THE OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE OF ABEL MORGAN by Cynthia Jefferies. Review by Adèle Geras

Cynthia Jefferies is a friend of mine. My name appears in the acknowledgements of this novel. I always begin reviews of books by friends with a declaration like this because I don't want to end up on the back pages of Private Eye accused of logrolling.  I hope readers of this blog will believe me when I say I would not recommend a book  I didn't enjoy. If I'm not liking a book, I stop reading it.  Pleasure is what I'm after.

And pleasure is what The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan provides. Not just a general pleasure either, but several different kinds of pleasure at the same time.

First, there's the narrative, which follows two people: Christopher Morgan and his son, Abel. Chapters from each point of view alternate for most of the novel and Jefferies has Christopher's account unfold in the third person while his son gives a first person account of events. By doing this, she varies the tone and style, and  makes things much more interesting. 

Left: Cornelius Claesz van Wieringen    Right: Willem-Alexander van de Velde ll

Secondly, readers of this book won't be bored. I'm going to use a reviewer's cliché and call it a 'roller-coaster ride.' It's a very exciting story, full of adventures, secrets, mistakes that seem uncorrectable, wicked men, a woman who's far from angelic, pirates, slaves, and traffickers, smugglers and even a walk on appearance from King Charles II and Samuel Pepys. I'm going to give away nothing about the plot, except to say that the widowed Christopher is left with a baby to care for. He loses the child, then finds him, then loses him again. He spends the best part of the novel on a quest to find him. And while he does this, Abel is having adventures of his own.

Thirdly, the characters (and we meet many) are brought to life very well. We can see them and hear them and several of them (especially the villain with the false arm and hand) stay in your mind long after you've closed the book. We care about Abel and his father because Jeffries has involved us so closely in their thoughts and feelings.

Fourthly, every place we visit as we're reading is vividly there. We move from the West Country to Constantinople, to London, to the Caribbean, to Jamaica and the Netherlands and it's wonderful to be able to travel so far while sitting snugly by the fire. I did actually read some of this book in front of my gas fire while my central heating was briefly on the blink, and it's the perfect way to enjoy this story.  Because my main feeling as I  read was that this is an old-fashioned novel in the very best sense of the term: happy to tell a thrilling and moving story in elegant and evocative prose and above all, one that everyone in the family can share.  I really hope there's an audio version on the way. Listening to that would be a splendid way to pass a long car journey. Meanwhile, I can heartily recommend the book. 

Photo of Cynthia Jefferies by Tammy Lyn Photography


All other photos provided by Cynthia Jefferies.

Today is the last day to enter our competition to win a copy of The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan! See the post for 31st October for details.

The Spirit of the Times - Celia Rees

Last weekend, I was at the Cropredy Folk Festival, Fairport Convention's annual August gathering, deep in the Oxfordshie countryside. I'm coming out here. I admit it. I'm a Folk Fan and have been for more years than I care to count. I know I'm not alone in this. There are other Folkies among the History Girls - Katherine Langrish for one.

Fairport have a special place in my heart. I first heard their music at a party in 1968. It was one of those arresting moments when you demand, 'Who's this?' and have to know. I've been a fan ever since. That song was Meet on the Ledge. It was not traditional, it was written by Richard Thompson. Their first albums were a mixture of their own compositions and songs written by other people, they contained only a smattering of traditional music. Then came Liege and Leaf. All the tracks were traditional but Sandy Denny's voice, the drums, the electric guitars and violin brought them right up to date. Made them now.  I fell in love with the music and have loved it ever since.

Folk songs are the poetry of the people. Frequently their only written record. They tell stories which are often vivid little capsules, vignettes of unknown lives. They contain folklore and history. A song like Tam Lin on Liege and Leaf is a treasure trove of faerie lore, an important source, but it is far more than that. It tells the story of a spirited young woman who defies her father, her father's court and the terrifying Faerie Queen herself to save her 'elfin grey' and turn him back into an 'earthly knight'.

