Category Archives: fiction

Second-hand Goods

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Caroline Dunford, A Death in the Hospital

I have a very bad habit of picking up any novel with a First World War or immediate post-war setting when I come across them in a second-hand book sale. My husband grumbles about my bringing yet more books into the house while, in my heart of hearts, I know that, more likely than not, I will spend most of the time I am reading them getting annoyed by inauthentic, not to say inaccurate, portrayals of the war which rely heavily on clichés. Yet I carry on doing it, in part in forlorn hope that I may encounter an original (and thus enjoyable) new author or series, and in part to remind myself of all the pitfalls to avoid when writing my own war-set fictions.

As painful as most of these are to read, in general I find there is enough to them, in terms of plot, characterisation or, very occasionally, setting, to keep me reading until the final pages. Certainly, I did manage to do this with Carola Dunn’s Die Laughing, in spite of its many short comings, and with Sulari Gentil’s A Few Right Thinking Men, which erred to much towards the thriller side of crime fiction for my taste, as including random fictional press clippings in a way that I found deeply confusing and off-putting. However, this cannot be said for my most recent acquisition, Caroline Dunford’s A Death in the Hospital (2020), which I picked up for 50 p. at our local National Trust property second-hand bookstall and which I abandoned about a quarter of the way through.

I had been vaguely hopeful about this novel, the 15th book in the Euphemia Martin series, which appears to still be going strong, with A Death at Christmas due out this year. After all, the war hospital setting was right up my street in terms of areas of historical interest, although this did risk a more than usual number of snorts at clichés about VADs and misuse of the term ‘field hospital’. What I didn’t expect, however, was a historical setting so inaccurate as to suggest that Dunford is not even familiar with Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, let alone any less ubiquitous representation of the British military medical services in the war. It was at the point where a hospital where the central character had gone undercover as a trainee nurse (not, apparently a VAD, although it remained entirely unclear what the character who made this distinction thought a VAD role entailed) was described as the first hospital of its type ‘since the Boer War or possibly the Crimean War’ that I gave up entirely. For the setting to have any meaning or interest, I did need to have evidence of some basic plausibility for the institution that formed that setting, including the awareness that the auxiliary hospital (which I think was what this one was supposed to be) was only one type of medical institution in Britain during the war. As well as the permanent military hospitals which treated the Regular army throughout the second half of the 19th and into the 20th century, at the outbreak of war, military hospitals were rapidly set up across Britain, usually in commandeered institutions. Where country houses were donated, these became auxiliary units, specialising in rehabilitation after initial treatment at a general hospital. The institution in A Death in the Hospital did not seem like any of these.

Which brings me to the second aspect that precluded my enjoyment of this book. In addition to the ahistorical setting, the question of timing made any suspension of disbelief I might have had impossible. The novel is, apparently, set in August 1914. Even if we assume that the book starts at the end of the month, in at most three weeks there has, apparently, been time for some sort of voluntary hospital to be set up and filled with wounded servicemen including at least one volunteer servicemen, although he just may have been a Territorial. It is also strongly implied that the military effort had achieved statis along the Western Front, although this wasn’t the case until the winter of 1914. In other words, the author attempts to invoke the war as historical context through clichés that ignore the somewhat atypical reality of the opening months of the war. This sort of telescoping of events is not just bad writing, it is terrible history.

I do like to think that I have a pretty high tolerance for inauthenticity in genre fiction set in the First World War, of which there is a remarkable amount. Yes, as I say, I do grumble about inappropriate uses of terms like ‘field hospital’ and conscientious objector, or assumptions about the incidence and understanding of executions and shellshock. But while reiterating worn tropes is boring and, for a historian, frustrating, I am aware that I bring a level of specialist knowledge to reading this type of fiction which gives me an unfair perspective. Where there is some evidence of basic historical research, some attempt to get to grips with the historic specificity of the world being depicted, I can usually suspend enough disbelief to at least finish the book. Here there was no evidence of any historicization, with events, ideas and innovations from at least three major conflicts mashed together in an ahistorical mess labelled ‘The First World War’ in a completely implausible time frame. It is the sort of historical fiction that makes me wish there were a way to certify an author’s credentials as a historical research before they are allowed to publish. Indeed, the only excuse for this sort of book, in my view, is the case it makes through absence for history, including that which informs creative products (films, television, art and games as well as literature) as an intellectual discipline that requires skill and rigour, not just a vague idea that the past is another country which might make for a romantic setting.

So A Death in the Hospital will return to the second-hand book sale table via my local charity shop, where I should clearly have left it in the first place.

