The Young Llanero by W H G Kingston

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  This month’s “reading challenge” was to read a book set in South America.  I’ve read quite a lot of books set in Argentina, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, so, Venezuela having been much in the news of late, I thought I’d try one about the Venezuelan War of Independence.  This was published in 1877, and is along the lines of G A Henty and other Boys’ Own type books of derring-do, except that it also includes a lot of descriptions of animals and birds.

The goodies are our Anglo-Irish protagonist and his family, their friends amongst the indigenous peoples, and any Spanish-speaking Venezuelans who are on the republican side.   There’s also a German scientist with an obsession with catching animals/birds and killing them so that they can become specimens in his museum, despite our hero’s objections.  I kept worrying that he might catch a spectacled bear, but he didn’t.  The baddies are very definitely the Spanish loyalists (royalists) and their allies, who are all evil and oppressive and bloodthirsty.   You’d think that, nearly 300 years after the Armada, people might have got over the Black Legend stuff.  But apparently not.

Our hero’s name is … er, Barry Desmond.  His dad is also Barry, and his uncles are Denis and Terence.  I know lots of very nice people with these names, but somehow they don’t sound very dashing and swashbuckling.  Hmm.   Anyway.  The Desmonds ended up in Venezuela after one of them supported the Wolfe Tone rebellion.  It should be understood that, whilst Venezuela wanting independence is a very good thing, Ireland wanting independence is a very bad thing.  Obviously.  It should also be noted that the Desmonds are Protestant, i.e. not Catholic.  Despite the family originally being from Ireland, and a lot of them having names which are clearly meant to sound Irish (e.g. Norah, Kathleen), they’re always referred to as being English.

Barry, having been at school in England, returns home to join the business of one of his uncles, and the whole family gets caught up in the war, and they end up trekking through various mountains, jungles, etc.   There are a lot of encounters with alligators, jaguars and snakes.   And, at one point, Barry joins the republican army and is taken prisoner and put in jail, but thankfully escapes through the window just before he’s due to be garrotted.

This was written nearly 150 years ago and, although the attitude towards black and indigenous people is a zillion times more enlightened than that of, say, R M Ballantyne, there’s the occasional use of words which are now seen as offensive.  And there are some missionaries who are irritatingly obsessed with converting “the heathen”.

Just as a point of interest, there were British legions, most of them soldiers who were looking for new employment after the end of Napoleonic Wars and supported the liberal views of Simon Bolivar et al, on the republican side in the wars of independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

As for “llaneros”, as well as being the name of a Colombian football team, it’s the name given to herders/cowboys in Venezuela.  During the War of Independence, their allegiances were split, some being pro-republican, and others being pro-loyalist as they felt that the Venezuelan elite looked down on them and weren’t concerned about them.   Our mate Barry only becomes a llanero at the end, but I suppose it made for a better title that “The Young Schoolboy About To Join His Uncle’s Business”.

I do like these Victorian derring-do novels!   They aren’t to be taken too seriously, but they’re always a very good read.

 

 

The Sea Captain’s Wife by Beth Powning

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  This is an excellent book; but, after reading it, I’m feeling ill at the very thought of getting on a sailing ship, however beautiful they may look!   In this book, Carrie, the campaigning cousin in The Sister’s Tale by Beth Powning , is a little girl.  Her parents, Azuba and Nathaniel, met and married in a small town in New Brunswick, where sea captains are at the top of the social ladder.   Azuba, has always longed to go to sea, and is upset at being left behind when Nathaniel sets off on his long voyages.  Bored and lonely, she becomes close friends with another man, and people begin to gossip.  Nathaniel therefore decides that she and Carrie should accompany him on his next voyage – which takes them across the Atlantic to London, back across the Atlantic, around Cape Horn, to Peru, to California, back around the Cape, and then to Antwerp.

En route, they get caught in a storm, witness some distressing goings on in Peru, and for weeks on end are literally in the doldrums, unable to move until some sort of wind gets up.  A young boy forming part of the crew is killed in an accident.  The ship runs short of food and everybody is close to starving.  And, throughout most of this, Carrie is expecting another baby – who fortunately doesn’t arrive until they reach Belgium.  Once they’re on shore, they go straight to a top class hotel and live in the lap of luxury!

