Wild Strawberries

Wild Strawberries, Angela Thirkell

When I discovered Angela Thirkell, back in 2000, and then quickly became obsessed with her Barsetshire books, I was lucky enough to find most of them here in Houston - some used, many new.  Since then they have all but disappeared, at least from our stores.  Though I own almost all the Barsetshire series, I always check in used-book stores, and sometimes one of the later titles turns up (often Close Quarters, for some reason).  The other day at Kaboom Books, when I saw a Carroll & Graf edition of Wild Strawberries, I nearly leapt across the aisle.  I had a copy of this once, but I gave it away in one of my periodic clear-outs (along with Pomfret Towers), because I remembered them as a bit tiresome, compared with my favorites.  I would never do that now, knowing how hard it is to find her books.  I've particularly wanted to find this one again, since the different posts about the gorgeous new Vintage editions made me wonder if my opinion of it would be different now.

The Barsetshire novels often center on one of the county families, and this is the first book to feature the Leslies, whose estate at Rushwater is in West Barsetshire.  The head of the family, Henry Leslie, is married to Lady Emily, a granddaughter of the Earl of Pomfret.  They lost their eldest son in the Great War, but his son Martin, the heir to Rushwater, lives with his grandparents.  There are two other sons (John and David), and a daughter Agnes, married to Robert Graham, who appears I think exactly once in the entire series but whose presence looms large.  As the book opens, Robert is in South America on War Department business, and Agnes and their three children are staying with her parents.  The Leslies have also invited Robert's niece Mary Preston to spend the summer while her mother goes abroad.  John and David live in London but often come down to Rushwater for the weekend.  John is a widower still grieving his young wife.  David, with oodles of charm and talent, is a dilettante who can't settle down to anything or anyone.  Mary quickly falls for him, though she can't help but appreciate John's quieter kindness and good nature.

Romantic complications aside, the summer is a busy one at Rushwater.  There are visitors, including the unwelcome Mr Holt, a rather boring expert on gardens and a professional houseguest.   More visitors arrive when the Vicar lets his rectory for the summer to a French family, the Boulles, with whose children Martin finds a common interest.  There is the annual tenants' concert, and Lady Emily and Agnes, with Mary, are also planning a great celebration for Martin's 17th birthday.  In Thirkell's later books, she would use this to bring together characters from across Barsetshire, giving them (and us) a chance to meet again, to catch up on family and county news, and usually to abuse the Bishop of Barchester and his wife.  But to my surprise, that doesn't happen here.  The only recurring character that I noticed, Lady Norton (better known as the Dreadful Dowager), is only mentioned in passing; she doesn't even appear on-stage, let alone at the party.  [N.B. I'd forgotten this book was only the second of the Barsetshire series, after High Rising, so she didn't yet have her large cast of characters.]

This is very much a Leslie book, which is partly why I had decided I didn't need to keep it.  Actually, Martin Leslie is one of my favorite characters in the later books, after he inherits Rushwater.  But I find his grandmother Lady Emily and his Aunt Agnes rather annoying at times.  At least in this book everyone seems to find them annoying at times, starting on the first page with the Vicar, but mother and daughter are so charming that everyone forgives them.  For me Lady Emily's daffiness wears after a while, as does Agnes' woolly-minded adoration of her unruly children, to whom she is contstantly cooing "Oh, wicked ones, wicked ones."  Her children play large parts in the later books, and I much prefer Clarissa in this one, plump and silent.

But in the end this book is more about Mary and Martin, and I enjoyed their stories, and the summer at Rushwater House.  I'm glad to have this back on my shelves, next to Pomfret Towers, and there they will both stay this time.

Bruce Catton and Ulysses Grant

Grant Takes Command, Bruce Catton

It was Bruce Catton who really introduced me to the American Civil War, though in a sense I grew up with the war.  As a child living in Georgia, I camped with my Girl Scout Troop at Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore, with its giant bas-relief of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.  When family visited, my parents took them and us to every battlefield and plantation historic site within driving distance.  But it was finding Catton's three-volume history of the Federal Army of the Potomac on my parents' shelves many years later that brought the war alive for me, introduced me to military history, and made me a student of this four-year fratricidal conflict.