Oh Dear

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I was so looking foward to Juno Dawson’s Her Majesty’s Royal Coven. Modern witchcraft set in Hebden Bridge, which came highly recommended by both a friend whose taste I trust and the local bookstore that sold it to me? What could be better as escapist reading? In fact, I anticipated enjoying it so much that I bought the sequel before I even started the first volume and savoured my anticipation of losing myself in the West Yorkshire equivalent of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls series (recommened by another friend whose taste I trust and which I enjoy enormously).

So it is with great regret that I must inform you that Her Majesty’s Secret Coven is the lastest of my very rare ‘did not finishes’, and this was after I got over 150 pages in. Usually if I make it past page 50, I will keep going with a book, even if only out of pure bloody-mindedness. This, however, felt like too much of a slog. The characterisation was remarkably flat, particularly of the women who were portrayed as archetypes rather than indivuals. Given that this is a story predominantly about women, with a plot centring on female identity, this is a serious problem, one reinforced by a confusing plot with gaping holes in it. I spent most of the time struggling to understand what was happening or why characters were choosing to act in the ways described.

But the biggest disappointment was the aspect I had been anticipating most eagerly – the setting. As a Hebden Bridge resident, I freely admit to being an ‘offcumbden’. But the town and its surrounding villages have a unique enough personality for me to feel, even after only seven years of residence, that I know them at least a little bit. And they are definitely not the town depicted in this book. Yes, they form a small pocket of liberalism, not to say radicalism, enfolded by the Calder Valley in the more generally conservative rural West Yorkshire. And yes, the 1960s hippie vibe which is central to the town’s identity is being diluted by an influx of the professional middle classes (of which I freely admit to being one). Sitting halfway between Leeds and Manchester, even the vaguaries of Northern Rail cannot detract from the attraction of the town to commuters. But for all that, Hebden Bridge is still very much Happy Valley, not Nappy Valley. I don’t recall ever meeting a yummy mummy, as asserted in one description of a local café, and this is after five years of schoolgate attendance. Dawson appears to see Hebden Bridge as a version of Brighton in the north, which it is not. It is its own distinct place, with its own unique, often contradictory, always fascinating character, one which Dawson fails to capture.

The geography also doesn’t make sense. The book is full of descriptions of characters’ homes, but I was unable to locate any of them in my mental map of the area. The actual map that forms the frontispiece is no help, drawing as it does on the imagery of maps in fantasy novels. By the time I gave up, I found I was lost, not in the story but rather in confusion. I kept longing to find my way back tot he real world, rather than continue to make my way through a fantastical vision of the placy I call home, peopled by unreal phantasms, not people with recognisable conflicts and motivations. My recommendation is, if you want to discover the complex magic of Hebden Bridge through fiction, try the work of Sally Wainright rather than Juno Dawson. Happy Valley is on iPlayer and Riot Girls is due for broadcast this year. Or better yet, come visit, and experience this darkly enchanting place for yourself.

Unreal City

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Kate Atkinson, Shrines of Gaiety

Having swallowed down Human Croquet and Normal Rules Don’t Apply in a gulp, I took a bit more time over Shrines of Gaiety, which is probably a good thing.  I enjoyed it – I think it is probably impossible for Atkinson to write a book that I don’t find totally immersive and enjoyable to read – but, in retrospect, I’m not sure it was as entirely wonderful as I had hoped. I don’t really expect anything to live up to the wonder of A God in Ruins, a book which speaks to so much that I love, am interested in and have dedicated my intellectual life to, or Life After Life, a literary and imaginative life raft which I clung to in the days after my mother died. But his is a book that had the potential to speak to me as strongly as either of these, a story of a time and people who are, in part, the subject of the (non-fiction) book I am writing at the moment, as well as being crime fiction-adjacent, touching on another of my great passions.

And there certainly were elements of this book that I loved. Nellie Coker, Gwendolen Keeling and Freda Murgatroyd (what a name!) are all wonderful creations – rich, complex, engaging women whose attitudes and actions I could deplore and root for in equal measure. I also loved the character of Niven Coker, a man shaped but not defined (except perhaps in the eyes of others) by his experiences of war. The ambiguity of the ending of his and Gwendolen’s story, so typical of Atkinson’s play with multiple narratives and possible outcomes, was one of the great pleasures of the novel for me.

And yet… And yet… I did not love this book the way I loved even Transmission, a novel that I know many critics struggled with. The problem for me was two-fold. In the first place, there were too many characters and storylines introduced, with the result that several of the plots and characters felt underdeveloped. Ramsey Coker in particular, who gets a considerable amount of space in the book, never came fully alive for me, and I never truly believed in his (strategically important) relationship with Freda. Similarly, the murdered girls whose disappearance I think is intended to be a central plot device, merged into one in my mind, which was a problem given the centrality of the moral imperative that drives Inspector Frobisher’s desire to name them individually. And to leave one major plot strand (the disappearance of Florence Ingram) entirely unexplained may be considered artistic license. For there to be a second (the murder of Vivian Quinn) feels like authorial carelessness.

