wise, stepping out the words like a traveller choosing where to place the stones to make a path over the river." (St Tiburtius's Day, p 197)

Synopsis (spoiler alerts)

John and his companions beautiful Andrew and strong Bernard are sent by Roger Bacon to walk from Oxford to Viterbus in Italy carrying Bacon's book to the Pope. On the way they are waylaid by a 'pilgrim for hire' whose attempt to steal the book is confounded, firstly by John demonstrating a burning glass and secondly by the gunpowder in a decoy box exploding. Other temptations include Bernard getting drunk in Paris and Andrew being bedded by a serving wench. John is tempted by Father Gabriel, a wise priest who has a paradisaical garden and uses herbs to help the sick; he urges John to stay. The trio fall out among themselves: John is upset when Andrew and Bernard reveal they have read his 'diary'; they are upset he hasn't been upfront about their task, Bernard steals ink and parchment in order to do drawings of mythical beasts. Finally they become the guests of a Guelph nobleman who sets John up as a healer and Bernard as a jeweller. Only John and Andrew leave. They then encounter Daniel, another friar from their monastery, who has been sent by Bacon with a smaller version of the Great Work; Daniel is martyred by bandits which enables John to escape. Finally, all alone, he comes to Rome and meets the Pope. The burning lens demonstration fails to work but Clement is delighted when he discovers the lens can be used to correct his failing eyesight and help him to read again. Finally, John decides not to hand the book over.

David Flusfeder has also written Something Might Fall

June 2026; 220 pages
First published by Fourth Estate in 2014
My paperback edition was issued in 2015

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"V2" by Robert Harris

 Dr Graf is a senior member of the team launching V2 rockets to bomb London in World War Two, but he doesn't believe in the Nazi attempts to win the war. Kay Caton-Walsh is one of the number-crunchers who are trying to pinpoint the rocket launch site so that the RAF can bomb and destroy them. This is a thriller immersed in its history, with plenty of statistics for those who like watching Top Gear and reading Jane's Encyclopaedias.

Selected quotes:

• "I have spent the last ten years of my life by the side of the sea, he thought, always with the smell of pine in my nostrils and the taste of salt in my mouth, listening to the seagulls and straining my eyes at a wide sky." (Ch 7)
• "In Germany now there are three choices ... You are shot by the SS, you are imprisoned by the SS, or you work for the SS." (Ch 17)

September 2022; 307 pages

Robert Harris is the author of many many books, some of them reviewed in this blog:

• The Second Sleep
• Conclave
• The Ghost

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"His Bloody Project" by Graeme Macrae Burnet

This book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016. Other Booker novels, in 2016 and other years, can be found here.

Set in a remote highland village in 1869, this novel is made up of the testimonies of Roderick Macrae, a crofter's son accused of a gruesome triple murder, and others involved in the case. There is never any question of whodunnit, only of why and whether the accused can be described as insane. All the characters are intensely believable (although the narration of the protagonist is hugely articulate and apparently lacking in dialect) and I can't remember so rooting for a murderer since Good Times, Bad Times by James Kirkwood. Once we get into the narrative, it was a page turner. At the same time, the author uses the narrative to highlight the iniquities and abuses of power inherent in the laird-crofter relationship of the time.

Selected quotes:

• "My father did not like Mr Gillies. He was too clever for his own good and teaching children was not proper work for a man." 
• "For folks like us there is no other ship than the hard ship."
• "Mrs MacLeod was an ancient widow known as the Onion on account of the great number of layers of clothing she wore." 
• "It is not the blow that causes greatest distress, but the anticipation of it."
• "The gaoler showed no surprise ..., This class of being exists almost entirely in the present; they think little of the past nor project their thoughts into the future, and are thus incapable of being surprised by anything. They are similarly incapable of experiencing boredom and are accordingly well-suited to undemanding and repetitive labour."
• "Prisoners rarely express remorse for what they have done. Any feelings of regret they might feel are generally limited to the fact of their being apprehended." 

