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.

Beyond 'Zulu' - the quest for Isandhlwana by Christina Koning

How do novels start? I have to confess I’m fascinated by the whole process. From the germination of an idea to the end result - a published book - often seems to depend on a quite random sequence of events. Chance plays as much of a part in determining the final outcome, as deliberate choice - or perhaps it’s a mixture of the two. I’m always interested to hear about the way other writers approach the task of rendering historical fact into fiction - or indeed into memoir or biography. Does an idea for a book come to you ‘out of the blue’ - or is it arrived at after months of painstaking research?

In the case of my own 2010 novel, The Dark Tower, it was very much a ‘Eureka’ moment - although the months of research, much of it in the British Library, followed soon after. I had been looking through some old family papers, and turned up a diary, written by a great-great-aunt, which described her horrified reaction to the news of a terrible defeat by the British Army at the hands of the Zulu army, at Isandhlwana, in what is now KwaZulu- Natal, on 22nd January 1879. This discovery was the starting-point for the novel. Because I realised that I knew almost nothing about the conflict during which this military catastrophe occurred. I’d heard of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, of course - anyone who’s seen the 1960s film Zulu, starring Michael Caine, will have some idea what that was about. But of course that was a victory for the British - one might almost say a necessary victory, given that it occurred only a day after the disaster at Isandhlwana. I decided that the only way to find out more about this largely forgotten event was to go to where it happened.   

Isandhlwana is a disturbing place. Even if one knows nothing of the grim events enacted there, it still leaves a powerful impression – with its barren outcrops of low hills, surrounding a grassy plain, seamed with dry river-beds, and with the squat, tower-like shape of the mountain, from which it takes its name, looming overhead. It is the landscape evoked, with eerie prescience, by Robert Browning, in his 1855 poem, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’, which supplied me with the title, for the book, and its epigraph:

‘Burningly it came on me all at once, 

This was the place! Those two hills on the right, 

Crouched like two bulls locked horn in horn in fight; 

While to the left, a tall scalped mountain…’

Here, at around mid-day on January 22nd 1879, over two thousand men lost their lives, in one of the bloodiest battles, fought on foreign soil, the British army had ever faced. What made the defeat even more of a blow to the esteem of the British imperial forces was that it was inflicted by an enemy most would have regarded as ‘savages’; an enemy which – though numerically superior - was woefully under-powered in terms of weaponry. In fact, as anyone interested in the history of the Anglo-Zulu wars will know, the Zulus were far from being the undisciplined rabble of popular supposition, but were a formidable fighting-force. Nor – despite the myths that have since grown up about the conflict – were the British soldiers as inexperienced, or their leaders as incompetent, as has been suggested. Bad luck certainly played a part in the tragedy, as did poor judgement by at least one of the commanding officers – but in the main, the British army fought heroically against overwhelming odds, and died, as so many have in conflicts before and since, defending ‘a little piece of ground’ not worth the fighting for.

After such a crushing disaster, morale – both of troops in the line of battle and of those back home – had to be restored, without delay. On the day after the battle of Isandhlwana, came the ‘famous victory’ of Rorke’s Drift. It is perhaps hardly surprising that this incident – in which 139 British soldiers successfully defended the mission station at Rorke’s Drift from an attack by 4,000 Zulus – is far more widely remembered, by the British at least, than what happened on the previous day. The fact that eleven Victoria Crosses – the most ever awarded for a single military action – were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, whilst only three out of a far greater number of the no less heroic combatants at Isandhlwana received the same honour, is surely no accident.

Now, if one visits the place, it is hard not to be moved by the thought of what happened here – reminders of which are everywhere to be seen, in the cairns of white stones which mark the mass-graves of soldiers, who, like Drummer Hodge in Thomas Hardy’s poem of that name about another South African conflict – the Boer War – which was to leave deep scars on the British psyche, have become part of that foreign land they once set out to conquer.

