historical fiction

The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron

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Confessions of Nat Turner

As the title suggests, this 1967 novel about the slave revolt of 1831 is told in the first person by Nat Turner, leader of the revolt. It starts with Nat in jail, chained hand, foot and neck. In meetings with his White lawyer, Nat dictates his confession, and we learn something of what sent him on this mission to kill as many White people as possible. But we need his whole life to get past the surface and truly feel what motivated him.

Nat’s life, brilliantly written, is a litany of injustice and often cruelty. Some of his owners treated him well, some viciously. He has joys and pleasures too: his friendships with some of the other slaves, his study of the Bible, his deep satisfaction in his carpentry work.

While reading, I was fully immersed in Nat’s consciousness, yet at the same time swept by my own horror and grief and shame. None of it was a surprise—I’ve seen, heard, read too much for that—but the effects of continual trauma brought to life like this affected me deeply.

Having grown up in the Tidewater area of Virginia during the Jim Crow years, Styron had been interested in the story of Nat Turner since childhood and “haunted by the idea of slavery.” His good friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write this story and to do it by taking on the persona of the protagonist.

Nat Turner has usually been presented as a fanatical madman, and apparently he truly did fast obsessively, see visions, and believe that he had been divinely appointed to this mission. Styron’s great achievement is to give us a credible and relatable individual within the confines of those facts. Two other recorded facts gave him some clues: Of the fifty-five White people killed in the revolt, Nat Turner himself only killed one, near the end, and the revolt “ran out of speed” after that.

Those facts indicate a moral consciousness at war with Nat’s mission. Throughout the book wee are in his head, thinking his thoughts, and he is always presented as rational and intelligent. By letting the reader merge into his life, taking each step with him, the author makes Nat’s actions seem reasonable, almost inevitable. Also, Nat’s thoughts are sprinkled with verses from the Bible which is his only reading material, verses which reinforce his decisions.

A third way this feat of characterisation is accomplished is by finding common ground between our experiences and his. Often Nat’s thoughts reflect insights that seem familiar to me, such as this one:

Does it seem a hopeless paradox that the less toilsome became the circumstances of my life the more I ached to escape it? That the more tolerable and human white people became in their dealings with me the keener was my passion to destroy them?

It took Styron five years to research and write the book. With little hard information to go on—the actual 7,000-word document produced by that lawyer being the only meaningful record of Nat’s life and thoughts—the author had to imagine himself into the mind and soul of a slave in antebellum Virginia. His intentions were good: he wanted to “fashion . . . an imagined microcosm of the baleful institution has persisted into this century and become the nation’s central obsession.” The book quickly became a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month pick.

Yet only a few years later it was denounced as racist by a group of Black writers. I’ve not read their book yet and am not qualified to say one way or the other. What I do know is that it is no surprise that a book about the experience of slavery by a prominent White author would be considered proof of the privilege awarded to White voices by the publishing world.

Having already read many books about slavery, Jim Crow, and today’s injustices by Black authors, having grown up myself in a racially segregated time and place, I’m grateful to have this story too. It deepens my understanding of the early 1960s, when it seemed to me that things would never change. In some ways, sadly, they haven’t.

One thing I didn’t know before reading this book and the author’s Afterword is that in 1831 Virginia was poised to abolish slavery in the state, but Nat Turner’s revolt put an end to that. As Styron says, “the impact on the future (especially in terms of the possible avoidance of events leading to the Civil War) is awesome to contemplate.”

At this moment in time, when our democracy seems at a tipping point into destruction, largely because of deeply engrained racism, it’s daunting to consider how much can turn on a single event.

What novel have you read that gave you new insight into an historical event?

Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

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The year is 1596. Hamnet carefully, quietly descends the stairs, searching for an adult, anyone other than his abusive and often drunk grandfather. The child needs help because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly and disastrously ill. He doesn’t realise that his mother is off tending her swarming bees.