After everything that’s happened, the plan is for Azuba and the children to return home on a steamship.  This is in the early 1860s, and sailing ships are being edged out by steamships.   There are strangely few references to the American Civil War, although another sea captain’s wife whom they meet in Belgium mentions actually seeing the sinking of the poor old Alabama.  (I’ve always had a bit of a thing about the Alabama!)  But then it’s decided that they’ll go on another voyage with Nathaniel.  This does not go well.  The ship is attacked by Chinese pirates.  Azuba and the kids are unhurt.  Beth Powning doesn’t seem to like harm coming to her main characters!   But most of the crew are killed, and the Belgian nanny is carried off into slavery, and never heard of again.  Which is horrific.  And Nathaniel suffers a head injury – which, fortunately for the plot, means that he has to pack in being a sea captain, and find happiness in a new life as a farmer, so that the issue of Azuba feeling that they’re not a proper family if he’s away all the time is neatly resolved.   And he also feels that the Age of Sail is over.

There are some very vivid descriptions of life at sea, and also of life in Antwerp, and yet it’s mainly a domestic novel, with the focus being on the relationship between Azuba and Nathaniel, and how their marriage is going to pan out.  I felt very sorry for the nanny and the crew, sacrificed so that the main characters’ marriage problems could be sorted out!   Fascinating book.  Beth Powning has an unusual style of writing.  She doesn’t seem to like the word “and”, preferring commas, so some of it reads more like poetry than prose.

I admired Azuba’s courage, but I couldn’t help wishing that she’d done the sensible thing and stayed at home!   And my admiration for the people who worked on the sailing ships has gone higher than ever.  But give me the luxury hotel in Antwerp, with lots of chocolate and visits to the cathedral 😉 .

 

The Sister’s Tale by Beth Powning

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I thoroughly enjoyed this book, set in New Brunswick, Canada, in the late 1880s.  It’s a domestic novel, but the main themes are the issues faced by orphaned children sent from the UK to Canada, Australia and elsewhere, also covered in the BBC’s Ten Pound Poms , and the fight for women’s rights.

Well-to-do sea captain’s wife Josephine is widowed when her husband’s ship goes down.  As no will can be found, the law dictates that she’s entitled to a third share in the marital home, the rest going to her children when they come of age, and little else: there’s no Married Women’s Property Act in New Brunswick at this time.  She has to go to court to apply to be appointed legal guardian to the children, and to take in boarders in order to bring in money.

The character of Josephine is very passive, though.  Her elder daughter gets a job and joins the women’s suffrage movement, in which a cousin is very active.  Relatives later agree to pay for all three children to go to college.  An old friend also helps out.  But the real star of the show is Flora, a teenage girl brought to Canada from a British workhouse. (Annoyingly, we’re never told whereabouts in the UK she’s from.)   We hear a lot about how, as well as involvement by the authorities, well-meaning people paid for girls to be brought to Canada and found positions for them in domestic service there.  Sometimes it worked out.  Sometimes it didn’t.  The girls got no say in the matter.

Flora’s kindly master and mistress were killed in an accident, and Flora was sold at a “pauper auction”.  These auctions, shockingly, were held in New Brunswick until 1889, with the authorities paying the buyers a small amount for the paupers’ support, to avoid having to pay for a workhouse.   Josephine is asked to “buy” Flora by a friend who’s concerned about what might happen to a pretty young girl if she’s bought by a man.

It’s Flora and the other remaining servant who run the boarding house.  At the same time, Flora’s searching for her sister, who was brought to Canada separately.  They’re eventually reunited.

There’s a rather silly and annoying sub plot about one of the male boarders turning out to be a mad axe murderer.  The book could have done without that.  The stories about the female characters are more than sufficient.  Very interesting.