These songs express complex emotions: joy, anguish, fear, horror, love, loss and sorrow which are often specific to that song, but also universal. In this, they are like all great poetry but these writers are anonymous. Nobody knows who wrote the original words or the music but these songs were learnt, sung, passed on from one person to another, changed and added to, so they provide a direct channel from the present to the present.  We are indebted to collectors, like Cecil Sharpe, who recognised their  worth and gave them new life. They evoke and conjure the very texture and spirit of the past. These are the hardest things for a writer to discover but they are vital if one is to write historical fiction that is more than a rag bag of yawn making research. Songs act like magical time machines allowing us to step back into the past. They also contain details that are as true now as they were then, and so prove that people don't change all that much. For example the song, Little Matty Groves  contains the lines:

And a servant who was standing by and hearing what was said,
He swore Lord Donald he would know before the sun would set.

And in his hurry to carry the news, he bent his breast and ran,
And when he came to the broad mill stream, he took off his shoes and swam.

We've all known people who'd do exactly the same thing, carry the tale in a blink of an eye.  

Folk songs inform much of my historical writing because they encapsulate the spirit of their times and that's what I am striving to do. Sometimes, the influence is obvious and direct. The eponymous Sovay came from the ballad of... Sovay. I first heard this sung by Pentangle on their Sweet Child album, many years before I even thought about being a writer but it stuck in my mind.

Sovay, Sovay, all on a day

She dressed herself in man's array

With a brace of pistols all by her side

To meet her true love, to meet her true love, away she'd ride

A girl dressed as a highwayman. What's not to like? But what I really liked about Sovay was the role reversal. She robs the boy, takes his watch, his gold, and demands one thing more

 That diamond ring  that I see you wear
Hand it over, hand it over and your life I'll spare. 

He refuses to hand over the ring because it's a present from his sweetheart. Sovay lets him go and the next day, in the garden green ... he spied his watch hanging from her clothes, which made him blush lads, which made him blush lads like any rose.  I love that fine detail. You can actually see them - and his blushes. With the last verse, comes the pay off. 

I only did it for to know

If you would be a man or no

If you'd given me that ring she said

I'd have pulled the trigger, pulled the trigger and shot you dead

And you know that she would - she's that kind of girl. Shocking behaviour. Even now. I've had e mails berating me for writing about a girl who would even think of shooting her boyfriend. But Sovay is exactly the kind of girl I want to write about. I'm glad she's still in my head from all those years ago. 

I used ballads less directly, but no less heavily when I was writing Pirates! I used ballads to give the titles to each section of the novel, to conjure my characters, the creak and roll of a sailing ship, the very smell of the sea. I called my lovers Nancy and William, the names most commonly used in the songs.  One of my favourite sea ballads is one of separation, loss and longing: The Dark Eyed Sailor, sung by Steeleye Span. I love the scene setting and the point of view:

 As I roved out one evening fair 

It being the summertime to take the air 
I spied a sailor and a lady gay 
And I stood to listen 
And I stood to listen to hear what they would say. 

The nameless bystander witnesses a confrontation between two lovers separated for seven years by the sea. The young woman thinks her William is drowned, although he is standing in front of her.  To test her devotion, the sailor suggests that she will find another because,

Love turns aside and soon cold does grow 
Like the winter's morning 
Like the winter's morning, the hills all white with 
Snow

And that is pure poetry. Of course, they are re-united and it all ends happily.

And there is a cottage by yonder lea 
This couple's married and does agree 
So maids be loyal when your love's at sea 
For a cloudy morning 
For a cloudy morning brings in a sunny day.

Poetry again. Incidentally, traditional songs like this perfectly illustrate the old Creative Writing saw of 'show and tell'. Anyone puzzling over what that actually means should go to the ballads. They illuminate a told story with vivid bursts of finely observed detail which infuse the narrative with light and colour.

While I was writing Pirates!, I didn't just listen to songs about love and longing. I was also listening to all the ballads about Female Sailors Bold. transgressive young women who broke all the rules. 