July 2022; 280 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Royal William" by Doris Leslie

This is a fictionalised biography of King William IV. The third of George III's sons, William served from the age of thirteen as a midshipman in the Royal Navy; he was in New York during the American Revolution (George Washington planned to kidnap him) and her served as a captain under Nelson, attending Nelson's wedding. After leaving the sea he settled down at Bushy House near Teddington with actress Dora Jordan by whom he fathered ten illegitimate children. During the regency and after the death of the Prince Regent's daughter, William married Princess Adelaide in an attempt to father a legitimate heir. George III's second son died during the reign of George IV so when he died William became King. Since he failed to father a legitimate child, on his death the throne passed to Victoria, the daughter of George III's fourth son.

Queen Adelaide sounds interesting. Her dad was a genuinely reform-minded German sovereign: "He permitted entire freedom of the press ... He interested himself in education. He founded schools. He was a connoisseur of art and something of a poet. He invited Schiller and Paul Richter to his table." (3.1) She wanted to be a painter. Judging from the number of Queen Adelaide pubs in Britain she became extraordinarily popular in Britain; she was even a devoted step-mother to her husband's illegitimate children.

Doris Leslie's book is divided into three parts: Sailor, Squire and King. She sees William IV as a real man of the people and the first democratic monarch. In her eyes he lived his life teleologically: his everyday experiences as a midshipman (including a night in gaol after a brawl in Gibraltar) and his everyday experiences as a squire and father fashioned his behaviour as King ... even though he resisted the Great Reform Bill to the point at which the London mob attacked his carriage and wounded him with a stone.

The book has been thoroughly researched and then fictionalised. This can be comic. Dora Jordan never loses her cod-Irish brogue and there are some scenes of melodrama. It is of its time (1940); no doubt our own drama documentaries will seem stilted and forced in another fifty years.

While Claire Tomalin in Mrs Jordan's Profession has made Dora Jordan a superwoman, talented and hardworking who combines a successful career with motherhood of a large family, accepting the shadow world of being a royal mistress, Doris Leslie makes her into rather a scheming bitch who is finally jettisoned by her caring prince when he discovers evidence that she has been having an affair with one of his brothers.

Doris Leslie also falls for the incorrect notion that the ballad The Lass of Richmond Hill was written about George III's morganatic wife Mrs Fitzherbert.

She also suggests that the ageing William had tinnitus. (3.3)

She quote Macauley as saying: "I only know two ways in which society can be governed - by public opinion or - the sword." (3.3)

Great moments:

• "The secrets of the alcove ... had revealed their mysteries to many younger than himself, but the tree of knowledge that is free to all of Adam's sons was denied to the son of the King. Only his Eden lacked an Eve where Eves were plentiful. At the entrance to those luscious groves stood gentlemen whose orders were as adamant as any flaming sword." (1.2)
• "The Queen's middle-aged ladies-in-waiting were as handsome as a row of turnips and as dull." (1.3)
• "In that underworld, as far removed from the palaces as Hell from Heaven, there where hunger stalked and man did not so much exist as he fermented in his rags and his starved flesh." (1.5)
• "Byron had loosened an outburst of revolt in 'Manfred', and the men of the workers were learning to read. ... Very soon all men would read. There was talk of education for the masses." (3.1)
• "What did this democracy portend? A state controlled by working men who had not only learned to read, but to think for themselves." (3.1)

Fun as fiction, not to be taken as history. June 2020; 373 pages

"Strumpet City" by James Plunkett

The story of some interlinked lives in Dublin in the years before the First World War. There are rich people such as Mr Bradshaw who own gerry-built tenements, and his well-meaning but ineffectual wife, and their friend Mr Yearling, an employer who sympathises with the poor workers. There are the priests: Father O'Connor, blinded by his faith to the material hunger of his parishioners (to the extent of kidnapping children who are being sent by their parents to Liverpool so they don't starve to prevent them being sent into Protestant homes), Father Gilchrist, his poor-sympathising superior who is sinking into alcoholism, and Father O'Sullivan who does modest good. And there are the legions of the poor: Mary who loses her job as maid to the Bradshaws and becomes the wife of Fitz, a foundry worker, who is best friend to Pat who has fallen in love with good-hearted prostitute Lily; there are the others who live in their tenement: Hennesey who can never hold down a job but fathers a growing brood on his anxious wife; Rashers, beggar and busker, who lives in the basement with his dog Rusty; and Mulhall, a man so vigorous you can never imagine him going sick.