O’Farrell’s tour de force focuses on Agnes, Hamnet’s mother, Shakespeare’s wife, and in so doing immerses us in the day-to-day experience of raising children and managing a household in Elizabethan England. Agnes herself is an outlier in her society: the first thing we learn about her is that she keeps a falcon, unheard-of for a peasant much less a woman. Independent, strong-minded, more at home in the woods than anywhere else, she is an herbalist and a healer. She also has a mysterious ability, presumably from her long-dead mother, to read people’s fates.

What makes this novel so stunning is the author’s evocation of the details of each scene. Instead of tearing through a scene to keep the reader hopping, the author takes the time to richly imagine the sights and sounds, the minutest actions, staying with the scene until we are there, and stays there before moving on.

Suspense comes from our foreknowledge about Hamnet’s fate—perversely denied to his mother—and from the dual timelines: one being the year of Hamnet’s death, and the other the 1580s when Agnes and William begin a life together. A lengthy middle section describing how the plague made its way from a glass-blower in Italy to Judith in Stratford-upon-Avon may at first seem unnecessary, but it serves to increase the suspense as we long to return to that house on Henley Street.

That middle section also adds to our immersion in the period, envisioning how and why goods are packaged and transported, and what the costs are. I couldn’t help but be struck by the many people felled by the plague during its journey, people whom we don’t have time to mourn as we mourn for Judith and Hamnet.

What we know about Shakespeare comes mostly from his work. What we know about his son Hamnet is simply that he died at the age of 11, four years before Hamlet was written. What we know about Shakespeare’s wife is only a name, which is probably wrong.

The way the author uses names, starting with the title, gives us the frame for this book. The epigraph, a quote from Stephen Greenblatt, tells us that Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably at the time. Similarly, his mother, who was called Agnes in her father’s will, is the woman we know as Anne Hathaway. Shakespeare himself is never named in this novel, instead called the glover’s son, the Latin tutor, her husband. My book club debated why, deciding that the book was not meant to be about him. One person astutely suggested that the author didn’t want us to think about Shakespeare the bard, but Shakespeare the man.

Our name is tied to our identity, so by introducing this uncertainty, the author reminds us how little we can know of each other, whether that other is in the past or our present. Members of my book club could not help but be struck by how many of the playwright’s works deal with misunderstandings and misinterpretations, switched and mistaken identities.

Every reference I’ve seen to Anne Hathaway depicts her as an older woman preying upon young Will, forcing marriage on him by getting pregnant. In truth, though, we know almost nothing about this woman—basically just the mentions of her in her father’s will and her husband’s—as we know nothing about the many women who loved, married, and bore children in obscurity.

Thus, though I am usually wary of fictional representations of real people who are not alive to defend themselves—per Milan Kundera’s masterful Immortality—here I welcome this reimagining of a woman and her passionate relationship with her husband.

In his review of Carole Angiers’ Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald in the London Review of Books, Michael Wood writes:

Sebald’s deep preoccupation is with what his character Jacques Austerlitz calls ‘the marks of pain’, psychological and physical, in human and other animals. These marks are indelible, and for some people unforgettable.

Similarly, O’Farrell writes:

Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicenter, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry . . . It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.

Speaking from experience, I can say that the wrenching pages after Hamnet’s death truly capture a mother’s grief: the stunned emptiness, the guilt (contrary to all logic), the obsessive replaying of the child’s suffering, the eventual return to being able to function though changed, profoundly changed, forever.

As I am changed by this story. I was afraid to read it, despite the glowing reviews and recommendations, because I feared the pain. I’m grateful to my book club for giving me the impetus to gather my courage and begin. As Agnes discovered, art can help heal our heart’s wounds. So I say to you, go ahead. Give yourself over to this extraordinary book.

What book have you put off reading?

The Lost Apothecary, by Sarah Penner

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In a back alley in 1791 London, a wooden door opens to what appears to be a storeroom. However, those in the know are aware that behind a hidden door lies Nella Clavinger’s apothecary shop. Like her mother before her, she caters only to women and dispenses powders and salves to ease their pains. However, unlike her mother—and this is why her shop is secret—she also sells poisons to women who need to get rid of a man who is mistreating them.