Secondly, and relatedly, the book is weakened by the attempt to coral all 73 characters and their interlinking storylines into small a social and geographic space. There are any number of coincidences – Frobisher’s presence on the bridge when Freda goes into the river, Freda and Florence rooming in the house of the abortionist employed by Maddox, Niven Coker passing by when Gwendolen is mugged. One of these would work to help drive the plot but, like the unexplained plot points, their accumulation over the course of the novel feels contrived. The appearance of Gertie Bridges as a deus ex machina and virtual twin of a central character feels particularly in artistic, violating as it does the tenth of Ronald Knox’s commandments of detective fiction for the period. Having invoked Eliot and his unreal city, the imagery of the nameless crowd flowing over London Bridge, undone by death, is undermined by the boundaries these coincidences put in place.

Ultimately, then, this in really a novel about the aftermath and legacy of the First World War as I had hoped. The decadence of the clubland setting, with its corrupt police, violent gangsters and privileged patrons, could belong as easily to the fin de siècle, with Wilde rather than Eliot as muse. The experience of the horrors of war are part but not the entirety of the life the characters, something which does ring true, particularly in the case of Niven, but this raises questions about Atkinson’s stated inspiration for the novel, as discussed in the Author’s Note. Unlike her Second World War novels, which do so brilliantly, this one fails to fully capture the uniqueness of the historical moment of its setting. Possibly this is a specific problem of the interwar period, which does seem to have a certain ubiquity in historical novels, although Sarah Waters undoubtedly managed to capture the unique flavour of changing times and social mores in the period in The Paying Guest.

None of which is to say that I don’t recommend Shrines of Gaiety. Anything by Atkinson is worth reading and Nellie Coker is far too good a character to refuse introduction to. I am very glad I met her, and her elder son. But this novel won’t haunt me the way that A God in Ruins and Behind the Scenes at the Museum do, enriching my life and scholarship in the process. However, this slight disappointment certainly won’t keep me for eagerly anticipating the paperback publication of Death at the Sign of the Rook, Atkinson’s latest (and apparently last) Jackson Brodie detective novel, an homage to Golden Age detective fiction. I live in hope that it manages to capture the feeling of the interwar – this elusive, infuriating, enthralling period that continues to fascinate me as both a historian and reader of fiction. I do so in the certainty that even if it does not, it will still, like Shrines of Gaiety, be a great read.

Enough is as Good as a Feast

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Kate Atkinson, Human Croquet

Kate Atkinson, Normal Rules Don’t Apply

It may have been a mistake, saving my stash of Kate Atkinsons to take with me on holiday over the summer. Not because they are not wonderful; they absolutely are. Reading Human Croquet, which I did in a day, gulping it down in a way I haven’t done with a book since the height of the pandemic, was a joy, an immersion in language and characterisation and intricately intersecting plot lines that took me to another place as only a great book can.

But oh! they are so rich! Coming to the end of the book after a day spent reading like that felt a bit like getting up from the table after an overly rich meal, or waking up with a hangover. It was almost too much, to the point where I felt lethargic and slightly headachy. So following such overindulgence with more of the same may, as I say, have been a mistake. Yes, Normal Rules Don’t Apply was, as a collection of short stories, briefer and lighter, but the collection of linking characters, locations and storylines required work, the language was just as intoxicating and the emotions evoked were, if anything, even more quietly devastating.

To recover, I gave myself a palate cleanser of Georgette Heyer’s The Quiet Gentleman, which was light and funny and straightforward in terms of plotlines and the emotions aroused, although not, perhaps, overly memorable. But it did leave me slightly out of time to tackle Shrines of Gaiety, which I had been keeping to savour,before the end of our stay in the US. I was left with the choice of starting it on the plane ride home or saving it for the long weekend trip to Scotland scheduled for the week after we returned. The former option risked my staying up all night reading, followed by jetlagged exhaustion on arrival. That was how I read Life After Life, but I wouldn’t have slept on that flight anyway, In the depths of grief following my mother’s death the week before, that book saved me from going mad, a life raft in the ocean of suspended time that flying back to my family in the UK entailed. This time I anticipated no such need, just the prospect of houseguests to prepare for, making the prospect of exhaustion compounded by jetlag a less than enticing prospect.

Saving it for Scotland, meanwhile, would give me something to look forward too when my husband and son headed off to climb Ben Nevis without me, a challenge to far for my torn ACL, which had been playing up even in the slightly less strenuous context of the hills of Western Massachusetts. So that is was I decided to do, planning to balance the intensity of Atkinson’s rich literary vision of 1920s London with the anticipated jeu d’esprit of Juno Dawson’s Hebden Bridge-set witchcraft novels.