For The Fool's Girl, I turned to the dances, jigs and street ballads of Elizabethan England. One of my favourite dance tunes is called Parson's Farewell. It was a popular tune in the 16th Century, so Shakespeare would certainly have heard it. My favourite version of it is by Bellowhead. Absolutely 21st Century, but I'm sure Shakespeare would have enjoyed it immensely.

So,

Come all ye rolling minstrels
And together, we will try
To rouse the spirit of the earth
And move the rolling sky

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Mother of the More Famous Mary – Celia Rees

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 - 1797

I always like women who are ‘vilified’. They have usually lived unconventional lives and have done something, or written something not to the liking of the (male) establishment. That makes them interesting on two counts:  interesting anyway, I like people who break rather than make the rules, and interesting to me as a writer of historical fiction.  When I’m writing in this genre, girls are my main characters. I make no apologies for this. It is a conscious decision. Boys and men have enough coverage. I want to broadcast voices less heard, give life to stories disregarded, unrecorded or forgotten. I search out women who led unusual and often transgressive lives. I’m not looking at the average. I’m looking for what it was possible for women to do.  For Witch Child and Sorceress, it was the ‘Unbridled Spirits’ of the English Revolution, and their sisters in America who settled the land there, or were captured by Native Americans but lived to tell their tale as redeemed, or unredeemed, captives. For Pirates! it was those Female Sailors Bold, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. For Sovay it was Mary Wollstonecraft. It annoys me when critics, as they sometimes do, dismiss my books as ‘rollicking good reads, but not history’. All I can do is give an ironic smile, shrug and mourn their woeful ignorance of the history of their own sex.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was unconventional in the extreme. She had affairs, she lived with men while still unmarried, she bore a child out of wedlock, and perhaps most shocking of all, she wrote pamphlets challenging the views of her male contemporaries. She took on the major thinkers of the day, both conservative and radical. She wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Men in 1790, as a riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Two years later, she answered Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with A Vindication of the Rights of Women, putting the case for the other half of the human race. She even took the sainted Rousseau to task for his dismissal of women. Burke was a pillar of the establishment; Tom Paine the leading radical thinker of the day; Rousseau wrote the Social Contract on which the American and French Revolutions were based, but Mary Wollstonecraft was determined to have her say and did not regard her relative youth, her lack of formal education, or her sex as prohibitions. She demanded to have her opinion heard. She saw it as her right.

‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity – and make them, as part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.’

Mary Wollstonecraft was arguing for equal rights, for men and women alike. She was the first to make such a radical claim and her audacity catapulted her to fame. It earned her the title ‘hyena in petticoats’ but she would not be intimidated or bullied into silence. She was well before her time. It would take close to a hundred years before men gained the right to vote, let alone women, but the call she made for equality would echo down from one century to another, to be taken up by the Pankhursts and the Suffragettes in Britain and by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and The National Woman Suffrage Association in America. Her voice would not be, could not be silenced.

Her intellectual daring was matched by her physical courage. At a time when most people were heading in the opposite direction, she went to Paris at the height of the Revolution to witness events for herself. She arrived barely a month before Louis XVI was guillotined and joined a group of expatriates which included the British writer Helen Maria Williams. She fell passionately in love with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and had a daughter, Fanny, by him.  She stayed in France through the height of the Revolution, even though foreigners were interdit, subject to arrest and the threat of the guillotine. Her An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution was published in 1794.

 

















She returned to England in 1795. She continued to travel and to publish. In March 1797, she married fellow writer and philosopher, William Godwin. She had only a few months left to live. Being a woman got her in the end. She died in September 1797, a few days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary. The placenta failed to come away cleanly and she died in hideous agony as her doctor tore it out of her, piece by piece, thereby introducing the septicaemia which would kill her.

She described herself as ‘the first of a new genus’. I’m proud to belong to the same family.  

Talkin bout a revolution... - Celia Rees

I have a confession. My next novel, This Is Not Forgiveness, is NOT historical, it is a contemporary novel, but motions to throw me out of the History Girls may be premature. I have another confession. This Is Not Forgiveness is about to be published (Feb 2nd) so this post is going to be a blatant plug for it. I'm not even going to try and disguise it. So, if you want to take issue with that, then feel free to do so in the comment box below.