The theme of the book is the battle between the workers, striking for better wages, and the employers, determined to resist them. The backdrop is poverty and hunger. There are good people and there are bad people. Tragedies happen and there is happiness. The key of a good book is whether I wanted to read to the end to find out what happened ... and I did. The key to a good book is whether it contains moments that make you sit back and reflect upon the world ... and it did (they are below). But it sometimes felt a bit worthy and a bit preachy; there was no question who was right and who was wrong.

Great moments:
BOOK ONE 1907–1909
Chapter 1

• “Mrs. Bradshaw, in her efforts to stifle a scream, continued to pour strong tea over the tablecloth for some seconds.”
• “Almost from birth she had shaped his mind to regard life as a trivial moment which had slipped by mistake through the sieve of eternity, a scrap of absurdity which would glow for a little while before it was snatched back into eternity again.”
• “She thought, a little wistfully, that a touch of human weakness in her husband would have been nice, her husband who was so good but at times so meticulous, at times so grumpy with rectitude.”
• “The rockets made a playground of the sky.”

Chapter 2

• “‘The poor are generally regarded as being more religious than the rich,’ Yearling continued, ‘but of course that isn’t true. They are simply more impressionable and have less to lose.’”

Chapter 3

• “In this country the ones that don’t fight are not worth your attention and the ones that do bring nothing but heartbreak.”

Chapter 4

• “Miss Gilchrist’s partial paralysis remained, until in the end Mr. Bradshaw made up his mind. Her removal to the workhouse upset Mrs. Bradshaw for several months.”

Chapter 6

• “To get married. To sleep in the sweat of one bed and deposit in due time a few more animal faces among the dirt and the dilapidation.”

Chapter 9

• “But he had come to see that the security itself was a mirage; people he did not know and would never meet decided its extent and continuance for reasons that suited only themselves. He and the others did not count.”

BOOK TWO 1910–1912
Chapter 1

• “You were never so destitute that the only piece of property you ever owned was your poor body.”

Chapter 4

• “I’m a Catholic. I don’t want to be made ashamed of my Church.”
• “The poorer and hungrier they were, the less fitted to stand up against weather. The poorer and the hungrier, the more often they had to face it.”
• “That was one good thing about religion. No one owned it. No one could put a wall around it and lock the gate on you.”

Chapter 5

• “Horses, when you worked with them for a long time, he thought, were like any other working mate. Some were lazy and forgetful, some had good humours and bad, some were inexhaustible and patient and long suffering, pulling loads without flinching until the great heart inside them burst.”
• “But you couldn’t stop them using machinery. Machinery meant more profit, and profit was the beginning and the end of everything. Roads and bridges and buildings would be reduced to rubble wherever they impeded profit. Men would be laid off and children would go hungry. For the sake of the machines families would know want.”
• “There is no such thing as companionship ... when it comes to coping with the melancholy intimations of Anno Domini.”

Chapter 6

• “the gardens of the well-to-do he despised as so many useless acres of multi-coloured vegetation.”
• “When you were destitute nothing lucky ever happened. The more you were in want, the more you’d go without ... if it was raining soup, you’d have nothing but a fork.”

Chapter 7

• “The great thing was not to be clever but to have Faith."

BOOK THREE 1913–1914 
Chapter 6

• “Socialism, as a very eminent Jesuit has clearly shown, is the worst enemy of the working man. It uproots his confidence in hierarchical order. It preaches discontent. It makes him covetous of the property of his social superiors, and impatient with the trials and obligations of his own station in life.”

Chapter 8

• “There was a time when he had intended to grow a beard because it seemed a pity not to give expression to one’s total potentiality.”

Chapter 9

• “Poverty, he had noticed before, had its own peculiar smell. A man’s station could be judged by what the body exhaled. Expensive odours of brandy and cigars; sour odours of those who nourished nature with condensed milk and tea.”

Chapter 11

• “the cupped depression worn in the granite flag at the entrance gate by countless churchgoing feet.”

