historical fiction

The Romantic, by William Boyd

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An unusual novel, my book club’s pick for this month covers the life of Cashel Greville Ross from his time as a young child in Ireland, through 451 pages of adventures, to his death. Born in December, 1799, Cashel’s 82 years covers most of the 19th century, and his adventures hit most of the touchstones of that period.

For example, when he gets disillusioned as a teenager, drops out of school, and joins the army, he ends up in the Battle of Waterloo. When he travels to Italy, he becomes friends with Byron and the Shelley ménage. This is a picaresque novel, like Don Quixote, where each chapter is almost a stand-alone story, with a new challenge for the protagonist and a new setting.

It’s great fun, seeing where a new chapter will take Cashel as he travels the world in pursuit of his next great scheme for living. Should he be a lover, an explorer, a writer, a farmer? This question of how to live your best life is far older than Oprah or Mary Oliver. Montaigne’s Essays are primarily multiple attempts to answer it.

The change of scene and story in each chapter becomes a huge challenge for a writer, which Boyd rises to brilliantly. He must have done a tremendous amount of research in order to create a new world in each chapter, full of a stunning amount of period detail. Also, since Cashel’s adventures are often tied to real events and people, each one had to be meticulously studied.

What ties it together, besides the dazzling writing and Cashel himself, is the theme named in the title. The question at the heart of the Romantic Movement in the 19th century is whether we should value our feelings over our rational thoughts. Which should prevail as we make large and small decisions? The Romantics plumped for the former, in reaction to the previous century’s Enlightenment, which prized science, facts, and logic above emotions. Thus, Cashel often allows his emotions to dictate his actions, with mixed consequences.

This theme of feelings versus logic is of interest to me. Of course, nothing could be more relevant to our society’s current discord between those who believe a statement is true because they feel like it is and those who look for facts and proof and logic to support it. Over the course of my own long life, I’ve also considered this theme, and questioned how much one or the other influenced my own decisions.

While I did enjoy—and admire!—the story, I have to admit that I eventually tired of the identical pattern for each chapter—Cashel succeeds brilliantly, then crashes for some reason or other, at which point another opportunity presents itself, which becomes the adventure of the next chapter. The idea that one person could be so amazingly proficient in every sphere is unlikely, which undermined what’s been called the dream of the story, pulling me out of it.

So why did I listen to this lengthy novel, not once, but twice? Because I was entranced by the narrator Kobna Holbrook-Smith. His voice is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever heard, and I’d be happy to listen to him read anything, however boring the content. Here, though, his dramatic talents are on display, bringing the story and each character to life. I might be happy to listen to this story many more times, until I can find something else he’s narrated.

By listening to this book, I apparently missed out on some of the ancillary materials: footnotes, maps, etc. In this case, it was a trade-off I was happy to make. It’s not the first time this has happened with an audiobook. Since I love maps, perhaps in the future, I’ll look to see what’s included with a book before choosing the audio version.

What “whole-life” novel have you read?

Best Books I Read in 2023

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As a writer, I learn something from every book I read. In no particular order, these are the ten best books I read in 2023. Please check the links to the blog archive for a fuller discussion of those I’ve reviewed.

1. Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan
This short novel at first seems, as the title indicates, quiet and unassuming. Set in an Irish town in 1985, it follows Bill Furlow who has earned a modest but sufficient position in life as a purveyor of wood and coal. Set apart from the town is an orphanage and laundry run by the Magdalen order of nuns. There are many things in today’s world—and in the past as well—that make me despair of humanity. Then comes a book like this that reminds me of the courage and goodness that can be found.

2. Purgatory Road, by Charles Coe
Coe’s superpower in these poems is his generous heart. Small things that strike his attention, such as a truck that won’t start in a grocery store parking lot or a woman talking to herself on a traffic island, lead us to understand what it is like to inhabit someone else’s life. Channeling Forster’s call to “only connect,” Coe’s poems from 2020’s lockdown trace what we’ve lost and our attempts to communicate across the void.