Catton, who was born in 1899, also grew up with the war, hearing stories from the veterans in his small Michigan hometown. After serving in the First World War, he became a journalist, working in newspapers before he became the founding editor of American Heritage magazine in 1954.  He was not an academic historian, but his many books about the Civil War were meticulously researched and documented.  Though he won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1954, his work was often labeled "pop" history (a dismissive term still sometimes used for historians who aim at or accidentally reach a wider non-academic audience).  Catton wrote in a relaxed, colloquial, but never sloppy style, and his narrative voice is unmistakable.  To my mind, he is the Anthony Trollope of historians.  He wrote complex narratives with a large cast of characters, moving his central story forward with frequent digressions to follow subplots, all of which come neatly back to the main theme.  He had a journalist's eye for description, for the telling detail, for the apt anecdote.  Writing about a war unprecedented in the slaughter of young men, he wasn't afraid to include the lighter moments that came even in the midst of desperate battles, while never playing for jokes.  He constantly brought in the common soldier's point of view, quoting diaries and letters as well as reminiscences written many years later.

Grant Takes Command is the final book in a three-volume biography of Ulysses S. Grant, focusing on his military career.  (Catton was chosen to complete the trilogy after the author of the first volume died.)  When I was reading John Jones' A Rebel War Clerk's Diary, my confusion with the lack of maps or notes led me to read with my National Geographic Atlas of the Civil War close at hand.  Its brief summaries of major battles made me curious to read more, particularly about the last years of the war, and there on the TBR shelves was this book, just exactly what I wanted.  (I had read the second volume, Grant Moves South, in my pre-blogging days.)

This book covers Grant's military career from late 1863 to the end of the war.  It opens in July, just after his great victory at Vicksburg.  With the equally important Federal victory at Chattanooga in November of that year, Grant became the military hero of the North, its most successful general and its best chance of winning the war.  Congress voted to revive the rank of Lieutenant General, last held by George Washington, and in March of 1864 Grant was promoted and made general-in-chief of the Federal armies. Following his career in 1864 and 1865 really gives a good overview of the war in general, because even when he wasn't in the field, as with Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas, he was still in charge, in frequent contact with his commanders across the entire front.  But Grant did spend most of his time in Virginia, facing Robert E. Lee and his army, taking his own men into some of the worst fighting of the war, at the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg.  He famously said that he would "fight it out on this line if it takes all summer."  It took much longer than that, and many thousands of deaths, before he finally brought Lee to surrender in April of 1865.

Here Catton was writing a life, not strictly military history, and like all good biographers he wanted (in the words of  historian Paul Murray Kendall) "to elicit, from the coldness of paper, the warmth of a life being lived."  First, Catton let Grant speak for himself, quoting frequently from Grant's own words, his letters and dispatches as well as his later Memoirs, and his reminiscences in Around the World with General Grant.  Catton also paid close attention to the people around Grant, his "military family."  Whenever possible, his wife Julia joined him in camp, bringing one  or another of their sons with her.  Grant's aid Colonel Horace Porter wrote that they "were a perfect Darby and Joan," who in the quiet evenings sat together holding hands, "looking shy and mildly fussed if anyone noticed that they were doing it."  Grant was an attentive father, as much as he could be while absent in the field, constantly worried that his children weren't getting a proper education.  He didn't want his sons wasting their time on music or dancing, though he didn't object to it for his daughter Nellie.

Grant's marriage to Julia and their family were the center of his life, the balance for everything else.  Catton gave equal attention to two other crucial partnerships, with Abraham Lincoln and William T. Sherman.  In Grant, Lincoln found the general that he and the country so desperately needed. He told one of his secretaries, "I'm glad to find a man who can go ahead without me . . . He doesn't ask me to do impossibilities for him, and he's the first general I've had that didn't."  Grant later said of Lincoln, "He was incontestably the greatest man I have ever known."  The second partnership, with Sherman, became a major factor in the eventual Union victory.  After Grant's promotion, Sherman took over his command in the western theater, but they continued to coordinate their military movements in Virginia and Georgia. Sherman once wrote Grant," I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come if alive."   Or as he once more bluntly put it: "He stood by me when I was crazy and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now, sir, we stand by each other always."