Every book I write begins with an idea. The idea for this book came from a film: Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. It’s the story of two boys and a girl. The boys are old friends and they both fall in love with Catherine, played by the captivating Jean Moreau. She is an extraordinary girl, unconventional, a free spirit who won’t be owned by either of them.

The film was made in 1962, and is based on Henri-Pierre Roche's novel of the same title, published in 1953. The novel is set before and after the First World War and is a semi autobiographical account of the love triangle between Roche, the artist Marcel Duchamp, and American artist, Beatrice Wood. She died at 105 and might, or might not be, the partial inspiration for Rose DeWitt Bukater in James Cameron's film, Titanic - such are the fascinating facts one unearths through research, but I digress. There is a plenty of history there, different periods of the Twentieth Century, but I find the film (and the book) curiously timeless. I was watching the film when I suddenly thought: ‘You could up date this. Make it now.’ I began to imagine the story I would tell and felt no temptation to make it into historical fiction. It was a strong idea and I wanted to set it in the present. My very first novels were contemporary thrillers. After more than ten years away, I wanted to see if I could still do it. I wanted to go back to my roots.

I began to write it as a love triangle, but that didn't work. I might be able to write lots of things, but straight forward Romance is not one of them. When I'm writing historical fiction: Witch Child, Pirates!, Sovay, The Fool’s Girl, my primary interest is in how historical events impact on my characters’ lives: witch persecution, the sugar trade and slavery, the French Revolution, Elizabethan fear of Catholic spies. I decided that I had to find similar big themes if I was to make this book work. I had my characters, two boys and a girl, so I began to look at the wider context. What is happening in the world around them? How could this could affect and shape their lives? Today’s events are, after all, tomorrow’s history.

We live in interesting times. I decided to make one of the male characters a career soldier, back from Afghanistan, he's been wounded and is suffering from Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
This opened the whole thing out for me It gave me something to research in the way I'd become used to, something to explore. I read accounts of soldiers engaged in warfare, not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but other wars, too, like Vietnam and the Second World War. The effect war has on those fighting doesn’t change. I watched films, like The Hurt Locker, TV documentaries, series like Generation Kill, and ‘soldier vision’, footage shot by the soldiers themselves.

Making one of them a soldier, helped to differentiate the male characters from each other and added weight and relevance to the story. But there was still the girl. I wanted her to be different, like Catherine in Jules et Jim, so I decided to give her an interest in radical politics. Make her an Anarchist. I have to say, that that idea was received with a certain amount of scepticism. Young people interested in radical politics? Very ’Sixties. Then, suddenly students were marching through London, smashing windows, fighting with police, hanging from the Cenotaph, throwing bins at the heir to the throne’s car. That initial scepticism vanished and I found myself writing and re-writing as events unfolded.

Suddenly, it was all kicking off, not just here but everywhere from Egypt to Wall Street. Revolution? Maybe. It is too early to say. History? Certainly. As I said, we live in interesting times...

Torture as Entertainment by Katherine Langrish

I wasn't going to write about this at all.  I was going to write a post about sailing reproduction Viking ships on the sunny waters of Roskilde fjord one happy midsummer a couple of years back.

But then, reading the Guardian newspaper for Saturday 20th August, I came across a review of an audio book, and changed my mind: so the viking ships post will have to wait till next time.

The column is headed 'Sue Arnold's Choice'.   As you probably know, Sue Arnold regularly reviews audio books for the Guardian, and I often read and enjoy her recommendations, but I guess Jove nods, we all have off days, and this one stopped me in my tracks.  You can find it online here, but I'm going to quote from it anyway.

'Pirates!' by Roy McMillan is an audio book for children which Sue Arnold describes as 'an entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia'.  So far, so good: and I was particularly interested to see that the book follows its subject matter right into modern times.  I used to work for Lloyd's Register of Shipping and know full well that pirates have never gone away, and certainly no longer present themselves in 18th century costumes complete with tricorn hats, parrots, cutlasses and seaboots.  (A costume which has a lot to answer for: take away the parrot and add a black mask and a horse and you have a highwayman, another stereotype of the imaginary long-lost romantic past.)

