regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
I read this one months ago but, what with one thing and another, never got round to writing up a review. Now [personal profile] luzula’s recent posts about this book reminded me of it, it's getting near a year since I last posted a D. K. Broster review and I thought I'd better get on with writing up the ongoing read-through; well, better late than never...

Couching at the Door (1942) takes a departure from Broster’s usual material, being a collection of short horror stories. I suspect that at least most of them are considerably older than the date of this book; some had appeared before in magazines, and some in the earlier collection A Fire of Driftwood.

(The title is sometimes misquoted as Crouching at the Door. ‘Couch’ is an archaic word for ‘lie’ or ‘lay’, probably related to the noun ‘couch’ as in the American for sofa, a couch being something you lie down on. Broster is paraphrasing Genesis 4:7, part of which the Revised Version renders as ‘and if thou doest not well, sin coucheth at the door’... While looking up the verse to check which translation it came from, I found that several other more recent translations have ‘crouching’, suggesting that Broster’s book isn’t the only place people have confused these words. So there you go.)

The exact forms of horror vary pretty widely. There are hauntings, time travel, doppelgangers, general unexplained weirdness; some of the stories are not outright supernatural but instead make a more psychological horror just as terrifying; while most of the settings are modern, several of the stories include historical elements, looking rather different here from what they are in Broster’s realistic historical novels. In all this variety I think most of them are pretty good; Broster’s elegant and precise prose, which works so well in rich description of time and place and in illustrating historical mores of honour and duty, also works very well for creating a precisely-drawn sense of spine-chilling horror.

The title story is about a pretentious and unpleasant Oscar Wilde wannabe of a writer who is haunted by the ghost of a past terrible sin in the form of... a fluffy fur boa that keeps turning up and trying to give him a hug, utterly horrifyingly. It's funny and creepy and very good, and I was amused to see a shout-out to, of all things, John Halifax, Gentleman (found alongside the relevantly-quoted Bible on a shelf of books that belonged to the main character’s mother and which form a morally-relevant contrast to his present depraved life). My other favourites included ‘The Pavement’, in which an elderly woman becomes obsessed with the image of a girl in the mosaic floor of a Roman villa on her family’s land (I was delighted to see Broster writing something with real femslash potential for once, and amused by how different it is from her slashy stories; it’s gone on the list for future [community profile] femslashex nominations). ‘Clairvoyance’ and ‘The Promised Land’, both repeated from A Fire of Driftwood, are both excellently chilling, and I very much enjoyed revisiting them here.

Some of the other stories are just downright weird in ways that, if they don’t perhaps work perfectly, still make for really good reading—I would put ‘From the Abyss’ and ‘The Taste of Pomegranates’ (which is better described as playing with the ideas and aesthetics of the myth of Hades and Persephone than as a take on the story itself) in this category. Before the story swerves into really disturbing murder mystery, ‘Juggernaut’ includes a very funny scene in which a writer character despairs over the printing-error-riddled mess which the publisher has made of the proofs of her story—I’m sure Broster was writing from experience there! ‘The Window’ (another repeat from AFoD) and ‘The Pestering’ both combine horror with historical elements familiar from Broster’s novels.

This collection seems to be one of the most difficult to find of all Broster’s books, which is odd when set against the fact that (at least some of) the individual stories have received much more attention, especially recently, than her historical novels. There was a new edition of some of them published only a couple of years ago! I would love to ebook the original Couching at the Door, especially since most of the stories in it are not otherwise available online, but first editions are not to be got for any remotely reasonable price. Perhaps the wartime publication meant a more limited number of copies? In any case, if you can get your hands on it (I have the 2007 Wordsworth edition, which seems generally more obtainable), this collection is highly recommended. ETA, thanks to [personal profile] luzula: There is also a commercial ebook edition!

I only have one more D. K. Broster book to go :(
regshoe: Black and white illustration of a young woman in Victorian dress, jauntily tipping her wide-brimmed hat (Gladys)
In her penultimate novel, D. K. Broster returns to her old favourite historical setting, approaches it from a new angle and has plenty of fun with it.

The Sea without a Haven (1941) opens in Toulon in December 1793. Charlotte d'Esparre, a young lady from a Royalist family, has sought refuge here in her aunt's house after the rest of her family died and/or were scattered by the chaos of the Revolution; but Toulon, about to fall to the Republican forces, is no longer safe. So the aunt arranges for Charlotte to marry a man, a plantation owner from Louisiana, who can convey her safely away by sea. Charlotte is not at all happy about this, but goes through with the marriage because she has no other options... and later that very day her husband is killed in a scuffle at the quayside while escaping from Toulon, and she is left alone on a ship in the British fleet which is rescuing people from the city. The ship brings Charlotte to Leghorn in Italy, where she tries to find some means of supporting herself, and from there she gets into various further adventures.

It is a refreshing change of focus from Broster's earlier books! This is the first time in the read-through that a female character has been firmly the single main character; I liked this very much in general and I liked Charlotte, who, understandably shaken by the hardships she goes through, finds reserves of toughness and resourcefulness. Really it's a female-perspective book generally; the whole thing, from the title downwards, is basically about the precarity and vulnerability of a woman's position in the historical society of the setting and when war forces her to become a refugee. (I imagine the topic of war and refugees was a relevant one when this book was written; and as for the hardships of being a self-supporting single woman, Broster must have experienced some of those herself). However, this only goes so far. Broster seems totally uninterested in introducing any complex, close f/f relationship to match the m/m ones of her best books, and two of Charlotte's most prominent relationships with other women consist largely of them being groundlessly jealous of Charlotte's fictitious romantic involvement with their love interests and absurdly obsessive and spiteful about it, which—I mean, women can be awful and indeed sexist to other women, a book pointing that out isn't anti-feminist, on the contrary, but I did feel it was a bit overly prominent. Besides that, there is some racism in the early chapters, though that side of things disappears later on.

In Leghorn Charlotte supports herself by becoming a governess, and this gives Broster a chance to introduce a child character who is a massive contrast to the cloyingly adorable children of some other books. In general I'm inclined to think the high point of her writing comes in the early-middle of her bibliography; but between this and her Mary Queen of Scots, this is one aspect in which she definitely improved over the whole course of her career.

Then there's Charlotte's love interest, Captain Nugent Carew of the British Navy, who baffled me by combining a surname I find particularly euphonious and a first name I find particularly unpleasant. (At least Charlotte's new married name will be a nice one?). Apart from that I couldn't summon up any especially strong feelings about him; he's a serious, capable officer who falls in love with Charlotte, is determined to save her from peril when that becomes relevant, and doesn't really get any noteworthy character development. Their getting-together at the end is a bit unsavoury, in the 'ooh, a Masterful man Taking Charge and deciding unilaterally that the heroine will marry him, isn't that the sexiest thing ever (???apparently?)' way. Actually I didn't find it as bad as it might have been—I think partly because I'd been warned and was not sure whether to expect even worse; partly by favourable comparison with the recent very annoying Heyer romance; partly because it is kind of understandable that Charlotte, after everything she's been through and all the self-reliance she's had to do, would take some comfort in a partner who 'takes charge' and sorts everything out for her; and partly because, to give what credit is due, Broster is careful to establish that Charlotte really does want to be with Captain Carew and is happy to choose him.

This is not a brilliantly ambitious book in general; the plot is fairly simple and the climax is contrived, not to say slightly silly. Not that it doesn't have anything serious about it, but in general I get the impression that Broster has left some of the complexity of her early and mid-career books behind and is just having fun messing about in a setting she loves. Aspects of it reminded me of Ships in the Bay!: it has the same light and somewhat annoying but basically happy romance, the same authorial attitude of fond indulgence towards the main characters, and the shape of the climax feels similar—a genuinely threatening but small-scale situation of conflict which, without failing to take it seriously, is treated kind of comically and resolved happily. I think Broster is good at combining that kind of arch humour in her tone and attitude with a real weight and seriousness where appropriate. And her prose is an utter delight to read; she constructs sentences with such brilliant precision and balance, and I am now as always in awe.

It's less closely based on real history than SitB! and other books—the island of Farfalletta is totally fictional, as far as I can tell—but, as always, Broster does get plenty of real historical detail in there where relevant, including an appearance by the current Captain Nelson, who's one of Carew's comrades during the British conquest of Corsica. And the landscape descriptions are as good as ever—here the maquis and luxuriant foliage of the Mediterranean and the sea in all its varied moods. Broster was born on the outskirts of Liverpool, and once wrote that her earliest memories were of ships and the sea; it's not so prominent in her early books, but those memories seem to have come back to her here, and she knows how to use them to excellent effect.

Also, did I miss something or Expandvague spoilers for the ending )

This book has a sequel, The Captain's Lady, and I am very much looking forward to reading about Charlotte's further adventures; but before I get there, another collection of horror stories intervenes...
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
So I thought it might be nice while on my Flight of the Heron-themed holiday to read another D. K. Broster book, albeit one not itself set in the Highlands. In fact, while this book does feature a lot that's familiar from Broster's usual style, the historical setting is a bit of a change from her usual eighteenth-century ground.

Child Royal (1937) opens at a Scottish country house in the late nineteenth century, where we're introduced to a curious old portrait showing a couple, ancestors of the house's current owner, holding a picture of Mary, Queen of Scots as a child; a visitor asks about this painting, to which the owner replies that he will tell the strange, sad story of these sixteenth-century ancestors and their Queen...

And so the rest of the book follows Ninian Graham, the man in the portrait, whom we meet in 1548 as he returns to Scotland from his life in the French service to visit his family. Events follow, and he ends up accompanying the five-year-old Queen of Scots on her voyage to France, where she is (historically) being sent to keep her safe from the English foe and where she will be brought up alongside the Dauphin of France, to whom she is betrothed, and his siblings. Ninian saves Mary's life when she is attacked by a dog on board the ship; the young Queen is determined to show her gratitude by appointing him to a position in her household, and Ninian spends the rest of the book as Mary's Master of Horse. Here he meets and falls in love with Magdalen Lindsay, Mary's maid of honour (she is of course the other half of that portrait). But things get a bit more dramatic for both Ninian and Magdalen when he meets a mysterious young Frenchman who claims to be his illegitimate half-brother. From here things twist and turn, with all sorts of political drama and royal intrigue, and Ninian and Magdalen's devotion to their young Queen is tested through sore trials indeed.

I don't have a huge amount to say about this book. It's pretty good; I certainly liked some things about it and there wasn't anything I especially disliked, but it didn't grab me the way some of Broster's books do, and I didn't get particularly attached to the characters or become invested in their stories. Really I think my favourite thing about it was, surprisingly, Mary, Queen of Scots herself. Writing child characters has not been Broster's strong point in certain previous books, but I think she did a good job of it here: as the title promises, Mary—between five and eight years old during the book's plot—is both believably childish and suitably royal, in a way that comes across as quite appropriately weird when her royal manner, her awareness of her own position as monarch and the outside facts of her royalty (like the way she receives as her due the absolute and sincere loyalty of devoted and yet sensible royalists like Ninian and Magdalen; or how she's betrothed to the Dauphin of France while they're both children and everyone accepts this as normal) are combined with the basic reality of her childhood. Broster does also indulge in an appropriate amount of commentary and foreshadowing of Mary's historical future, which I liked. Despite the setting being two hundred or so years before her usual favourite periods, there's still a lot of historical detail in there, and I enjoyed visiting the sixteenth-century court setting, though I wouldn't—either fannishly or for real—want to live there. I also thought it was interesting to see something of the earlier history of the Auld Alliance, with all these Scotsmen in the French service and of course the Scottish Queen being sent to France for safety, before the Jacobite context of the eighteenth century gets involved in it.