3. The Years, by Annie Ernaux
Ernaux’s genre-bending experiment adds a new dimension to the field of life writing. She goes beyond memoir—a subjective view of events in the author’s personal life—and autofiction—a reexamination and fictionalisation of those events—to create a new form that melds both of these with sociology and history. She has captured the sweep of the lifetime simultaneously with that of a person and a generation.

4. Horse, by Geraldine Brooks
This novel succeeds on so many levels. Brooks weaves together multiple storylines, with different narrators and time periods, ensuring that the story reveals itself smoothly. Yes, this is a story about a horse, beautifully written, with leisurely scenes full of luscious period details. It is also the story of the United States, from the antebellum world to the present. Inevitably it is about what Wendell Berry called the U.S.’s hidden wound. It is the story of us, what we strive for, and the price involved. There’s much to think about here.

5. Wild Girls, by Shirley J. Brewer
There were no maps for those of us who came of age at the beginning of the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. Or rather, we threw them away and created our own path, our own definition of what it could mean to be a woman. My friend Shirley (full disclosure) discarded her Catholic schoolgirl veil and took on the world in sequins and a feather boa. Breezy and brave, with a heart as big as the Chesapeake, she sends us these letters from her world. A chameleon, she revels in the brightest colors and slips into one woman’s heart after another. She pulls off her magic through humor and compassion and turns that surprise us. She awakens the wild, original, and authentic selves that we know ourselves to be.

6. A Charmed Circle, by Anna Kavan
I’ve long been a fan of Kavan’s work. This, her first novel, is the story of an English family whose life has become so enclosed as to become toxic. A modern town, loud with trams and lorries and motorcycles, has grown up around their walled home, an old vicarage. What is a refuge for the parents has become a prison for the three children, who are now young adults. It’s hard not to care about these characters as they try to assert the freedom to be themselves.

7. Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips
In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him. This is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, and how they are affected by the girls’ disappearance. We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia.

8. Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck
This absorbing historical novel follows two real women, Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake, who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it.

9. Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve is given away in payment for his father’s debts. Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

10. The Bay of Angels, by Anita Brookner
When Zoë is sixteen, her widowed mother unexpectedly marries again and moves to Nice. Zoë decides to stay in their old London flat and enjoy her new-found freedom from her drab life alone with her mother. As with all of Brookner’s work, this is an iceberg of a novel: brief and quiet on the surface, with a huge mass of emotions and ideas and insights hidden below. Narrated by Zoë, the story is built on scenes that bring to life both the quiet London dusk and the blazing sun of Nice. With her usual penetrating psychological insights, Brookner provides fascinating portraits of Zoë and the people with whom she interacts.

What were the best books you read in 2023?

The Testament of Mary, by Colm Tóibín

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There are some authors whose every book is a must-read for me. Tóibín is one, ever since I picked up a battered copy of The Heather Blazing at a used book and tool sale in a market town in England twenty years ago. I persuaded my book club to read it as well and they’ve gone on to enjoy other novels by him. You’ll find several of his books in my blog: Brooklyn, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, The Empty Family, Nora Webster, and The Magician.

Not having been raised Catholic and a longtime feminist, I’ve given little thought to the culture that has built up around Mary, aside from discarding the stereotype of her as docile and obedient that many people hold up as the ideal toward which all women should strive. As a mother, I could feel her horror and grief at the death of her son, but that made me dislike even more the priestly glorification of human sacrifice. Well, I guess they would say half-human.

However, this first-person narrative captured me immediately, giving me a new and completely plausible image of an historical Mary. Here, she is older and alone, living in Ephesus, a city known for its Temple of Artemis, located in what is now Turkey, thus far enough away from Rome to offer safe haven from her Roman pursuers. There, she is visited by two of her son’s disciples who watch and support her even as they question her repeatedly about her son’s life to bolster their own narratives. She says:

They think that I do not know the elaborate nature of their desires. But nothing escapes me now except sleep . . . They are too locked into their vast and insatiable needs and too dulled by the remnants of a terror we all felt then to have noticed that I remember everything. Memory fills my body as much as blood and bones.

She considers those who followed her son a “group of misfits he gathered around him, men who could not look a woman in the eye,” and judges herself with the same brutal clarity. In this slim novella, she tells us her story, the one she holds in every part of her body.