‘They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest 

Uncoffined — just as found: 

His landmark is a kopje-crest 

That breaks the veldt around…’

In the little museum at Isandhlwana are memorabilia – cap- badges, belt-buckles, letters, drawings, diaries – retrieved from the field of battle and preserved, as a poignant reminder that wars are fought by human beings, not machines. If the recent upsurge of interest in the lives of the ordinary soldiers on the hundredth anniversary of the start of the First World War has demonstrated anything, it is that we are no longer prepared to consign those who fought and died in such conflicts to the anonymity which was the fate of the ‘common soldier’ for centuries.

  

In writing The Dark Tower, I wanted to show the devastating effects of war on individual lives, and to make the point that, even though the nature of modern warfare has changed, and its technology has become vastly more powerful, the physical and psychological damage suffered by those caught up in such conflicts remains largely unchanged. In depicting what, arguably, might be described as the first ‘modern’ war, I have chosen to focus, not only on the combatants, but also on those left behind – that is, the women.

For if my novel had a starting-point, or a single moment of inspiration, it was not my visit to Isandhlwana, nor David Rattray’s wonderful talks on the subject at the Royal Geographical Society, but an entry in a slim, cloth-bound diary:

‘February 13th 1879 I must not wait a moment longer because I want to write down the dreadful news we have had from the Cape where our troops are fighting against the Zulus…’

Great-Aunt Laura then goes on to copy out the account of the battle, sent by the Commander of the British forces in Natal, Lord Chelmsford, to the Secretary for War, and published in the previous day’s Times:

‘I regret to state a very disastrous engagement took place on the 22nd of January between the Zulus and a portion of No. 3 Column left to guard the camp about 10 miles in front of Rorke’s Drift. The Zulus came down in overwhelming numbers and in spite of the gallant resistance made by five companies of the 1st battalion of the 24th Regiment… they overwhelmed them…’

‘This terrible news,” writes the then twenty-four year-old Laura Barrett, ‘has caused a most profound sensation all over the country, & eight regiments are ordered out in ten days…’ A later journal entry strikes a more anguished note:

‘I have been through the cloud, & have known what real trouble is, and in the dark & cloudy day I could not write…’

A section of the diary has been torn out at this point. It was this – and the confessional tone of the above – which led me to speculate about whether Laura herself might have had a more personal connection with the ‘terrible news’ she has related, and, if so, what that connection might have been. The few facts I knew about her – a woman who, though living into her nineties, never married, but was said to have once been engaged to a man (perhaps a soldier) who had died in Africa – provided further food for thought.

I realised that Laura’s story was also one I wanted to tell. Out of that realisation, came the opening pages of The Dark Tower.

'The Skull Beneath The Skin: The Nearness of Death in History' by Not A L Berridge

My husband has a cold. The house reeks of eucalyptus, the bins are full of tissues, and the air is loud with complaint. My sympathy of Day One has eroded into the irritation of Day Four, and it’s only a matter of time before I say, ‘Well, you’re not actually dying, are you?’ 

But of course that’s a modern luxury, and a hundred years ago I wouldn’t have dared say it. A ‘chill’ can lead to bronchitis, pleurisy, or pneumonia, and in the days before antibiotics these were often fatal. It might even be the precursor to influenza – and the pandemic of 1918-1920 killed between 3-5% of the entire world’s population. A mere cough could be the first sign of ‘consumption’, ‘phthisis’, ‘scrofula’, ‘Pott's disease’, or the ‘White Plague’ – the global killer we’ve now learned to call ‘tuberculosis’. Everyone knows that if a character in a historical drama is seen to cough, then the next scene is going to be a funeral.

'At Rest': The death of Little Nell in 'The Old Curiosity Shop' by George Cattermole

We still fear some of these things. TB is making a comeback, pandemics are always good for newspaper sales, and we are once again being advised to take precautions our grandparents took for granted. Yet the fact we need to be told to cover our mouths when we cough shows the astonishing degree of our modern complacency. The miracles of modern medicine have stripped away so many of our natural fears that we’ve come to see science as a shield against death itself.