The main plot as it develops in the second half of the book was, I thought, not so strong. There was certainly potential in the conflict between Ninian and Gaspard, the half-brother, but the drama is spoiled by, I think, the villains being too villainous. Yes, Gaspard shows an amount of horrified remorse over what he does both during and after the terrible deed itself, but this is never actually worked out in his interactions with Ninian in a way that might have led to an interesting relationship and resolution between them, and the way other characters come into things is frustrating. Oh, I said, obviously they can just use that postscript to make it clear they're both innocent—but wait, one of these scheming French nobles cut the postscript off and no one believes them that it was ever there! It's too contrived and not satisfying.

The romance between Ninian and Magdalen is unobjectionable—they're both likeable, it seems like they'll be happy together—but again not particularly interesting. I suspect Broster may have had a bit of a thing for scenarios where a couple are prevented from marrying as soon as they'd like to and the man expresses his frustration about this in an alluringly attractive (?) way—I think this is a bit silly, but whatever. As with Broster's other later books, there isn't really any slashiness anywhere.

So, overall, this one doesn't stand out in quality amongst Broster's novels, but it does stand out for the different setting and interesting ideas, there are certainly things to enjoy in there, and I would recommend it as long as you don't go in expecting something of the quality of her best books. And now I only have two more of her novels, plus one collection of short stories, to go! Next up in order is, very conveniently as I have just acquired a first-edition copy of it, The Sea Without a Haven...
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
At long last, I have returned to the D. K. Broster read-through! It's good to be back.

World Under Snow (1935) is a fairly massive departure from Broster's previous style and niche—instead of a romantic historical adventure, it's a modern detective novel. I thought her last historical, Almond, Wild Almond, was particularly weak; perhaps she agreed, and thought it was time for a new direction. Perhaps she wanted to develop further the strand of modern-set and mysterious writing from the second half of A Fire of Driftwood. Or perhaps her co-writer G. Forester is responsible for the new style; and this is a particularly frustrating question because I have been totally unable to find out anything about G. Forester. All that seems certain is that they never published any other books under that name; but whether they ever wrote anything else (obscure short stories, unpublished, or under another name), how they knew Broster, what their literary tastes and background were in general or what the G. stands for, I have no idea.

Anyway, it's a murder mystery! We open on a snowy winter's evening in the Cotswolds, where something mysterious happens to a postman, David Jenner, as he struggles on his round over the wolds (neither rain, nor snow, nor glom of nit...). After that we meet Hilary Severn, a civil servant and friend of Jenner's who uses his house as a base while fishing in the Cotswolds; Hilary learns of Jenner's disappearance, and then of the discovery of his body buried in a snowdrift. At the same time Hilary's BFF, the elaborately-named Denzil Folyat, has just got engaged to a charming girl named Chloe Page. Hilary goes to the Cotswolds to comfort Jenner's grieving widow, but the plot begins to thicken when Mrs Jenner tells him about her suspicions of foul play surrounding her husband's death. Initially intending simply to relieve Mrs Jenner of this obvious delusion, Hilary turns sleuth—and soon discovers that things are not at all as simple as they seem, and that Jenner's death appears connected in some way with his friend Denzil, and a certain unpleasant rival he has for Chloe's affections...

It's a cleverly-constructed mystery, and I enjoyed the unfolding of all the vital details, the clues planted early on that come back, the relation of apparently unrelated parts of the story to each other, and the eventual solution of the mystery. The shape and mood of the thing are very much reminiscent of the more famous detective authors of this period—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc.—and I enjoyed seeing an example of the genre that hasn't stood the test of time so well and comparing them. It's definitely not as good as theirs—the plot and solution rely quite a lot on contrived coincidence, and I thought some of the details were rather implausible—but it was a fun and suitably dramatic mystery, and I enjoyed it.

And, because one can't really give full opinions of a murder mystery without spoilers: Expandspoilers! )

I also really enjoyed seeing Broster writing in a new setting and atmosphere. The prose is recognisably hers, though not so distinctive as in her other novels, and I wonder how much of this is because of the new context and how much is because some of it was written by Forester instead (one gets curious about exactly how this co-writing works...). And the modern setting is great fun: a world of motor cars, 1930s office work, crowded Underground trains and sudden telephone calls clashes rather with Broster's favourite themes of honour, which come up faintly and rather confusedly in poor Hilary's characterisation. Another thing it has in common with other interwar-period detective novels I've read is a certain self-consciousness of both setting and genre: there's a lot of comparison between modern and Victorian life and values, for instance, and an awareness on the characters' parts that they're 'playing the role' of sleuth in a certain type of story. That was interesting to see, and I enjoyed some of the snobbishness about modern life, though some of it seems rather hypocritical—I don't think you get to complain about how the interconnectedness of the modern world ruins no-longer-isolated lovely old villages with new development when you're driving a car halfway across the country every weekend, Hilary—and the portrayal of Chloe as (rather blandly) good because old-fashioned has a slightly nasty savour to it after Almond, Wild Almond.

Perhaps it's a feature of the genre that characters and relationships take a back seat to the development of the mystery plot, but I did feel that these weren't nearly as good as they often are in Broster's historical novels. There was a lot of potential in the various tensions and conflicts of Hilary and Denzil's friendship, but apart from a few fraught moments it's not developed anything like as compellingly as some of the relationships in the other books. And I found both Hilary and Denzil frustratingly neither-one-thing-nor-t'other in their values and morals: they're not committed to honour and duty as Keith and Ewen are—perhaps the authors felt it wouldn't be plausible for any men to be, in the modern world—but neither are they really bad, and the resultingly rather vague way in which they're good but flawed I found much less interesting than the conflicts of loyalty, love and duty in the historical books. And there's no slashiness anywhere!

A few other things! Broster's books are often notable for fun minor characters, and that's still the case here—I especially liked Quentin, Hilary's irritatingly curious ten-year-old nephew. At one point there's a striking reoccurrence of what looks like the central idea of the short story 'Fate the Eavesdropper', although here the calamity is merely significantly threatened, and I found that a very interesting example of how authors reuse ideas across stories. There is, as far as I can find, only one free digitised copy of this book on the internet, and it's missing a couple of pages—not plot-crucial pages, but aggravating enough. I shall have to find a paper copy and see if I can fill in the gap (this book won't be eligible for Project Gutenberg for a while, but it's as well to prepare...)

Overall, definitely not one of Broster's best, but very entertaining, and interesting for being something a bit different in the progress of the read-through. And next is Child Royal, which looks like another interestingly different one!
regshoe: A stack of brightly-coloured old books (Stack of books)
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox by Stephen Jay Gould (2003). Subtitled Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, which more or less explains what the book is about. The hedgehog and the fox come from a proverb which forms the central image of Gould's argument: to paraphrase, the fox uses its cunning to devise many strategies for evading its enemies, whereas the hedgehog concentrates all its effort into a single highly effective strategy (curling up into a ball, protected by its spines). Gould relates the animals to his ideal for a full intellectual life and culture: we need the diverse strategies of the fox, represented by the different and complementary approaches of the sciences and humanities, allied to the hedgehog's definitiveness of purpose in our intellectual aims. He develops this argument by exploring the history of conflict between the sciences and the humanities, showing how it has its roots in the emergence of modern science in the seventeenth century in a context dominated by a Renaissance humanism which was often hostile to the new approach of empirical science. He argues that the antagonism this situation created is no longer relevant in the modern world, and also argues against the modern scientific view—represented by his biologist colleague E. O. Wilson—that the humanities should be subsumed into the sciences in a sort of hierarchy; instead, the different intellectual traditions must work together on equal terms. I am as much in awe as ever of Gould's insight and erudition; his arguments are beautifully thought out and fascinating, and his prose is a pleasure to read. I especially appreciated his own particular scientist's perspective—as a palaeontologist, Gould is more aware of the historical aspects of science and the usefulness of more humanities-like approaches to understanding the world than perhaps a more reductive physicist (for example) might be, and brings this into his arguments very interestingly.

Very good stuff, and I really must read more of Gould's longer books. After this one I especially want to look at Rocks of Ages, about science and religion, another topic I trust him to have interesting and good thoughts on—but of course there are the more purely scientific books as well, and Full House looks particularly good.

A Pacifist's War by Frances Partridge (written 1939-45, published 1978). Another account of life in World War II, from another interesting perspective. Frances Partridge was a writer, a connection of the Bloomsbury Group and a principled pacifist, who lived during the war in the Wiltshire countryside with her husband and young son; her diary records their everyday life and her thoughts about the war and life in general. A lot of it is taken up by accounts of visits to and from Bloomsbury Group friends, which were not all that interesting (I found many of the people described kind of annoying). The parts I most enjoyed were Partridge's private reflections on and feelings about the events of the war, which presented a fascinating contrast to Mollie Panter-Downes's more public and conventional accounts: without being particularly closely involved in events, she records in detail the emotions of living through the war as someone who took seriously the idea of war as an evil in itself, while necessarily being very much invested in Britain winning. The conflict, emotional contradictions, anxiety and hopelessness she writes about are, I think, a very valuable perspective—pretty much, it was an awful time to be alive. Partridge's husband Ralph, who had become a pacifist after fighting in World War I, was called up, chose to register as a conscientious objector and actually had a hard time convincing the authorities that he was genuine in his beliefs—that process was also interesting to read about.

And a couple of shorter things:

I had missed out D. K. Broster's short story 'Mongst All Foes (1902) in my read-through, and was reminded of it now. It makes very interesting context for Flight of the Heron: not only was Broster already writing about the Jacobites more than twenty years before the novel, the story contains some very similar themes of friendship, honour, terrible dilemmas and noble tragedy, as well as some particular familiar elements like hurt/comfort, dramatic swordfights and more than a little homoeroticism. (Arguably more overt homoeroticism than FotH, actually—the narrator actually says at one point that he could never have loved a woman, because he loved his friend first). The writing style is also interesting—unlike most of Broster's writing, the story is in first person, and the style, while recognisable as Broster's own, is not yet the distinctive omniscient voice of the novels. It feels more consciously old-fashioned than most of her historical writing, as well—there's especially a lot of use of the 'had it been... it had been' subjunctive, a construction I think is very elegant if slightly confusing.