 

At the Water’s Edge by Sara Gruen

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This is an extremely silly story.  However, the author’s clearly done some research into the Second World War period in Glen Urquhart/Drumnadrochit, and that comes across well, notably the presence of lumberjills and Canadian airmen, and a bombing raid on an aluminium factory on the shores of Loch Ness … although it would have been rather considerably better had she not decided to “move” the air raid from 1941 to 1945, and shown everyone carrying masks and constantly having to run to air raid shelters during the last few months of the war.  There are some things that you really shouldn’t try to move!

The premise of the story was that three wealthy Philadelphians, a husband and wife and their (male) friend, having annoyed everyone by getting drunk at a party, crossed the Atlantic (er, during the war) on a ship carrying wounded soldiers (from America to Scotland?) and then went to look for the Loch Ness monster.   As you do.

They rocked up at a small inn, run by Angus, a widowed war hero who’d been discharged from the Armed Forces after being seriously injured.  The two American men were not in uniform because one had flat feet and the other had pretended to be colour blind.  Apparently, no-one could find them anything else to do, so they’d just been hanging around at parties.  They somehow obtained ration books.  Was it as easy as that?   The men went out to look for the monster, expected to be waited on hand and foot, and got on everyone’s nerves.  Maddie, the wife, made friends with the staff at the inn and got sick of her husband.  Who decided that he was going to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital.  There were references to Mrs Rochester.

There was also a lot of talk about the Wee Frees.  The author obviously liked this term, because she kept using it.  AFAIK, it’s considered pejorative.  But the press kept using it a few years ago, when Kate Forbes was standing for the leadership of the SNP.  Are Wee Free farmers such strict sabbatarians that they lock up their cockerels on Sundays, so that they can’t, er, get up to anything with the hens?   It’s such a daft story that it sounds as if it has to be true, and that the author must have heard it from someone!  Her other favourite term was “National Loaf”, also used repeatedly.

Maddie decided that she wanted to divorce her husband, who really was vile, and marry Angus.  But the really vile husband, who was worried that she’d tell his parents that he’d faked the colour blindness and that he’d be disinherited, threatened to shop Angus for poaching.  However, it turned out that Angus was actually the local laird, having recently inherited the title from his uncle, apparently without anyone noticing.  So he couldn’t have been poaching, because it was his land.  Phew.  Meanwhile, the husband and his mate, having failed to find the monster, were going to fake some photos to make it look as if they had.  But he then obligingly drowned.  At the water’s edge.  This was possibly due to the monster, or, alternatively to the ghost of Angus’s late first wife.  Keep up.

So Maddie married Angus, and they moved into the big house and lived happily ever after.

I did say that it was an exceptionally silly story!   But some of the details about wartime life in the area were interesting.

Nuremberg

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  I missed this one at the pictures, so thank you to Sky Cinema for showing it so soon after it was released.  It’s had some mixed reviews, but I thought that it was very good.  There’ve been a lot of Second World War and Holocaust films/books/TV series in recent years.  This one was trying to do something a bit different, and it succeeded.

Pretty much every character in the film was a depiction of a real person – led by Russell Crowe as Hermann Goring, Rami Malek as American psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, and Leo Woodall as Howie Triest, Kelley’s Jewish interpreter who’d escaped from Germany to the USA but whose parents were both murdered in the Holocaust.  The focus was on Kelley’s attempts to assess Goring and on the fact of the trials taking place, rather than on public reaction to the trials and to learning the details of what the Nazis did.

Channel 4 showed two programmes, a couple of months ago, about Hitler’s DNA.  People are still looking for some sort of answers as to what makes a monster.  DNA doesn’t seem to give those answers, and, from what this filmed showed, even psychiatric assessment struggles with them.  But Kelley’s main remit was to determine whether or not Goring was likely to commit suicide.  The film showed how hard the Allies tried to stop those on trial from taking their own lives and cheating the hangman.  Of course, regrettably, they didn’t succeed with Goring, who managed to obtain cyanide and take it.  But not before denying any knowledge of the “Final Solution”, and claiming that what the Nazis did was just part of warfare.

