Historical Novels Review - August 2009

WHEN FORTUNE FROWNS

William H. White, Tiller Publishing, $29.95, hb 337pp, 978-1-888671-24-7

October, 1790. Captain Edward Edwards of the Pandora is directed by the Admiralty to seek out the infamous mutineers, late of the Bounty, and return them to England to face justice. The journey around the world to find and capture the missing mutineers mirrors the journeys of Captain Bligh, the Royal Navy winning through at last, but not without hardship and hard work.

This is a serviceable Age of Sail story, with plenty of scrupulously accurate details. Unfortunately, the pacing is as slow as a frigate in the calms around the equator, and the dialog as stiff as a captain’s neck stock. The characters, including the protagonist, third lieutenant Edward Ballantyne, are one-dimensional and I’m afraid I was never really interested in them or their journey. What pulled me along to the end was the historical detail and the inherent mystery and adventure of searching for the missing mutineers.

The sudden shifts of point of view were hard to digest and the overuse of exclamation marks and random quotation marks distracting. Recommended for Age of Sail die-hards looking for a quick, historically accurate read.

A MONSTER’S NOTES
Laurie Sheck, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, $28/C$33, ??, 540pp, 978-0-307-27105-1

What would it mean if Mary Shelly’s monster had been real? What implications would there be for her story, what clues about her story could we find in the people she lived with and loved? That is the premise of this ambitious book.

Sheck, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, poses answers to these questions in a series of stories and flashbacks, all connected by the monster who was created by an unknown hand and interacted with Mary when she was a child, sitting together, reading at her mother’s graveside. The stories are told through the monster’s own ponderings, letters written by Mary Shelley, her sister Claire, and Clerval, who in this universe was an intimate of the monster’s maker, as well as a character in Mary’s book.

As is to be expected, the book is well written – more of a free-form 540-page poem than a novel. There is little plot, and it is difficult to connect with the characters and their plights – even the monster.

It is a meditation on mind, what it means to think, what it means to be a person, what it means to be an individual – what it means to dream, think, see, to know someone, to know yourself. It’s heady, ambitious stuff, quite thought-provoking, though not at all an easy read.