Nella’s work with poisons has prematurely aged her, and she suffers pain and weakness. One day she is surprised when it is not a woman who arrives at the appointed time to collect a poison, but a 12-year-old girl, Eliza Fanning, a maid picking it up for her mistress. Eliza is fascinated by Nella and begs to be taught her skills. Nella refuses, but Eliza’s presence still has catastrophic consequences.

There’s more: This book has a dual timeline.

In present-day London Caroline Parcewell is visiting from Ohio. Although this long-planned trip was to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary, she has left her husband at home, after discovering that he has been having an affair.

As she wanders disconsolately around the city, she stumbles on a mudlarking tour, mudlarks being the name for people in earlier centuries who dug in the edges of the Thames looking for anything they can sell. She finds a mysterious vial and eventually suspects she’s on the trail of eighteenth-century London’s “apothecary murderer.”

The two stories intertwine, both speaking of women trying to control their own destinies. Nella keeps a register, the one started by her mother, noting the name of each customer, the date, and what they purchased. She knows that women like her—not wealthy, not royalty—are not recorded or remembered. So her register is one small way to recognise women who would otherwise be forgotten.

Even as Nella tries to find a way out of the troubles that come upon her, Caroline looks back over her marriage, assessing where she has abandoned her own dreams and debating whether she can continue with the marriage.

There’s a lot of suspense, with as many twists and turns as a back alley in eighteenth-century London. As always, after my first immersive read, I examined some technical aspects of the book. In this case, I was interested in how the two timelines bounced off each other, sometimes reflecting, sometimes diverging. I was also interested in the way information was gradually revealed, heightening the suspense. I have a few minor quibbles, but overall the book was a good read and a fine way to while away a rainy afternoon.

Can you recommend a book with a dual timeline?

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride

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The story opens with Sportcoat, a deacon at Five Ends Baptist Church who is perpetually drunk on the local moonshine called King Kong, entering a courtyard at the Cause Houses, a Brooklyn housing project. He takes out a rusty handgun and shoots Deems, a young drug dealer whom Sportcoat used to coach on the project’s baseball team.

Deems gets away with just losing an ear, but all the witnesses are shocked by the genial drunk’s use of violence. They are also concerned about the danger to Sportcoat from the police, Deems himself, or competing gangsters. It is 1969, just before communities such as this—a mix of Baptists, Catholics and criminals; Blacks, Latinx, Irish, and Italian—began to disintegrate due to the loss of idealism after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the changes in city politics, and the influx of crack cocaine.

McBride uses what Jane Alison in Meander, Spiral, Explode calls a spiral structure, which “begins at a point and moves onward . . . spinning around and around that central point or a single axis.”

As we spiral out from the shooting, we get to know many of the people in the community: Sportcoat’s best friend Hot Sausage who gives out the high-quality cheese that appears regularly as if by magic, an Italian gangster known as the Elephant, and Deems himself, once a promising pitcher but lured away by the easy drug money. We meet Potts, a policeman near retirement who’s come back to his early beat in the Cause Houses, a number of strong church ladies, and a quiet Nation of Islam convert named Soup, among many others. It’s a large cast, but everyone is so colorful that it’s easy to remember them.

With humor and compassion, McBride gives us their stories, while always coming back to Sportcoat and the shooting. The deacon claims he doesn’t remember shooting Deems and instead is trying to get him to come back and play baseball. Sportcoat is also in near-constant conversation with his dead wife Hettie, who disapproves of his laziness and drinking, and refuses to reveal where she hid the money collected for the church’s Christmas Fund.

The Christmas Fund is one of a number of other spirals in the story, cropping up repeatedly, as does the question of who is providing the cheese. There’s also a recurring question expressed by various characters as to what exactly a deacon does, and stories about the founding of the church.

A lot of humor is created by the shenanigans the characters get up to, such as Sausage and Sportcoat sharing a single driver’s license on alternating weeks or trying to fix a recalcitrant generator. Even when poking fun at them, McBride sidesteps stereotypes to present each character as a full human being, flawed perhaps, but trying their best to get on.