And speaking of '~friendship~', I've also been having a look through The Quorum: A Magazine of Friendship, whose single issue was published in 1920. Very interesting stuff, and wide-ranging—the contributions include homoerotic poetry, a review of a recent school story and an essay arguing that friendship across class boundaries is necessary to heal political conflict—and also interesting for the perspective it gives on period views of 'friendship' and types of relationship in general. The linked edition contains an introduction discussing the historical queer and literary context in more detail. I came across the magazine via [personal profile] sovay commenting on a discussion of historical attitudes to friendship and love on [personal profile] osprey_archer's journal, and the contributor most discussed there was Dorothy L. Sayers, whose poem 'Veronica' was probably my favourite thing in the magazine. Her book Unnatural Death seems to be especially relevant to this side of things in her writing—I bounced off the second Peter Wimsey book several years ago, but recent discussions have intrigued me, and I see that Unnatural Death is in fact the third book in the series, so I may well go back and give it a try now...

Finally, I have also read E. W. Hornung's Witching Hill! It is excellent—one of my favourites of his so far, I think—and I shall write up a proper review this weekend. :)
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
Despite the familiar settings, I'd been warned not to expect too much from this book, and now, yeah, I see what you mean. This was definitely not D. K. Broster's finest moment.

Almond, Wild Almond (1933), like The Flight of the Heron, takes place during the 1745 Jacobite rising. Broster tends to keep to a fairly narrow slice of history in her settings, and there have been small overlaps in the settings of her books before, but this is the first time she's returned to exactly the same piece of history as in a previous book. However, there's little direct crossover: this one is set largely in the eastern Highlands, around Loch Rannoch in Perthshire; and the events of the plot are entirely different again.

The beginning made me think that perhaps Broster was going to approach the '45 from the angle which, given her other books, one might have expected her to approach it all along, because this book opens in 1744 in Dunkirk, with the failed French expedition to England which preceded the eventual successful landing of Prince Charles in Scotland. We see the Prince meeting a Highland Jacobite named Ranald Maclean and a French officer, M. de Lancize, and see something of the Comte de Saxe's plans. However, we swiftly return to Scotland and follow Ranald as he meets Bride Stewart, a young woman from a Perthshire Jacobite family (they're Stewarts from the royal line, as we keep being reminded!). Ranald, upon receiving the news of the Prince's landing, is torn between his duty to the cause, his sudden love for Bride and his need to go back to France to fight in an inheritance dispute which will determine his own future. Of course he decides to stay and fight for the Prince; and the rest of the book follows his, and Bride's, fate over the course of the rising.

I'll talk about the things I liked first, so as not to be unfair! Broster's prose is as lovely as ever, and there are some more good descriptions of the Highlands. I liked getting to see a slightly different side of the '45, including a few scenes set during the march into England, a memorable appearance by the historical Jacobite heroine Lady Lude, some detailed description of the experience of Highland households forced to quarter Government soldiers and the (cliched, but fun) encounter with the Prince while he's skulking amongst the heather in the summer of '46. I very much enjoyed Ewen Cameron's brief cameo, in which he rather impatiently breaks up a duel between two far less sensible young men (no old heads on young shoulders in this book!). Oh, and the book includes a rather lovely map, although no Ardroy on this one, I note.

The things I didn't like... well, there have been some less than ideal thematic trends hovering in the background of Broster's writing for a while, I think, and in this book they come to the fore in a decidedly unfortunate way. Spoilers below:

ExpandPurity-based morality is horrifying )

...Besides all that, the inevitable comparisons with Flight of the Heron somewhat undermine even the good things about this book. There are some nice passages about the characters' love for their Highland homes; but they're nothing like as good or as convincing as Ewen's love for Ardroy (and Ranald's conflict over leaving the Highlands for his French inheritance is strangely dismissed by the ending). We see the defeat of the Jacobite cause, and the bravery of the Prince; but we don't feel it the way we felt it with Ewen after Culloden. And there are no interesting m/m relationships at all. Can that side of Broster's id come back, please, instead of this one?

Overall, definitely a disappointment. I shall carry on in hope of better things to come; and, hmm, I think the next book, World Under Snow, might be just that...
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
And now for something... somewhat different.

A Fire of Driftwood (1932) is D. K. Broster's eleventh published book and first collection of short stories. Like many authors of the time (including E. W. Hornung!), Broster seems to have got her start as a writer publishing short stories, as well as poetry, in magazines, and here various stories apparently written over some period of time were published in book form together.

I say it's a collection of short stories; actually it's two distinct collections of short stories published together for mysterious reasons and sitting slightly oddly alongside each other. The book is divided into two parts. The first set of stories are in very much the same vein as Broster's novels: romantic historical adventures, most of them set during the French Revolution and the rest not very far away from it. The second set are very different: they're supernatural horror stories in contemporary or near-contemporary settings. This makes for an interesting contrast, and reveals an intriguing new side of Broster's character as a writer.

The typical historical stories of the first set make a good complement to Broster's novels. Their plots feature many of the familiar trappings—duty and honour, nobility and courage in the face of tragic fates, parole prisoners, wounded characters being cared for by others, compassion and respect between enemies—but they also seem to extend and play on the structures of the novels in some interesting ways. The first story, 'Our Lady of Succour', can almost be interpreted as a subversion of the Keith Windham/Hervey Barrington type of the cynical character redeemed through kindness to a helpless wounded enemy, though the context is somewhat different. Another story has a sympathetic main character who again seems to be the honourable wounded enemy in need of the help of a courageous ingénue, but who it turns out was formerly a parole prisoner and (unthinkable to a Ewen, a Raoul or an Aymar) was arrested and imprisoned after breaking his parole. Two others feature characters, one Royalist and one Republican, both being killed by members of their own respective sides for putting personal above political loyalties—the parallel between them isn't very clear and perhaps wasn't intended as significant, but I thought it fit well with the more complicated attitude towards characters' political allegiances that Broster seems to be developing over time. As with the novels, most of the sympathetic characters are Royalists and their allies, but villainous Royalists and heroic Republicans are certainly not entirely absent.

The horror stories of the second set are not a complete departure from Broster's other writings—the prose style is very recognisably hers, she still manages to work French history into many of the stories and the religious elements of some of them are not unexpected from the co-author of The Vision Splendid—but they are certainly something a bit new. And they're impressively varied between themselves, too. There are ghosts, religious miracles, murders and early twentieth-century spiritualism. Some of the stories are very much overtly supernatural, others merely creepy; some have the same sentimental mood that shows up in the novels, others are shockingly brutal. Altogether I enjoyed this new aspect of Broster very much! The ending of 'The Crib' does that annoying thing of mocking the hypothetical sceptic who'd scorn to believe the supernatural tale were it presented to them as true, which I think generally ruins the mood of an otherwise good ghost story; but then 'The Book of Hours' seems to be half-subverting a similar sort of religious sentimentality, which perhaps made up for it. It was interesting to see the appearance in 'The Window' of First World War nursing, a biographical element which was apparently an important influence on Broster's writing but, until this story, not directly. 'Fate the Eavesdropper' and 'Clairvoyance' are both impressively bloody and beautifully chilling (though the latter is a bit unfortunately exoticising; Broster wouldn't perhaps have treated an ancient French sword the same way), but I think the most horrifying of all is 'The Promised Land', which starts out as a sort of light interwar-period social tragi-comedy and ends up somewhere that wouldn't look out of place in the more experimental and disturbing Agatha Christie novels.

[personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea has put together a good list of Broster's early magazine stories here, which shows that at least some of the stories in A Fire of Driftwood had been published in magazines some time earlier—the earliest one linked there is 'The Aristocrat', from 1906. Update: it's actually 'Fate the Eavesdropper', from 1902! I don't know how many of the rest were new, rather than just not being available on the internet now. It would be interesting to know when these were written in relation to her novels, given how many of them seem to be developing and complicating themes from the novels—perhaps, rather than being evidence that they were written later, if they clearly weren't, that shows the greater flexibility and room for experimentation in the shorter form.

In any case, short stories are certainly something D. K. Broster does well, and this collection (/these collections) has made a very enjoyable and exciting addition to the read-through! And next on the list is Almond, Wild Almond, which I believe returns to another familiar setting...
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
D. K. Broster further develops the theme of using punctuation in titles which she began in "Mr Rowl".

Ships in the Bay! (1931) is Broster's tenth novel and her first non-Jacobite book since Flight of the Heron. It's also the first one I've read for several months, and, aww, it was so nice to get back to reading Broster! I hadn't realised how much I'd missed her gorgeous prose style, nature descriptions, narratorial attitude and everything else I love about her writing.

Having explored Brittany and Scotland in the earlier books, this one deals with two more Celtic countries. The book is set mostly in Wales—in Pembrokeshire around St David's, a setting that gives Broster ample opportunity for that lovely descriptive prose—and, although the main action never goes there, Ireland is fairly important to both the plot and the historical background. It's 1796 and the midst of the French Revolutionary Wars; Nest Meredith, the daughter of one of the cathedral clergy of St David's, is living quietly in the relatively peaceful Pembrokeshire when she stumbles across a vagabond who deserted from a privateer which stopped on the nearby coast. After a disagreement between this man and her dog, in which it becomes plain that, surprisingly, he's an English gentleman, Nest decides to help him. Eventually she learns this man, Martin Tyrrell's, dramatic backstory, with which I think Aymar de la Rocheterie would sympathise: he's been falsely accused of treason, but for involved reasons of honour he can't defend himself, and so he's gone on the run. After that the plot rambles around St David's for a bit while Martin, with Nest's help, builds a life for himself in hiding; then the pace picks up and there's a somewhat surprising dramatic denouement.

Besides Broster's beautiful prose, this book shows a lot of her characteristic attitude as author. There's her fundamental kindness to her characters, her air of sort of indulgently smiling at them while poking fun at their foibles in a way that's amusing without being OTT (although one could sometimes criticise her judgement of what counts as an amusing foible, e.g. Mr Salt's anti-Welsh attitudes). The romance is kind of annoying but sweet enough, and the book is full of the sort of highly specific geographical and historical detail that Broster is so good at—not just the war and the ships but the surroundings of St David's and its cathedral, the background politics and appearances by historical characters, the 'antiquarian' bits and pieces of Welsh history and so on.

The history gets particularly interesting at the climax, which involves this affair in Fishguard Bay—the bay of the title. I was thinking while reading that this was either a very big thing to invent or a very big role to have fictional characters play in real events. It turns out Broster was inventing an explanation for what she regarded as a historical mystery (I don't know whether it still is one—the wiki page doesn't really give that impression), and doing so in a way I thought was both ingenious and exciting. In any case, the historical detail is as precise and wide-ranging as ever, and very enjoyable to read.

And it presented an interesting historical contrast to the Jacobite books, too. Both situations involve the possibility of Celtic countries unhappily ruled by England rebelling and seeking the help of the French to do so—but the political contexts are entirely reversed and, apparently as a result, Broster's heroes are firmly on the English side here (despite the whole 'English government falsely accusing one of them of treason' thing). It's kind of uncomfortable in the same way her French Royalist books are, really—and although things aren't quite as simple as they sometimes were there, and there are suggestions of treating the Irish rebels sympathetically (including a memorable appearance by this guy), it never really goes anywhere.

I haven't said much about the characters and relationships, which I didn't think were quite as good as in some of the previous books. Nest and Martin are both unobjectionable main characters but not particularly compelling or complex in the way that e.g. Keith is. There were some enjoyable relationships, like Martin and Mr Salt, and some little bits of politics getting messily involved in people's relationships, but nothing of that kind of tension-filled fraught loyalty/enemies dynamic—the people on the other side of Martin's dilemma of honour are not sympathetic at all.

