Over the Wine-Dark Sea, by H. N. Turteltaub. Book review

Tom Doherty Associates, 2001. ISBN 0-312-87660-2. 381 pages.

Over the Wine-Dark Sea is set in the Eastern Mediterranean in spring to autumn of 310 BC. According to the Historical Notes, one of the two central characters, Menedemos, is a historical figure, as is Antandros of Syracuse who makes a brief appearance. All the other characters who appear in the novel are fictional.

In spring 310 BC, Menedemos and his cousin Sostratos, two young merchants from Rhodes, are eager to put to sea for their summer trading trip to Great Hellas, the Greek colonies and city-states of Sicily and mainland Italy. Their ship, the Aphrodite, jointly owned by their fathers, is a merchant galley with forty rowers as well as a sail for propulsion. Unlike the broad sail-only trading ships, the Aphrodite does not need to wait for a favourable wind; the rowers can take her wherever her captain wants to go. But this also means she is expensive to run, as the crew have to be paid wages, and her cargo space is limited. So the Aphrodite carries luxury goods, perfume, silk, fine wine, dye, papyrus, ink – and peafowl, exotic birds from India that have never before been seen in Great Hellas. Menedemos and Sostratos will need their wits and a shrewd eye for a deal to cover their costs and bring back a profit. But as well as business risks and the ever-present danger of pirates and bad weather, several wars are raging along the Aphrodite’s intended route: between Syracuse and Carthage; between an obscure Italian tribe called the Romans and their neighbours to the south; and between the various generals who inherited parts of the empire of Alexander the Great after his death a decade ago and are now fighting each other in Egypt, mainland Greece, Asia Minor and the seas in between. One miscalculation could see Menedemos, Sostratos and all their crew dead or for sale in a slave market – and on top of this, there is Menedemos’ liking for other men’s wives...

Over the Wine-Dark Sea is a highly entertaining travelogue of the varied cultures and geography of the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. It doesn’t really have a plot as such – Menedemos and Sostratos travel from one island or port to the next, buy things, sell things, get into and (hopefully) out of trouble, and hope to return home safely and profitably. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing (after all, the same sort of comment could be made about The Odyssey). Their journey is colourful and varied enough, and the cousins’ contrasting characters amusing enough, to make Over the Wine-Dark Sea great fun to read. The cousins’ bickering is often witty, and there are a few knowing jokes, like the various Hellenes who solemnly opine that the obscure barbarian tribe called the Romans will never amount to anything much. The difficulties of managing a peacock, five peahens (and in due course a multitude of chicks) in the cramped confines of the ship form a running joke for most of the book.

Over the Wine-Dark Sea is also immensely informative about the ancient world. Each of the ports, harbours and towns is described, often with snippets of its history and layout. Different types of ships are described and named, along with their development over time and the various uses for the different types. Hellenic social conventions and customs are described and shown in detail; haggling over a business deal; the correct format for a symposion (a drinking party for wealthy men, a sort of cross between a dinner party and a stag do); the names of different courses in a meal; conventions about which hand to eat with and how many fingers to use for different types of food; sports activities at the gymnasion. All of these are restricted to men, of course. The confined life imposed on women is acknowledged (and Sostratos is sensitive enough to feel just a little bit uncomfortable about it occasionally), but women don’t get much of a role except as possessions for men to squabble over.

Both Menedemos and Sostratos are familiar with Homer and like to relate the places they see to the poetry – could the whirlpool they see in the Straits of Messina be the original Charybdis, could this or that island be where Odysseus encountered the Sirens or the Cyclops? Sostratos also has aspirations to be a historian and likes to collect obscure facts, such as two different theories about how the town of Rhegion got its name, or the correct way to wear a toga. All this information has an undeniable tendency to slow down the plot, and I can imagine that some readers might find it annoying, although I quite liked these obscure excursions. For readers who want to imagine what it might have been like to trade luxury goods around the Aegean and Italy in the ancient world, what items came from where, and how money and coinage worked, there is much to enjoy.

The book is written throughout in straightforward modern English (with American spellings). Some of the different cultures are given different accents or dialects to distinguish them from one another; one region of Greece drops ‘H’s, Macedonia has an archaic dialect, and a slave girl kidnapped from Cisalpine Gaul in the distant north of Italy is given an Irish accent and turn of phrase to emphasise her foreignness.

