The Pleasures of Men – Kate Williams

22 Jan

‘Catherine Sorgeiul lives with her Uncle in a rambling house in London’s East End. She has few companions and little to occupy the days beyond her own colourful imagination.

But then a murderer strikes, ripping open the chests of young girls and stuffing hair into their mouths to resemble a beak, leading the press to christen him The Man of Crows. And as Catherine devours the news, she finds she can channel the voices of the dead, and comes to believe she will eventually channel The Man of Crows himself.

But the murders continue to panic the city and Catherine gradually realizes she is snared in a deadly trap, where nothing is as it first appears.
And lurking behind the lies Catherine has been told are secrets more deadly and devastating than anything her imagination can conjure …‘

The Victorians were really keen on microcosm paintings, panoramic views of their society crammed full of faces, stories and activity like so many over dressed ants all busying themselves at the same time. William Powell Frith’s amazing sprawling The Derby Day and The Railway Station are perfect examples of this particularly Victorian genre, where the viewer is invited to greedily observe everything, their eyes scanning the myriad of different faces, pausing here and there to ponder what their story is.

In recent years, the ‘Victoriana’ novel has gained popularity and almost become a genre in its own right. Like the microcosm paintings of Frith, there are rules to this genre, certain period set pieces that must be included, descriptions and observations of a more contemporary nature that must be made and they are invariably populated by a vast cast of characters, mostly incidental but who must be described in great and lurid detail.

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams is one such book. I was very much looking forward to reading it, anticipating something akin to Michel Faber’s brilliant The Crimson Petal and the White. Now, The Pleasures of Men is very similar to The Crimson Petal but only in so far as most other ‘Victoriana’ novels are – there’s the usual description of dirt, decay and damp. The wails of unfortunate babies follow the characters wherever they venture. People drink gin like it’s about to run out. There’s an awful lot of prostitutes.

There are other similarities – like Faber’s Sugar, Catherine, the heroine of The Pleasures of Men is damaged by her past and keen on feverishly writing down fantasies that involve violence, death, murder and destruction. Fascinated by a serial killer, known as The Man of Crows, she writes lurid accounts of his murders and eventually decides to venture out into the city at night to walk in his footsteps, believing herself ‘protected’ by the evil that she has always been told dwells inside her.

This was a complex and often deeply unpleasant book. I’ve seen complaints that it is over written and I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment but I believe that it is intentionally so. The writing is full blown, lavish, feverish and often over wrought, creating a really horrible, almost suffocatingly intense atmosphere of heat, dust and dirt as observed by a sexually obsessed, disturbed Victorian teenager who has spent time in a lunatic asylum.

The narrowness of a young Victorian girl’s life is well described here – not just that of Catherine with her peculiar circumstances but those of her over dressed acquaintances, who sexually torment their maids and fantasise about serial killers while slyly keeping watch for suitable young men.

At times though, the plot, which when you think about it isn’t really all that complicated (you’ll be disappointed when you discover the identity of the Man of Crows) veers not so much into confusion as into vague slapdashness, almost as if the writer herself lost interest about a hundred pages before the end (which was a bit of a damp squib all things considered) and decided that she didn’t care who the Man of Crows was or who he murdered any more. I can’t blame her for that – I didn’t really care either.

Would I recommend this book? Well, yes and no. If you are in the mood for a dip into the revolting iniquity of London’s east end in the 1840s and have a thing for Victorian asylums and the deranged meanderings of cooped up young girls as well as splendid Victorian set pieces like visits to pie shops, trips to gin dens and a splendidly disastrous visit to the vaudeville theatre then you’ll almost certainly love this. Otherwise you’ll probably start to feel a bit queasy and long for something a bit less histrionic.

Personally, although I did, I think, rather enjoy myself while reading it (and also feel slightly alarmed as I have written about similar themes in my own Victorian effort), I went off and had a long bath when I’d finished reading and splashed the water about a bit while muttering ‘A MILLION POUND ADVANCE? A. MILLION. POUNDS?’ over and over again until I felt like booking myself in for a nice restorative stay at Catherine’s lunatic asylum, the lovely sounding Lavenderfields.