Bruce Catton was probably never near the cutting-edge of Civil War scholarship, but his books are well-researched, neatly organized, and eminently readable.  I'm glad to have them on my shelves, and to see that so many are still in print - now considered classics.

A Civil War diary from the heart of the Confederacy

A Rebel War Clerk's Diary, Vols. I & II, John B. Jones

My father gave me these two books several years ago, and since he never follows my blog I can admit that at the time, I didn't think I'd ever read them.  Though I've lived half my life now in the South, when it comes to books about the Civil War, I prefer the Northern perspective (possibly from reading Gone With the Wind at an early age, when we were living in Georgia.  My mother had forbidden me to read it; I was ten, and I didn't realize the futility of trying to hide a book that size under a mattress).

But I kept these books on the TBR stacks, and then reading George Templeton Strong's diary of the Civil War made me more interested in first-person accounts of the war, particularly diaries.  When I finally sat down with John Jones's, I ended up reading through both volumes in just a few days, fascinated by seeing familiar events unfolding from such a different angle.  Jones was a Southerner by birth, living in New Jersey but working in Philadelphia, where he published a pro-Southern newspaper, the Southern Monitor.  When war broke out in April of 1861, he feared that he would be liable to arrest as a prominent Confederate sympathizer.  He fled south, leaving his wife and five children to follow later.

Stopping first in Virginia, which had not yet left the Union, Jones watched as a convention met and eventually chose secession.  To provide for his family, he decided to seek a post in the new Confederate government.

"At fifty-one, I can hardly follow the pursuit of arms; but I will write and preserve a DIARY of the revolution.  I never held nor sought office in my life; but now President Tyler and Gov. Wise say I will find employment at Montgomery."

Jones travelled to the first capital of the Confederacy, where he was appointed a clerk in the office of the Secretary of War.  When the government offices were transferred to Richmond, Virginia, he moved with them.  His family joined him there, and eventually his two sons also found places in the government (which kept them out of the army).   From the heart of the Confederacy, in one of the offices central to the Rebel war effort, Jones watched President Jefferson Davis, the three Secretaries of War he worked under, generals including Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, members of the Confederate Congress, and officials from every level of the government.  For his work, he had access to official correspondence and state papers, many of which he had to summarize or draft responses to.  He wrote about all of this in his diary, which he stated more than once he kept with the full knowledge and approval of the President and the Secretary of War.  He often quoted the President's letters, and sometimes copied them whole into his diaries, which makes an interesting contrast with Harold Holzer's book about Abraham Lincoln's mail, Dear Mr. Lincoln.  I can't believe that Jones ever showed his diary to Davis or his superiors, or some of his franker comments might have cost him his job, if not landed him in jail.  On the other hand, he was completely loyal to the Confederate cause, which he saw as a war to preserve slavery and Southern independence, the birthright of the American Revolution.  He owned no slaves himself but was fully committed to the slave system.  I found it interesting that in contrast to Strong, Jones never used the n-word, only the term "negro."

Jones and his family lived in Richmond throughout the war.  They faced the constant threat of Federal invasion, and despite their exempt places his sons were sometimes required to join home guard units to defend the city.  Many of the entries detail the hardships the civilian population suffered.  It was often difficult to bring goods and food into the city.  Speculation and inflation drove prices to unbelievable highs, while salaries sank with a Confederate currency that constantly fell in value. In official papers and in articles that he wrote for the city's newspapers, Jones frequently called for government control and rationing, with prosecution of speculators and hoarders.  His own family benefited from his government contacts, which allowed him to buy food at reduced price or in effect on the black market, which Jones justified out of necessity.  He constantly put the blame for shortages on Jewish merchants, and I was taken aback by the blatant anti-semitism in so many of his entries.  The second Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin, was Jewish, and he went on to serve as the Secretary of State in Davis's cabinet.  I wonder if Jones kept his attitudes toward Jews for the privacy of his diary.