And it is an utterly credible story. If there truly was an historical Jesus—his name is never mentioned in this book—then this portrait of a happy, playful child grown into a cold and distant man is one I can believe. It is the story of too many men, and a few women, who have embraced the portrait of themselves they see in others’ eyes and the power that comes with it.

It is not the story that has come down to us; that’s the one crafted by his followers, the one she disputes. It is still an enthralling one. A mother, telling us about her son—her son. She discounts the stories she hears about his so-called miracles as exaggerations by the crowd that follows him. Even her glancing acquaintance with the results, such as meeting the undead Lazarus, are ambiguous.

Tóibín has crafted a tender and agonizing book that has changed my view of Mary and her son.

What novel of Colm Tóibín’s have you read? What did you think about it?

Haven, by Emma Donoghue

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My horror at the devastation wrought by evangelical “Christians” (who eschew the basic tenets of Christianity) in the U.S. made this novel tough going for me. I couldn’t get past my outrage that anyone would submit themselves to torture and starvation in the name of religion when salvation—an earthly one to be sure—was so easily available.

Donoghue, author of Room, has constructed another story where people are confined in a tiny location, dependent on the whims of an all-powerful tyrant. In 600 A.D. Cluain Mhic Nóis, an Irish monastery, hosts a visiting holy man, perhaps the holiest man on earth: Artt, legendary for having read every book in existence and surviving the plague with the loss only of a finger.

While there, Artt has a dream—surely a holy vision!—that he should found a new monastery on a remote island off the Irish coast, far from the earthly temptations that have, in his view, corrupted Cluain Mhic Nóis. The dream/vision/mandate from God further commands that he take two of the monks: Cormac, an older man who came late to religion and is fond of telling stories, and young, impressionable Trian, who was given to the monastery at 13.

They fetch up on a stony isle that it is hard to imagine anyone could survive a week on, though the author’s note assures us that it is indeed the site of a medieval monastery. The fascination for me was in the various ways they—mostly Cormac to be honest—find to survive in this hostile environment. Trian, too, captures the heart with their sweetness and love for everything—birds, fellows, mussels, God. Artt is just, in my opinion, a self-righteous, narcissistic blowhard, convinced that he alone is the conduit of God’s word.

Well, obviously I’m the wrong audience for this book. I could hardly bear continuing to read of their hardships, knowing that civilisation—with, sure, its evils, but also actual sustenance and shelter—is only a short boat ride away. The writing is gorgeous but the story infuriating.

I have my moments of thinking like Artt that the world is incurably decadent, and wanting to preserve some small piece of what life could really be like. But this is not the way. And I’m far too practical to take my minions, even if I could bear to have minions, away from necessities like food, water and shelter to create religious monuments. Nor could I ever sacrifice others to my vision of my own greatness.

So, while I admire the prose, the story left me cold. No, not cold, but a turbulent mix of emotions: frustration, anger, sadness, a hint of longing. The book challenged me to think outside my own box, a challenge I guess I failed. Stil, I’m left thinking of John Lennon’s Imagine: no religions, nothing to die for.

Have you read a novel that challenged you?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

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This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two women. With the stunning invasion of France, a pregnant Violette in London immediately starts campaigning to do some kind of war work, despite her father’s discouragement, a campaign that takes fire when her husband in killed in North Africa. Meanwhile, Virginia elects to remain in France with her beloved husband, invalided out early in the war.

Alternate chapters follow the two women as they find their way forward, Violette doing various kinds of war work before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret UK intelligence agency, in the hopes of being sent to France, Virginia and her husband sheltering and helping downed pilots and escaped POWs.

Beautifully written, full of stunning scenes that we discover in the historical note at the end actually happened, this is one of those books that you simply cannot stop reading. It’s a fantastic addition to our understanding of what was happening beyond the battlefields during this showdown with fascism.

You might think that I would have had enough of women Resistance fighters after reading nonfiction books about Virginia Hall, one of the first British spies in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who also ran a Resistance operation in France, supplying critical information to MI6, the UK’s Special Intelligence Service. I thought so too until I read reviews of this book by Robuck, whom I know slightly.

Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it. Remembering the heart-breaking realities of fascism is especially critical today when the radical right, funded by amoral one-percenters, are waving swastikas and trying to persuade people in this country to do away with democracy and embrace fascism in order to fulfill their white supremacist dreams and fantasies of a nation with no freedom of religion.

In her Author’s Note, Robuck tells us how Virginia and Violette’s stories came together, “showing the different ways that women, in particular, are called to serve, how each of us has a vocation, and we cannot have peace until we become who we are meant to be. Also, ultimately, they show us that none of us can operate alone. We are all called into a community of people working together for good.”

Virginia and Violette—their courage and integrity—are an inspiration for us all.

Have you read a history—fictionalised or nonfiction—that has inspired you?

The Last Bookshop in London, by Madeline Martin

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When Grace Bennett lost her mother, she lost almost everything. Her sole relative, an uncle, not only takes over her house but also dismisses her from her job at his store without a reference. She and her more adventurous friend Viv have always dreamed of going to London, so they set off, buoyed by the offer of lodgings with a friend of Grace’s mother.

It’s August, 1939.

Viv gets her dream job at Harrods, but timid Grace has no luck because she has no references. Finally, the fond, if bossy, Mrs. Weatherford bullies the owner of a struggling bookshop into hiring Grace for six months so she can get the necessary reference.

Primrose Hill is barely staying afloat because it is far away from Paternoster Row, home of most of London’s bookstores, and its owner Mr. Evans is not much of a businessman. Grace is nervous: she’s not a reader, so how can she recommend books to customers?

However, her retail experience helps her make the shop more organized and attractive, and she finds the kindness lurking under Mr. Evans’s gruff exterior. She also enjoys the customers, especially George whose encouragement finally gets her to start reading.

Then war comes, with blackout curtains and the Blitz. Amid loss and constant fear, Grace volunteers as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) warden, coincidentally paired with the grumpiest of the store’s customers, sending her out on the dark nights during the worst of the bombing. She takes refuge in her new passion: reading. On the nights she’s not on duty, when she and Mrs. Weatherfield sleep in the subway tunnels, she’s persuaded to read aloud to help others pass the time and distract them from their fears.

This second in a string of bookshop books for me starts out as a light read, but quickly turns serious with the start of World War II. The story eloquently depicts the home front: the women and old men left behind, the first attempt to find your way home in the blackout, the fear at the sound of the doorbell because it could be someone delivering a telegram, the sounds and smells of sleeping in the tube station turned air raid shelter, the attempt to extinguish incendiaries, the shock—first physical and then emotional—of a bomb blast.

What I most admire in this story is the way Martin integrates the larger story of the war with Grace’s particular journey. The grim accuracy of life in London during the Blitz, and all the losses—loved ones, homes, security—keep this from being a frothy romance or coming-of-age story. The war is not just pasted on to add drama; it informs everything in Grace’s story, from large events to the smallest detail.

What novel have you read that incorporates events current to the story?

A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth, by Daniel Mason

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Having found Mason’s novel The Winter Soldier a rich experience, I picked up this collection of short stories. I was surprised to find that I had already read one of them in The Atlantic and thought it brilliant.

“For the Union Dead” begins with the narrator being asked to sort through the belongings of his recently deceased uncle, a nan he didn’t know well. “He was a quiet figure, my father’s only brother, and overshadowed by my mother’s sprawling clan of six siblings.” The narrator does know that Teddy was peculiar: an unmarried man who wore suspenders, drank borscht every morning, and kept the tv tuned to pro wrestling. We learn more about Teddy’s background, his growing interest in Civil War reenactment, and the strange way he chose to participate in it. All add up to an unforgettable portrait of man and the weight of history.

The other stories are about equally peculiar people. Set in earlier ages, each delves into a person who is, well, different. From naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace collecting new species in the Malay Archipelago to a female aéronaute piloting a balloon into eternity, their voices invite us to share their experience as they launch themselves outside society’s straitjacket.

