Guest review by Fiona Mountain: THIS THING OF DARKNESS by Harry Thompson

 

"An immense, brave, tragic and hauntingly profound story, richly told. I honestly believe it’s one of the best historical novels ever written."

Photograph by Hugh Dickens

Fiona Mountain is an award-winning novelist. Her debut novel, Isabella, tells the haunting love story of Bounty mutineer Fletcher Christian and his cousin, Isabella Curwen, and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year Award. It was followed with Pale as the Dead and Bloodline, which combine history with mystery and feature 'ancestor detective', Natasha Blake. Bloodline is the winner of an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Fiona grew up in Sheffield and moved to London aged eighteen, where she worked for the BBC for ten years. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her family.

This is historical fiction at its finest; a based-on-fact novel with gripping, page-turning pace which at the same time engenders a fascination for its subject that is sure to send readers hunting out biographies to find out more about the real life protagonists and events surrounding them.

This Thing of Darkness recounts the legendary, world-changing voyage of HMS Beagle, shining the spotlight on the brilliant young captain, Robert FitzRoy, whose fate has been obscured by his famous passenger, Charles Darwin.

FitzRoy and Darwin were intellectual equals and it’s the deep friendship they shared which drives the novel and provides the source of conflict as the two friends turn into enemies, their ideological differences slowly tearing them them apart, leading one to great acclaim and the other to tragedy. The two men disagree over God’s creation and as Darwin grows in stature, FitzRoy slowly and painfully fades under the burden of his traditional morality and practical responsibilities. This Thing of Darkness is a thrilling seafaring adventure which fans of Patrick O'Brian will appreciate. As the Beagle sails around the Pacific there is plenty of violence and danger and storms at sea. But fundamentally it’s a novel about ideas and relationships.

Harry Thompson achieved success as a writer of comedy at the BBC: one of his credits being the creation of Have I got News For You. This is his only novel, written a few months before his untimely death, aged 45. It was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and it’s a phenomenal achievement and legacy. The breadth and depth of the research is incredible, immersing readers in the life on board a ship on a voyage of discovery. The characterisation, the complexity of the debates and the sheer power of the story arc is sublime, and as all the best historical fiction should do, it makes you question thoughts and beliefs and look at the world and your place in it with fresh eyes. It teaches you and leaves you wanting to learn more.

An enigmatic figure, the fourth great-grandson of Charles I, Robert Fitzroy was a man ahead of his time. He believed in equal rights for those who, in Victorian drawing rooms, were considered to be savages. I was fascinated to learn that he’s the father of meteorology. He showed how storms can be predicted and he began telegraphing shipping forecasts and installing storm warning systems which saved countless lives at sea, but his work was delayed in England because ship owners lost money when their boats didn’t go out because of the forecasts.

The theory that was borne on The Beagle led to Darwin losing his belief in God. Emotionally fragile, Robert FitzRoy, a secret manic-depressive, eventually lost his life to suicide.

This is an immense, brave, tragic and hauntingly profound story, richly told. I honestly believe it’s one of the best historical novels ever written.

This Thing of Darkness is published by Headline Review.

MISS BENSON'S BEETLE by Rachel Joyce, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Rachel Joyce has a gift for expressing profound truths with simple directness."

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. She has published widely for young readers, with titles including Set in Stone, a young adult novel which won the Costa Children's Book Prize. Titles for younger readers include Lob and The Brockenspectre. Her latest publication, This Book is Cruelty Free: Animals and Us is a guide to compassionate living, looking at the choices we make in our everyday lives and how they affect animals and the environment.

This was a recent choice (someone else's) for my reading group, and I was drawn to it for several reasons. I'd greatly enjoyed The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Rachel Joyce's first novel, and The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessey even more, with its deeply poignant, revelatory ending. I love stories about exploration, discovery and the natural world, and when you add two highly memorable characters, a mystery, a troubled war veteran and Rachel Joyce's characteristic warmth and insight, this was a winner. And only when reaching the Afterword did I learn that the sparking-point for the novel was a photograph that intrigued me when I saw it at Kelmscott Manor a few years ago; it shows May Morris, William Morris's daughter, with her companion Mary Lobb, with whom she travelled widely. These two women are transformed in Rachel Joyce's imagination into unlikely travelling partners Margery Benson and Enid Pretty, setting off for New Caledonia to discover a golden beetle that's so far been reported but never captured or catalogued. 