But when we write historical fiction that shield has to be the first thing to go. There’s obviously huge variation in place and period, but awareness of sickness and mortality colours every one of them, and our characters can’t but share in it. How can they do otherwise when they’re seeing it every day?

'The Beggars' by Brueghal the Elder

And really they would be. There’ve been sick beggars on the streets since before even Roman times, and as late as the 17th century it was impossible to walk the length of the Champs Elysée and remain ignorant of the reality of blindness, paralysis, lameness, dropsy, or even disfiguring cancers. Nor was visible sickness restricted to the poor. Smallpox struck kings as well as paupers, and even Elizabeth I bore the scars of it on her face and hands as evidence that she had faced death and survived. Almost equally prevalent (especially in mainland Europe) were the terrible signs of syphilis, on which many medieval church gargoyles are deliberately modelled to show the deadly wages of sin.

Smallpox victim 1911 Illinois                 Bust of tertiary syphilis

But syphilis didn’t end in medieval times, and neither did most of these other horrors. Fast forward to the civilization of Victorian England and we can laugh at the grotesque minor characters populating Dickens’ novels – but the truth is that he was largely describing what he saw. Some deformities were caused by accidents or war wounds – eye-patches, wooden legs, and hooks for hands – but many others are immediately recognizable to doctors as the result of childhood illness or malnutrition. 

'The Internal Economy of Dotheboys Hall' from 'Nicholas Nickleby' by Phiz

Goitres were a consequence of iodine deficiency, ‘hunchback’ is kyphosis, often caused by poor childhood nutrition, bandy legs were a sign of rickets, while ‘cripples’ with atrophied limbs were probably victims of polio. Many of these conditions are still with us in the poorer countries, and when we look at those heartbreaking photographs of children with cleft lips and palates it’s hard to believe that not very long ago we’d have seen these in London too.

 

 

 All these things are an essential part of the ‘historical world’, and we often have enormous fun writing them. With In the Name of the King I was delighted to find the real character of Fontrailles was genuinely a ‘hunchback’, and only wish I’d had the space to develop the ways in which that affected his personality. I also took a hideously writerly pleasure in basing my fictional Comte de Vallon on a real-life syphilitic nobleman whose return to society was eased by Louis XIV requesting his courtiers ‘not to notice his having no nose.’ Anything out of the ordinary is grist to a novelist’s mill, and I was going to grind it all I could.

But sometimes it’s in the 'ordinary' that the real gold is buried. We can write historical novels where nobody gets ill at all, and yet the characters will still have been shaped by a world in which these things happen. Their perception of cruelty will be different, their ideas of fairness, even their concept of religion, and they will be constantly aware of their own mortality. Dreadful as they were, the hunchbacks and crooked legs were tokens of those who had survived, and served as a terrible reminder of the many who did not.

People could and did die of the most minor things, and the fact they were so imperfectly understood only added to the sense of a random destiny that could strike at any time. This 1665 Bill of Mortality raises far more questions than it answers, and while ‘sore legge’ might be tetanus, for instance, what are we to make of medical causes of death listed as ‘Bedridden’, ‘Suddenly’, or even ‘Grief’? Yet the one that brings home to me most powerfully the reality of the pre-antibiotic world is described in that ominously single word – ‘Teeth’.

And of course we have to show this awareness in our writing. We can’t have characters say modestly ‘It’s just a scratch’ when everyone would have known that a scratch could kill. We can’t even give them a quick bout of toothache and then forget about it. Ridiculous as it is, we even have to let most of our characters believe it’s possible to die of a broken heart.

But the risk that would have affected most people sooner or later is that of pregnancy, and we can’t ever take that lightly. Even today we know of the risks of miscarriage, and many couples won’t officially announce a pregnancy until the first three months are safely passed – but in the case of Louis XIV’s brother Philippe, the Queen was never acknowledged to have even been pregnant until the child was born and had stayed alive a full calendar month.