While some reviewers have considered this story a farce, to me it seemed utterly real. The characters are much like people I have known, and their world—so vividly portrayed—one I am familiar with.

Between the humor and the human drama, the story moves quickly. A common problem for spiral stories is how to end them and, indeed, here the ending seems a rush to tie up the different subplots. Disappointingly, there are some loose ends left dangling and bit of time confusion, but these are small quibbles for a book that manages to be both rollicking fun and profoundly moving.

Most of all, I treasure stories such as this one where the characters, despite their failings, are treated with respect and compassion. We all want that for ourselves. And what a better world this would be if we could all manage to extend the same to everyone we meet.

It’s rare to find a bestseller that lives up to its hype. This one does. Have you read it? What did you think of it?

A Thousand Ships, by Natalie Haynes

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It starts with fire—after the muse has her say about the poet’s invocation, of course. Creusa, wife of Aeneas, awakens to find the Citadel, the highest point of the city of Troy on fire. Her husband and five-year-old son missing, and the fire is rapidly spreading throughout the city.

The city is falling. But that’s impossible. Troy has won the war. Just a few days earlier, they had seen the ships sail away, the Greeks finally giving up after ten grueling years of war without winning back Helen, who had started it all. And yesterday for the first time in all those long years, the gates of Troy were opened and its citizens walked out, only to find a magnificent offering to the gods left by their enemies on the beach: a huge wooden horse.

Haynes deftly slips in this background as Creusa frantically tries to escape the burning city. This outstanding book is a reimagining of the events around the Trojan War through the eyes of the women involved: Greeks, Trojans, goddesses, muses, Fates. As the muse Calliope says:

There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

Even with a multitude of voices, the reader is always firmly grounded: only one narrator per chapter, with the name and often some explanatory information as the chapter title. Plus there are subtle clues in the beginning of the chapter to explain who the woman is. For example, here is the first paragraph of “Theano, wife of Antenor (advisor to Priam) mother of Crino:”

Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

The through-line of the book follows the women of Troy from the night of Troy’s fall through what happens to them at the hands of the Greek conquerors, while weaving in events from the past and future. For example, there are several letters to Odysseus from Penelope. As she waits the long ten years for his return after the fall of Troy, her tone becomes increasingly barbed.

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.

We also get the events that led up to the war and to the fatal night. Haynes’s orchestration of these various pieces is an incredible achievement. Some incidents are slowly unpeeled like an onion, with chapters about other events interspersed between layers. Others are placed just where they will have the most emotional impact or when the reader needs to know about them to understand the next chapter or to see the previous chapter in a new light.

The women are presented so realistically, even the goddesses, that they could easily be people you know. I’ve quoted generously from the book to show how accessible it is to any reader. Haynes includes enough information to orient those who are not familiar with the events described in the Iliad and Odyssey, yet presents all of it in such a novel way that it is fascinating all over again for those who are.

The book reads so easily that I was surprised by the description in the Afterword of Haynes’s extensive research. The historical record of women’s lives from that period is almost nonexistent, so the author really had to dig to find anything about the women in this book, fragments that Haynes could then supplement with her imagination.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is not just a mesmerizing story, one that I could not put down despite knowing how it would all turn out. It is also a textbook for writers on how to reveal information and backstory. And it is a psychological masterpiece, a gorgeous tapestry of women’s lives and ideas and reasons. You’ll never think of the Trojan War—or any war—in quite the same way again.

Every now and then a book comes along that I want to send to everyone I know. What book have you read recently that you’ve recommended to your friends?

The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

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Many people recommended this 2018 novel to me, and it is indeed precisely the sort of novel I enjoy. In truth, I like different kinds of novels depending on my mood and what else is going on in my life, but often what I lean toward is a serious, accomplished novel without a lot of look-at-me meta-tricks, one that uses a small frame to explore big ideas.

Lucius is a 22-year-old medical student in Vienna in 1914. The only child of a wealthy family, he is a disappointment to the parents who want to see him become a famous diplomat or war hero. Yet his passion is for medicine, so much so that he has no time for anything else, his only friend a fellow student. The war promises to release him from the, to him, useless lectures at his school and enable him to treat actual patients. Also, like so many others at the time, he has a romaticised vision of war.