Impulsively leaving her dull job teaching domestic science, Margery advertises for an assistant, and it's the least apparently suitable, Enid, dressed in pink with yellow candyfloss hair and pink pompom shoes, who joins her on the voyage to Brisbane. They are stalked by young ex-soldier Mundic, who records their activities obsessively and continues tracking them to the remote island of New Caledonia and the northern settlement where they rent a rickety bungalow as the base for their expeditions. Enid thinks she's the one being followed - what does she have in that red valise she always keeps close by, and what happened to the husband she left behind in London? Margery's suspicions gather, and so do those of the stuffy Consul's wife they meet on arrival at the main town.

But the growing friendship becomes vital to both women. It's the irrepressible Enid who keeps Margery going with the quest for the golden beetle when weather, circumstances and physical failings turn against them, and Margery who first humours then supports Enid in her desire to have a baby. There are many memorable moments, such as when they swim in a forest pool and Margery feels a surge of exhilaration: "She stayed, staring up at the thundering cascade of water and dark green pine clumps and, above them, the sky as blue as a piece of glass. And, just for a moment, she could have sworn she heard something inside her, groaning with pleasure ..."

Enid's distaste for killing makes it impossible for Margery to convince her that three of the golden beetles, if found, must be put into her killing jar and preserved as specimens for the Natural History Museum. For the always-practical Margery this is part of her training, although she was sickened years before by her first experience of the process: "She had screwed on the lid. But the beetle would not die quickly, as she'd expected: if flailed and sucked at the burning air, lifting its antennae, cramming its legs at the glass, calling her - or so she imagined - to stop, amazed and appalled at what she was doing after she had taken such care to lift it with her tweezers." A person who could feel and notice so much would never do that to her special golden beetle, would she?

The larger-than-life treatment lends warmth and humour. Rachel Joyce has a gift for expressing profound truths with simple directness, and Margery recognises something similar in her friend: "Sometimes Enid still surprised Margery - the way she could look into the air and come out with a piece of wisdom ..." As events escalate the search for the beetle becomes almost incidental, but several surprises await in the perfectly-judged ending.  

I highly recommend Miss Benson's Beetle - and if you haven't read The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, that too is not to be missed.

Miss Benson's Beetle is published by Penguin.

Linda Newbery's This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us is published by Pavilion.

THE INVENTION OF NATURE: the Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, by Andrea Wulf, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

"Why isn't he as widely acknowledged as Charles Darwin as a key figure in our understanding of nature?"

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her young adult novel Set in Stone was a Costa category winner; she has published widely for young readers, and is currently working on a new adult novel. Her non-fiction title This Book is Cruelty-Free: Animals and Us will be published in July by Pavilion Books.

What an amazing man Alexander von Humboldt was - one of those driven people who achieves enough to fill ten lives. Yet until I heard about Andrea Wulf's book when it won the Costa Biography prize in 2015, the name Humboldt meant little to me beyond the Humboldt current in the Pacific and the Humboldt penguin. In fact, he has more animals and plants named after him than anyone else – as well as the Mare Humboldtianum, an impact basin, or ‘sea’, on the moon. He was so influential that I’m astonished he isn't a household name, like Charles Darwin, and Wulf's subtitle reflects this: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science. 

Born into a wealthy Prussian family in 1769, he loved collecting and labelling shells, insects and plants from an early age. His father, an army officer, died when Alexander was nine, and he was brought up by his rather distant mother, who sent him to study government and politics. Alexander rejected this planned career in favour of natural history, and became a tireless traveller, explorer, collector, writer, observer and interpreter of the natural world.