Russell Crowe was superb.  Rami Malek as Kelley …  well, Kelley was pretty annoying, so it couldn’t come across as purely goodie versus baddie, and he also seemed to get rather obsessed with Goring.  But the real footage of what happened in the concentration camps was the most important part of the film.  Whatever you think of what Hollywood did with this, just watch that footage and remember.  Never forget,

The film seemed to be saying that mid twentieth century Americans were the first people to come up with the idea of international peace and justice.  Didn’t Cardinal Wolsey suggest something similar in 1518?!  But, point taken, the Nuremberg charter – drafted in London, with the UK, the US, France and the USSR all involved, not just the US! – established the form of trials to be held by international courts, the idea of crimes against humanity which superseded national laws and national jurisdictions.  It would have been a lot easier just to have put all the senior Nazis up before a firing squad, and I don’t suppose that too many people would have objected.  Of course, if you tried it now, you’d have some “human rights” lawyer from Brighton screeching that Goring couldn’t be put on trial because he was once picked on at school or something, and the Fruit and Nut Party (sorry, “Your Party”) saying that Churchill and Truman should be tried instead.

Maybe other countries should have been more involved.  Maybe survivors should have been more involved.  But the idea was that the documentary evidence was much more difficult to argue with than testimony from individuals.

What came across very well in the film was how unrepentant those on trial were.   They didn’t seem to think that they’d done anything wrong.

And, at the end, Howie Triest said that people should have spoken up against the Nazi regime.  Why were so many people impassive against evil?

There are a worrying number of stupid and ignorant people who howl that anyone who does anything they don’t like is “acting against Nazi Germany”.  No.  They’re not.  Unless you think that they’re carrying out an industrial extermination operation.

And, two days ago, someone smashed up the Broughton Park memorial bench which commemorated a man who survived eight concentration camps and later settled in Manchester, which contained an audio recording of him talking about some of his experiences.  And threw the pieces into the lake.  That’s where we’re at, with some people.  We need education.  If this film can provide some of that, then all power to it.

Of Stone and Sky by Merryn Glover

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  In between worrying about who’s going to be the next manager of United, getting through the snow and trying to work out exactly what was going on in Corriedale, found a book which is set near Inverness but *isn’t* about Jacobites.  It was supposed to be a “sweeping family saga”.  Sweeping misery, more like.

It was about two brothers, Colvin and Sorley, born after a series of devastating miscarriages and stillbirths, and their sort-of-cousin Mo (Maurabelle), who was fostered by their auntie and uncle after being left on their doorstep by her desperate birth mother, a young housemaid who’d been sexually assaulted by the local laird.  Mo’s foster father died young, and her foster mother took against her.  She then moved in with the others, to look after Sorley after his mother died after falling through a roof.  But, after narrowly escaping assault by their drunken father, she ran away.  Then became a minister.  Then a pub landlady.  As you do.  And tried unsuccessfully to sort out everyone else’s financial and emotional problems.

Sorley also ran away.  He made a lot of money.  Then lost it all, came back, had an affair with Colvin’s wife, and was badly injured in a fire probably started by Colvin’s son, who’d tried to shoot him.

Colvin disappeared.  Various clues as to what had happened to him turned up throughout the book, but we never found out the answer.  Which was very annoying.

The only happy-ish person was Colvin’s daughter.  Until her fiance was accidentally shot in the head.  But he did pretty much recover.

There were some interesting points about life in the Highlands and how it had changed over the years, but it was largely unrelenting misery.   I get enough of that from Coronation Street, Emmerdale and EastEnders – but thank goodness for Steve McDonald, who lightens the mood a bit!

On the positive side, the snow has melted.

And Sarina Wiegman is 100/1 to be the next manager of United.  That’s the most sensible suggestion I’ve heard yet.   She’d soon kick Ratcliffe & co into touch.  And I’m pretty sure that you don’t get Dutch Jacobites.

 

 

The Serpent Queen – Channel 4

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  This started off quite promisingly.  Hooray – finally a sensible historical drama series, not like the rubbish that is Marie Antoinette and the even rubbishier rubbish that is The Great.   However, it deteriorated as the series went on, and “jumped the shark” when Charles V, who died in 1558, turned up at the funeral of Henri II, who died in 1559.   Also, I somehow doubt that anyone in the 1550s used the term “global superpower”.  And why do American scriptwriters seem to think that everyone, everywhere, swears every ten seconds.