Another frequent target of Jones's ire was the large number of able-bodied men not serving in the Confederate forces.  As in the North, those liable to the draft could hire substitutes to serve for them.  In addition, the Confederate Constitution exempted many government positions from service, and farmers and industrial workers could also be excused.  But manpower shortages became so dire in the last two years of the war that there were calls to arm even the slaves, with the promise of freedom after the South gained its independence.  Jones frequently railed against the rich slaveowners who hired substitutes, while poorer men fought on their behalf in a war over slavery, and he also wanted the young men in cushy government jobs sent out to the army - though not his own sons.  He never explained why they should have been safe, exceptions to his own arguments.

In all of this, Jones's diary makes for much grimmer reading than Strong's, yet it does have its more human, even light-hearted moments.  Jones turned the backyard of their rented house into a garden, out of necessity.  His family needed all the tomatoes, cabbages and beans he could grow, but he loved every moment he spent there and took great pride in his harvests.  When his daughter's elderly cat died in 1864, he wrote,

"I sympathize with Fannie in all the grief natural on such an occasion; but really, the death of the cat in such times as these is a great relief to me, as he was maintained at the cost of not less than $200 per annum." 

I couldn't help but empathize with him at that moment, a man willing to spend what little they had on a family pet, and appreciating how much her cat meant to his daughter.  There was also the time he opened an old trunk, the key of which had been lost for many years, to discover it contained among other things "several books - one from my library, an octavo volume on Midwifery, 500 pages, placed there to prevent the children from seeing the illustrations . . . "  Obviously a more successful tactic than hiding it under a mattress.

Unlike George Templeton Strong, whose diary lay undiscovered in an archives for decades, John Jones decided to publish his after the war.  He apparently revised and expanded it from his original notes, but he did not live to see its publication in 1866, having died a few months before.  I hope that his book helped his family as much as Ulysses Grant's posthumous Memoirs did his.  I'm sure though that not all the reviews were positive.  Of all the Confederate leaders, only Robert E. Lee escaped his frank criticism or blame.

The edition I read is from Time-Life Books, part of their series the "Collector's Library of the Civil War."  Other than a brief note on the author, the diary was not edited, simply re-printed from the 1866 volumes.  I will be checking to see if another edition is available.  It would have been helpful to know more about some of the people that Jones mentioned, and also to have some perspective on his criticism.  I am also interested to know just how much revision he did prior to publication.  The author's note states that he "added assertions based on hindsight - the diary's major weakness. . . "   Despite its weaknesses, I am glad to have read this and to have watched the events of war unfold from a new perspective.

One crucial year in the Civil War

Rise to Greatness, David Von Drehle

Over the past couple of weeks, I've read two very different books about the Civil War, and started a third.  I'm not sure what sparked this little read-athon.  I've all had these books on the TBR shelves for a while; maybe it was just their time. Or maybe reading about the First World War sent me back to a more familiar conflict.

The first, Rise of Greatness, is subtitled "Abraham Lincoln and America's Most Perilous Year."  That year is 1862, which was indeed a momentous year in the Civil War.  This is a general overview, a month by month account, "as much as possible from Lincoln's point of view."  When 1862 began, the Union war effort was stalled, and Confederate hopes of European recognition and intervention were high.  The Secretary of War, Simon Cameron, was a political appointment whose department was notorious for its corruption and incompetence.  In the east, Federal General George B. McClellan, the "Little Napoleon," openly snubbed Lincoln and refused to share military information with him.  The rise to greatness that David Von Drehle charts is Lincoln's own, as he grew into the unprecedented challenges of a presidency amidst civil war.

That war was not just between north and south, Federal and Confederate.  Lincoln faced divisions within the North, as radical Republicans pushed him to abolish slavery while Unionists in the critical slave-owning border states like Kentucky warned that would push them into the Confederacy.  There were no guarantees that the armies in the field, who enlisted to preserve the Union, would fight to free the slaves.  Northern society remained deeply divided over slavery, with many blaming abolitionists for the conflicts that led to the war in the first place.  Lincoln's Cabinet mirrored these divisions, and he also had to deal with a Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, who was already angling for the Republican presidential nomination in 1864.