The climax has, as I've mentioned, some very nice historical drama—the first part involves a rather tiresome 'damsel in distress' set-up, but the second part, in which Broster solves the historical mystery, was much more enjoyable, due in large part to Expandsomething spoilery! )

Anyway, despite some flaws, overall I did really enjoy this one. And next up is A Fire of Driftwood, a collection of short stories the titles of which look intriguing—hopefully this will be something a bit different but equally good...
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
A short detour on the D. K. Broster read-through...

Flemington (1911) is a historical novel featuring a significant and emotionally fraught relationship between two men on opposite sides of the 1745 Jacobite Rising, and, while the two books are ultimately very different, it was clearly a major influence on Flight of the Heron—which is dedicated to Jacob 'in homage'. Unusually for me I listened to this book in audio form—thanks to [personal profile] luzula for that. :D

The novel is set in Angus in the northeast of Scotland. Archie Flemington, our hero, is the descendant of a formerly Jacobite family who have changed their loyalties; during the Rising he becomes a spy in Government service, and is sent to Montrose to investigate and report on the activities of suspected Jacobite agents in the area, and in particular James Logie, the soldier brother of a local landowner. Archie gains admittance to the house of Logie and his brother Lord Balnillo, successfully deceiving them as to his real motives under the disguise provided by his artistic skills and painting Balnillo's portrait for him, and discovers that James is indeed plotting to raise the country in support of Prince Charles. But then he and James, who's utterly taken in by his disguise and believes him to be a Jacobite, get to know each other a bit better, and things become complicated.

I found it a very frustrating book, and overall I agree with [personal profile] garonne's assessment on comparing it to Flight of the Heron—what this book does badly FotH does well, and what Flemington does well FotH does better, both objectively and in terms of my own tastes (with just one big exception—the het romance is confined to backstory here). The story is oddly structured, very meandering for such a short book and relatively simple plot. What should be, and feels like it's meant to be, the central relationship between Archie and James is barely developed, and a lot of the time I felt that Jacob was trying to balance far too much emotional weight on a structure not strong enough to support it. Archie and James are together for only a short time at the start of the book, during which Archie is smitten with remorse for his deception of James after James shares his (frankly a little melodramatic, I felt) tragic backstory with him and treats him with generosity and trust. It's a good idea, but it didn't feel like enough, especially in comparison with Part 1 of FotH. After that they barely meet again—only the very brief meeting necessary for James to realise Archie's deception of him—and that's it, until an ending which would have been beautifully dramatic and quite heartbreaking if it had only had more to justify it.

My other main complaint is that I didn't like Archie very much. He has a quality that his contemporaries call 'impudence' and which I think of as 'not taking things seriously', and really dislike in both fictional characters and real people. It's just different enough from Keith Windham's character and development to tip over from something very interesting into something I didn't like—and again, I felt the contrasts and the effect that James has on Archie in this respect just weren't developed enough. Related to this, I found the general tone and mood of Jacob's writing far less generous and kind than D. K. Broster's—and that's one of my favourite things about Broster's writing. It's not hugely different on the surface, but the small differences are enough to make the whole thing feel like a very different sort of fictional world.

I also thought the pacing was too slow—Jacob is very fond of the long narratorial monologue explaining a character's thoughts, personality, backstory or motivations, and considering that the book is barely 250 pages long it spends a remarkably long time getting to the good bits. To be fair, however, it's so rare for me to think anything like this (I mean, my favourite books include Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Lord of the Rings, and the pacing is something I particularly like about both of them :P) that I have to think this isn't all the book's fault. I suspect that listening to it as an audiobook, by making me slow down my reading speed, reduced my tolerance for slow pacing—which is interesting in itself, I suppose.

This review feels much too negative so far! I did actually enjoy this book, but I think the fact that it always comes out the loser in the inevitable comparisons with FotH doesn't work in its favour. Probably the most notable thing I did enjoy was the relationship between Archie and Captain Callandar, a Hanoverian officer with whom Archie works in the later part of the book. Callandar is puzzled, exasperated and intrigued by Archie's contradictions and strange attitudes, and the ending of the book hinges on a horrible choice brought about by Archie's loyalty to James and Callander's to his duty. Again, it wasn't nearly as well-developed as it deserved to be, but there's something very good indeed in there.

Other things I liked include Christian Flemington, Archie's grandmother and decidedly not an Aunt Margaret, who raised him to be the person, the Whig and the spy he is—she's intriguing in her complications. Skirling Wattie, the colourful character who carries messages between Archie and his Government commanders, provides an opportunity for several good Jacobite and other folk songs! And there are some good bits of description and scenery, and the history is pretty interesting—rather than following the famous bits of history surrounding Charles's army, Jacob focusses on the less memorably romantic but nonetheless historically important area around Montrose, dramatising the historical capture of a Government ship by the Jacobites.

Overall, then, I found this book a bit of a disappointment, but it was still very much worth the read, both for its own sake and for the Broster connection—and it has a lot of potential which I do feel could be developed further in fic!
regshoe: Text 'a thousand, thousand darknesses' over an illustration showing the ruins of Easby Abbey, Yorkshire (A thousand darknesses)
Jacobites!, part three.

The Dark Mile (1929) is the third entry in the increasingly inaccurately named Jacobite trilogy. It's partly a sequel to The Gleam in the North, and partly the tenuously related story of the romance between Ewen Cameron's younger cousin Ian Stewart and Olivia Campbell, whose last name gives an indication of why their love is not what you might call very welcome from the perspective of those around them.

It's 1755, two years after Archibald Cameron went to the scaffold, and the question of who exactly sent him there—who tipped off the Government that he was in Glenbuckie—has never been resolved. Finlay MacPhair of Glenshian, Ewen's neighbour, was definitely doing something fishy regarding the Government and spying in '53, and Ewen suspects that he was the informer, but can't prove anything. We meet MacPhair in this book accusing Ewen of the classic Highland crime of cattle theft against himself. Meanwhile, Ian Stewart witnesses a carriage accident suffered by a young lady and her father. He gallantly rescues the young lady, Olivia, who goes back to Ian's family's house of Invernacree to recover from her injuries, and learns that the father is Mr Campbell of Cairns—the commander of the Campbell militia who killed Ian's brother Alan at Culloden. The next few days at Invernacree are awkward—and are made more so by the growing attraction between Ian and Olivia. These two plots are linked by the figure of David Maitland, a family friend of the Campbells of Cairns... and, unbeknownst to anyone else, he's also the man who betrayed Archibald Cameron.

This book no longer has very much to do with Flight of the Heron. There are one or two oblique references to Keith near the end, and a few more mentions of things connected to FotH, but nothing more. In that respect my feelings about it are basically the same as what I said about Gleam in the North, but more so—the whole thing feels very removed from that story, and missing its own heart as a result, and it's a shame.

However, I've said all that already, so I shall discuss this book on its own merits, which are for the most part pretty enjoyable. It picks up those plot threads from Gleam in the North which were left unresolved in the all-consuming tragedy of the ending—the question of who betrayed Archie, the question of what exactly Finlay MacPhair was doing and Ewen and Hector's disagreement with him. Finlay, now come into his inheritance as chief and living at Glenshian not far from Ardroy, spends the book trying to get revenge on Ewen and Hector on the one hand and trying to find out who the informer was on the other, while getting increasingly frustrated that the Government remain reluctant to give him the financial reward he expects for spying for them. It was good to see these points get some resolution; David Maitland's story was surprisingly tragic, and Ewen's eventual enlightening as to the truth of what happened provided some of the closure that he didn't get at the end of the last book. I also enjoyed all of the plotting and intrigue going on—there's less unimpeachable honour (Broster does manage to get in a duel, although it's fought for a rather silly reason) and more scheming and characters making genuinely bad decisions which they later bitterly regret.

The balance of the story has moved on since GitN; Ian, rather than Ewen, is the protagonist here, and this gave a slightly strange feeling to the book's structure and pacing. While the Ian/Olivia parts of the book work well enough done this way, Ewen is still very much the main character of the Finlay/betrayal plot—it's his old score with Finlay MacPhair that has to be settled, and his grief over Archie's death that gets some resolution at the end—but we don't see his POV and he's not placed at the centre of the story as it's told. The effect is kind of similar to what I said about GitN, where Ewen is the protagonist but Archie is the main character, and it's odd.

Finlay MacPhair, who was merely unpleasant and suspicious in GitN, is a fully-fledged moustache-twirling villain in this book, concocting schemes to frame his enemies for theft, locking them up in dungeons and monologuing about his evil plans to deceive the Government he's spying for. It's great fun, although difficult to take quite so seriously as the issues in the plot of, for instance, FotH. I'm not surprised that Broster felt the need to fictionalise the identity of Alastair MacDonnell of Glengarry if she was going to portray him like this. Although doing so causes a bit of a continuity issue: it's more obvious in this book that not only is Finlay a disguised Alastair, Glenshian the place is intended to be Glengarry.. except that Glengarry is mentioned several times in FotH under its real name. There's a memorable sequence in this book that takes place on the same section of lochside that Keith Windham rides along in the first chapter of FotH, and the specific, distinctive castle there, which was Invergarry Castle, has mysteriously become Castle Shian instead. I'm going to take this as evidence that GitN and TDM actually don't take place in the same continuity as FotH and are just a weird AU, but seriously, I think it is evidence that Broster didn't come up with the idea for the later books until after FotH—which is pretty interesting.

Other good things about this book: more Aunt Margaret being her brilliant self, and more lovely nature descriptions, especially of the landscape round Ardroy where much of the later part of the book is set. (Although I couldn't shake the feeling that the happy state of things at Ardroy is wrong, it's not what really matters... yeah, I think at this point I'm remembering FotH more than Broster wants me to).

Somewhat to my surprise, I also quite enjoyed the Ian/Olivia romance, at least at first—it's all a bit overwrought, and causes Ian to behave very badly towards Hector Grant, but there are some lovely descriptive scenes and the 'forbidden' element was good (I had osmosed that Olivia being a Campbell was what made it forbidden, but not the specific personal element, and I thought that, unlike some justifications for 'forbidden love' plots, that was actually a pretty sensible reason to have second thoughts about wanting to marry someone—I sympathised with Ian! And, of course, it means you don't get so much of the 'it's right and natural and the way things should be' attitude that's why I dislike a lot of canon het... and neither did I ship either of them with anyone else, the other big reason :P). ExpandHowever, the ending changed that. ) I thought that was a massive cop-out and a real let-down at the end of what could have been a really good story.

So, on that somewhat disappointing note, Broster leaves Ewen Cameron and the Jacobites behind for a while—her next book is Ships in the Bay!, which I believe is a return to Royalist France—and I'm going to have a break from the read-through while I go and read other things. (Although I will of course need to re-read SIatF at some point...)
regshoe: Photo of the white cliffs of Dover, with Greek text (On the knees of the gods)
All right, here we go.