December 2019

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Music and Silence" by Rose Tremain

The winner of the 1999 Whitbread Novel award, this is a historical novel set in the court of King Christian IV of Denmark, who was a contemporary of Charles I of England (who appears briefly). Tremain also wrote Restoration and its sequel Merivel which were set in the court of Charles II of England, and The Gustav Sonata which is more contemporary.

Despite the title, Tremain seems to concentrate rather on the visual analogies of light and darkness. This starts on the first page:

• “Until this moment, when the flame of the lamp flares blue, then settles to study yellow inside its ornate globe, the young man had been ... questioning the nature of this darkness. For it seemed to him not merely an external phenomenon, having to do with an actual absence of light, but rather as though it emanated from within him, as if he had finally crossed the threshold of his own absence of hope.” (p 1)

It continues throughout:

• “Since the death of Karen she has not been comfortable with the way shadows in the lamplight move at such astounding speed.”
• “She was my sister and she told me a rhyme. What is the world made of I do not know, sometimes it is made of dancing snow. Sometimes it is made of darkness.”
• “She is tired of living in the dark, weary of the perpetual shadows and the dripping of the candles.”

However, other aspects of the book are clearly based on musical forms. For example, the plot has the complexities of Grand Opera and the story is told from the point of view of many of the participants, as though these are the instruments of the orchestra.

The plot is labyrinthine. It follows the fortunes of Peter Claire, a lutenist from Harwich, England, who has an angelically beautiful face. He falls in love with Emilia Tilsen, a serving woman to the Queen's wife Kirsten Munk, a splendidly horrid woman who dislikes all her many children and is having an affair with a Swedish nobleman. It is Kirsten's intrigues and manipulations which prove an obstacle to the young lovers. Such a convoluted plot reminded me of grand opera. On the other hand, I had the impression that the plot lacked structure; there seemed to be the feeling of 'what else can be done in order to keep the lovers apart for a little longer?' It seemed almost picaresque in its lack of an overall shape, a criticism that could also be made of The Gustav Sonata. A third perspective could be that such is life, it is a meandering journey in which no direction is discernible for long; however, that is rarely true of a piece of music. The fourth way that one could consider the plot is in terms of the Hero's Journey. Peter Claire 'enters the labyrinth' (a stage in the classic Hero's Journey) when he meets the King at the Danish Court; here he has adventures including the trip to the silver mine and he is made to undergo trials by wicked women. Equally Emilia has a similar journey from the moment she goes to court until she escapes from Kirstenm and returns to her father's farm; there is still a final trial required of her here.

The story is told in little snippets from many of the main characters including the King, mourning his friend, the dyslexic nobleman Bror Brorson; Peter; Peter's previous lover the Italian/Irish countess from his previous job in Ireland; Emilia; Kirsten; Peter's dad back in Harwich; King Charles I ... It is as if there are many instruments in the orchestra, each one having its moment to predominate if not solo. Sometimes this approach, especially when involving minor characters, seemed bitty but it was impressive how Tremain could mimic so many voices.

My favourite character is the villain: Kirsten, unfaithful wife of the King. She has great lines:

• “Why do husbands refuse to understand that we women do not for long remain their Pet Creatures?”
• “This is the principal trouble with Children: they do not let you do one single thing but they must do it also, and this Habit of Copying does so grate on me that I declare I wish I never had never had any children whatsoever.”
• Kirsten talks about babies: “The noise they make is infernal. The stench of them is scarcely to be endured, for they are ever spewing out strings of pearly vomit or straining till their eyes start from their heads to produce farmyard motions. Their talk is plain nonsense. At the least thing, they wail and scream.”
• “She is merely Like All Other Babies, and that is: ugly, foul-smelling, cross-eyed, mewling, farting, uncomfortable, angry and Wretched.”