Then there are the accents.  Most of the characters speak in a range of British accents.  Mary Queen of Scots has a London accent, which is a bit weird.  But a few of them have ‘Allo ‘Allo-esque French accents.

Bleurgh.  It started really well.  This first series only goes up to the early 1560s, so we don’t get the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  That meant that I was free to feel sorry for the young Catherine – which I always have done, because of all the carrying on with Diane de Poitiers.  Despite Jean Plaidy presenting her as someone who spent most of her time getting poisoned gloves to bump people off, I think she gets a bad press.   There seems to be a thing about Italian women in the 16th century – see also Lucrezia Borgia.  Obviously, once we get to St Bartholomew’s Day, it all changes.  I think we all get a bit Anglocentric about the Armada et al, and forget the effect that news of the Spanish Fury and the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre had in all countries where the Reformation had taken hold.

This claims to be based on Leonie Frieda’s superb book about Catherine de’ Medici; but it isn’t.  Some maids have been invented and given storylines, for dramatic effect.   That’s fine.  But slipping into a mode of spoofery and silliness isn’t.  There’s enough of that around.  Good start, bad finish!

 

Singin’ In The Rain – Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

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  I got splashed!   I wasn’t sure how this was going to work on the small, circular stage at the Royal Exchange Theatre, but it actually worked brilliantly, and splashing the audience and handing an umbrella to someone in the front row fitted in rather well with panto season!   OK, it’s a rather daft plot, and the iconic Singin’ In The Rain scene doesn’t really fit in with the rest of the story, but it was very entertaining and a very good January afternoon out.

Giving Lina a very broad Noo Yoik accent worked better than just saying that her voice was annoying, and the actors and actresses in all the other main parts were great as well.  And we have had clear blue sky and glorious sunshine today, so no jokes about this suiting the Manchester weather!  It’s a shame that the Royal Exchange Theatre cafe *still* doesn’t have scones, but the show itself was superb!

Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig

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  I took this one off the TBR mountain because Myanmar was briefly back in the news last week – and I’m so glad that I did, because it was superb.  It’s based on the incredible true story of the author’s maternal grandparents, the son of Rangoon’s rabbi and the daughter of Karen villagers, and of her mother, who became a beauty queen, an actress and then a leader of a Karen National Liberation Army brigade.  It’s biased, as you’d expect of a book about someone’s own family, and there’s nothing to explain what’s historically accurate and what’s been changed; but all in all it’s a very, very good book, both in terms of story and in terms of the writing.

I remember that we used to hear quite a bit about the Karens in the early 1990s.  I can even remember discussing their situation in a university tutorial.  That would have been in around 1993, shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize.  How things change.  I know that I was the one who brought the subject up, but, annoyingly, I can’t remember what the context of the conversation was!   And, only a few years ago, both Channel 4 and the BBC showed documentaries trying to raise awareness of the Rohingya genocide.  But we hear very little about the ethnic conflicts there now.  Like we hear very little about Sudan.  Why don’t people care?

The book started with Charmaine Craig’s grandfather, Benny (Ben-Zion) Koder, later known as Saw Bension, son of a rabbi in Rangoon/Yangon and a relative of the influential Indian Jewish Koder family.  He was orphaned at an early age and sent to live with relatives in Calcutta/Kolkata, but later returned to what was then British Burma, and married a Karen woman, Khin.   During the Second World War, the Japanese imprisoned and tortured him, accusing him of spying for Britain, but Karen forces managed to get him freed.

