Reading for October
Oct. 20th, 2017 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhYellow Jack by Josh Russell. A novel set in 1840s New Orleans, about Claude Marchand, the (fictional) apprentice of Daguerre, who steals his technology of daguerrotypes – early photographs – flees to New Orleans, and becomes rich taking memorial photos of the dead during a yellow fever epidemic. Along the way he hooks up with Millicent, a mixed-race woman who becomes his mistress, and Vivian, the young daughter of a prominent white family. The most interesting thing about this book is its stylistic conceit. The story is told through three intercut threads: Claude speaking in the first person, in which he is very obviously an unreliable narrator, frequently changing events to make himself look better; excerpts from Millicent's diary; and a modern-day academic study meant to accompany an exhibition of Claude's surviving daguerrotypes.
All I have to say is that it's a damn good thing the multiple styles are interesting, because nothing else about this book is worthwhile. Right on page one the academic study says, "Because of his constant contact with the mercury vapor used to develop daguerreotype images Marchand had lost all of his teeth and was reportedly mad for the final months of his life." so it's not a spoiler to say that Claude is increasingly a complete and total dick throughout this book. I guess going insane from mercury poisoning is a pretty good excuse for beating a young enslaved child until his face needs stitches, taking nudes of an eight-year-old, nearly having sex with an eleven-year-old, mistreating all the women in his life, and generally being an irredeemable asshole, but knowing that the author is doing it on purpose doesn't make spending two-hundred pages with Marchand remotely pleasant.
There are so many things that irritated me about this book that it's hard to decide which tops the list. Perhaps how the author continues to refer to Millicent as an "octoroon" even when he's discussing her in modern-day interviews, or the scene where a dude in the 1840s figures out mosquitoes transmit yellow fever because I guess the author didn't trust his readers to understand that people in the past don't have access to the full scope of modern knowledge, or just the overall sleazy attitude of the text, which seems to think that it's oh-so-shocking because it has (extremely mild) sex scenes and a main character who uses drugs. Yellow Jack thinks it's saying something deep about the nature of perception – can a photograph ~really~ capture the truth, or is reality dependant on the beholder? – but it's really just a few shallow ideas wrapped around the story of an equally shallow asshole.
The Witchfinder's Sister by Beth Underdown. Between 1645 and '47, a man named Matthew Hopkins declared himself "Witchfinder General" and promptly began to hold more trials for witchcraft than England had ever known, leading to the deaths of about three hundred women. The Witchfinder's Sister is a novel detailing these events from the point of view of Matthew's sister Alice (who does not actually appear in the historical record, though she could theoretically have existed).
The book opens with Alice newly widowed, forced to return to her hometown and the brother she hasn't seen in years. Without money, without other relatives to go to, without influence, and with the general lack of independence granted to women in the seventeenth century, Alice quickly finds herself trapped as a dependant member of Matthew's household. She's shocked to learn of his belief in witches (given their father's general reliance on logic, common sense, and an academic approach to the Bible) but is unable to talk him out of it or stop his trials. She desperately investigates old family secrets, in the hope of figuring out what drives Matthew to do such things, believing that if she figures out his motivations she'll be able to stop him. At the same time, Matthew slowly maneuvers her into acting as an assistant during his interrogations of "witches".
The Witchfinder's Sister is mostly concerned with exploring how witch trials could be allowed to happen; it goes with an explanation based on the general chaos of England during the Civil War, particularly the tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as well as Matthew's troubled relationship with his mother. Which, you know, is probably accurate enough, but somehow felt a bit shallow in the depiction, though I can't put my finger on exactly why. There's also a twist at the very end (it's literally the last sentence) that seemed silly compared to the serious-minded tone of the rest of the book.