Selected quotes:
Part One

• “They say the devil, driven out of churches by the implacable Lutherans, began to seek unbaptised souls to inhabit and that he flew round the crowded cities at night, sniffing for the odour of human milk.”
• “Learning he loved, this was certain. It was the passing on of this learning that he did not love entirely.”
• “A man can travel too far from his point of departure and become lost and never find his way back. All that remains to him then is to keep moving forward and pray that hope does not desert him too.”
• “Running ... with their dark cloaks flying, as if time had been sewn into their garments and was now pursuing them”
• “Hope is a strange commodity. It is an opiate. We swear we have relinquished it and lo, there comes a day when, all unannounced, our enslavement to it returns.”
• “Nature locks away her secrets like a courtesan, to tease us with longing.”
• “When you find yourself at odds with life, strive not to fight with fortune but fight instead with your own weaknesses.”
• “Not being Shakespeare appears to him ... as a not inconsiderable burden all Englishmen are forced to bear.”
• “He finds himself ... in a grey desert where the horizon is unpeopled yet the ground is covered in shadows.”
• “Man at his greatest is still mortal. A nail in the sole of his foot can snatch his life away.”
• “Should a man strive ... only to let in those thoughts which proceed logically from other thoughts and to protect himself from everything that had about it the feeling of uninvitedness? Or, might it be true that certain kinds of valuable perception only arrive as the wind-blown seed arrives in the water meadow, their provenance for ever unknown or unrecorded?”
• “In his twenty-seven years of life, women have behaved towards Peter Claire and the sea behaves towards the wind. His power to disturb their calm, to whip up their longings ... has never before deserted him.”

Part Two

• “Man spends days and nights and years of his life asking the question ‘How may I be brought to the divine?’, yet all musicians instinctively know the answer: they are brought to the divine by their music.”

Part Three

• “A man’s vision, before it has achieved its intended form, habitually expresses itself in confused strivings.”
• “To stay Alive, we are forced to Scheme. To have any Joy, we must Steal like Magpies from the Pitiful Store of it.”
• “‘Just at present’ is not a fixed entity. It is not the sundial ... but the moving shadow cast by the sun.”
• “Once the dancers are balanced on their rope, the crowd will long only for them to fall.”
• “The secret of a successful life is not to die before one’s death.”

I enjoyed the richness of the world created by Tremain; the details brought me into the Danish court so that I became a part of it. However, I found the repeated postponement of any possibility of a happy ending wearisome and I skim-read the last twenty pages or so because by then I cared for little except that I should finish the book.

March 2019; 454 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Rose Tremain novels:

• Sadler's Birthday (1976)
• Letter to Sister Benedicta (1978)
• The Cupboard (1981)
• Journey to the Volcano (1985)
• The Swimming Pool Season (1985)
• Restoration (1989)
• 1989 Sunday Express Book of the Year
• Shortlisted for the 1989 Booker Prize
• Sacred Country (1992)
• Winner of the 1992 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
• Winner of the 1994 Prix Femina Etranger
• The Way I Found Her (1997)
• Music and Silence (1999)
• Winner of the 1999 Whitbread Award
• The Colour (2003)
• The Road Home (2008)
• Trespass (2010)
• Merivel: A Man of His Time (2012)
• Shortlisted for the 2012 Wellcome Book Prize
• Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott prize
• The Gustav Sonata (2016)
• Winner of the 2016 National Jewish Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2016 Costa Book Awards
• Longlisted for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for fiction
• Winner of the 2017 Ribalow Prize
• Islands of Mercy (2020)
• Lily: A Tale of Revenge (2021)
• Absolutely & Forever (2023)
• Shortlisted for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize

"Artemisia" by Alexandra Lapierre

Artemisia Gentelleschi was a woman artist during the Baroque. She worked for Popes and Kings. Her art, which often depicts Biblical women at violent odds with men, is recognised as among the best of this period. She's in the Uffizi, Seville Cathedral, the NY Metropolitan Museum, and the Prado amongst other places. She was the first woman artist to be elected to the prestigious Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in Florence. And she was the victim in the first ever fully-documented rape trial.

This is a historical novel although it is firmly based on the evidence so it is perhaps more of a fictionalised biography. The events, we are led to believe, occurred. The sense that is made of them, the feelings of the actors in the story, are speculative.