One of Lincoln's first steps was to educate himself more deeply in military matters.  He was always a master of self-study, a true autodidact, though also willing to learn from others with more knowledge or greater experience.  What he learned over the next few months, primarily from books on military strategy borrowed form the Library of Congress, enabled him to assert his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief.  With a new Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, he began to set policies and strategy, and to find generals who would carry them out.  Some of the war's worst fighting came in that year's battles, at Shiloh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and especially Fredericksburg.  General after general came and went, and one stayed: Ulysses Grant.  "I can't spare this man," Lincoln once said. "He fights."

Over the course of the year, Lincoln also came to recognize the role that slavery played in sustaining the Confederate war effort.  As Eric Foner argued in The Fiery Trial, Lincoln believed with many of his fellow Republicans (and most Democrats) that since slavery was protected by the Constitution, he could not interfere with it where it already existed.  However, he came to believe with many others that he could use his wartime powers to abolish slavery as a military necessity.  That step might also influence Britain at least against intervention or assistance (France meanwhile was playing a dangerous game in Mexico, where Napoleon III had put the Austrian archduke Maximilian on a puppet throne).  Lincoln first discussed emancipation with members of his cabinet in July.  He issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 23rd, and he signed the final formal document on January 1, 1863.

All of this took place against a background of personal tragedy for the Lincoln family.  On February 20th, their third son Willie died of typhoid fever.  He was Lincoln's favorite, many said the most like him.  Lincoln's own deep grief, mostly silent, was made even more difficult by his wife Mary.  Already extravagant, she was determined to make her mark as First Lady, and she seems to have crossed over the line into compulsive or addictive behavior.  One friend of the family remembered a bill for three hundred pairs of kid gloves.  To finance her extravagance, there were rumors that the president's wife was forging bills and taking kickbacks.  She also became obsessed with spiritualism, trying to contact Willie's spirit, falling victim to more than one charlatan.  The séances that she held at the White House made the President a target of ridicule from all sides.  It's impossible not to feel sympathy for Mary Lincoln in the loss of her son, while at the same time wishing someone could have sat her down for a serious talk and some professional help.

David Von Drehle is an editor at Time magazine who has written several other books, including a history of the Triangle fire (now on my library list).  This book is a good introduction to a very complicated year.  He puts the events, political and military, in context without overwhelming the reader, and he also manages a large cast of characters, deftly keeping them distinct.  He has an eye ear for the telling anecdotes, much like Lincoln himself.  His narration is brisk and even a bit breezy at times, which it makes for a lively story.

Initially I was going to write briefly about both books, but I had more to say about this book than I expected, so I'll put my thoughts about the second in another post.

Life after life

Life After Life, Kate Atkinson


I loved this book, which was one of the most intense reading experiences I've had in a long while.  I started it on a Sunday afternoon, thinking to just try a few pages before I went on to finish some weekend projects.  I finally set it firmly aside about 9.30 that night, because if I knew if I didn't I'd still have been reading at 3 AM.  I took it to work with me, to read at lunch and on the commute home, and finished it Monday evening.  Those 529 pages just flew by.

I've been waffling a bit about this post, though, for a couple of reasons. First, because other people have already written wonderfully about this book, including Teresa at Shelf Love, Alex at Thinking in Fragments, and Helen at She Reads Novels.  But even more because in the end I'm left with so many questions, and with the feeling that I missed something major, that perhaps my reading was too literal, that I was too caught up in the complexities of the plot and the deeper meaning of the story eluded me - or I read right past it, too intent on what happens next.