A brief Historical Note outlines the historical events that form the background to Menedemos’ and Sostratos’ journey, and there is a very useful note at the front about weights, measures and units of money. This is well worth bookmarking, as the characters refer to these units constantly and it is very useful to be able to flip back quickly to see whether a minai is a small fortune or small change. An excellent map at the front is very useful for following the Aphrodite’s journey.

Colourful and entertaining account of the episodic adventures of two young traders shipping luxury goods around the Eastern Mediterranean in 310 BC. 

Better Than Gold, by Theresa Tomlinson. Book review

A & C Black 2014. ISBN 978-1-4729-0782-0. 124 pages.

Better Than Gold is set around 655 AD in Northumbria (in what is now north-east England) and Mercia (in what is now the Midlands). The main character, Egfrid, is a historical figure, and his time as a hostage at the royal court of Mercia is a historical event, although the details are not known. Other historical figures who feature as important characters in the novel include King Penda and Queen Cynewise of Mercia and their children, Egfrid’s father King Oswy of Bernicia and his queen Eanflaeda, Egfrid’s cousin Ethelwold and the Christian monk Chad (later St Chad, if I have identified him correctly).

Egfrid, son of the King of Bernicia, is aged ten when he is taken hostage by Penda, King of Mercia, in a raid. Mercia and Bernicia are bitter enemies; Penda has previously slaughtered Egfrid’s paternal uncle and his maternal grandfather and uncle. Egfrid’s father Oswy has so far escaped a similar fate by avoiding battle, which leads Penda to despise him as a coward. Unlike the Christian kings of Bernicia, Penda is a pagan and his religion practices human sacrifice, so when Egfrid is captured he fears the worst. But his courage and loyalty to his nursemaid and tutor, both captured with him, earns him Penda’s respect. He finds himself treated with honour and even kindness, particularly by Penda’s queen Cynewise, who is working to weave a peace treaty between the kingdoms. But when the old feud breaks out into war once more, Egfrid is faced with a dilemma – whose side should he be on?

I enjoyed Theresa Tomlinson’s mystery novels, Wolf Girl for young adult readers (review here) and A Swarming of Bees for adults (review here), both set in the Northumbrian royal abbey at Whitby in the seventh century, and her novel about Acha of Deira set in the late sixth century, The Tribute Bride (review here). Better Than Gold is a children’s book set a few years earlier than Wolf Girl or A Swarming of Bees.

Part of the inspiration for Better Than Gold was the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard near Hammerwich in the territory of the old kingdom of Mercia in 2009. This is the largest collection of early English (Anglo-Saxon) precious metalwork ever found, and consists almost entirely of gold and silver objects associated with military equipment, for example the decorative fittings from sword hilts and fragments of at least one helmet. For details of the Staffordshire Hoard, see the official website. This overwhelming focus on martial items is extremely unusual, as most Anglo-Saxon precious metalwork consists of dress fittings such as strap-ends, buckles and brooches, or luxury tableware such as plates or cups, and immediately suggests that there ought to be a dramatic story behind the Staffordshire Hoard. How might it have been assembled, who owned it, what did it signify, why are the items almost all military, who might have buried it, and why might it have been buried and never recovered?  (For a discussion, see my blog post at the time and the associated comments thread). We will probably never know the answers for sure. In Better Than Gold, Theresa Tomlinson has drawn on an episode recorded in Bede’s History and the rather enigmatic Restoration of Iudeu mentioned in Historia Brittonum to imagine a scenario that might lie behind the hoard.

Better Than Gold also imagines how life might have been for a ten-year-old noble boy in the society that produced the Staffordshire Hoard. What would a boy at a royal court eat and wear, what would he be expected to learn, how would he spend his time? This focus on the details of daily life was one of the features I liked about The Tribute Bride and A Swarming of Bees, and it was pleasant to see it again here.

Better Than Gold has the same gentle tone as The Tribute Bride and A Swarming of Bees. Most of the people, most of the time, treat each other decently. There is violence – human sacrifice and battles with many casualties – but because of Egfrid’s age he is rarely directly involved and most of the violence happens in the background. Like the author’s other books, the women are very much to the fore. Queen Cynewise has much authority at the Mercian court, ruling the kingdom while Penda is away on campaign and exercising considerable influence when he is back. Their rule of Mercia seems to be very much a joint enterprise. Like Acha in The Tribute Bride, the royal women in Better Than Gold play a crucial role as peaceweavers, both by formal marriage alliance and in the day-to-day management of court life, ever alert to the need to head off situations where drink and ego threaten to spark conflict and even war.