Madame de Sevigne by Lefebvre

The risk to the mother was almost as great, as we see in that figure of 23 childbed deaths in a week. In 1671 the famous French letter-writer Madame de Sévigné began a letter to her married daughter in this rather cryptic fashion:

 

'Today is the sixth of March. I beg you to tell me how you are. If you are well, you are ill, but if you are ill, then you are well. I hope, my child that you are ill, so that you will be in good health for at least some time to come.’

The mystery is clear once we realize the daughter was due to menstruate, and what her mother feared more than anything was another pregnancy.

But what I actually find most fascinating about that letter is the way phrases we now use as mere formulae had real meaning in the past. ‘Tell me how you are’ is not the standard ‘How are you?’ with which we greet each other today, usually hoping we won’t be told the answer. Those of us over a certain age still tend to begin letters with the polite ‘I hope you’re well’, but this has already come to signify a broader enquiry in which health plays little part.

1864 Civil War letter with standard opening

It was different in the 19th century. I included a letter in Into the Valley of Death which began with the then-standard phrase ‘I hope this finds you well as it leaves me’, but it wasn’t until a reader asked me about it that I began to see its real significance. Outside London, a letter could take days to reach the recipient, and the writer’s awareness of time reveals a very real concern for the risk of ill-health. The most they’ll commit to is ‘I’m well at the time of writing’, because they know perfectly well that in a week or so they may not be. This seems strange in a time when even the most deadly disease usually gives the sufferer at least a few more months of life – but in 1854 a man who wrote ‘I am well’ on Monday could be dead by Friday. It’s true the phrase is a standard one and would often have been used without conscious thought, but behind it is a mindset that knows the sword of Damocles can fall at any minute.

And this one phrase exemplifies two of the things I love most about writing historical fiction. The first is the everyday reality of a bygone world, which can give us not only great texture but also the kind of plot development unthinkable in a contemporary work. 

 My favourite example is in Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Bennet walks in the rain to a dinner with two desirable bachelors, and quickly develops a cold which makes her return impossible. The house is only three miles away from her own home, but she is of course too ill to be moved, and in such a condition that requires her equally marriageable sister Lizzy to come and attend her.

This is brilliant. True, if Jane’s cold had been anything like my husband’s then her hosts would have bundled her out of the house in two minutes flat, but if we assume the phlegmier stages were passed invisibly in the bedroom, then the plot mechanics are perfect – and I challenge anyone to devise a contemporary narrative which would achieve such a result.

But, as usual with Austen, there’s far more going on here than plot. Jane’s mother deliberately sent her daughter out in the rain in the hope of engineering this very situation, and Mr Bennet is only half-joking when he hopes she’ll find it a comfort if her daughter dies following her orders. Austen is of course writing about her own time, but she uses those perceptions to create both story and character unique to that age, and I'd love to be able to emulate her.

But the second aspect I love is the Sword of Damocles itself, and the way in which awareness of death gives an extraordinary intensity to life. Our own lives are too safe to imagine it easily, but I’ve found the most useful comparison is to wartime. When living through war we’re all at once back in a time when life is cheap, death can strike without warning, and the only moment there might ever be is now. We might normally find incomprehensible the religious fervour of bygone ages, but even an atheist prays when the house they’re sitting in is being bombed. We might laugh at the superstition of the past, but from verbal rituals to ‘lucky socks’, you’ll find no people more superstitious than soldiers in even a modern war.

Everything is more concentrated and intense. The friendship forged between men who face death together is far deeper than that between those who use the same coffee machine, and when time is short, then love and passion soar as never before. And people take risks. Mad, exhilarating, even heroic risks – because there is so little to lose. Live through war, and we begin to understand some of the heroic lunacy of even sixteenth century peacetime, when men and women risked their lives for power, for politics, for religion, and for love.

It's no coincidence that the most passionate romances are often set in war

I write war in my novels anyway, but I’d still want to study it for the insight it can give us into the past. War is a magic door that can take me right back in time, to a world where death lurks round every corner - and where there are far worse things to deal with than my husband’s cold. 

***

Well, OK, I am A L Berridge really, just filling in a gap in the schedule. And I hope you noticed I didn't mention Crimea even once...