Growing up in her father's art workshop in Rome, Artemisia showed a precocious talent. Aged seventeen she was raped by Agostino Tassi, a specialist in perspective and trompe l'oeil who collaborated with her father and gave her lessons. For the next nine months Artemisia and Agostino conducted an affair; the excuse given is that Artemisia, having been deflowered and dishonoured, could only hope that Agostino would marry her. She thought he was free. His first wife had died (he had been accused of hiring assassins to murder her) and she didn't know that he was living with his wife's sister (technically incest) by whom he was having children. When she discovered that he had no intention of marrying her (and later that he couldn't, since the assassins had failed and his first wife was still alive and paying him off) she accused him of rape. The trial proceeded according to the laws of Italian justice. Agostino was jailed, awaiting sentencing (time in the galleys, or exile, or death), while the witnesses were tortured. So Artemisia had her fingers crushed but maintained her story. Meantime a young boy, working for Agostino, falsely accused her of sleeping around and maintained his story during the strappado, being strung up and hung by his wrists while his arms were tied behind his back which was not only excruciating but led to dislocation of the shoulders; this boy was willing to undergo this ordeal twice because of the promise of a pay off from Agostino. Finally the verdict was against Agostino and he was exiled but, pulling strings, never actually left Rome. Instead Aretmisia found a husband and left for Florence where she mingled with Buonarotti, the great-nephew of Michelangelo and a famous playwright, and Galileo as well as the last embers of the Medici clan. She had four children, three of whom died. 

In her later life, after her good-for-nothing husband finally disappeared, she divided her time between Venice, London and Naples, having affairs with Nicholas Lanier, a musician at the court of Charles I, and the Spanish Duke of Alcala, one time governor of Naples, by whom she had an illegitimate daughter.

She was a stunningly talented artist and she lived in a world of struggle, hardship, early death. She fought against the society-imposed disadvantages and restrictions of being a woman and, despite the patriarchal attitudes towards female sexuality she had a number of lovers. She mixed with popes and kings. But most of all her work makes her immortal.

Some of my favourite lines:

• "A galley cuts through the mist over the Thames and docks heavily to the accompaniment of a De Profundis, lugubriously intoned by Capuchin monks" (p 3) The opening sentence seems perfect for a book about a Baroque artist.
• Her father "put her to work, observing her progress with the dread that she would not succeed, and the fear that she would succeed too well." (p 46)
• "She loved him as people loved their sins." (p 137)
• "Did he die of the French malady - syphilis - from which so few recovered that the hospital in the Corso, charged with admitting its victims, bore the extremely optimistic name, Hospital of the Incurables?" (p 138)
• "You cannot have happiness in this life and immortality for all time to come. You have to choose." (p 191)
• A display at the Pitti Palace in Florence in 1615 showed the moon "with craters and volcanoes, areas of light and shade. One could also see Jupiter and its four satellites, which Galileo had recently baptised the Medicean Stars." (p 208)
• "Artemisia had learned many things in the Via della Croce. Tassi, who boasted everywhere of having taught her how to 'handle a brush', did not mean these words merely in the painterly sense." (p 280)

The biography of a fascinating artist, with a useful dramatis personae and useful maps and colour plates of her paintings. A wonderful insight into an interesting time made all the more vivid by the clever device of turning it into a novel. 

January 2018; 442 pages

"Weir of Hermiston" by Robert Louis Stevenson

This is the last book by RLS and it was left unfinished at his death, rather like Edwin Drood was by Charles Dickens. It finishes in the middle of a sentence ...

RLS was responsible for the pirate novel with Treasure Island, a novel which is almost perfect as it can be. The villain, one-legged Long John Silver, was based on a one-legged friend of RLS, W. E. Henley, a poet, who also knew J M Barrie the author of Peter Pan. Henley's daughter, who is buried beside him in Cockayne Hatley churchyard, as a child could not pronounce her rs. She called Barrie her 'fwendy-wendy' which is where the name of Peter Pan's girlfriend Wendy Darling comes from (and all subsequent Wendys).

I read Treasure Island when I was little and still remember having nightmares about blind Pew, tappping his way along the street.

RLS also wrote the horror classic Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, one of the very few novels to have created a mythic stereotype (perhaps Frankenstein, Dracula, and Treasure Island itself might be among the others).