The Gleam in the North (1927) is D. K. Broster's eighth novel, and it is a sequel to The Flight of the Heron. Now, before I read this one I was somewhat questioning the choice of FotH as a book for which to write a sequel—the story is so well-structured and contained in itself, and of course killing off one of the main characters at the end means it's not really possible to add anything to it. If I was choosing one of Broster's first seven books to write a sequel to I'd go with Sir Isumbras at the Ford, or perhaps 'Mr Rowl', both of which have fairly open endings with all the main characters still alive. I think I understand rather better now why Broster chose FotH instead—but I still don't really agree with the choice.

The action opens in 1752, more than six years since the ending of FotH. Ewen Cameron is back at Ardroy, with Alison and their two young sons, one of whom has a minor adventure and ends up requiring medical treatment. Ewen finds a doctor for him—but it's Archibald Cameron, who, still under an attainder, is back in Scotland secretly on Jacobite business. Appearing at Ardroy is therefore a risk for Archie, and one which, unfortunately, doesn't pay off. Archie escapes from the resulting redcoat raid, but Ewen is captured on suspicion of sheltering him and imprisoned at Fort William. From there... things go downhill, and, well, the rest is history.

The plot is based much more closely around specific historical events than Flight of the Heron—there, while the '45 is portrayed in brilliant historical detail, it's the setting for a fictional plot, but here, particularly later on, the main details of the plot simply are what historically happened to Dr Archibald Cameron in the first half of 1753. The early part of the plot focusses on Ewen's various adventures following his capture and escape—meeting a priest and having some thoughts on religion, meeting Major Guthrie and having some thoughts on revenge, meeting his cousins and having some thoughts about the Jacobite cause, and finally meeting Keith Windham's brother Francis and having some thoughts about Keith (<3). But then, despite Ewen's best efforts, Archie is finally captured, and the rest of the book follows Ewen as he tries in vain to prevent history from taking its course. It's an interesting structure, in that our protagonist is, for much of the time, not really the main character of the actual plot, so the story ends up being more about Ewen's reactions to events and his character development as a result.

And the historical stuff is really interesting! Broster is meticulous about accuracy as ever, and portrays the events leading up to Archie's fate in brilliant, dramatic detail. I was pleased to recognise several little things near the ending (the steel buckles...) from The Lyon in Mourning, which contains copies of Dr Cameron's last writings and an account of his execution. The character of Finlay MacPhair, a spy who apparently plays a role in Archie's capture, appears to be a fictionalised version of Alastair MacDonnell of Glengarry, the real 'Pickle'. I also enjoyed (sad as it was) the stuff earlier in the book about Ewen's life at Ardroy as it is in the wake of the Rising, with redcoats posted up and down the Great Glen and his former way of life largely proscribed. And, against this background, the book contains a lot of very interesting reflection on the ultimate fate of Jacobitism. Ewen wavers at the start between supporting ongoing Jacobite plots and acting to protect his family; later on, of course, he's determined to save Archie, but by the end he has pretty much accepted that for the Cause he loves it is, as the chapter titles put it, 'after sunset'. Broster gets in her honour and loyalty, but in a rather different form—Ewen has to let go of his desires for revenge and a resolution to the events of seven years earlier, and learn to move on. This, and his pre-emptive grief at Archie's death, which is described in some detail, were pretty heartbreaking. And in all this lovely historical detail, I feel like I'm getting to share with Broster a developing and extended interest in this period of history and the story of Jacobitism—it is a fascinating story to explore in more depth, and she certainly does it justice.

But then there's the other thing.

As I mentioned, Ewen meets Keith's brother Francis in one of the dramatic twists of the plot; later, he also meets Keith's mum and his step-dad, the Earl of Stowe, who attempts unsuccessfully to intercede for Archie on Ewen's behalf. While this is all very involved with the plot, it also provides Ewen with lots of opportunity for thinking about Keith, and we see very clearly that he's not over the ending of Flight of the Heron. He calls Keith his 'best friend', has more than one moment of more or less breaking down while thinking about Morar, declares that he will wear the ring Keith gave him until his dying day... Well, I appreciated getting to see that. I like Francis, the charming and hot-tempered, for his own sake as well—the misunderstandings and eventual friendship between him and Ewen are amusing and lovely—and Masters, the devoted old servant who's thrilled at the chance to speak about Keith to Ewen. (Although the episode with Lady Stowe is a bit grotesque, considering the context!).

And I wasn't as upset by seeing Ewen and Alison happily married with children as I might have been (there's a certain tinge to the whole thing, set alongside the rest—beautiful conventions received them; while out beyond the barrier... and all that; but I'm being unfair). Frankly, I think that knowing what was inevitable after the ending of FotH, and having heard many of the details from others in the fandom, I was pretty much already over it, and even I have to admit that, while it's of course the wrong thing, this is a plausible, and plausibly happy, future for Ewen. And the existence of a small boy called Keithie is rather affecting (or, at least, it would have been if his dialogue wasn't so atrociously written—seriously, Sir Isumbras at the Ford wasn't bad but Broster is not good at writing children).

...and yet. It's not that the things I discussed earlier—the plot and history and character development—aren't done really well, because they are. And it's not that the mentions of Keith felt at all perfunctory or insincere—they're neither. But they do seem to sit uncomfortably alongside the rest of the book, an odd idea that doesn't really fit here and doesn't have much to do with what the story is otherwise about. This book is not, in short, the story I love Flight of the Heron for; and I can't help but feel that it's in a sense undermining the significance of FotH to present this as an appropriate continuation of the story. And I think the resulting emotional detachment made it difficult for me to get properly invested in this book, either the story of Archie's fate or Ewen's character development. (Being so fannish about FotH probably doesn't help here; at this point I basically accept as canon the version of events where Keith survives and he and Ewen live happily ever after, and I can't really see a continuation where that's not the case as fully real).

So, to conclude, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I totally understand why Broster chose to write this story, and I think she does it very well for what it is; but, on the other hand, I don't think there was ever any way she could have written it while really doing justice to Flight of the Heron—and that makes me sad, because I feel like she's almost forgetting the most important thing.

(Oh, one other thing—why so little Aunt Margaret? She's away for the entire early part of the plot set at Ardroy, and only appears very briefly in the epilogue. I was disappointed! Although it was amusing to see that sending her away on a visit apparently wasn't as implausible a contrivance as I thought it was while writing 'It Will Be Summer' :P).

Anyway. I'm going to go and bake some shortbread biscuits and read Flight of the Heron fix-it fic.
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
Looking over my first post about Flight of the Heron, nearly a year ago, I think I can say I was right to predict that 'it's going to be an all-time fave'. :D Since then I've read six more books by D. K. Broster, and now that my read-through has got back up to the publication of FotH I thought I'd do a post reflecting on how reading these earlier books has put Flight of the Heron (1925), Broster's seventh novel and fifth solo novel, into context...

Of course, the most striking difference between FotH and the earlier novels is the historical setting. With the exception of The Vision Splendid (which is an aberration in several ways, probably due to G. W. Taylor's input), Broster's first few books are all set in and around Revolutionary France, and form a fairly straightforward historical progression, from Chantemerle in the early days following the Revolution to The Wounded Name and 'Mr Rowl' towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars. She starts to branch out a little with 'Mr Rowl', with the action taking place entirely in England—although the main character is French—and removed from the Royalist resistance settings of the books before it. Flight of the Heron, however, is a much more ambitious change: set fifty years earlier than any of the other books and in Scotland. Broster's care and attention to historical detail is one of my favourite things about her writing, and I think it's even more impressive to know that she could put that amount of detail into a book, not only in what's clearly her favourite historical period, but in one completely new to her.

There are obvious parallels between the Royalists and the Jacobites, and it's not hard to see why an author interested in one would like the other as well. Interestingly, Charles is a far more important presence in FotH than the Bourbons are in any of the French books; but in both contexts, while Broster writes sympathetically about characters who are loyal to the monarchs in question, she's clearly not ignorant of their faults. The new setting provides plenty of opportunity for Broster to explore her favourite themes of loyalty, honour, duty and sacrifice, which are central to the plots of basically everything she's written so far, and to create those beautiful twisted set-ups of conflicted loyalties, betrayal, damaged honour and misunderstandings that she loves so much. Her interest in exploring both sides of historical conflicts also seems to be developing—while in the early books all the sympathetic characters are Royalists, 'Mr Rowl' features a Bonapartist protagonist forming various relationships with characters on the British side—although most of the British characters don't seem that invested in their loyalty to their side as such. FotH takes the obvious next step, with its central relationship between two characters deeply committed to opposite sides of an ongoing conflict.

Comparing Flight of the Heron with the two books immediately preceding it, The Wounded Name and 'Mr Rowl', Broster clearly has a very specific type of m/m hurt/comfort-focussed relationship dynamic that she likes. It's kind of charming how it appears almost out of nowhere in TWN—there are hints of similar close relationships between male characters, and a few memorable hurt/comfort scenes, in the earlier books, but not this very specific dynamic—and immediately takes over the next three books. I think FotH makes the most effective and emotionally compelling use of this dynamic, thereby producing the most shippable pairing. Aymar/Laurent is really pretty imbalanced as a relationship, with Laurent not having much in the way of his own character development and Aymar's side of the relationship not being explored that much; Raoul/Barrington is very affecting, but it doesn't turn up until halfway through the story and isn't the most important relationship for Raoul or for the book as a whole. In contrast, Ewen/Keith is absolutely central both to the plot and to the emotional core of Flight of the Heron; both characters are well-developed and set up such that both sides of the relationship become deep and compelling, and the whole thing is a great deal more symmetrically meaningful. It's possible to see it as syncretising elements from some of the best relationships in the earlier books: combining 'that one m/m dynamic' from TWN and MR with the emotional arc of Fortuné de la Vireville and his relationship with Raymonde from Sir Isumbras at the Ford.

Another interesting new element in FotH is its use of folklore and fate. Broster has been making use of these for a while—significant folkloric elements make major appearances in SIatF and The Yellow Poppy, and TWN features folk beliefs connected to the fate of a major character—but the heron prophecy in FotH is much more developed and much better integrated with the plot. Indeed, it's what gives the plot its structure, which is another thing I think is particularly good about this book compared to the others—it feels more tightly and surely put together in both plot and emotions, and the fated feel that the prophecy gives to the whole thing is an important part of that. Structuring the plot around a prophecy also avoids some of the issues that the previous books have with contrived coincidence—and here there are no problems with characters acting in ways that don't make sense to move the plot along. Instead the fated plot is bound up with the characters acting in ways perfectly characteristic of them.

Speaking of which: Broster is not as fond of killing off characters as I got the impression she was after reading only FotH and the first two books with G. W. Taylor! If anything, up to this point her endings have been getting tamer over time—both those first two kill off a major character, as does TYP, and SIatF seriously threatens it more than once, but in TWN and MR, although the characters face plenty of deadly peril, I never really felt that anyone was in actual danger—and everyone does survive in the end. But FotH, of course, reverses this trend. It'll be interesting to see how her varied endings go in the later books...

