A subset and more difficult discipline of the historical novel is that dealing exclusively with historical personages of no particular heroism or centrality. Few real lives follow the convenient rhythm of plotting or can contrive to be at all the most interesting scenes of an age which are the hallmarks of the tortured peregrinations of certain fictional characters dropped in the midst of great events. This novel is peripheral to what is usually considered the great event of the age, the career of Joan of Arc, but manages to throw great light upon the milieu in which she rose and was betrayed. Centering first on Louis, duc d'Orleans in the reign of Charles VI (the mad), a man of many virtues and some of the typical moral compromies of the age, it chronicles the political maneuvering of the powerful dukes of Burgundy, Bourbon and Orleans, almost sovereigns in their own right, in the court of a weak king when the ideal of a unified France was regarded by many as pipe dream. After Louis's blatant murder by John of Burgundy the focus falls on the successor Orleans, Charles.
Charles is more a dreamer than a politician and spends more than two decades in a tedious English exile after the battle of Agincourt. He returns to France to find himself the pawn of more powerful interests, including Charles VII, who owed his throne to Joan of Arc, and the current Duke of Burgundy. Haase writes believeable dialogue and brightly charged descriptions of the world her characters inhabit. She undertakes the dangerous strategy of exposition of her characters thoughts and motivations rather than always letting her characters speak for themselves, but she does it with such understated subtlely that it becomes a successful tool for advancing her story. Haase sprinkles the historical Charles d'Orleans' poetry throughout her story and so successfully creates the fictional Charles' character that we have no trouble believing that he is indeed the author of these lines. Other brilliantly drawn characters and lucid vignettes draw back the curtain on a distant and murky age. Charles' frustrations and powerlessness, his brief happiness and excruciating loss feel like real life, a life painted with subtle colors and shadings in this very high peak in the art of the historical novel.
A panoramic view of French society in the years after the fall of Napoleon exposed through the ultimately tragic career of a young man of lowly origins who places his considerable intelligence at the service of boundless ambition. Pride and an essential decency become the ironic instruments of his downfall. Gentle irony and natural humor are brushes with which Stendahl paints his incisive portraits of types from all levels of society. His essential humanism prevents him from falling into broad caricature, but the effect is the same, if not more powerful. We see clearly a society which is no more absurd in its relative values than our own. By seeing the ropes and pulleys behind that stage, the structure of our own drama is perhaps a little clearer. This is a wonderfully entertaining novel, which despite some typically nineteenth century excesses of plot, is almost modern in its sympathetic characterizations.
After reading the first seven volumes of this massive fantasy series in as many years, I find myself not anticipating with a great deal of ferver the just-released eighth volume. On the whole, I have enjoyed these books, but I wonder if the author has not recently lost his sense of direction, ie., where does he want to go and how long does he plan to take to get there? Various characters, on whom he focuses periodically, have their differing attractions for me, and there is enough difference in style amongst them that each reader will have his favorites. And sparks usually do fly when Rand, the central character, is on the stage. Jordan's empathy with his characters, particularly the female ones, is one of the somewhat unique strengths of the series. On the other hand, the systematic theology of his magic system, to which he has added so many bells and whistles that it threatens to fall of its own weight, is frequently called upon to pull him out of plot impasses.
I heartily recommend reading the first fifty pages of "Eye of the World", the first book in the series. I still recall it as some of the most vivid and exciting fantasy writing I have ever read. How far you persevere beyond that is your choice. Just thinking about the characters while I am writing this has put me in the mood to reenter that massive and quirky world. I suppose it won't be long before I read volume eight, "Winter's Heart".
In 1900 the US Weather Service and weather science were both still in their infancy, but the one exhibited a pride of nationalism and imperialism and the other a false confidence inspired by other more mature branches of the sciences. This pride and confidence combined that year to contribute to many thousands of deaths during a major storm which struck Galveston, Texas that fall. Isaac Cline was the Service's station chief in Galveston, who, through a combination of his own scientific prejudices and the bureaucratic maneuvering of his bosses, failed to predict the fatal storm. Larson brings Cline and many of his fellow Galvestonians brilliantly to life and places them solidly in the context of their time. His description of the storm and its effects is masterly and haunting.
I've been aware of the O'Brian novels for years, but having read all of the C. S. Forester Hornblower novels as a teenager, I didn't think I needed any more sea battles. But then an aquaintance last year expostulated that he regrets having read all of the O'Brian novels (13?) because in this life he'll never be able to read them for the first time again. Fortunately, I've read only the first five so far and have much to look forward to. The meeting of Jack Aubrey, a young lieutenant in the British navy at the turn of the eighteenth century and the surgeon Stephen Maturin in Master and Commander begins one of the greatest friendships in the history of literature. O'Brian conjures up a world which is familiar yet alien, with its own distinct set of values, not just a reflection of the author's twentieth century attitudes. Aubrey and Maturin share a deep love of music, but seemingly little else. They are so unalike that there is always a current of tension and misunderstanding running through their relationship. The sea battles and chases are vibrantly imagined and while the necessary time spent on land is never tedious, the reader is just as anxious as the central characters to begin another voyage.
Winning the praise of Patrick O'Brian shortly before that eminent writer's death, Mallinson has indeed brought off a vivid evocation of the cavalryman's life around the end of the Napoleonic wars. Cornet Matthew Hervey of the fictional Sixth Light Dragoons suffers under a frustrating mix of highly competent junior commanders and senior officers whose only military talent consists in having enough money to buy their rank. English cavalry were despised in many quarters at that period, not least by the Duke of Wellington, and had much to answer for at Waterloo. Mallinson deftly inserts his young protagonist into historial nooks from which he can observe momentous events culminating in the Waterloo campaign.
Mallinson makes much of the break between the fall of Napoleon and his exile at Elba and the Hundred Days to plant Hervey firmly amongst his family near Salisbury where the womenfolk quote Austen, but he can't see much in her. When his brigade is billeted to Ireland the implications of the absentee landlord/tenant economy of that unfortunate land are probed. Mallinson does not possess O'Brian's subtlety or ear for dialogue and Hervey possesses perhaps just a bit too much of a twentieth century sensibility, but this is not a trivial effort. The author has done his research and hands us the proud cavalryman's elevated view of the world and a notion of how easily he may be brought low.