Not content with that for a lifetime, he also wrote the brilliant adventure yarn Kidnapped in which the cattle-headed David Balfour is put on a boat by his evil uncle Ebeneezer and sent to be sold as a slave in the Americas but is rescued by the colourful, vain, dandyish Jacobite rebel Allan Breck Stewart; together they race through the heather across Scotland with a price on their heads.

I even enjoyed its sequel Catriona.

Weir of Hermiston is about a father, Weir the elder, a hanging judge, and his son, Archie Weir, who is rather ashamed of his dad and, having spoken out against the father, is exiled to be the laird of the family farm in Hermiston. There Archie, also called Erchie (the poorer characters speak broad Lallan Scots, the posher characters English) meets and falls in love with Christina, aka Kirstie, not to be confused with her aunt also called Kirstie, who has four black brothers made famous after their bloodthirsty revenge on the robbers who killed their father.

The fragment that we have sets the scene. Archie's father is a stern and rather horrid character, blackly drawn. Archie is a chip off the old block in some ways, being self-disciplined, but at the same time he takes after his dead mother (hers is a brilliant portrait of a pious lady completely down-trodden by her husband and regularly taken advantage of by servants). Old Kirstie regrets being an old maid and is jealous that the little boy she looked after is in love with young Kirstie. Young Kirstie is another wonderful character, well aware of clothes and the effect that a look can have on a lad, innocent in some ways but already old in the ways of coquetry.Into the Eden that is the Scottish countryside comes a snake in the guise of one of Erchie's old friends from Uni (although Erchie was only ever an acquaintance in the old days and is not so friendly now, extending the duties of a host with none of the tenderness for a guest) who guesses the secret love affair and decides to worm his way into the affections of young Kirstie. And the four black brothers include farmer Hob, Glasgow merchant Clem, and shepherd-poet Dand.

Wonderful characters and a wonderful setting, told in a mixture of English and beautiful Scots, looking set to create a great tale. The plan that we are left with is rather a melodrama involving seduction, murder, a prison-break and exile. Perhaps it is as well he never finished it.

March 2016; 111 pages

"Witch wood" by John Buchan

Having read Huntingtower I was prepared to find that Buchan was better than the thriller writer of The Thirty Nine Steps and Prester John that I remembered from my youth but I was not prepared for this. It is a very good book indeed.

It is set in Scotland during the War of the Three Kingdoms and much of the dialogue is in broad lowland Scots which is a challenge. Nevertheless I found myself getting by in it quite comfortably and it was only about two-thirds of the way through that I discovered the glossary in the back!

David Sempril returns to the village where he grew up as the Minister of the Presbyterian Kirk, a rather hell fire and damnation puritanical sect fixed firmly on a retributive God from the Old Testament. He has high hopes of fulfilment in his new role. But on the edges of his parish lurks the Black Wood. Despite the warnings of his housekeeper, the brilliantly characterised Isobel (Buchan describes her "charity seasoned with maledictions") and others, he travels through the wood to rush to the bedside of a dying parishioner. Suddenly the mood turns sombre: "It was as if he had stripped and dived into a stagnant pool." It grows cold and dark as the pines close in. "He recited a psalm, but his voice, for usual notably full and mellow, seemed not to carry a yard." He hears owls and moths flap into his face. His horse shies. Its "flanks were damp with sweat." He is too late. His parishioner has died before he arrives.

And from this begins his descent. That night he meets some soldiers in the woods and guides them to the local laird's house where he encounters a beautiful girl. Later he discovers that these soldiers are Montrose and two of his men, on their way to fight the armies of the Kirk. Then the winter sets in and he is busy rushing around his village trying to keep the poor folk alive. Towards the end of the winter a lot of babies are born out of wedlock; many of them are born dead. Something strange is going on. And then ...

By chance he meets the girl again in a beautiful part of the wood that she calls Paradise. Shortly after that, trying to find the same place after dark, he blunders into the Black Wood and gets lost. Again terror rises. And he stumbles across a coven of witches celebrating a black mass.