Instead of a bustling hospital where he can get clinical training, Lucius is posted to a remote field hospital in the Carpathian Mountains. where he is the only doctor. The commandeered church is freezing; supplies and equipment are minimal, and there’s an outbreak of typhus among the patients. He has a few untrained helpers and one nursing sister, who quickly notices Lucius’s lack of practical knowlege and unobtrusively teaches him.

Among his patients are several with “nervous shock” including the silent Horvath, whom they call the winter soldier. Lucius begins to suspect that this newly defined ailment goes beyond the physical illnesses of his training, that they are at least partially psychological. His sympathy for his patients is sorely tried by the primitive treatments he has to offer and by the army’s demand that he patch them up enough to send them back into combat.

Despite the support of the level-headed sister, Lucius’s missteps, the hardships he has to endure, and the cruelties he witnesses lead to his own PTSD. Some of the scenes are grisly and devastating to read, but there are also scenes of grace and beauty. Balancing the two is perhaps Mason’s most impressive achievement.

Also impressive is his ability to bring these different mileaus to life, the gilded mansions of Vienna where we start, the terrible winter journey to his first posting, the war-ravaged village on the eastern front. While this is a story about WWI, it is not about trenches and battles. It is a small, human story powered by big ideas, not just the romance/reality of war itself and the emergence of what we now call PTSD as a recognised illness, but also the unlikely connections that save us, the small mistakes that have large consequences, hubris, guilt, atonement. It is a brilliant evocation of this moment when everything about the world changed.

Have you read a WWI novel not only captured your attention but also gave you new insight?

Paris, by Edward Rutherfurd

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In my virtual travels this winter I’ve most recently been in Venice; before that I was in Paris for several weeks. Rutherfurd’s book had been on my shelf for a long time, so that was a great opportunity to read it.

Like his other books that I’ve enjoyed, London and Sarum, this big book follows a handful of families from the earliest days of the city (here 1261) to the modern day (1968). The families vary: thieves, nobles, merchants, craftsmen. As they act and interact, we get to know the history of Paris itself, highlighting important events but more importantly taking us into their daily lives. We walk the streets with them, navigate the surge of Protestantism, mount the barricades, help build the Eiffel tower, hide a downed RAF pilot.

There’s a Jewish family that includes a physician, an antique dealer and an art dealer, through whose eyes we see the shifting political and social winds that dictate their lives, seeing the effects on individuals as tolerance veers into pogroms.

There are Brits and Canadians, tying France to the Western world and introducing the effects of immigration. There are country houses and political refuges that bring in regions outside the city.

I loved getting to know the city, relying heavily on the maps in the front of the book (as well as the family trees). Never having been there, I was always a little unclear about the geography, but now I have a good sense of it. It was also fascinating to see how the character of individual neighborhoods changed over the centuries. The Marais, for example, housed the Templars starting in 1240 which led to many churches also being built there. Royal palaces and aristocratic mansions proliferated. After the French Revolution, though, with the nobility gone, the mansions deteriorated and the area became home to Jewish and working class families. The Marais began to be rehabilitated in the 1960s and now hosts numerous art galleries.

In Rutherfurd’s novel, each of these transformations is tied to individuals and families. We escape in the middle of the night with Jacob and his family and later sell our paintings with Marc Blanchard. One of the most fascinating parts for me was Thomas Gascon’s work building the Eiffel Tower where I for the first time grasped what an engineering marvel it was, the vision of its architect Gustave Eiffel, and the courage of the men who built it.

You may start this book as I did intending to learn about the history and geography of this remarkable city. But I defy you to resist getting swept up in the stories of these individuals, their dreams and passions, their choices and chances. If stories really are the way we best remember things, as current research tells us, then what better way to learn about Paris than through these stories?

What book about or set in Paris have you read?
 

Waiting for Time, by Bernice Morgan

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This novel set mostly in Newfoundland seemed appropriate blizzard reading. It’s a sequel to Random Passage, which I haven’t read, continuing the saga of several families on a remote cape on the Atlantic shore. We learn enough about the characters that not having read the earlier book wasn’t a problem.