On the surface this is the story of Ursula Todd, born on a stormy winter night in February of 1911, her parents Hugh and Sylvie, her brothers and sister.  It's not just one story of one life, it's a series, life after life.  Ursula's first life ends as it begins, when she is born with the umbilical cord choking her.  The doctor has been delayed by the storm, and Sylvie is caught in childbirth with only the family's maid Bridget to help her.  The women don't know what to do, how to save the newborn infant, who dies.  Two pages later, the scene is set again, re-set, but this time the doctor is there and the child, Ursula, is saved.  As she grows up, if (when) her life follows a path that ends in tragedy, the story goes back to that February night.  Sometimes the story resets to a different point in Ursula's life, to a different crossroads, so that she can turn to the left this time, rather than the right, follow a different path, until that story too comes to its end.

I found all these different stories fascinating in and of themselves.  Sometimes I could see an end approaching, and though I dreaded its coming, I was so curious to see where Ursula's story would begin again, and where it would take her next.  Two of the story lines I found so heartbreaking that I felt such a rush of relief when they ended, and she could escape to start somewhere else again.  One of these I thought turned on a very weak plot element, and strange as it may sound to talk of implausibility in a book like this, I found it difficult to accept a sexual assault on a staircase in the family home in broad daylight.  The consequences on the other hand I found all too plausible, and sad.

Somewhere along the way, as these stories diverged and converged, I began to wonder why all this was happening.  Who was shaping these events, or who was resetting the clock, God or History or Fate or Providence?  The opening scene, in a cafe in Munich in November of 1930, suggests some purpose.  It reminded me of Connie Willis's time travel novels, though, where the historians have learned that they cannot get close enough to major events to influence or impact them, they are simply pushed out into another less fraught time.  (I was also reminded of Terry Pratchett's Alternative Pant Leg Theory of History, not to mention Chrestomanci's Related Worlds.)  God or Fate seems to be pushing Ursula, but I was never sure what He or She or It was pushing her toward, except another chance at survival, at life.  And why Ursula in the first place?

It was interesting that Ursula herself develops a sense of previous lives, so that she learns to avoid some dangers.  It takes serious efforts to avoid some fates, such as the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, which costs more than one life.  On the other hand there seem to be some fixed points, which cannot alter, such as Pam's marriage and Hugh's death, and Lavinia Nesbit with her little cat brooch.  I am still haunted by Nancy's recurring fate, and by that of the fox (and disappointed that Maurice never ever in a single one of the many stories gets his just desserts).

The final pages brought even more questions.  Are others' lives repeating and changing along with Ursula's?  Isn't that what Sylvie's final experience with the scissors suggests?  What does Teddy's resurrection, so late in the book, mean for Ursula's story - and for Sylvie's?  Can the changes flow backwards?  Is there an end to this chain of lives?  For Ursula, it can't be with the events in Hyde Park, which seem fitting, if the story then circles back to the start, but goes so wrong. But then Ursula's experience with Frieda, with its choice of an ending, should be where the story goes wrong, if "something had cracked and broken and the order of things had changed."  And what in the world is the meaning of that last chapter, with Mrs Haddock, which reprints word for word her earlier appearance?

I am clearly going to have to buy my own copy of this book, so that I can read it all over again, while I puzzle all these things out, or simply decide to live with the mysteries.  In the meantime, which of Kate Atkinson's books should I look for next?

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci

Witch Week
Charmed Life
The Lives of Christopher Chant, Diana Wynne Jones

I really am enjoying John Keegan's book on World War I, as well as learning a lot from it.  But last week was a bit stressful, and I found myself struggling with the complexities of six different war strategies, not to mention details of troop movements on both Fronts.  I found it hard to settle down with anything else, though. I started and abandoned books all week, until Friday evening, when I sat down with Witch Week, the fourth of the Chrestomanci books, and read half of it almost in one go.  And though I finally had Kate Atkinson's Life after Life waiting at the library, I set it aside for the moment in favor of still more Chrestomanci.