The majority Burman (or Bamar, but referred to in the book as Burman) people, led by Aung San, joined forces with the Japanese.  The Karens, who’d been ill-treated by the Burmans for centuries before Burma was annexed by the British Empire, sided with the Allies.  The way the author tells it is that the Karens pretty much won the war against the Japanese in Burma.  That may be an exaggeration, but they certainly played a big part, and were expecting an independent state. When it became clear that the Japanese were going to lose, the Burmans changed sides, and Aung San then became president of an independent Burma.  Some minority groups were involved, and were supposed to have autonomy.  The Karens weren’t.  The author makes it sound as if Clement Attlee effectively backed plans to wipe the Karens out.  He didn’t.  But they certainly got a very raw deal – possibly because of fears that having a number of small states in the area could increase Chinese influence? – and civil war broke out.   And Aung San was assassinated by political rivals.

Meanwhile, Benny had established a business empire and become one of the wealthiest men in Burma, and the family lived the high life.  He also became involved in supporting the movement for Karen independence.   But then he was arrested, and held first in prison and then under house arrest, as a political prisoner, whilst Khin tried to work for his release.  Sexual violence against women never seems to be far away in Burma/Myanmar, with mass rape being used as a weapon of war by the Burmans against both the Karens and the Rohingya.  Both Khin and the family’s nanny were attacked.   The distance between Benny and Khin, partly because of their experiences, partly because of their different backgrounds, and partly just because of their personalities, comes across very well – but how strange to write like that about your grandparents.

Meanwhile, their eldest child, Louisa, the author’s mother, had reached her mid-teens – and became a beauty queen, winning the Miss Burma contest and becoming a celebrity and an actress.  It seems very odd that the mixed-race daughter of a prominent political prisoner should have become one of the country’s best-known celebs, but that much is all true.  She was pursued by Ne Win, who’d taken power in a military coup and was to rule as a military dictator from 1962 to 1988, and his wife, was invited to a load of high society events, and was wrongly but widely believed to be Ne Win’s mistress.  As far as I can gather, she studied in America for a while, but the book didn’t mention that.

She then married a leading Karen rebel commander.  According to the book, he’d been her mother’s lover, but she married him to escape from the celebrity world which she’d never enjoyed.  He was killed soon afterwards, and she took control of his brigade.  The book ended, rather abruptly, with her crossing into Thailand, hoping for peace talks with the Burmese government.

What actually happened was that she went to America and married into a well-to-do Massachusetts family.  Her father and siblings also went to America.  There’s a lot in the book about American involvement in Burma/Myanmar.  She continued to try to work for Karen rights.

I have to admit that I don’t know a lot about Burma/Myanmar.  Weirdly, I can remember thinking, as a little kid, that it sounded fascinating … er, partly because of Tuptim in The King and I, and partly because of the Five Find-Outers book in which someone sent anonymous letters to Mr Goon, using newspaper articles about Rangoon but cutting off the “Ran”.   I just liked the sound of the word “Rangoon”.  Yes, I know that it’s “Yangon” now.  And that it’s not even the capital any more.

We rarely hear anything about the Karens any more.  We don’t even hear much about the Rohingya any more.

And I’ve never read much about Burma/Myanmar before.

I’d highly recommend this book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Jacobite’s Daughter by Lorna Windham

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  This could have been a good book.  As it was, it was very average – if that.  The title was silly: the main character’s father hardly featured at all, and it was more a case of “The Jacobite’s fiancee”.  The punctuation was diabolical.  I don’t know whether that was down to the author, the late Lorna Windham, or down to the publisher, but every other sentence was either missing a comma or contained a comma in the wrong place.  One character was referred to as “Lady” and then as “Miss” – on the same page.  And, to cap it all, Wigan was spelt as “Wiggon”!

Had it not been for all that, it might have been a decent book.  Oh, it was the standard ’45 stuff with the dashing Jacobites, the spies, the redcoats all being evil and everyone failing to realise that Bonnie Prince Charlie was a prize idiot; but it wasn’t bad.  The main character, Morag, was quite attractive, and so was her fiance Euan, and the descriptions of life in camp and life in Edinburgh were entertaining.   But it just wasn’t as good as it could have been, and the punctuation was so poor that it made it difficult to focus on the story.   There are two other books in the series, and I wouldn’t mind knowing what happens to all the characters.  However, I don’t think I can face any more of the misplaced/missing commas!    Oh well.