Better Than Gold is a much simpler and shorter story than the young adult mystery Wolf Girl. I’d estimate its length at around 20,000–25,000 words, roughly a quarter of the length of a ‘standard’ adult novel. I would guess it is aimed at a younger audience, perhaps about the same age as the ten-year-old protagonist. The complex political rivalries and feuds between the various kingdoms are seen mainly in family terms – appropriately, since the conventions of blood-feud and vengeance for a kinsman meant that early English warfare could have a personal as well as a political dimension. It’s clearly written in straightforward modern English, with some archaic terms to add a period flavour, such as the Old English names for the months (Blood-month, Offerings-month, etc. More information on the Old English calendar and the month-names can be found in my article here). I was pleased to see that the original Old English personal names have been kept, e.g. Egfrid, Cynewise. Some names have been replaced by nicknames to avoid potential confusion between similar names within a family, e.g. Egfrid’s dead uncle Oswald is referred to by his (historically documented) nickname of Whiteblade to avoid confusion with his brother Oswy.

A short Author’s Note at the end briefly outlines some of the underlying history and provides a link to learn more about the Staffordshire Hoard. Unfortunately there’s no map on which a reader could follow Egfrid’s travels, although as most of the place names are given in their modern forms (Bamburgh rather than Bebbanburgh, Tamworth rather than Tameworthig) they could be identified on a modern map.

Charming tale about life at the royal courts of seventh-century England and the sort of events that might lie behind the burial of the magnificent Staffordshire Hoard.

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson. Book review

Doubleday, 2013. ISBN 978-0-385-61867-0. 477 pages

Life After Life is set in England and Germany between 1910 and 1967, against the background of the First and Second World Wars. All the main characters are fictional.

Ursula Todd, born into a prosperous family in rural England in 1910, lives her life over and over again through the traumatic events of the first half of the twentieth century. The first time she is born, she dies before taking her first breath. On the second occasion, the doctor has arrived in time and baby Ursula survives to experience childhood during the First World War and the influenza epidemic of 1919. On other occasions, she experiences the Second World War as a young woman, both in Germany in the ruins of Berlin in 1945 and in London during the Blitz. Each time, she is disturbed by bewildering flashes of deja vu – glimpses into the past, present and future of alternative lives – but without fully understanding what they are. And in one of her lives she has a chance to change the course of history...

Most people, I imagine, have had occasions when they wonder about ‘the road not travelled’, and speculate on what might have happened if they had done X instead of Y at a particular point. Life After Life explores that concept, by allowing the central character to live her life many times over, each time taking a different path. Each cycle starts with her birth in the middle of a snowstorm in 1910, and each ends with the words ‘Darkness fell’. In one life she experiences a violent marriage; in others she avoids the events that led her to that marriage and develops other relationships. One life takes her to 1930s Germany, where she becomes friendly with Eva Braun and, through Eva, acquainted with a fringe politician called Adolf Hitler. Sometimes the different paths diverge wildly, sometimes many paths all lead to the same or very similar endings (several end at the 1918/1919 influenza epidemic, and several more end during the Blitz).

For me, by far the strongest part of the novel was the central section set in London during the Second World War. Ursula is an adult woman by then and experiences the Blitz in various ways during several of her lives. It is a dramatic and convincing portrayal of life for ordinary people, being bombed out of their homes, working in rescue services, fire-watching, and vividly describes the everyday privations, the many ghastly ways to suffer and die, the numbing effect of witnessing repeated horrors, and the random nature of events, where running after a stray dog can make the difference between living – for another day at least – and dying. These scenes are so convincing that I wonder if they might be based on eyewitness accounts. The novel is well worth reading for this section alone.

The cyclical nature of the narrative can be repetitive or rhythmic. Which it is probably depends on the reader and/or the reader’s mood. Sometimes arriving at the same place yet again borders on the tedious; on one occasion the author writes ‘Darkness, and so on’, instead of the usual ‘Darkness fell’, leading me to wonder if she herself was getting a little weary at that point. Ursula is by far the dominant character, since she is the central figure in every cycle, whereas some of the secondary characters appear in only one of the lives and are never seen again. Those secondary characters who are recurring figures, such as Ursula’s immediate family, are developed into distinct personalities. It would be difficult to confuse Ursula’s brothers Maurice and Teddy, for example.