Real pirates are not and never were romantic, and neither were highwaymen, in spite of the myth of the handsome beribboned rascal who kisses the lady's hand before demanding her diamonds.  There's room in fiction, I guess, for romantic rascals: but that's because it's fiction. With another hat on, I spoke recently at the Mervyn Peake Centenary Conference at the University of Chichester on Peake's classic picture book about pirates: 'Captain Slaughterboard Drops Anchor'.  Here is Captain Slaughterboard in all his sleazy glory: a comically terrifying character in the tradition of Long John Silver and Captain Hook.  Pirates in children's fiction are almost pure fantasy: as mythical as unicorns. 

History, however, presents the naked facts.  And the naked facts are often extremely unpleasant.  Don't get me wrong, I don't have a problem with telling children about the nasty things which have been done in the world: but I do have a problem with nastiness which is presented as entertainment.

Time for that quote:  Sue Arnold writes:

"Punctuating the biographies [of famous pirates] are ... graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed 'Gruesome Alert', which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for example, one pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money.  The  unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could only walk on all fours.  Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish."

I'm sorry?  Kids will ENJOY hearing this?

You know, some of them actually may.  The ones without much imagination, and the ones who haven't noticed or bothered to think about the fact that the book follows pirates right up to the present day, and that perhaps torture isn't some quaint old-worlde custom after all.  But I thought books were supposed to broaden our imaginations so that we are more capable of empathy, and I thought history might be a way of making us think more wisely about the present - rather than a lurid chamber-of-horrors freak-show.

My quarrel is not with Roy McMillan's book, which I haven't listened to - it may be well and sensitively written, and the subtitle which the author apparently employs, 'Gruesome Alert', may be genuinely intended to warn rather than to amplify.  My quarrel is with the careless tone of the reviewer.

"Kids are tough" says Sue Arnold.  Well, some of them are and some of them aren't, and parents know pretty well what their own offspring can stand; and what is likely to produce the tap on the bedroom door at midnight and the shivering cry of 'I can't get to sleep - I can't stop thinking about [insert horror of choice]' - so it's a bit silly to name-call those parents who do decide this is all a bit too strong, as 'PC'. 
The world is full of horrors and always has been, we know.  I don't in the least mind children hearing about them - at the appropriate age - as long as the adults who convey this information don't present it as fun stuff.  (Those jolly old pirates, eh? What they got up to!)

My elder daughter studied GCSE history about five years ago, and one of the topics was 'Victorian Crime and Punishment'.  Part of the course involved a close study of the Jack the Ripper murders - including photographs of the victims - for no good reason that I could see (since the Ripper was never caught and therefore never punished) other than its sensation value: educators clearly thought the subject would liven up potentially dull lessons.  My daughter and a good portion of her classmates found it very disturbing, especially as her (female) history teacher appeared to enjoy the topic in a way which was quite out of sympathy with her class.  Indeed, this woman told them with regret she was unable to show them more graphic photos, since when she had done so with the previous year's class, a girl had fainted.

Unlike their teacher, my sixteen year old daughter and her friends understood they were looking at pictures of real people - real women and girls, some maybe not much older than themselves - who had lived hard lives and known terror and pain and early death.  They had been real, not some stop on an East End Jack-the-Ripper tourist trail. 

"Kids are tough".  Let's be sure this doesn't mean, "Kids are insensitive, unimaginative and callous. They need strong meat, even carrion: they won't appreciate anything better."  Let's be sure we don't apply lower standards to children's history books, sensationalising them because we think children won't read them otherwise (and people say "it doesn't matter what they read so long as they're reading" - a statement quite as idiotic as "it doesn't matter what they eat so long as they're eating"). 

And let's agree that just because something happened in the past, doesn't make it entertainment.

See Katherine Langrish at the Cheltenham Festival, Sunday October 16th at 5.00pm, talking with Kevin Crossley-Holland about her book West of the Moon.