Armed with the wrath of the Kirk, he decides to expose the hypocritical parishioners who are selling their souls to the devil. He is repeatedly advised to let things be, by Isobel, by villagers and by his elder priests. But he is determined to prosecute the Satanists. He seeks to spy on their next Black Mass and collects evidence against them. This he lays before the elders of the Kirk, despite being again warned (by them) to let things lie. Then, half way through the book, a simple act of charity puts him on the wrong side of the Law of the Kirk.

There is still so much to come, so much of it inevitable as his life spirals into despair. He is censured. Plague arrives at the village. And finally, when everything has gone wrong, there is a confrontation with the Arch Priest of Satan.

Stunning descriptions, brilliant characters, and a wonderful plot, perfectly paced: this book has it all. It is a classic tragedy of an innocent struggling against the evil of the world. The monolithic Kirk, a religion with no charity, and the dark forces of Satan which seem to be able to destroy at will, are the Scylla and Charybdis between which David is unable to navigate.

Read it! July 2015; 301 pages

Books by John Buchan reviewed in this blog:

• My very favourite: a historical novel set in Scotland which proved that Buchan really could write: Witch Wood
• Weird plot, terribly un-PC but with some wonderful characters, a laugh aloud speech, and a real feel for the joys of hunting: John Macnab
• Well written but with the most ridiculously bonkers plot and some horrible classism, racism and anti-semitism: The Three Hostages 
• A wonderful description of the Scottish countryside and some fantastic characters and some brilliant counterpointing: Huntingtower
• Greenmantle: another bonkers plot with weak characters set during the First World War 

"The Botticelli Secret" by Marina Fiorato

Luciana Vetra, "part time model and full time whore" poses for Flora in Botticelli's Primavera. Little does she know when she purloins an unfinished sketch of the masterpiece that she is unleashing a trail of murder and treachery. For the painting holds a secret that her and novice monk Brother Guido must unravel if they are to stay one step ahead of the killers.

This is a brilliant romp through renaissance Italy visiting Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, Venice, Bolzano, Milan and Genoa.  The heroine is a fabulously feisty strumpet with a wonderful line in earthy epithets; the monk gives the unlikely-to-be-requited love interest and the book learning; the whores mother is a brilliantly complex character in whom the political and the maternal instincts are often at war.

There are points when it was disturbingly similar to the book that I am writing with its themes of secrets hidden within a painting, a child whose noble birth has been concealed, priests and churches and betrayal. But Fiorato has provided me with a lesson in how to write with verve and vigour and never to get bogged down in over-complicating character, scenery or plot.

And it is so much better written than the da Vinci code! March 2015; 548 pages

"Heartstone" by C.J.Sansom

Matthew Shardlake, hunchbacked lawyer, investigates crimes in the England of Henry VIII. In this book he travels into Hampshire to find out whether a young orphan is being cheated of his inheritance by the man who has bought his wardship. At the same time he tries to discover why Ellen has been committed to Bedlam despite there being no certificate of lunacy: what is the secret buried in her past? All this is set to the background of preparations for Henry VIII's final war against France: the French fleet is off Portsmouth and there are rumours of invasion. The book climaxes with Shardlake on board the Mary Rose as the capsizes.

This is written with all the verve that characterises Sansom's Shardlake series (also see entries on Dissolution and Dark Fire). He is exceptional on describing scenes though sometimes I thought there was a little too much incidental detail in this book and not enough concentration on the plot: the journey down to Hampshire with the company of archers, for example, took several chapters and could have been axed without disruption to the narrative.

"Peter Abelard" by Helen Waddell

This novel is based on the true-life story of Peter Abelard, a Scholastic philosopher who became famous as a rabble rousing teacher in the early 12th Century, then famous as the lover of Heloise and, after being castrated by Heloise's outraged family, again famous as a heretic forced to burn his book and finally famous again as a scholar and teacher. Some cv.

This novel was first published in 1933. It faithfully reflects that rather gentler age. There are no graphics details, the conversation of many characters breaks off into quotations and snippets of poetry (as presumably the academics of the 1930s did, and the pace of the book is gentle and refined.

It is an interesting book but of its period and therefore rather dated and somewhat slow.