The Chrestomanci stories are set "In the multiple parallel universes of the Twelve Related Worlds."  In those universes, related worlds are created at a divergence over major events, like the Battle of Waterloo.  In our world, Napoleon was defeated, but a parallel world was created in which he won that battle, and World B (while related to ours) developed differently from that point.  Most people have doubles in all the related worlds, but occasionally someone doesn't.  If that single (un-doubled) person has talents, especially magical ones, then all the talent that would normally be spread across his or her doubles in the related worlds is instead concentrated in one person.  In the worlds with magic, the most powerful are the enchanters.  As Diana Wynne Jones explains,

"Now, if someone did not control all these busy magic-users, ordinary people would have a horrible time and would probably end up as slaves. So the government appoints the very strongest enchanter there is to make sure that no one misuses magic. This enchanter has nine lives and is known as 'the Chrestomanci' . . . He has to have a strong personality as well as strong magic."

The current Chrestomanci reminds me very strongly of a Georgette Heyer hero, one of the impeccably-dressed, imperious, rapier-tongued type, the Marquis of Alverstoke perhaps, though with the saving grace of humor.  When at home in Chrestomanci Castle, he tends to lounge around in gorgeous silk dressing gowns, but no one would ever take him for a curst dandy.

Witch Week, which I read first, falls somewhere in the middle of the series' chronology (which does not match the publication order).  It opens with an accusation: "SOMEONE IN THIS CLASS IS A WITCH."  The class is 6B, in Larwood House, "a boarding school run by the government for witch-orphans and children with other problems."  The accusation of witchcraft is an extremely serious one in this world, where it is banned and witches are routinely executed (though no longer burned at the stake in public spectacle).  Hence all the witch-orphans, sent to places like Larwood House for re-education.  When accusations of witchcraft fall on 6B, and strange things begin to happen in the school, it won't be long before the Inquisitors make their appearance.  And those children who know or suspect that they are witches have no one to turn to, except the almost-mythical figure of the Chrestomanci.  Larwood House is a nasty place, with cliques and bullies, toadies and sneaks, and I don't think the similarity in name to Lowood House is a coincidence.

Charmed Life is the story of Eric Chant, generally known as Cat, and his sister Gwendolyn.  They are orphans as well, having lost their parents in a boating accident that Cat himself barely survived.  Gwendolyn is a powerful witch who believes herself destined to rule the world, though she is presently stuck in the small town of Wolvercote.  When she learns that they are related to Chrestomanci, she writes to him for help.  Soon after, a tall man dressed in trousers with a pearly stripe and a coat of beautiful velvet arrives (the setting seems Edwardian).  He arranges for Cat and Gwendolyn to live with his family at Chrestomanci Castle.  Gwendolyn is at first thrilled, believing that her time has come, but she is mortified when they arrive to be treated as a child, one who must still be educated in the basics of magic, let alone more mundane subjects.  She plots to prove her power and take her place as one of the great witches.  Cat, meanwhile, is miserably afraid of what will happen when everyone realizes he can't work magic.

The Lives of Christopher Chant is the story of how the Chrestomanci of the other books came to be.  It starts with a little boy, the Christopher of the title, who can travel in his dreams to all kinds of wonderful worlds.  These worlds are a way to escape his unhappy family, where his parents communicate only by acrimonious notes amid accusations that his father wasted his mother's fortune in foolish investments.  When Mama's brother Uncle Ralph learns about Christopher's journeys, he explains that bringing things back from those worlds can help his mother live a comfortable and happy life.  But the other worlds are a dangerous place, and Christopher dies more than once in the course of his adventures.  Once his father finds out what is going on, he takes Christopher away for proper training.  Christopher is devastated to learn that he is a nine-lived enchanter, and he must therefore be the next Chrestomanci.

All three stories are great fun, though each has its dark moments (I am haunted by the fate of the mermaids in one of Christopher's worlds).  There is treachery and betrayal, greed and ambition, but also loyalty, honor, and the love of family and friends - and a true appreciation for cats, especially those rescued from the Temple of Ashteth.  Some of the scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, like two accused witches fleeing in desperation, one on an elderly hoe and the other on a recalcitrant rake, while others are truly creepy.  Gwendolyn in particular has a talent for nasty tricks, and she doesn't spare even her own brother.  Cat is a great character, as of course is Chrestomanci himself, but the real hero of the books is his wife Millie, who has her own wonderfully adventurous story.