There are plenty of other things I've always liked about FotH that I now recognise as general features of Broster's writing—like the detailed nature descriptions, the carefully-chosen literary epigraphs (although FotH lacks the whimsical chapter titles of SIatF and MR—perhaps it's too serious a book for that sort of thing), the swordfights, the engaging cast of minor characters, and of course her beautiful, eloquent prose. I love getting to know the characteristic elements of an author's style like this, and I think it makes me appreciate that style more in the favourite book I read first.

Overall, much as I've enjoyed the read-through as a whole so far, I have no hesitation in saying that Flight of the Heron is still my favourite of Broster's books. And now I'm going to ruin it by reading the sequels!
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
We're no longer following D. K. Broster's chronological progression through post-Revolutionary French Royalist history: this book is set in 1813, slightly before The Wounded Name, it takes place entirely in England and, very unusually for Broster, the French hero is not a Royalist, but a loyal officer in the army of Napoleon.

"Mr Rowl" (1924) is Broster's fourth solo novel. The Napoleonic wars are still in progress, and Captain Raoul des Sablières, our hero, is a French prisoner of war on parole in England—the title is the clumsy Anglicisation by which he's known amongst his new neighbours, hence the inverted commas. The book opens with a lovely peaceful Regency drawing-room scene, in which Raoul sings for the company and talks literature with a most charming and independent-minded young lady named Juliana Forrest. But then, due to a set of circumstances not unconnected with the lovely Juliana, Raoul is accused of breaking his parole... from here, the plot is a succession of unfortunate coincidences and things happening at exactly the wrong time; Raoul goes through many trying adventures, and meets a variety of interesting characters along the way, while Juliana works tirelessly to try and save him from his fate.

What I really liked about this book was how much fun it is. It's not that the stakes aren't high—Raoul is plausibly threatened with execution at one point, and nearly dies several times later on—but the general mood feels light-hearted in a way that many of Broster's other stories don't. There's a good-natured humour to the narrative, and a feeling all along that most of the characters are good at heart and that things will work out for the best. The whimsical chapter titles, much like those in Sir Isumbras, certainly help. The structure of the plot, with Raoul passing through a series of different places and scenes and meeting new groups of characters in each one, contributes to this—he makes new friends and sees the good in lots of different people, albeit there's plenty of bad there sometimes. Despite the stakes, there are still opportunities in the plot for wacky hijinks—the bit where Broster tricks the reader about a disguised character's real identity twice in a row is especially memorable! I think Broster was really developing as a writer at this point—she's established the sort of tropes and plot beats that she likes, and her prose style is particularly good in this book, with so many of those perfectly constructed subtle turns of phrase that she's so great at. Honestly, as a writer, I am thoroughly jealous of her ability to put together a sentence.

The main characters make the centre of the book's happy mood. Raoul himself is just loveable—his goodness and sense of humour, combined with strength and persistence and the side of him that his enemies call a 'wildcat', make for a great protagonist. Juliana is definitely one of Broster's better love interest characters—she's determined and fearless, and I really enjoyed watching her try all the stratagems available to her to help Raoul in his plight, working against the restrictions placed on a respectable young lady. I like that she gets involved in Broster's inevitable tangles of honour and betrayal. And I like that she doubts herself, and doesn't always know her own mind—that combination of strength and vulnerability is something Broster does well, and both Juliana and Raoul have it, in different ways. And they bring out the good in each other! As canon romances go, their relationship is pretty tolerable. :)

Unlike Aymar and Ewen, Raoul doesn't have one big central relationship with another male character, although the same sort of relationship dynamics are there, in bits and pieces—there just seems to be something about Raoul that keeps making stern, duty-minded English officers come over all philanthropical! The most important of these, the disgraced naval officer Captain Hervey Barrington, who threatens to recapture Raoul and then does an about-turn and saves his life and cares for him while he's injured instead, is a sweetheart, unexpectedly. His transformation from unforgiving enemy to devoted friend is abrupt and dramatic, perhaps a bit too much so—certainly it's not explored in anything like the detail that Keith Windham's development is—but very lovely to see, and provides Broster with plenty of opportunity for all her favourite hurt/comfort tropes, which I enjoyed very much.

As ever, there are lots of good side characters as well. I particularly liked Miss Barrington, the Captain's sister, with her sharpness and alertness alongside her wicked sense of humour and her indulgent kind-heartedness. Then there's the eccentric geologist doctor who Barrington brings in to care for Raoul, Juliana's dad and the running joke about his resemblance to the Duke of Wellington, Raoul's marching companions on the way to Devonshire, Barrington's housekeeper Mrs Jeremy and her love for Raoul...

If I had a criticism of this book, I'd say that it has far too much unresolved potential—I felt there were a lot of potentially interesting and complicating things that were never explored. Raoul's political allegiances were one of these. He is a Bonapartist, but he comes from an old Royalist family, and he gets an opportunity early on in the book to argue his views with another French character, an émigré who still supports the Bourbons. It's interesting, and a definite development from the assumption of the earlier books that of course the Royalists are right—but it never really goes anywhere. I wondered if Broster was setting things up for what Raoul might end up doing after the Restoration, but the book ends and it's still 1813, so we never find out. The resolution of Raoul and Juliana's relationship felt similarly not quite complete in all its issues—we're reassured that they'll find a way to work things out despite Raoul having to go back to France and their countries still being at war, but we don't get to go through the details of this, and I thought it would have been really interesting to do so, even just in an epilogue set a few years later explaining how they managed it. (Or maybe I just have overly-high expectations for stories dealing with how characters from opposite sides of a war manage to overcome the difficulties in the way of their love after all that FotH fic... :P)

Anyway: another good one, I'm pleased to say! Highly recommended.

So, my read-through has now got up to the Jacobite trilogy... I don't think I'm going to do an actual re-read of Flight of the Heron at this point, but I may write up a post about how reading the books Broster wrote before FotH has influenced my thoughts and understanding of it, because I think there's some interesting stuff there.
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
Oh, boy.

The Wounded Name (1922), D. K. Broster's fifth novel and third solo novel, continues the theme of post-Revolutionary French history begun in the earlier books—we've now made it to the Restoration and the Hundred Days—and also continues some other very distinctive common themes of her writing. Some of these are good.

So, it's 1815. Napoleon has been vanquished and a Bourbon is back on the throne, but, as they used to say on Horrible Histories, not for long. Laurent de Courtomer, a young Frenchman who grew up in England following his family's emigration and has just returned to his ancestral home, goes off to join the forces fighting in the Vendée against Napoleon's comeback. He's captured by the Imperialists and locked up in an appropriated château, where he meets a fellow-prisoner in a far less fortunate state than he—a Breton leader named Aymar de la Rocheterie, alias L'Oiseleur (the Fowler—a reference to a local legend which he's supposedly recapitulating), whom Laurent met in England the year before and immediately fell head over heels for. Laurent happily takes on the duty of tenderly nursing Aymar back to health, but as he does so, he becomes aware that a terrible secret lies behind Aymar's injuries and captivity—everyone is saying he did something horrifyingly dishonourable, something Laurent is sure he would never do. In between a frankly silly amount of indulgent hurt/comfort and fraught questions of honour, all is revealed...

(...also, like, the battle of Waterloo happens, somewhere, and Napoleon is defeated again, I guess? I don't know, it isn't really important when we've got all this homoerotic hurt/comfort and honour-related drama to get through. Truly, D. K. Broster is the anti-Victor Hugo.)

The plot is in three rough sections (although, oddly, this book isn't divided into Parts the way most of Broster's books are—instead it has a smaller number of much longer chapters). The first is the ridiculous hurt/comfort-slashy-honour bit, in which Laurent and Aymar go through various trials and adventures while imprisoned by and escaping from the Imperialists; it ends with Aymar finally revealing what the horrible dishonourable thing everyone keeps saying he's done was, and why he can't deny having done it. Then there's a middle section in which, Aymar being partly recovered and Waterloo making it easier for Royalists to move around in the open, he goes home and some het romance happens, but the vital question of his 'wounded name' is not resolved. Finally, Aymar sets out to restore his reputation and prove that he acted honourably after all, stalwartly defended by Laurent, and we get some great tense courtroom scenes and miraculous plot twists. In some ways the structure felt a bit disjointed, and the POV is very uneven, with the entire first part from Laurent's perspective and Aymar suddenly becoming a POV character later on.

...So, this is a really slashy book. It's a lot more than your typical 'this historical male friendship reads as kind of romantic to a modern audience'. Laurent's feelings for Aymar in the early part of the book are all but textually romantic—from their first meeting Laurent is constantly thinking about how handsome he is, treasuring every time Aymar smiles at him or honours him with a greater confidence than he gives other people, and later on, the way the narrative describes their growing closeness during the hurt/comfort section really doesn't read like the friendship Broster keeps insisting it is. (Is this what they did in the 1920s instead of 'gal pals'???) She even does the 'one character in a chair, the other sitting on the floor with their head against the first character's knee' thing she likes so much with her textual het romances! I didn't strongly ship it the way I do Ewen/Keith (IMO it isn't as interesting a relationship in itself), but it's impossible not to see it that way. To the point that it never rising above subtext felt almost dishonest—like, the relationship obviously ought to go that way, and it's so obvious that it not doing so is frankly unconvincing and unsatisfying.

ExpandGrumbling about canon het )

This book is by far the most similar to Flight of the Heron of any of Broster's other books so far; it kind of reads like Broster was testing out the ideas that she'd later develop to their full potential in FotH. The first part is basically an extended version of the 'Ewen gives away Lochiel's hiding-place by sleep-talking, and Keith comforts him while he's injured and a prisoner' section from FotH (I was almost afraid that the big reveal was going to be that Aymar gave away the information about his plans by talking in his sleep—there is in fact some sleep-talking involved elsewhere in the plot—but happily it's a bit more involved and ingenious than that!). There's the same emphasis on folkloric fate, although less tightly bound up with the plot and less interestingly written. And Aymar is... not quite the same character as Ewen, but they certainly have an awful lot in common. (Laurent is nothing like Keith, however—he's a much less well-developed character). And, while Broster's love of historical detail is certainly here, the historical setting isn't nearly as detailed or as cleverly woven together with the plot and characters as it is in FotH.

What else is there to say about this book? There are some good side characters—M. Perrelet, the irritable but indulgently good-hearted doctor who cares for Aymar during his captivity and comes to like and admire both him and Laurent (also in FotH links, the way Archibald Cameron is written in that book is much the same character type) is a fave. And Colonel Richard, the Imperialist officer to whom Aymar supposedly betrayed his own side, somewhat surprisingly turns out to be a great 'honourable enemy' character. The trial scenes towards the end of the book are properly gripping, even if the big reveal about a certain character's real identity is a little contrived.

On the whole, I didn't really enjoy this one, partly because I couldn't get over that horrible falsehood about the central relationships and partly because of how much it reads like a less well-executed beta version of my great love Flight of the Heron. But I think this is an unfair opinion—it's really a pretty good book, and I can recommend it for anyone who wants to see the best, even if amongst other things, of D. K. Broster's writing.

...Anyway, now I'm going to go and write another few hundred words of Ewen/Keith fic!
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
We seem to be progressing through Revolutionary French history, apart from the brief detour taken by The Vision Splendid: having dealt with the Vendean War of 1792-3 and the Quiberon Bay invasion of 1795, D. K. Broster now moves on to the Royalist uprisings of 1799-1800, in which a certain young man from Corsica appears on the scene for the first time.