I particularly liked “The Line Agent Pascal” which begins “Every morning Hippolyte Pascal, agent of the Line at Urupá, woke to the sun and the sound of parrots, rose from his hammock, dressed, set a battered kettle on the fire, and crossed his tiny station to check the signal.”

Writers are often advised to leave out routine actions for fear of boring the reader. Yet this first sentence not only grounds the reader in time and place, but also conveys his solitude. It is a time when the telegraph was necessary to connect the town and the distant mines, when the technology was primitive enough to require signal boosters at intervals along the line. But it is his solitude that is the core of the story, the eternal balancing act between solitude and society.

The title story takes us into one of the farthest of society’s outliers: Arthur Bispo de Rosário who calls himself a sailor and “a collector of lives.” What today we would call an outsider artist, he speaks to us from the Brazilian psychiatric institution, his home for fifty years, where a doctor draws details of his life from him. Interspersed in the narrative are Arthur’s descriptions of his elaborate embroideries, part of his “divine mission.“ Mason draws on his own work as a psychiatrist to take us into the mind of this actual person, diagnosed with schizophrenia, whose name now adorns Rio de Janeiro’s Contemporary Art Museum.

The real question in these stories is: What does it feel like to be inside this person’s head? How do they perceive and interpret the world?

And this is the great gift of fiction: to be able to see the world through the eyes of another.

Yes, like many readers, I sometimes dive into a novel to escape from our humdrum or terrifying present into a pleasant dream of a world. Even in the most lightweight novels, though, we are asked to experience the events along with the protagonist. Every time we do that, we increase our capacity for empathy.

Some stories stay with us for years. What is one that has stayed with you?

The Island of Sea Women, by Lisa See

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The island is Jeju, off the South Korean coast. The sea women are the Haenyos, women who don’t use breathing equipment but rather hold their breath to dive to the sea floor to harvest seafood.

The story opens with Young-sook, an elderly retired Haenyo who hates being treated as a tourist attraction. She is especially peeved by the persistence of an American woman and her daughter who claim to be descended from Young-sook’s best friend Mi-ja. They show Young-sook a photograph which she pretends not to recognise.

We are then transported back to 1938. As the daughter of the chief of a Haenyo collective, Young-sook trains from a young age, both to learn the breathing technique called “Sumbisori” and to be in top physical condition. Since the women are the ones who earn money, men on the island stay home to care for the children. Meanwhile, the island is suffering under Japanese rule.

We follow Young-sook as she meets and befriends Mi-ja, who is an outcast because her parents collaborated the Japanese. The girls eventually begin training to become Haenyos, starting out as “baby divers” and gradually becoming more proficient. They work as a team farming the wet fields (the sea) and the dry fields (the vegetable garden). Much as Young-sook loves being in the sea, she can never forget the danger involved, repeating the mantra “Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life.”

The situation worsens during World War II, as the Japanese impress young men from the island into their army and send refugees to the island, where there is already too little food. The end of the war brings a new nightmare, as the Americans install a dictator in South Korea and help his forces further tyrannize the island. The carnages on top of the great poverty on the island makes for difficult reading at some points.

The two girls find themselves at odds as they enter arranged marriages. The progress and zig-zags of their friendship are one of the best things in the story, beautifully rendered. The story occasionally flashes forward to 2008, when the Americans continue to pester the elderly Young-sook, wanting to tell her about Mi-ja’s fate.

The details of the culture on the island, the history of the people there, and most of all the immersive experience of diving with the Haenyos are what make the story memorable. Meticulously researched, with additional information on the author’s website, we are privileged to learn about a way of life that has now almost disappeared.

Perhaps the hardest task for a novelist is inserting a trail of breadcrumbs such that the ending comes as a surprise, yet perfectly obvious looking back over the story. What makes it hard is the range of readers: I know from my book clubs that some people catch on right away, while others may still need an explanation even after finishing a book.

For me, with this book, I saw the answers to the story questions too early and wondered through much of the book why the characters were not able to see them as well. Still, though the story of the friendship sagged a little, for me at least, the story of the sea women and their island did not. I strongly recommend this book.

Have you ever heard of the Haenyos?