I have to say that I was not much taken with the central premise of living one’s life over and over again until one ‘gets it right’. What counts as ‘getting it right’? Living as long as possible? As happily as possible? What if the other people involved have a different idea of ‘getting it right’? And so on. On the other hand, ignoring the value judgment implied in ‘getting it right’, it’s interesting to watch events play out in different ways as Ursula encounters different people and situations. In a few cases she consciously influences events by taking a definite action or making a different decision, seemingly based on a hazy recollection of one of her other lives, though for the most part it seems that the changes in her various lives happen without her having to do anything.

Beautifully written tale with an unusual cyclical structure, memorable mainly for the dramatic sequences set in the London Blitz during the Second World War.

An Officer and a Spy, by Robert Harris. Book review

Arrow 2014. ISBN 978-0-09-958088-1. 610 pages.

Set mainly in France in 1895-1899, this is a retelling in fiction of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, a notorious miscarriage of justice that saw army officer Alfred Dreyfus wrongfully imprisoned on Devil’s Island for crimes he had never committed. All the characters are historical figures.

In Paris, in January 1895, Major Georges Picquart watches as army officer Alfred Dreyfus, convicted in a military court of selling secrets to Germany, is ritually degraded in front of a howling crowd before being sent to life imprisonment in appalling conditions on Devil’s Island. Picquart’s report on the event for the Minister of War results in his promotion to Colonel and appointment as head of the ‘Statistical Section’ – the army’s counter-espionage unit. Picquart does not want the job, but is determined to do it thoroughly. Soon his work shows that there is still a spy in the French army trying to sell classified material to the German embassy. As Picquart follows the threads and gathers more evidence, he discovers proof that Dreyfus was wrongly convicted and the real spy is still at large. But his superiors in the army and the government are far more concerned with covering up their own failings in the original investigation than in correcting a miscarriage of justice, or even the protection of their country’s secrets. If Picquart continues his investigation, the threat is clear – the establishment will close ranks to destroy him as they destroyed Dreyfus.

An Officer and a Spy is a tense psychological thriller. The narrative is consistently gripping as events twist and turn, and the atmosphere of corruption and menace is as all-pervading as the stink from the Paris sewers. At its heart is the dilemma faced by Picquart, a man of integrity who finds that the institution to which he has devoted his life is corrupt at its highest levels. Does he go along with the corruption and lose his self-respect?  Or does he follow his conscience, try to pursue justice, and lose his career, his position in society, his livelihood and his freedom, and perhaps also destroy the lives of people he loves? Many aspects of the Dreyfus Affair have modern parallels, and this gives the novel a powerful feel of immediacy.

An Officer and a Spy follows the historical events of the Dreyfus Affair faithfully. The Author’s Note at the beginning says ‘None of the characters in the pages that follow, even the most minor, is wholly fictional, and almost all of what occurs, at least in some form, actually happened in real life’. Although I had vaguely heard of the Dreyfus Affair before reading An Officer and a Spy, it was mostly in the context of Emile Zola’s famous ‘J’accuse...!’ letter. I had never heard of Georges Picquart before, even though it seems that Picquart was the key figure – Zola’s letter essentially gave a push to a something that Picquart had already begun, and without Picquart’s testimony the truth would never have come to light. I also had not realised the discrepancy between the original offence – the ‘secrets’ for which Dreyfus was wrongly imprisoned in such inhuman conditions were actually rather minor – and the astonishing scale of the cover-up.

An Officer and a Spy does a masterly job of shaping a complex sequence of events and reversals over several years into a coherent narrative whose pace never flags. It is recounted throughout in first-person present tense by Picquart, whose character is key to the whole novel. Picquart as portrayed here is an admirable character, driven not by any particular sentiment or regard for Dreyfus, nor even (at least initially) by any high-flown ideals of truth and justice, but by a steady professional determination to do his job thoroughly and honestly (and later, also by a desire for revenge on the army for their treatment of a woman he cares for). The other characters are deftly drawn with a few bold strokes, so that even though there is not much demographic diversity in the cast – they are almost all middle-aged Frenchmen and most of them are army officers – they emerge as distinct individuals. I am afraid that most of the army does not come out of the novel with much credit (except General Leclerc, provincial commander in North Africa) but being on the wrong side of the narrative does not prevent them being portrayed with sympathy and understanding, particularly Picquart’s adversary Major Henry.

The writing style is clear and unfussy, and the 600-odd pages pass effortlessly. I normally dislike present-tense narratives, but it is a testament to the quality of the writing that after a few pages I had ceased to notice it.

Taut, gripping thriller retelling the Dreyfus Affair, carried by the admirable central character and with a disturbing number of modern parallels.