Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

This book is classed by its publisher as Historical Fiction. As such, it is in the same category as Robert Graves, Georgette Heyer and Hilary Mantel. Elaine T Joyce isn’t the latter and nor would she claim to be. You read Mantel with complete absorption because the voice created, of Thomas Cromwell say, the son of a brutalising father, later to be a mercenary, so fitting himself by background to be the king’s right-hand man – always aware, even at the pinnacle of his power, that there are many waiting to take him down and then to the block.

It is a hard thing to create a narrator’s voice. Even harder if there are to be nine distinct  voices. These are voices of nine separate characters who are ‘witnesses’ to the character and actions of one William Careless. The characters speak from the distant past; the effect is created by a sprinkling of archaisms in their speech. Involved in different degrees in the tumultuous events of the English Civil War, they appear as ghosts, come to visit a later inhabitant of the Careless manorial family home, and to impart the Royalist tragic defeat. Their initial protestation of love for each other is offputtingly sentimental, but when it comes to an account of their heroic campaign against the forces of Parliament, the narration becomes precise because fact-based. Properly so, because the record is in large part that of military personnel, or those militarised through fighting. The account of Charles II’s escape from Worcester is thrilling, as the Cromwellian troops hunt and we take the part of the king, hidden in the tree above them.

I admired the compression of all this historical data into nine fluid tellings. Although the same events are described, there is little repetition; instead these events are corroborated. Equally engaging was the astute inclusion of maps – which made me realise how much of the struggle took place in the West Midlands. A whole chapter is given to Colonel Thomas Leveson, who withstood the siege of Dudley Castle in 1646. The place-names – Stourbridge, Tipton Green, Wolverhampton – occur frequently. If these locations could have been given a descriptive presence, how much the better. We must enjoy this writing, however, within its set limits; inside her chosen framework, this writer does well.

Stephen Fry, in a tribute to Georgette Heyer, begins thus:

But there is another style of literary historical fiction whose project it is to research and reproduce the airs, modes and everyday details of a period with so much authenticity that you might almost be reading an author of that age.

This is a good readable book, excellently produced and illustrated. It tells a story, vividly, to which all of us living in this region can relate. Joyce is a competent historian and a good literary writer. We should look forward to her next work, and expect the ‘airs, modes and everyday details’ among the extent of the research, and the hard effort to bring the past alive for us.