There are three other books in the Chrestomanci series, and I may find myself back in his worlds before too long.

The home front in France in the Great War

Home Fires in France, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Katrina's review of this over on Pining for the West caught my eye the other day.  I've been looking around for more of Dorothy Canfield Fisher's work, after falling in love with The Home-Maker and Understood Betsy last year.  A book of stories about France in the Great War sounded very intriguing.  From reading about Fisher, I knew that she and her husband spent three years doing relief work in France, so I expected that her stories, while fictional, would be based on her own experiences.  Ever since reading Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth a few years ago (before I started blogging), I've wanted to learn more about the First World War.  It was a bit of shock to realize from that book just how little I do know.  I can't remember studying it in any great detail, even as a history major in college.  Only a random assortment of names and dates comes to mind - August 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the invasion of Belgium, Ypres and the Somme.  Thinking this might fill in some of the blanks, I requested a copy through interlibrary loan and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it arrived.

Home Fires in France was published in America in 1918, presumably while the war was still going on.  According to the "Publisher's Note," Fisher wrote him that "What I write is about such very well-known conditions to us that it is hard to remember it may be fresh to you, but it is so far short of the actual conditions that it seems pretty pale, after all."  Her stories certainly aren't subtle.  They are clearly and strongly pro-French (one wouldn't know from them that the British are actually in the war). 

There are eleven stories in this book, and they are an interesting mix.  As the title suggests, they are not about the armies in the trenches but the home front.  They focus on both French soldiers and their families, and on Americans in France, many working for relief organizations.  Several of the stories are in the first person, with presumably Fisher herself narrating, others in the third person.  Some are set in Paris, flooded with refugees and invalided soldiers, others in the country-side, while two are harrowing accounts of events in northern France under German occupation. Fisher shows that while America was officially a neutral power, France was full of Americans like herself, collecting supplies and money from the U.S., organizing ambulances for the wounded, rehabilitation for the maimed and blind, food and clothing for the refugees.  Some of the Americans in her stories are there just to get their pictures in the paper, or to play at nursing handsome young men (as were some of the French involved in relief work as well). Others with a sincere desire to help are unprepared for the scope of the work and simply overwhelmed.  Several of the stories feature demobilized soldiers, maimed and blind, who must be provided for.  The narrator of one, "A Honeymoon . . . Vive l'Amérique," runs a Braille printing press producing books for veterans, which was one of Fisher's own projects.

The most affecting story, to me, was the one called "A Little Kansas Leaven," about a young woman named Ellen Boardman, twenty-seven, unmarried, an office manager, "plain, rather sallow, very serious."  Reading about the invasion of Belgium startles her into an awareness of world events, outside of her small Kansas town.  From the start, she cannot understand why America is standing by, unwilling to help France and Belgium (Britain apparently is on its own).  She ask questions of the fellow residents of her boarding house, and of her co-workers, many of whom see her as something of a crank, yet they find themselves reading the war news with more attention.  Eventually Ellen decides that she has to do something.  She takes leave from her job, over her boss's objections, takes out her life savings, and sails to France, to do what she can.  In Paris, she finds her way to a refugee bureau run by prominent Americans who desperately need her practical skills.  She spends four months there, organizing their work and their office.  In the evenings she goes to the Gare de l'Est, where soldiers returning to the front catch their trains.  There she timidly passes out chocolate and writing paper to those she finds alone, without family seeing them off.  When her savings run out, she sails back to America and her hometown, where she finds a hero's welcome.  I have to admit, this story brought tears to my eyes, a rare occurrence in reading.

I enjoyed these stories, though they weren't always comfortable reading.  However fictionalized, they opened up a new world to me, and they sparked my interest again in learning about the war itself.  I had no idea, for example, just what parts of France were occupied in the Great War.  Unlike Fisher and her readers in 1918, though, as I read I couldn't help thinking of the future, of what would happen in France just twenty years later.  It was especially poignant, reading the constant mention of fathers, husbands, sons lost, to know that her own son would die in the next war, in the Pacific.