Despite those complaints, I mostly liked The Witchfinder's Sister. The characters of Alice and several other disadvantaged women are very well done, and give a real sense of the constriction of their lives. The mystery of Matthew's childhood secret kept me turning the pages until the ultimate reveal. But the best part of the book is its excellent depiction of the terror and tension of Alice's position. There's a scene of a swimming trial – where a woman was tossed in water to see if she sinks or floats – that was particularly chilling. It's more literary fiction than horror novel, but The Witchfinder's Sister does a good job of reminding one of how scary normal humans can be.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
All I have to say is that it's a damn good thing the multiple styles are interesting, because nothing else about this book is worthwhile. Right on page one the academic study says, "Because of his constant contact with the mercury vapor used to develop daguerreotype images Marchand had lost all of his teeth and was reportedly mad for the final months of his life." so it's not a spoiler to say that Claude is increasingly a complete and total dick throughout this book. I guess going insane from mercury poisoning is a pretty good excuse for beating a young enslaved child until his face needs stitches, taking nudes of an eight-year-old, nearly having sex with an eleven-year-old, mistreating all the women in his life, and generally being an irredeemable asshole, but knowing that the author is doing it on purpose doesn't make spending two-hundred pages with Marchand remotely pleasant.
There are so many things that irritated me about this book that it's hard to decide which tops the list. Perhaps how the author continues to refer to Millicent as an "octoroon" even when he's discussing her in modern-day interviews, or the scene where a dude in the 1840s figures out mosquitoes transmit yellow fever because I guess the author didn't trust his readers to understand that people in the past don't have access to the full scope of modern knowledge, or just the overall sleazy attitude of the text, which seems to think that it's oh-so-shocking because it has (extremely mild) sex scenes and a main character who uses drugs. Yellow Jack thinks it's saying something deep about the nature of perception – can a photograph ~really~ capture the truth, or is reality dependant on the beholder? – but it's really just a few shallow ideas wrapped around the story of an equally shallow asshole.
The Witchfinder's Sister by Beth Underdown. Between 1645 and '47, a man named Matthew Hopkins declared himself "Witchfinder General" and promptly began to hold more trials for witchcraft than England had ever known, leading to the deaths of about three hundred women. The Witchfinder's Sister is a novel detailing these events from the point of view of Matthew's sister Alice (who does not actually appear in the historical record, though she could theoretically have existed).
The book opens with Alice newly widowed, forced to return to her hometown and the brother she hasn't seen in years. Without money, without other relatives to go to, without influence, and with the general lack of independence granted to women in the seventeenth century, Alice quickly finds herself trapped as a dependant member of Matthew's household. She's shocked to learn of his belief in witches (given their father's general reliance on logic, common sense, and an academic approach to the Bible) but is unable to talk him out of it or stop his trials. She desperately investigates old family secrets, in the hope of figuring out what drives Matthew to do such things, believing that if she figures out his motivations she'll be able to stop him. At the same time, Matthew slowly maneuvers her into acting as an assistant during his interrogations of "witches".
The Witchfinder's Sister is mostly concerned with exploring how witch trials could be allowed to happen; it goes with an explanation based on the general chaos of England during the Civil War, particularly the tensions between Protestants and Catholics, as well as Matthew's troubled relationship with his mother. Which, you know, is probably accurate enough, but somehow felt a bit shallow in the depiction, though I can't put my finger on exactly why. There's also a twist at the very end (it's literally the last sentence) that seemed silly compared to the serious-minded tone of the rest of the book.
Despite those complaints, I mostly liked The Witchfinder's Sister. The characters of Alice and several other disadvantaged women are very well done, and give a real sense of the constriction of their lives. The mystery of Matthew's childhood secret kept me turning the pages until the ultimate reveal. But the best part of the book is its excellent depiction of the terror and tension of Alice's position. There's a scene of a swimming trial – where a woman was tossed in water to see if she sinks or floats – that was particularly chilling. It's more literary fiction than horror novel, but The Witchfinder's Sister does a good job of reminding one of how scary normal humans can be.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
no subject
Date: 2017-10-28 09:16 pm (UTC)Yellow Jack sounds dreadful. Why do dudes write such creepy books? (I know, I know, #notallmen, but all the same there's a particular type of creepy that almost always seems to be associated with a male author.)
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Date: 2017-11-03 06:33 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's not that I disagree with this as a general theory – I'm sure it's quite accurate! It's just that the novel never gets deeper than your one sentence summary (well, maybe plus a bit of mommy-issues in Hopkins's psychology), and when you've got three hundred pages to fill, you start wanting examples and more details. Or at least I do.
Why do dudes write such creepy books?
It was SUCH a dude book. I kept feeling like I was supposed to be offput yet scandalously intrigued by the ~shocking sex scenes~, but they were quite mild and fade-to-black compared to the average fanfic or, hell, romance novel, so it ended up just being underwhelming.