March 2008 Archives
The perfect read for the long journey home from Bhutan via Kolkata. Shadows and Strongholds tells of the childhood friendship and subsequent marriage between Fulke FitzWarin and Hawise de Dinan - characters I'd first met in Lords of the White Castle and which I now feel the need to go back and read again!
The novel also shows the friendship between their fathers - minor noble Fulke FitzWarin (senior) and former mercenary, Joscelin de Dinan, whose sensible wife Sybilla had inherited Ludlow castle - and the ever present threat to their power posed by rival claimants and the Welsh. I felt that I'd me these characters too - but can't work out where.
The novel spans 12th century decades from the waning of the civil war between Empress Matilda and King Stephen and Matilda's son Henry II, firmly taking control of the crown and the country.
One of Elizabeth Chadwick's best, with the powerful female characters underlining the limits of female freedoms and corresponding male attitudes.
Amazon.co.uk link: Shadows and Strongholds - Elizabeth Chadwick
An entirely fortuitous loan from the library, I had no idea that the setting for this novel would be so close to where I ended up reading it - the foothills of the Himalaya - albeit in Sikkim rather than Bhutan, where I was.
Set in the 1980s there's a big cast, with most characters carrying on their post-colonial lives in and around Kalimpong, close to India's border with Nepal. Despite their best efforts, the modern world manages to intrude quite cruelly - both in the person of Biju (who makes it to America to find that the streets are not paved with gold particularly for illegal immigrants) and in the Gorkha independence uprising (which inevitably turns from idealism to self aggrandisement).
Amazon.co.uk: The Inheritance of Loss - Kiran Desai
A slim novel, but beautifully written - telling of frenchman Casimir de Chateauneuf's quest to find the Ottoman woman whose portrait he first sees in a Paris shop. Lovestruck, he leaves behind his family and travels to the exotic East during the declining years of the Ottoman Empire, suffering many trials en route before ultimately reaching Constantinople and the woman of his dreams.
Amazon.co.uk link: The Palace of Tears - Alev Lytle Croutier
Michael Dibdin's last book, and the end of Aurelio Zen's adventures. He (Zen) isn't the same character as he was in earlier novels, but then we all change as we grow older.
Set in a provincial capital in Calabria, a location even more remote than Naples from Zen's Venetian roots, we find Zen in the apparently unlooked for position of interim Chief of Police, covering for the native incumbent who is temporarily hors de combat due to an unfortunately self inflicted foot wound. Zen's final investigation combines the old, unchanging world of the native Calabrese with the modern hi tech world of the West Coast of the USA. The clash of cultures between northerner Zen and his southerner colleagues and the community for which he finds himself responsible is less marked, but always there. And as Dibdin's final novel brings to life a suitably wide range of characters, it is noticable that his handling of the modern (American) world is better than in Back to Bologna with references to the worlds of online gaming and Google Earth far more natural than the celebrity reality TV setting of Back to Bologna.
But the focus of End Games is Calabria, and its ancient ways of life which continue apparently impervious to incomers, whether Greek, Roman, Norman, Spanish, Albanian.... However, in this novel the incomers of interest are Alaric the Goth at the time of the Roman Empire and 21st century Americans, returning sons of Italian emigrants, entrepreneurial second generation Vietnamese and Microsoft millionaires.
Whilst End Games brings to a close - for the reader at least - the career of Aurelio Zen, I do at least have a trio of earlier investigations to enjoy - Vendetta (1990), Dead Lagoon (1994) and Cosi Fan Tutti (1996) - and I hope that in these earlier novels I'll get to see a bit more of the man himself.
Amazon.co.uk link: End Games - Michael Dibdin
A slimmer volume than some other Elizabeth Chadwick novels, but still a good love story set in the Middle Ages. In Shields of Pride, Linnet de Montsorrel finds freedom from her abusive oik of a noble husband when Giles is killed at Smithfield horsefair, but her hand and her land is swiftly "reallocated" to Joscelin de Gael, illegitimate son of William Ironheart. The course of true love is inevitably indirect, but Linnet and Joscelin get there in the end, and on the way we have brawling (half)brothers, obsessed and bitter wives/ mothers, ghostly apparitions and royal rebellion.
Amazon.co.uk link: Shields of Pride - Elizabeth Chadwick