While still in his twenties he came to the realisation that nature forms ecosystems, such a key concept today. His term for this was Naturgemälde, in which – unlike other naturalists of his day, who focused on identifying, naming and categorising as if species lived in isolation – he saw that natural systems form a complex, interdependent web. Not only that, but as early as 1800 he foresaw that human intervention had the potential to disrupt the climate; he described "mankind's mishief ... which disturbs nature's order".  More than two hundred years later we're still waiting for this to be fully acknowledged by world leaders.

His earliest travels, in his twenties, were in Venezuela, where he climbed mountains and volcanoes, studied vegetation and made detailed notes on climate zones. From then on, he wrote and published copiously, starting with botany, progressing through his seven-volume Personal Narrative, which combined scientific study with travelogue. Through further travels in South America he observed the damaging effects of Spanish colonialism on indigenous peoples. He advised Thomas Jefferson on the likely effects of independence from Spain and how it might affect the United States; throughout his life he was an outspoken critic of slavery. His influence also set Simon Bolivar on his campaign to free south American from Spanish rule. Wulf points out his contradictions, though – while approving of revolution, he served for years as court chamberlain to the German King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. 

His view that nature calls for an emotional response alongside scientific interest  (he wrote like a poet, one reviewer said) inspired the Romantic poets – Wordsworth and Coleridge are known to have read his books, and Byron directly referred to Humboldt in Don Juan. And Charles Darwin had Humboldt’s Personal Narrative in his cabin on the Beagle, ­annotated with his own comments. Reading these, Wulf says, is like eavesdropping on a conversation between the two. For Darwin, Humboldt was such a key influence that he rather nervously sent the older man a copy of The Voyage of the Beagle, and was delighted when Humboldt replied with detailed appreciation. ‘Few things in my life have gratified me more,’ Darwin wrote; ‘even a young author cannot gorge such a mouthful of flattery.’ We’re so used to seeing Charles Darwin as the bearded, venerable grandfather of natural science that it’s intriguing to see him here, responding as any novice author would to praise from a much-admired elder.

Possibly, Humboldt’s ‘web of life’ idea is also behind James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis – that the Earth, as a whole, is a living thing, capable of regulating itself (if not destroyed by excesses of human interference). Certainly it was the impetus behind Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, which elaborated on Humboldt’s idea that humans would have a disastrous effect on the natural world. Marsh even foresaw that animal agriculture and meat-eating would deplete natural resources, and that vegetarianism is far more sustainable. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden also owes much to Humboldt’s writings. and Wulf believes that Humboldt was the first to produce nature writing as we think of it now..

The energy and drive of this remarkable man lasted well into his eighties – when he died, at 89, he was still working on a massive, multi-volume project, Cosmos, which aimed to bring everything – animals, plants, geology, oceans and even the sun and stars into one consummate study.

If you’re interested in nature, exploration, the history of science and how we see ourselves in relation to the natural world, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this richly informative book as much as I have. Perhaps Humboldt’s ideas, revolutionary in their time, strike us now with a new and pertinent force. 

So why has he slipped from view? Why isn't he as widely acknowledged as Charles Darwin as a key figure in our understanding of nature? Wulf suggests that, firstly, he was writing at a time when generalism in science was being replaced by specialist disciplines; and secondly, that anti-German feeling in Britain and the USA began to play its part. Still, Wulf concludes that "Environmentalists, ecologists and nature writers today remain firmly founded in Humboldt's vision - although many have never heard of him. Nevertheless, Humboldt is their founding father."

The Invention of Nature is published by John Murray.

See also: Walden by Henry David Thoreau

SECOND ANNIVERSARY post by guest Joanne Harris: RECORD OF A SPACEBORN FEW by Becky Chambers

Kyte Photography

Joanne Harris (MBE) was born in Barnsley in 1964, of a French mother and an English father. She studied Modern and Mediaeval Languages at Cambridge and was a teacher for fifteen years, during which time she published three novels, including Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.

Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories, a Dr Who novella, guest episodes for the game Zombies, Run and three cookbooks. Her books are now published in over 50 countries and have won a number of British and international awards. She is an honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, has honorary doctorates in literature from the universities of Sheffield and Huddersfield, and has been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) Prize, the Orange Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science.

