Best Historical Novels 2009
The Best Historical Novels
I Read in the Past Year
by Margaret Donsbach
My favorite historical novels have characters that pull me right inside their skin so I can see (and hear, and smell) their time and place through their perspective. The lovely, clean prose either disappears into the world of the story, or it sings to me and carries me along without a misplaced bump or squeal. The best novels also give me something worthwhile to think about: a haunting idea, a new way of seeing something, or a question about human nature to ponder long after I've turned the last page. They never, ever bore me. My favorite novels straddle the boundary between literary and popular fiction, giving me rich characters and ideas along with a lively story with twists and turns that keep me wondering what will happen next.
Here are fifteen historical novels, plus five historical mysteries, I read this year which lived up (mostly) to these high standards. More complete book reviews for all are onsite.
1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)This rich, intelligent novel won the 2009 Booker Prize for good reason. Wolf Hall offers a fresh, fascinating perspective on a period one might think had been done to death: the years when Henry VIII of England struggled for a papal dispensation to set aside his queen of many years, Katherine of Aragon, so he could marry the luscious vixen Anne Boleyn and obtain a son in legitimate wedlock. Mantel audaciously chooses Henry's minister Thomas Cromwell as her entry point into the controversy and paints a compelling, sympathetic portrait of him in contrast to a not-so-saintly Thomas More. See Review
2. The Jewel Trader of Pegu by Jeffrey Hantover (2008)Luminous and utterly unlike any other novel set in the Middle Ages that I have read, The Jewel Trader of Pegu is about a Venetian Jew, still mourning the untimely death of his wife, who travels to exotic Pegu (later part of Burma) on a jewel-buying expedition for his uncle. Here he is a much greater curiosity to people for being European than for being a Jew. As he sheds the part of his identity shaped by being an object of prejudice, he begins to shed his own prejudices as well. I loved this novel because of the vast sense of compassion emanating from it. See Review
3. Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell (2008)Few novelists write as well about warfare as Bernard Cornwell. Agincourt, about the battle the army of Henry V fought near that location in 1415 during the Hundred Years' War, strikes just the right balance of fear, courage, pride, the exhilaration of survival, and horror at war's carnage. He also conveys the medieval mind, a mixture of ruthless practicality and proneness to superstition and mystical visions, with unusual skill. I would want to be any closer to the real thing than Cornwell brought me in this novel. See Review
4. The Wet Nurse's Tale by Erica Eisdorfer (2009)The spunky, plain-spoken but funny heroine of this novel is no beauty. I fell in love with her partly because of that – and also because of her combination of survival instincts and generosity of spirit. I knew that aristocratic women of the past often gave their babies into the care of wet nurses to be suckled and raised for the first few years, but I knew very little about the lives of the wet nurses themselves. This well-researched novel opened my eyes to the wrenching dilemmas many of them faced. See Review
5. Devil's Dream by Madison Smartt Bell (2009)Unlike his fellow Confederate generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest was born into poverty, raised himself to a position of wealth through the distasteful occupations of slave trading and land speculation, and had no formal military training. Hthe had courage and intelligence to spare, though, and a more complex relationship with his slaves than stereotypes might suggest. Madison Smartt Bell does him justice in a novel that keeps circling back to the Fort Pillow Massacre, one of the most searing, shocking events of the American Civil War, adding layers of meaning each time. See Review
6. Quakertown by Lee Martin (2001)Quakertown is the story of a black girl whose overabundant compassion lands her in trouble when she falls in love with a white boy and also a proud black World War I veteran. It is also the story of a thriving black community betrayed by one of its most respected members, a man who meant well but loved his magnificent garden just a little too much. Though many of the characters behave badly, no one in this graceful, inspiring novel, black or white, can be easily condemned. See Review
7. Mistress of the Sun by Sandra Gulland (2008)Many novels have been written about the mistresses of kings, but Gulland's tale stands out because the love story between young Louise de la Vallière and King Louis XIV plays second fiddle to the love story between Louise and a remarkable white horse. Absolute monarchy breeds narcissism, and it's a rare king who did not break the hearts of the women who loved him. Here, the precise, insightful writing and the story of woman and horse add dimension and a note of spiritual triumph to what might otherwise have been a tale of depressing familiarity. See Review
8. The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (2009)Readers can't help but empathize with the eager-to-please, sensually alive sake brewer's daughter in this novel of nineteenth century Japan. Rie lives for her father's goal of making their family brewery the best in Japan – even though, as a woman, she is forbidden to enter the brewing rooms lest her unauspicious presence sour the brew. But as we follow Rie's story, we gradually become aware what she does to herself is more tragic than what others do to her. More depth and complexity emerge from this novel than its easy-to-follow story would suggest. See Review
9. The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan (2009)Bess, the daughter of a man who worked in the management of the Niagara Falls power plant, and Tom, the young riverman she falls in love with, are everyday people, loving and lovable, interesting and individual. Even Tom, modeled after a historical figure who could seem larger than life, has a simplicity that makes his unusual abilities and his heroism seem perfectly natural. Sometimes lyrical, the prose is also straightforward, so that the beauty of the way something is said never obscures the meaning of what is being said. The novel's theme deals with death and spirituality in a graceful way that never preaches. See Review
10. Pallas and the Centaur by Linda Proud (2004)A sequel to A Tabernacle for the Sun, which appears on my "Best of 2008" list below, this novel delves more deeply into the conflicts between old ideas and new at the beginning of the Renaissance. Too often, philosophy seems like a dry, abstract endeavor without direct application to people's lives in the real world. Even more than A Tabernacle for the Sun, this novel shows how intensely, wrenchingly emotional the ramifications of the new ideas that gave birth to the Renaissance could be and how powerfully they affected people's daily lives. See Review
11. The Fire of Origins by Emmanuel Dongala (1987)It can be tempting to attribute Africa's problems entirely to its history of being exploited under colonialism (or entirely to the failings of Africans). The surrealism of this slender novel is, ironically, what allows it to grapple so perceptively and realistically with the roots of Africa's problems not only in the brutality of the colonizers, but also in the greed and passivity of Africans who enabled the colonization process. Time is condensed for its hero, who lives through the history of Africa from before Europeans arrived until after Africans finally won their independence, and reaches a point of genuinely joyful insight. See Review
12. Rifling Paradise by Jem Poster (2006)The best historical novels are directly relevant to modern issues, illuminating dynamics so entrenched they may seem immutable by tracking back to their origins in the past. Some of the characters in Rifling Paradise are sympathetic, some appallingly unsympathetic, but both types of characters play a role in the exploitation of Australia's primeval natural environment. Weaving through this gripping, suspenseful story are subtleties of language and incident that offer important clues to additional layers of irony and insight, a treasure trove for the thoughtful reader who enjoys tracing them. See Review
13. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (2002)This novel is remarkable for its atmosphere, so thick and foreboding you could cut it with a knife. Two young women, each psychologically deformed by the differently exploitive ways in which they were brought up, meet, grow close, and make a desperate bid for freedom. In dreams, a house is often a symbol of the self, and Fingersmith mines the tradition of the Gothic novel to create a house whose isolation, mystery and confining atmosphere reflect the lives of its inhabitants. See Review
14. Arabella by Georgette Heyer (1949)Sometimes, you don't need or want a book to be deeply reflective or psychologically or morally illuminating. You just want it to be great fun. Deliciously witty and full of dilemmas that grow more excruciating by the page, Georgette Heyer's Regency romances supply fun in abundance. WhiArabella is like a tasty dessert, it's also the result of meticulous research, so readers who "know too much" about nineteenth-century English mores and customs won't be tripped up by anachronisms. See Review
15. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton (2009)Pirate Latitudes plunges readers into a death-defying adventure. Like Arabella, it's a novel to be read for pure fun, but the flavor is red meat rather than chocolate mousse. It's violent, fast-paced and full of plot twists to keep you on the edge of your seat. Improbable encounters and last-minute escapes from the jaws of death are supported by a wealth of well-researched details to provide that crucial illusion of reality that fosters suspension of disbelief. See Review
16. The Cavalier of the Apocalypse by Susanne Alleyn (2009)Set on the eve of the French Revolution, this is a prequel to other mysteries in the "Aristide Ravel" series that take place after the Revolution, and it can easily be enjoyed as an introduction to the series for readers who haven't read the others. Along with a genuinely intriguing mystery and a portrayal of one of the most remarkable (but little known) historical figures of the time, it offers insights into the pre-Revolutionary period that go deeper than the usual pat explanations of what led to the Revolution. See Review
17. Persona Non Grata by Ruth Downie (2009)This novel is remarkable in portraying both the pagans and the Christians of Roman Britain and Gaul with respect and sympathy. The third in a series, it centers on a Roman army physician and his mistress, a woman of the Brigantian tribe in northern Britain. Their misunderstandings about each other as she gives him crucial assistance in unraveling a difficult mystery reflect the clash of cultures between Roman and Briton. The novel is also very funny. See Review
18. Winter in Madrid by C.J. Sansom (2006)Winter in Madrid captures the exhaustion and diminished sense of hope in Spain after its Civil War. Amid the floods of novels about World War II, the Spanish Civil War has been relatively neglected by novelists. Reminiscent of Graham Greene, this mystery of slowly building intensity, which becomes a thriller in the later chapters, portrays with unsparing realism the tragic interplay among politics, war, and the desires, hopes and cruelties of individual humans. See Review
19. Cézanne's Quarry by Barbara Corrado Pope (2009)An inexperienced judge left in charge during the August vacation season in Aix-en-Provence must find out who murdered a beautiful young woman and left her body in a quarry where the artist Paul Cézanne had been painting. It seems she had been his mistress. Skillful prose makes the stifling midsummer heat in nineteenth-century Provence almost physically present for the reader, and the setting echoes the characters' suppressed, hothouse emotions in this psychologically astute novel. See Review
20. Race for the Dying by Steven F. Havill (2009)Less a mystery than a meditation on the frailty of the human body, the power and limits of ego, and the temptations of the medical profession, Race for the Dying is about a naive young doctor who joins the practice of an old family friend in a small, late-nineteenth-century logging town on the Washington coast. It is all too relevant to the modern world in showing how easily people can fool themselves and others into believing exploitation is really altruism. See Review
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Best Historical Novels 2008
The Ten Best Historical Novels I Read in 2008
1. The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (2008)The novel opens with a modern man wrecking his car, which bursts into flame. I fell in love with the woman who visits him in the hospital burn ward. Somehow, it's beside the point that we never know quite who she is (a time-traveler? a reincarnated fourteenth century German nun? a sweet but delusional mental patient who has researched medieval German mystics much too thoroughly?). She's a rich and multi-dimensional character, and I felt like she was right in the room with me as I read. Plus, I learned a lot about fourteenth century German mystics. See Review
1. As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann (2001)This is another novel that puts readers right inside the skin (unburned this time) of its main character, a man of violent impulses and a deep yearning for love. He's not a nice guy, but his clumsy, often counterproductive efforts to find a human connection won my sympathy without winning my approval. This novel introduced me to the seventeenth century Diggers movement, an idealistic but poorly organized group that, amid the carnage of the English Civil War, tried to take over uncultivated land to develop agricultural communes. See Review
1. Conceit by Mary Novik (2007)Also set in the seventeenth century, Conceit couldn't be more different from As Meat Loves Salt, except that once again the characters sprang to life as I read. You don't need to know or admire John Donne's poetry to appreciate his daughter's yearning to experience the kind of passion he wrote about, or her frustration with his insistence (now that he is Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral) that such emotions are unworthy of himself and his family. There's no violence, unless you count the hazards of falling cathedral beams during the Great Fire of London. See Review
1. A Tabernacle for the Sun by Linda Proud (2005)Right away, the beautiful prose in this novel made me feel I was in the hands of a master. Shortly thereafter, the story of a young man's search for fulfillment in Lorenzo de Medici's Florence fully won me over. Most novels set in Renaissance Italy irritate me with the superficiality of the characters' desires. Renaissance Florentines were indeed wealthy beyond the dreams of most Europeans of their day. Many of their concerns were indeed superficial. For some, though, wealth provided an avenue to learning and philosophy. Young Tommaso burns with desire for two incompatible but decidedly unsuperficial things: revenge for the Florentines' destruction of his city, and spiritual understanding. See Review
1. Great Maria by Cecelia Holland (1974)Sometimes the plot flows underground through stretches of this novel as Holland focuses on Maria's daily life in medieval Norman Sicily, but it does flow. Immured in her marriage to an equally strong-willed husband who, as men of his time did, considered wives to be under the dominion of their husbands, Maria requires patience and cunning along with her will and determination in order to win a measure of control over her own life. The power of this novel is in the power of Maria's personality, and also in Holland's extraordinary ability to convey not just the external world of a past time, but also the internal attitudes of its people, something few writers are able to achieve so thoroughly and gracefully. See Review
1. The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck (1931)Buck won a Pulitzer Prize for this novel in 1932. She deserved it. Her characters are simple farmers living in the last decades of Imperial China. Her prose is plain and earthy, but singing. Readers experience everything through the viewpoint of the man Wang Lung, who marries a former slave girl. Because he is so poor, he feels lucky to get her, but she has no beauty to excite his heart. He treats her as a workhorse. The novel seems to be about Wang Lung's struggle to rise out of poverty, but by the time I reached the end, I thought it was really about his wife's ever-so-patient campaign to win his respect. And then, of course, there's the land … See Review
1. The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Kay Penman (1982)This is a splendid, big novel with a love story at its center that will thrill readers looking for heart-wrenching romance. It's no literary novel: the characters are bigger than life, and the prose is competent without being lyrical. But the characters' passions, whether romantic or political, are rich, lusty and infectious. Most people remember this novel for its controversial portrayal of Richard III as a paragon of virtue who, far from murdering his nephews (the famous Princes in the Tower), treated them with consistent kindness. But it's almost as much about his brother Edward, king before him. It's a compelling novel of the Wars of the Roses. See Review
1. The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton (1958)This was the first Anya Seton novel I read as a teenager, when I relished the stirring (not very graphic) love scenes. It sparked a Seton binge, and this novel and Katherine have lingered in my memory for decades. Rereading it this year, I was delighted to find I enjoyed it as much as ever. It's not really a romance, but a novel about a woman's life amid the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Company and migrated to the American Colonies, and of her struggle to exchange the harsh and unbending Puritan view of religion for a more gentle, mystical and consoling experience. See Review
1. People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (2008)I'm not usually a big fan of sweep-of-history novels that dip into one time period with a brief story, then skip ahead a century or so to the next one. Brooks makes this work, though, because each of her stories is in itself a beautifully written, absorbing tale that would be worth reading even if the rest of the book were not. But it is. The stories are linked by the passage through time and place of a unique, illustrated Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book. The novel was inspired by a real Haggadah that, like its fictional counterpart, survived the bombing of Sarajevo. See Review
1. Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana Franklin (2007)This mystery novel has been criticized for its portrayal of a medieval woman whose work resembles that of a modern coroner perhaps a little too much for the medieval context. I was willing to suspend disbelief, because the character is engaging and does come from southern Italy, where the Arabic-influenced approach to medicine was less benighted than in the rest of Europe. It's worth reading even for those fussy about such details, because the portrayal of King Henry II near the novel's conclusion is nothing less than brilliant. Ariana Franklin is a pen name of Diana Norman, whose well-regarded 1980 novel Fitzempress' Law, also about Henry II and his legal reforms, has never been published in the U.S. and is scarce as hens' teeth here. See Review
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