Lav Andrews, a civil servant in Ottawa, anchors the frame story. She’s sent to St. John’s to oversee a report on the viability of the Atlantic fishery and discovers a journal kept by her several-generations-back Aunt Lavinia. The main story is about the life of that aunt’s best friend, Mary Bundle, whose marginalia in the journal intrigue Lav.

Life on the cape is hard. There’s never enough to eat and no industry beyond fishing and salting cod to be sold in St. John’s. Mary is different from the others. Of course, she’s known poverty and starvation her whole life, as a child in rural England and as a servant in St. John’s. Where she’s different is that she’s always looking two steps ahead: not just at the next task to be done, but how to do things better so there will be a bit more food in years to come.

While the others aren’t thrilled with her nagging, they do go along with most of her ideas. She speaks her mind and is famous for her rages, a powerful character. Shaped by hardship, she couldn’t care less what others think of her and doesn’t hide her opinion of them: that they are like sheep. Now 97 and nearing death, she is dictating to her great-granddaughter Rachel what to write in the margins of Lavinia’s journal, determined to correct what she believes are inaccuracies in her friend’s account.

Mary made me think of my mother, who became increasingly outspoken as she aged. I tried for years to get her to write a memoir but it took her brother writing one to finally get her going. Like Mary, she needed to correct his “mistakes”.

Morgan captures the details of life at the end of the 19th century in a tiny isolated fishing community. It is a hard life, for sure, but Mary’s invincible spirit and strong voice make for fascinating reading. She has a lot to say about the couple of dozen inhabitants of the cape, their squabbles and celebrations. And there is always the sea, relentlessly eating away at the land, and always winter just around the corner.

In the end we come back to Lav, setting off for the Cape to meet Rachel, now nearly 100 years old. It’s a challenge to fit so many lifetimes into one not particularly long novel. One of the ways Morgan handles it is to keep the number of named characters small and giving them distinct characters and voices, so that it isn’t hard to keep track of them. Both Lav’s and Mary’s stories are organised chronologically, which makes them easier to follow. Morgan dips in and out of their lives with scenes illuminating her major storylines.

As with other books about the first Canadian settlers, such as Charlotte Gray’s Sisters in the Wilderness : The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, I am shocked that people could survive such conditions. It makes our current pandemic lockdown that has spawned so many complaints seem like a picnic, and the blizzard outside something minor indeed.

What do you like to read when the weather outside is frightful?

Daughter of the Daughter of a Queen, by Sarah Bird

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What an absorbing read! Bird takes the bare bones of a forgotten slave, Cathy Williams, who posed as a man to join Sheridan’s army near the end of the U.S. Civil War and was the only woman to serve with the Buffalo Soldiers. Then she fleshes those bones out in this captivating novel and clothes them, not just with uniforms but with fully imagined bindings.

When Sheridan on his quest to starve out the Confederate army raids the already-depleted Missouri tobacco farm, he finds little left to take: a scrawny chicken, some sweet potatoes, and a slave to help his cook. He thinks the slave he’s confiscated is a boy because of his britches, and Cathy quickly discovers that she needs to keep up the disguise if she’s to survive. Glad to be free of her cruel mistress but miserable at being torn from her mother and little sister, she calls herself William Cathay.

As a writer, I was intrigued by the choices the author had to make. What kind of woman could not only survive, but become an integral part of an army of men? Bird’s answer: a woman whose mother never let her child forget that she was the daughter of the daughter of an African queen, a mighty warrior who may have been captured and sold into slavery but never lost her pride and spirit.

How would the author handle the bathroom issues, often ignored in historical fiction, but so important here to Cathy’s disguise? Bird comes up with creative, believable solutions, not just for bathing and peeing, but also for Cathy’s “monthlies”.