She works from a shed in her garden, plays bass in the band she first joined when she was 16, is currently writing a screenplay and lives with her husband and daughter in a little wood in Yorkshire.

The first volume of Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers trilogy, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet was by far the best sci-fi novel I'd read in a long, long time. Genuinely different to the mainstream of the genre, inclusive and compassionate, it seemed to me to be doing what speculative fiction has been trying (and mostly failing) to achieve for most of the ‘90s. Two volumes later, I am convinced that Becky Chambers is near the forefront of a long-overdue revolution in a genre that has been seen for too long as very male, very white and with a general tendency to value space battles over psychology. Not that there’s anything wrong with space battles. But, with some noble exceptions, sci-fi has traditionally been seen by many as an action genre, plot-heavy and character-light, with aliens often presented as thinly-disguised racial stereotypes, and women as love interests, rather than fully-formed protagonists.

Becky Chambers’ first novel forms part of a fresh, new wave of sci-fi. Initially self-published when mainstream publishers failed to see its potential, or to understand the deep demand among readers for increased diversity, it is lighter on plot than most sci-fi, but far richer in character development. It concentrates on powerful themes of belonging and identity, and treats the concept of alien-ness - in terms of race, gender, sexuality and culture - as something genuinely different, rather than just presenting them as humans in clever makeup. The dialogue is terrific - Joss Whedon with more empathy - and the narrative style is spare and elegant and wholly, gloriously immersive.

Record of a Spaceborn Few  carries on from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Close and Common Orbit only in that it serves to further our knowledge of the universe in which the books are set. Only one character from the first book is mentioned – and that only in passing – which means that the books can be read alone or as part of a wider exploration. I would suggest reading them all – not only because they are excellent, but because they provide an expanding overview of the author’s universe; a universe at least as important as any of the characters. Unlike most futuristic scenarios, this is a universe in which Humans are neither the dominant nor the superior species. The order that has been established within interstellar society has come from an alien culture, as has much of the technology. Humans are a minority group – white humans even more so – challenging the assumptions of so much of our traditional science fiction.

Only on the Exodus Fleet are Humans still in the majority, but the Exodus Fleet is a relic, dating from many centuries ago, still bearing the descendants of the last generation of Humans to leave Earth. This fiercely isolationist group still retains its original cultural identity, though the ancient ships are in disrepair, and supplies are always a problem. Young people wanting to explore the outside world with its many colonized planets are faced with the same kind of culture shock faced by members of certain religious groups who choose to leave their traditional environment. Some leave for good; some return, unable to face life outside the bubble.

When a disaster rocks this already fragile community, those Exodans who still call the Fleet their home are faced with an existential crisis – how to face up to the knowledge that their final destination – the stars – was reached a hundred years ago, and that they are an irrelevance in a universe that has moved on?

Within this framework, the author manages to weave themes of inclusivity and diversity into her sci-fi, along with representations of mental illness, body dysmorphia, xenophobia, depression, gender fluidity and so on - all with the most delicate touch, and in a way that feeds directly into the plot, rather than appearing pasted-in for the sake of political correctness. This is the real deal emotionally: the characters are well-rounded, original and relatable, and the underlying ideas are compassionate and true. It's also a cracking story, well-paced and compelling, with more than enough plot to satisfy, but with a nice, grown-up element of personal and emotional growth, too.

The story is seen through the eyes of a number of different characters – a young mother; a hopeful visitor struggling for acceptance; a young man desperate to leave – all these stories intertwined to make up a larger – and strangely familiar – narrative. A tale of a grieving community; a tale of misplaced ambitions; a tale of optimism and rejection; a culture willing to do almost anything rather than face the outside world. The parallels with current events are inescapable, and yet are delivered with a welcome lightness of touch.

Imagine The Grapes of Wrath, set in space, with all the intensity, heartbreak and tension that implies. And grieve a little for the fact that the mainstream literary world is so slow in acknowledging the scope, skill and literary value of sci-fi - although frankly, anyone who scorns sci-fi as a lesser genre really doesn't deserve to read anything as splendid as this.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is published by Hodder & Stoughton.