The Yellow Poppy (1920), Broster's second solo novel, is set amongst the Royalist leaders of Finistère in the far west of France (this made me think of the beautiful June Tabor song, although I believe that's about the Finisterre in Spain rather than this one). It's going to be a difficult one to review, because most of the plot depends on a couple of big twists that take place early on, and that I don't want to give away because they were so much fun to experience unspoiled. So, as much as I can say without spoilers:

The novel opens on a gathering of Royalists led by the émigré Marquis de Kersaint, including the priest Pierre Chassin and a gallant but naive young man named Roland de Céligny. A happy coincidence gives them some information about a hoard of buried treasure at the château of Mirabel near Paris, which once belonged to the Duc de Trélan, now believed to be in exile in England. De Kersaint is a relation of the Duc and hopes, with his permission presumed if they can't actually obtain it, to find the treasure and use it to fund the arming of Finistère. In making these plans, the characters discuss the sad story of the Duc de Trélan: he went into exile in 1790, leaving behind his wife, who was imprisoned and then executed two years later; some people hold the Duc to blame for the Duchesse's death. The rest of the story follows the group's attempts to recover the treasure of Mirabel and subsequently to raise Finistère against the Republicans... and along the way we learn much more about the story of the Duc and Duchesse de Trélan.

This story has an incredible amount of dramatic irony. At one point two characters both believe that the other is dead and are both living under assumed names, and a third character ends up making promises to both of them not to give away their identities to anyone—and so can't tell either of them that the other is alive, even though he knows they'd both want to know. At another point one character lies to another for reasons of his own that a third character is dead, then goes back to the third character, who's living under an assumed name, and discovers the truth about who he is—and the third character still doesn't know about the lie... anyway, there's a lot of this kind of thing, with vital secrets being revealed to the reader and then slowly, in turn, to the characters, and it was great fun to read!

Broster also has a lot to say about honour. Obviously all the secrets and lies place a great deal of stress on the characters' honour, in particular in the relationship between the Marquis de Kersaint and his second-in-command the Comte de Brencourt. It's all very exciting, and culminates in a dramatic duel fought under the moonlight (Broster, as the omniscient narrator, comments on the absurdity of the conventions of duelling—look, I know the rules are silly and don't make sense, but this is really what it was like, okay...). The ending of the novel turns on a horrifically dishonourable act committed by Napoleon Bonaparte—and there's a subplot where a minor character, a Republican officer who has followed and adored Bonaparte for some time, is so disgusted with the orders he's obliged to carry out that he gives up his commission (this led to some interesting thoughts about Keith Windham).

The characters are great. There's the Marquis de Kersaint, with his difficult past and his hard-won honour; the Comte de Brencourt, a seriously unpleasant person who repents of his worse decisions and learns what they cost; the equivocal Republican M Camain; 'les jeunes', Roland and the other young men accompanying de Kersaint, who are written with much of Broster's amused, half-sentimental indulgence and were very funny to read about, but who turn out to be serious enough when it matters; and of course Valentine, the heroine, with her painful, complex backstory, her self-awareness, steadfastness and bravery. I thought she was sidelined a little in the later part of the book—she doesn't do very much of importance to the plot after her spell as concierge—but her character development remains very good right up to the final page.

The title refers to Glaucium flavum, a flower which, 'so late in blossoming, so little favoured in its surroundings, so exquisite . . . and, perhaps, so short-lived', is a metaphor for two characters' relationship: having known each other for many years and had a difficult relationship in the past, they reunite in middle age and find a brighter and more fulfilling love than either of them ever expected. I really enjoyed this relationship—complex and an unusual sort of thing to make the centre of a romance, in several ways, but very compellingly and heartbreakingly written. The flower metaphor also allows for a lot of the detailed, evocative nature descriptions that Broster does so well—the chapter which introduces it takes place on the coast of Finistère beside the sea, and is very memorable indeed.

And then there's the ending. Apparently, having had the big plot twists in the first half of the book, Broster decided that it didn't need any more, because unlike Flight of the Heron and Sir Isumbras, both of which suggest an obvious 'fated' ending and then swerve away from it, this one ends exactly how it looks like it's going to end. But this is handled very well too, with the slow and inevitable fall towards a tragic ending that, the characters being as staunchly honourable as they are, couldn't have gone any other way.

In conclusion, this is another good one, and I encourage you to read it and enjoy the plot twists for yourself :D
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
I am currently procrastinating on the fic I want to be writing by writing a different fic instead. It's progress, I suppose!

Anyway: [personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea has been doing some great work finding obscure D. K. Broster-related stuff on the internet, including these two pictures of her! (The first is poor quality and very shadowy and mysterious as a result, the second—she's on the right in the top middle picture—is much better). Another great find is the short story 'Fils d'Émigré', which appears to be the original form of Sir Isumbras at the Ford, published five years before the final version. It's a very interesting insight into the writing process! The story isn't at all the condensed proto-Sir Isumbras I imagined upon hearing that it started out as a short story, but an episode from the middle of the book in—excepting a few minor changes—pretty much the same form that it appears in as chapter 28 of the eventual novel. There's no La Vireville or Raymonde, and the wider context of the plot is almost totally absent. I find the implication that Broster started out with this little, isolated story and then built up a wider plot around it really fascinating.
regshoe: A grey heron in flight over water (Heron)
Sir Isumbras at the Ford (1918) is the first book written by D. K. Broster alone. Now, I don't want to denigrate G. W. Taylor, whose contributions to the two earlier books I enjoyed, but I do have to say I think Broster is better off without her. This book felt like a serious 'levelling up' in prose style, emotional stakes and general quality, and it's the first time in this read-through that I've really gone, oh yes, this person wrote Flight of the Heron.

Once again, the story takes place amongst the aristocratic émigrés of post-Revolutionary France. It begins in 1795 with the precocious young Royalist Anne-Hilarion de Flavigny, who lives with his French father and Scottish grandfather in London, being kidnapped and taken to France by nefarious Republicans who want to get information about the political schemes his father René is involved in. René is away on business related to these schemes, so it's left to his friend, the Breton guerilla leader Fortuné de la Vireville, to go to France and rescue the boy. This rescue effected, La Vireville returns to his counter-Revolutionary activities in Brittany, where he meets the courageous and interesting Royalist agent Raymonde de Guéfontaine; and then he and René de Flavigny both become embroiled in an invasion of Republican France, which (history spoilers) doesn't go well.

Before I discuss actual details about this book: the one thing that's really struck me, the more so the further through the book I got, is the sheer emotional weight and impact of Broster's writing. Something about the way she constructs sentences, scenes and plots... I can't put my finger on exactly what this quality is—I don't think it's tragedy alone, because ExpandSpoilers ). If I had to make an attempt, I'd say that it's something to do with the sense of authorial presence in the story—Broster puts her characters through terrible trials and heavy emotional journeys, but she also constantly sympathises with them in a knowing, omniscient-narrator way. She's got a way of emphasising little details of mundane happiness in the wake of tragic events, which I think is meant to show how the characters grow past their trials and misfortunes, but which feels almost cruel at times. It's almost as bad as Mary Renault, and possibly worse than Rosemary Sutcliff.

Anyway, pointless introspection aside, I really enjoyed this book for a number of reasons...

The characters, in general, are great. Anne-Hilarion's endearing precociousness got a bit much after a while, but his 'surrogate uncle' relationship with La Vireville was very sweet all the same. And La Vireville himself is a fave—his combination of world-weary cynicism about people in general and readiness to see the good in people he cares about, like Anne and, later, Raymonde, is great, and his bravery and endurance are very impressive. (If that sounds a bit familiar... yeah, I'll get to discussing FotH further on). My absolute fave in this book, however, was Raymonde. Now, I'm frequently disappointed with the roles that female characters get to play in the sorts of stories I otherwise enjoy, stories like this one, and it was very refreshing indeed to see a different sort of female character here. I loved that a woman gets to take part in the emotionally intense loyalty/honour/revenge/betrayal plots that Broster writes so well; I loved that she's an important political player in her own right, risking everything to work for the Royalist cause as much as the fighting men she works alongside; I loved her courage and resourcefulness and passion and pride. More characters like this, please!

I also enjoyed the two Republican double agents, Madame and Mademoiselle de Chaulnes. It's interesting to see women playing active roles as villains too, of course, and there's a lot of potential in their backstory and scheming. The last meeting between Mme de Chaulnes and La Vireville was particularly intriguing—we see Royalist and Republican characters actually arguing the merits of their causes and accusing each other with what they feel are the flaws of the other side, and I really enjoyed getting a view of that. And there are many other great characters—Anne's strict and suspicious but loyal Scottish nurse Elspeth, La Vireville's sweetheart of a mum, the eager young naval officer Francis Tollemache, etc. etc.

This book has a lot in common with Flight of the Heron! [personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea has described La Vireville as a sort of proto-Keith Windham—he's a soldier fallen into cynicism after the woman he loved betrayed him, who finds himself forming significant relationships with other, more worthy characters and slowly rediscovering the value of love. This arc involves some fraught situations of honour, characters mistakenly thinking other characters have betrayed them and characters saving each others' lives despite the enmity between them. La Vireville/Raymonde—the canon romance—is very much like Keith/Ewen, and I felt very vindicated by this. :) Other similarities include Broster's fondness for feinting towards killing characters off before abruptly saving them (which also appears in Chantemerle; interestingly, the patterns and eventual outcomes of threatened and real deaths are different in all three books), and impressive feats of physical endurance by badly injured characters. Although not the homoeroticism (which I'm glad about, frankly; I wouldn't want conflict with an m/m pairing I'd inevitably prefer to the canon m/f pairing to interfere with my love for Raymonde!). There's even a mention of a Mr Windham, although he appears to be historical—perhaps he's a relation.

My other favourite thing about this book is the presence of Child Ballads! Elspeth sings ballads to Anne-Hilarion, who loves the stories and quotes verses from them (with appropriately childish powers of association) at various significant moments in the plot, and Broster also uses them as epigraphs. The two ballads that turn up again and again are 'Sir Patrick Spens' and 'Thomas the Rhymer', which just happen to be two of my faves, as well. Good taste, Anne and Broster.

Altogether: a very good and enjoyable book, highly recommended if you like Flight of the Heron and enjoy playing spot-the-common-detail. Since there doesn't currently appear to be an ebook of this one available, and I have a first edition, I'm considering scanning it and sending the text to Gutenberg.org, because more people deserve to break their hearts over Broster's lovely writing. :D
regshoe: A stack of brightly-coloured old books (Stack of books)
Upper Fourth At Malory Towers, In the Fifth At Malory Towers and Last Term At Malory Towers by Enid Blyton (1949, 1950 and 1951). Finished the Malory Towers re-read, which has continued great fun! I really enjoy the structure and organised setting of boarding-school stories, and Blyton is undoubtedly very good at telling interesting stories within those constraints. Some of the ideas are a little dated (there's a streak of cruelty in Blyton's writing which got a bit strong for me at one point in In the Fifth, although to be fair the girls do eventually realise that they've gone too far)—but the overall portrayal of Malory Towers as a place that grows the character of its pupils, through the various challenges and adventures they face as part of the plot, the social dramas and small-scale power struggles and moral dilemmas and practical jokes and midnight feasts and so on, is really lovely. Last Term has a quietly poignant feeling of a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia about it, that felt very deserved.

