3 posts tagged “historical”
ICE COLD (translator: Anthea Bell) is the second novel by the acclaimed author of THE MURDER FARM; both novels have won the German Crime Prize in consecutive years. ICE COLD tells the story of a serial killer in the Germany of the Weimar Republic. The book opens with the execution of Josef Kaletis, and the rest of the book tells the story of events leading up to that point, from the perspectives of several different people either directly involved in the story or as witnesses to various parts of it. As in the earlier novel, the various voices are signified by different typefaces.
This grim tale is told amid lives of extreme poverty and ignorance, with the political propaganda applied to the population by the government always in the background. The atmosphere of working class Munich is well-conveyed, reminding me of L'Assommoir and Nana in Emile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, which explored poverty and squalor in Paris 50 years before the events of ICE COLD.
Andrea Maria Schenkel conveys vividly the hopes of the young Kathie, a farm girl who escapes her boring village and strict parents to start a new life in the bright city. On arrival, Kathie's aspirations are immediately dashed, as both families to whom she at first turns are struggling themselves, each having to let out their meagre spare room to lodgers to make ends meet. Cast off on her own, and seemingly with little education, intelligence or common-sense, Kathie soon falls in with some men who spend their time drinking and who have wives at home.
This novel is vivid, bleak and short. It is also very graphic: in unsensational terms it describes in considerable detail horrific violence in passages I wish I had not read. The novel certainly has power, and the story of the murderer (ignorant, violent and yet passive when confronted by authority) and his victims, as well as the other characters, is starkly memorable, not least because of the ability of the author to convey experiences from her characters' perspectives and with their emotions.
STRATTON'S WAR is an excellent book: a fully rounded novel of London in the Blitz in the summer of 1940. There are two main protagonists, both outsiders as far as the Establishment is concerned - one is a professional policeman from the 'working' classes; and the other, of a socially higher class, is a woman. Each of these characters is the centre of their own story, and it is not until about two-thirds of the way through the book that they meet - and although they instinctively like each other, it is not until the end that they share a mutual awareness of their similarities, far stronger than their superficial differences, which bind them together.
In one of the book's two main stories, the titular DI Stratton attempts to keep law and order in a chaotic city, where buildings, even his own station, can be reduced to rubble overnight; where the black market and gangsters have plenty of opportunity to operate; and where the general chaos acts as an encouragement to looters and petty criminals, or just ordinary people, fed up at the sacrifices they are being forced to make for the 'war effort', to lash out.
The impetus for Stratton's story is the apparent suicide of a failed silent film actress who never made it into the talkies. Stratton does not believe that the death was accidental, so even though his bone-headed superiors want him off the case and onto higher-profile crimes, he continues to investigate on his own time. These events drive the plot, but Stratton's own story has considerable depth, not only in the character study of the man himself, but in his relationship with his wife, their evacuee children and her extended family, as well as the authentic background of the contemporary police force, conveying what it must have been like to try to carry out investigations, or indeed any 'normal' activity, in a time of war, when resources were scarce and a bomb could drop on you at any moment.
The second, equally compelling, story is one of spies and patriotism. Diana Cudlipp is unhappily married, stuck living with her awful mother-in-law while her husband is away fighting. She wangles a job at the War Office on the strength of her beauty and language skills, and is asked to infiltrate the Rights Club, a collection of upper-class Nazi sympathisers. She's very successful, being sensitive, intelligent and observant, yet quickly realises that a senior colleague, Sir Neville Apse, might be implicated. Diana's boss, "F-J" transfers her into a job in Apse's office, and Diana begins to uncover secrets that are obscure to her, but which are clearer to the modern reader - even though we are never quite sure what proportion of the clandestine goings-on concern the war, F-J's office politics, or the sexual proclivities of Apse and his associates.
Diana is bought into sharp focus for the reader via her all-too believable naivety and insecurity about personal relationships; she is manipulated by all the men she meets apart from Stratton. She's painfully aware that this is happening, and is a strong, independently minded character who has grown up considerably since her early marriage, but, in those pre-liberated times, she cannot break out of the straitjacket of society's expectations, stoically having to accept the rules of a male-dominated world.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The plotting is excellent, dovetailing perfectly with the excitingly tense World War Two background. The constant personal frustrations of Stratton and Diana, as the truths they separately uncover are suppressed for the "greater good" or for the war effort, or for the retrospectively quaint (but no doubt accurate) imperative to preserve the status quo of the class structure, make the book far deeper than a genre novel.
Part of the pleasure and poignancy of this book is the objectivity and frankness that this talented author can bring to bear on events of nearly 70 years ago. For 30 years or so after the war, novels of this type were still, on the whole, covered with a veneer of propaganda and, although exciting, were often too black-and-white to seem realistic or involving. Laura Wilson examines all the issues: social, sexual and political, with a clear-sightedness that provides real insight to the modern reader. This is an admirable novel, both as a good piece of historical crime fiction, but also as a social and emotionally telling commentary on the snapshot of time in which it is set.
First posted at Euro Crime, August 2008.
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The winner of this year's Costa (formerly Whitbread) prize for first novel, and winner of the overall prize, is a suspenseful, atmospheric novel set in Canada. It is 1867, and the small settlement of Caulfield is witness to a murder. Laurent Jammet, a trapper, trader and loner, is found dead in his bed by his neighbour and the book's main character, Mrs Ross.
Over the next few days, we learn about several of the people who live in the settlement, and those who travel to and from it. We also learn that this is not the first untimely death or accident that the inhabitants have experienced: some years ago, two young girls went out picking berries and never returned. Their mother eventually died of grief, and after years of searching for them, their father died also. The local physician, Doc Wade, was found drowned in Dove River a couple of years previously. Now Francis, Mrs Ross's son, has also vanished, yet his father seems distant and unconcerned.
This cloud of suspicion covers the small town like a blanket. Inside it, we see the lives and characters of the Ross and the Knox families, other neighbours, and the Company men who come to investigate Jammet's death - McKinley, Moody and associates - and their interactions with the locals. (The Company is revealed as the Hudson Bay Company). A trapper friend of Jammet's called Parker, half Indian and half white, is arrested for the crime, but he does not seem a likely suspect. Mrs Ross is desperate to find her son, another friend of the dead man, before he too is suspected.
By this point, although I was enjoying the book, I thought that there were too many characters in it to be able to fix any firmly in my mind or to care very much about any of them. Once the journey started, however, the book began to exert a strong spell on me. The developing relationship between Parker and Mrs Ross, together with her sad tale, is very moving. Parker tells her of an abandoned wolf cub he once found and bought up as a dog, until "It remembered it was a wolf, not a pet. It stared into the distance. Then one day it was gone. The Chippewa have a word for it - it means "the sickness of long thinking". You cannot tame a wild animal, because it will always remember where it is from, and yearn to go back."
This phrase, "the sickness of long thinking", is the key to this wonderful book. The story turns into a book of journeys by most of the characters, and by these journeys we come to know their true natures. Several, but not all, of the mysteries, old and new, are eventually solved, and several of the characters come to know themselves and their families more deeply.
Perhaps there are slightly too many elements in the book than are strictly necessary: the Norwegian settlement and the story of Line is the least successful aspect, to my mind. And, given the number of criss-crossing journeys, the book would certainly have benefited from a map. But these are very minor quibbles. The book is brilliant - I have not done it full justice by this brief review.