How much historical context of the Civil War and the Buffalo Soldiers campaign against the Indians would she include? Bird makes the smart choice to tell the story as a memoir, in Cathy’s distinctive and engaging voice. In keeping with that choice, she concentrates on the vivid details of daily life—the size of cooking pots, tea with blackstrap molasses and condensed milk, training new recruits with hay and straw, the things that Cathy would have noticed—and leaves out the big events that Cathy wouldn’t have been aware of.

What about real historical figures? Too little is known about the real Cathy to guide how she is portrayed. I’m no expert on Sheridan and Custer, the only other real figures besides a glimpse of Lee at Appomattox, but the way they are shown here is consistent with their actions.

If I have one quibble with this novel, it is in the characterization. Cathy herself is brilliantly brought to life, and two other characters, Sheridan and the cook Solomon, are complicated men who evolve during the story. However, the other significant characters are either all good or all bad. The remaining black soldiers have no moral sense beyond immediate gratification and are easily led. The Indians, whom the Buffalo Soldiers are sent to quell, are an undifferentiated vicious and terrifying horde, though to be fair that is probably all Private Cathay would have known of them.

Of course there is a love story—it’s rare for female characters to be allowed any other plot—but luckily it is but one strand in the many stories of friendship and courage and leadership.

If you’re looking for a tale of a strong woman succeeding against terrible odds, if you want to be immersed in a time other than our own suddenly grim one, check out this novel.

What issues have you encountered with historical novels? What historical novels have you enjoyed?

Jordan County, by Shelby Foote

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It was the author’s name that caught my eye. Shelby Foote is of course the author of The Civil War. I didn’t know he wrote fiction, but this is only one of several novels. Well, it is subtitled A Novel. In reality, it is that always fascinating hybrid: a novel in stories.

Here it is in a novella and six other stories, all set in the fictional town of Bristol in Jordan County, Mississippi. They are the opposite of a traditional historical narrative because they start in 1950 and go backwards in time to 1797, lending a curious perspective, an unfolding of causes, each absorbed in its present moment, but leading up to the time when Foote was writing.

The first story is begins with Pauly arriving in Bristol on the train. A 25-year-old veteran, presumably of the Korean War, he walks through the town, perplexed by the new names on stores, the traffic lights, the new parking meters. A distracted man approaches.

“They changed it,” he said to the man. “They changed it on me while my back was turned.”

“How’s that?” The worried look did not leave the man’s face.

“The town. They changed it. It’s all new.”

These are stories about change, adjusting to it, creating it, fighting it. Some characters are caught in the shredded remnants of the past while others launch themselves into the future, all while we move through the Jazz Age, across the turn of the century, into Reconstruction, the war itself, the beginnings of the town, all the way to the clearing of the Choctaws.

Almost nowhere is more haunted by dreams of the past than Mississippi, home of William Faulkner who famously said “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

In giving the life of Hector Sturgis, the novella tells of several generations of the Wingate-Sturgis family, centered in the mansion built by his grand-grandfather in 1835. On the first page we’re told that the mansion has been torn down after the death of Hector’s mother, as specified by her will, and turned into a public park.

Introduced almost as an omen of what is to come, the county is in the grip of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic when Hector is born. The description is eerily familiar: railroads and steamboats shut down, people confined to their homes.

Growing up, Hector inhabits a liminal space. Dressed by his doting mother as Little Lord Fauntleroy, he has no friends. The boys in town are briefly in awe of him but quickly turn to jeering at him. His domineering grandmother wins the power struggle over him leaving his mother seething with resentment. Spoiled, untrained in any practical skill, he is poorly equipped to take his place as a man. Yet he does have one remarkable skill.

As the story weaves and turns it began to remind me of Faulkner’s Wild Palms, that fever dream of the South, of unexpected love, of omens and tragedy and hauntings. Still, just as in the larger novel, we can see the unspooling of whims, decisions, and actions whose long tentacles entangle Hector and his family and threaten to drown them.

There’s brilliant choreography, within each story and in the novel as a whole. Foote releases information, ties things together with the most gossamer allusion, gives us the taste and feel of life in the past. These days I’m a vessel brimming with sadness for our world; Foote helps me see how we got here.

Have you read a novel in stories? How did the form work for you?