And the characters are great, of course! My fave Mary-Lou doesn't have a big role in the later books, but it's clear that she has grown up a lot and is going to do great things in the world. Bill and Clarissa... what can I say, I love them both :D Such great characters, and so good for each other—I love how they find that they have things in common and just instantly click, then they're always together, they appear in the plot as a unit, they're planning to set up a riding school together after they leave school, and everyone just accepts the whole thing and takes it for granted that they'll still be together years later. Darrell and Sally's relationship is lovely, too—a more quietly steady thing that's very good for them both.

...I may or may not already have about a thousand words of Bill/Clarissa fanfic in my drafts, but I'm finding my lack of horse knowledge a bit of an obstacle. If anyone here happens to know about horses and riding and would be willing to give me some help with this, it'd be much appreciated!

And this morning I added another small entry to the D. K. Broster read-through with the short story The Questionable Parentage of Basil Grant (1905)—many thanks to [personal profile] theseatheseatheopensea for bringing it to my attention! It's a weird but very funny parody of the detective stories of the period, especially the Sherlock Holmes stories. I kind of felt like I was missing some of the background I needed to really get the joke (despite knowing the Holmes stories pretty well—it's the context, I suppose), but it was very enjoyable all the same. And surprisingly many things to remind me of FotH—there are multiple Scottish characters, including a family named Grant, and several light-hearted references to Scottish history, ballads and Jacobites!
regshoe: A row of old books in a wooden bookshelf (Bookshelf)
D. K. Broster's second book, again co-written with G. W. Taylor! After recognising so much of Flight of the Heron in her first book, Chantemerle, I was a bit surprised to find that this one has much less in common with it—in fact it's kind of an odd book in several ways.

The Vision Splendid (1913) takes place in the early 1830s, where the mildly fantastically-named Horatia Grenville, a Berkshire clergyman's daughter, falls suddenly and unexpectedly in love with the romantic but unreliable Frenchman Armand de la Roche-Guyon, whose family are staunch supporters of the recently dethroned and exiled Bourbon King Charles X. After overcoming opposition from both their families, they marry. Tristram Hungerford, a friend of Horatia who is mixed up in the incipient Oxford Movement and now contemplating ordination, is heartbroken, because he's been in unrequited love with Horatia for years. From here on, Tristram works through various theological tangles alongside his friend Charles Dormer and a number of historical Tractarians, while Horatia tries to adjust to her new life as a French noblewoman. Various complicated and dramatic things happen, the characters suffer a great deal, and eventually Tristram and Horatia come to see their lives and their relationship in entirely new lights.

[Another historical note: the Oxford Movement, or the Tractarians, were a movement within the Church of England that emerged at the University of Oxford in the 1830s. They argued that the Anglican Church was losing its way, should re-adopt various older traditions lost at the Reformation and, essentially, ought to be more Catholic. They opposed the Evangelicals, who were also enjoying some success at this time. It was all very entertaining. Read the Barsetshire novels for more information and church drama!]

It's a complicated plot, and fairly different from both Chantemerle and The Flight of the Heron. Apart from one significant but brief intrusion of violence, the plot depends on interpersonal and emotional drama rather than war or politics, and religion is a very important theme throughout. There are plenty of questions of right conduct as regards sin and one's duty to God, but not much in the way of notions of honour as it appears so memorably elsewhere in Broster's writings. And there's no central intense m/m relationship—there's a suggestion of that sort of thing with Tristram and Dormer, but it's never explored in great depth. I like all these things, so I was disappointed not to see them here.

As to what the book is about, then, I'm finding it difficult to summarise. I said in my review of Chantemerle that it felt impressively cohesive for a book by two authors, but I'm not sure I can say the same of this one. It's not so much that it goes in two distinct directions, but more just that there's an awful lot going on and it's difficult to get a sense of what the book is really trying to do. The religious themes dominate the plot—they pretty much take it over completely at the end—but I struggled to get much sense of what the overall religious message is supposed to be, beyond the fact that the authors think the Oxford Movement was a Good Thing. It didn't feel like much of a conclusion—even the epilogue felt disjointed and messy, bringing in far too many new plot threads rather than wrapping up loose ends from the rest of the book.

This probably wasn't helped by a few particular things early on in the book that looked likely to put me off. Horatia begins the book thinking that she'll never marry, and it becomes clear very quickly that this is going to change. The one thing I hate more than anything else in a book is that thing where a female character happily thinks she'll never marry, then ends up falling in love with and marrying a man and getting the approved heterosexual happy ending, because of course that's what happiness means really. Now, this book does not actually do that, and I don't really mind what it does do in the end, but I was worried for a little while that it might do something uncomfortably close. Then there were some worrying references to anti-enclosure riots—look, I know I've said I'll tolerate a lot of dodgy politics for a Broster novel, but asking me to sympathise with the perpetrators of the Enclosure Acts is going too far. Happily this thread is dropped soon after. And, finally, in a nice bit of continuity there's a brief reference to the main characters from Chantemerle, which reveals that ExpandSpoilers! )

ExpandMore spoilers, for the ending of this book this time )

I don't say I didn't enjoy this one, however! There is plenty to like about it—all the vivid description, beautiful wordy sentences and rich historical detail that I love about Broster's writing are here, and the way the main romantic relationships are written gave me a lot to think about in terms of how these authors approach writing about characters in general. (The significant pairing which goes south very badly later on is portrayed, in its early days, in a similar way to and actually with some of the very same details as Ewen/Alison, which was, hmm, interesting?). I enjoyed the portrayal of the Oxford and Berkshire settings in particular. Broster (and, I think, Taylor as well) lived in Oxford for many years, and she's clearly writing about places she knew well—the details of streets and colleges, the breeze up on the downs, the Uffington White Horse of Tiffany Aching fame even makes an appearance. But, overall, I still don't feel like I really got this book.

Next up in the read-through is D. K. Broster's first solo novel Sir Isumbras At the Ford, which I haven't been able to find in ebook form but should hopefully be able to get a physical copy of (along with The Wounded Name, which I certainly can't miss!). In the meantime I feel like returning to my next Barsetshire book...
regshoe: A row of old books in a wooden bookshelf (Bookshelf)
I like The Flight of the Heron so much that I've decided to embark on a read-through of the author's complete bibliography. D. K. Broster, over a forty-year career, wrote twelve novels alone, co-wrote another three, and also wrote two collections of short stories, one book of poetry and one non-fiction book (apparently a biography), so this should keep me in reading material for a while! Chantemerle (1911), co-written with G. W. Taylor, was her first published work.

First, some background. If you don't already know (I didn't!), the Vendean War was a counter-Revolutionary rising of the people of the Vendée, a region in the west of France, in 1793. Two major reasons why the Vendean peasants weren't very happy with the Revolution were 1) the Vendean aristocrats tended to live on their estates, where they knew their tenants personally and treated them relatively well, rather than horrifically oppressing them and using the profits to fund a life of decadence in Paris like the rest of the nobility and 2) the region was strongly Catholic and objected to the whole 'Church bad' aspect of the Revolution. Both of these are pretty relevant to this book.

Chantemerle follows the fortunes of Gilbert de Château-Foix, the owner of an estate in the Vendée, and his cousin Louis de Saint-Ermay, who grew up with him at Chantemerle. Gilbert is a serious-minded and forward-thinking landowner with strange ideas about 'agricultural improvement' and 'crop rotation' and 'turnips', whereas Louis is a reckless and irresponsible young cad who spends his time living a life of decadence in Paris and getting mixed up in plots against the Revolutionaries—unlike the Liberal Gilbert, he is a staunch Royalist. Unsurprisingly, Louis gets into political trouble, and Gilbert has to go and rescue him. Unfortunately, Louis also spent his time in Paris falling in love with Lucienne d'Aucourt, Gilbert's arranged fiancée, and this causes a great deal of tension and drama between the two cousins—as well as anguish for Lucienne herself, who escapes to exile in England along with Gilbert's mother. Finally, after surviving various adventures and perils together, they make it back to Chantemerle... and then the Vendean War gets going.

Several of the distinctive features of Flight of the Heron are recognisable in this book: a central intense relationship between two men which is tested by conflicts of loyalty and duty; a comparatively underdeveloped het romance where the female half goes off into exile partway through the book and doesn't really do anything; very many questions of Honour; an awful lot of emotionally fraught hurt/comfort; and, of course, an impressive amount of historical research and detail. D. K. Broster knows what she likes, and happily most of it is stuff that I like too—I enjoyed it all very much. Given that they're cousins who've known each other most of their lives and are fighting on the same side, Louis and Gilbert's relationship really ends up reading as less straightforwardly positive than Keith and Ewen's—their disagreements over politics, each other's life choices and, of course, Lucienne lead to a lot of conflict between them. But there is eventually an emotional reconciliation, all written in lovely Brosterian detail. Once you get past the obvious similarities it's a very different sort of relationship from Ewen/Keith (I shipped them a bit anyway—the AU where Gilbert realises that his passionate fury and hatred for Louis has become more about Louis himself than it ever was about Lucienne, and whoops, perhaps that passion isn't all hatred anymore, could be pretty fun to read—but I'm not sure it's OTP material :P).

The conflicts over Honour and Duty are more personal than political, and felt a little unnecessary at times—the notion that it would be better for Lucienne not only to give up Louis for Gilbert's sake, but to hide from Gilbert the fact that she doesn't love him and go through with the marriage anyway, was kind of ridiculous. However, I still enjoyed all the tension they caused—and especially the fact that Lucienne herself, as well as the men, gets caught up in the Love vs. Duty heartbreak—and all the beautifully written relationship scenes involved in working them out. The scene at the ford where Gilbert fails to challenge Louis to a duel was especially memorable. The later part of the book, in which Gilbert has to learn to lead his people in their war against the Revolutionaries and Louis has to grow up into a serious and courageous fighter, was also very dramatic and enjoyable to read, although my relative lack of sympathy with the Royalist cause (I read too much Victor Hugo at an impressionable age) probably made it less so than it might have been.

Another interesting feature of this book is the extent to which it doesn't read like obviously the work of two distinct authors. I can recognise some things that it has in common with FotH and reason that those were probably Broster, and some things that it doesn't—like the emphasis on religion—and reason that those were probably Taylor, but overall it is a very well-unified whole (more so than, for instance, Good Omens, IMO). It's impressive. (I can't find very much information about Taylor besides the books—this and The Vision Splendid—which she co-wrote with Broster, and she doesn't seem to have published any books on her own).

Anyway! I could say more (including spoilery things—this book has another and particularly drawn-out emotional ending...), but I think that's enough for now. I really enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to fans of The Flight of the Heron, and I think this read-through was a good idea.

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  1234 5
67891011 12
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

Expand All Cut TagsCollapse All Cut Tags
Page generated Jul. 30th, 2025 11:59 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios