Basing this fine novel about the settlement of Australia’s New South Wales on the real life and notebooks made by Lt. William Dawes from 1788 – 1790, author Kate Grenville subjects the empire-building attitudes of the Crown and its representatives to careful scrutiny and creates a novel filled with conflicts and well-developed themes. New South Wales was already inhabited by an aboriginal population which had its own language and culture when a thousand British officers and prisoners, both male and female, landed their eleven ships in Sydney Cove and took over land which had been the traditional homelands of the aborigines. Demonstrating the arrogance of conquerors, these officers and officials imposed their harsh “justice” upon anyone who challenged their will and their national “destiny.” Lt. Daniel Rooke is on the first ship that lands in New South Wales. Allowed to set up an astronomical observatory on a headland above the settlement, Rooke is happily alone with his instruments and calculations all week, climbing down to base for Sunday dinner and avoiding most of the daily conflicts at the settlement. Isolated from the settlement, he is respected by the aborigines, who visit him, but he also recognizes that he is in conflict with his peers at the most basic level. A well-developed novel which explores the human costs to both sides of colonial conquest.
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Charles Cleasby, highly intelligent and very reclusive, believes that he and Adm. Nelson are the same person– that he is, in fact, the dark side of Nelson. At the outset of the novel, Cleasby is trying to reconcile his abiding belief in Nelson’s heroism with Nelson’s behavior in 1798, when he aided the Bourbon rulers in Naples against the French and directly contributed to the outbreak of a civil war in Naples. Strong evidence suggests that Nelson has betrayed a truce and that he bears responsibility for the hangings of hundreds of Neapolitans. Unsworth raises the larger questions of what constitutes a hero and why a nation even needs heroes, elevating this book to a significance of scope and universality rare in fiction.
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Posted in 18th century, France on Jun 18th, 2009
The confusion of fact and fiction in this book is both its strength and its weakness. Lovers of history will admire French author Patrick Rambaud’s book for the author’s careful depiction of the Battle of Essling (1809), near Vienna, Napoleon’s first defeat in Europe, the details of which make the action vivid, bloody, and unrelenting. He also creates plausible historical figures.
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Palace intrigue of the highest order, conducted by courtiers and officials who will do anything to achieve their goals, makes this one of the most stimulating and thoroughly engrossing novels of 2002. The Danish court from 1768 – 1772 pulses with life as powerful personalities collide in their rush to fill the power vacuum resulting from the weakness of King Christian VII, a sensitive, half-mad 17-year-old boy, married to Caroline Mathilde, the 14-year-old sister of Britain’s King George III. Swedish author Per Olov Enquist brilliantly recreates the psychology of the king, a puppet who desperately wants to please the courtiers and officials and is tormented when he does not. When he becomes interested in the enlightened ideas of Voltaire and Diderot and is celebrated by these philosophers on a trip around the continent, his nervous and threatened court decides he needs a physician. Bursting with dramatic scenes of Machiavellian court intrigue and fear of the Enlightenment, and with powerfully moving scenes of psychological abuse, tenderness, passion, love, and genuine sadness, this novel is stunning.
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Combining natural history, a search for the remains of the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, several love stories, and a number of exciting mysteries, author Martin Davies keeps the reader totally engaged and on the edge of his/her seat for the entire length of the novel. As the novel opens, famed researcher of extinct birds John Fitzgerald is visited by Gabriela, a former lover from Brazil whom he has not seen for 14 years. She is now in London with Karl Anderson, an aggressive researcher/natural scientist, who is actively searching for the Mysterious Bird of Ulieta, and Gabriela wants Fitzgerald to help. Anderson believes that if he can locate the remains of this mysterious bird for the Ark Project, a project to collect rare DNA, that it will not only boost the value of the shares but will also attract much needed publicity. Hoping to lure John Fitzgerald into helping him find the bird, Anderson offers him $50,000, an offer he refuses. Fitzgerald has decided to search for the bird himself, eventually aided by Katya, a young graduate student renting a room in his house.
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