Having said that, I fully expect this to be made into a film at some point in the near future…

Ps. Where is the woman’s right hand in the cover photograph? Haha, now that I have made you look, you will never be able to UNSEE.

Snakes and Bastards – I love you, Agatha Raisin

22 Jan

I have decided that from now on SUNDAY is BOOK REVIEW DAY here on my blog. I give it a week before I forget this resolution but let’s just roll with it while I am still all pumped up with enthusiasm, shall we?

Several people over the years have noted that my continued insistence upon using the word ‘shall’ is a bit odd, not to mention antiquated. Is it? Is it REALLY? No, of course not.

Let’s move on.

My love for Agatha Raisin began quite by accident. In that I liked the look of one of the covers and had also simultaneously come to the dismaying discovery that I am a bit too keen on what are dismissively known as ‘cosy mysteries’. You know the sort of thing – Rosemary and Thyme is a prime example of this genre as is, possibly, Murder She Wrote, although that can get a bit hectic at times, can’t it?

Unfortunately, being an INNOVATOR, I rather stupidly opted to read the most recent Agatha Raisin book first, scorning the notion that as it is a series and presumably in some chronological order, I ought to begin at the BEGINNING.

I regret this perfidy now, of course, but the damage has been done and I would urge you, dearest and in some cases not so dear, reader to BEGIN AT THE BEGINNING if you intend to read the Agatha Raisin series. It’s not a hardship, really – the first book is about her leaving her pressured job in London, taking early retirement and moving to the Cotswolds where in an attempt to ingratiate herself with the locals she decides to cheat in the local Quiche Making Competition. When someone is murdered with her quiche, it swiftly becomes clear that being suspected of murder by the villagers is far more preferable to them knowing that she cheated with *gasp* SHOP BOUGHT QUICHE…

I just typed ‘quiche’ so often that it has somehow managed to lose all meaning.

In my last post I absolutely URGED you all to add me on Goodreads and if you had done so you will have seen that over the course of the month between the 11th of December 2011 and the 12th of January 2012, I read FIFTEEN Agatha Raisin books.

I think it is fair to say that I rather enjoy them. I didn’t at first though. No. I was flummoxed by Agatha herself with her brusque manner, jealousies, vanity and bitchiness. What, I found myself wondering, are ‘bear eyes’ and how old is she meant to be, exactly? I came to love her though. She’s just so HORRIBLE and yet so sweet at the same time with her non existant social skills, embarrassment about her lack of cultural education and reliance on microwaved ready meals.

If you’re anything like me, which I sincerely hope you aren’t, then you will absolutely ADORE books with horrible characters in. The only reason I struggle through Jane Austen’s paen to the miserable existence of the dependent female, Mansfield Park, is for the sheer JOY of Mrs Norris. Likewise, Mrs Elton in Emma. Anyway, if you ARE like me then you will love the Agatha Raisin series as with only a few exceptions (the vicar’s lovely wife and the adorable Bill Wong), EVERYONE in these books is downright unpleasant. EVERYONE. It’s just glorious.

The most unpleasant of all to my mind are the men in Agatha’s life, who manifest like the most dreary and hideous game of Snog/Marry/Avoid ever. Seriously, her taste in men is DREADFUL. You find yourself wanting to reach through the page and soundly slap her while shouting ‘DON’T DO IT, AGATHA! THE GUY IS A PRIZE PLUM AND I SHOULD KNOW.’

You won’t find yourself taxed by the crimes being solved in these murder mysteries, but that doesn’t matter as what is on offer here is instead a smorgasboard of the divine Agatha and a bunch of really unrelentingly awful people. It seems to me like a collision between Midsomer Murders and Mapp and Lucia with surreal tinges of Joanna Trollope thrown in for good measure, which is just my sort of thing.

Anyway, if that sounds like your sort of thing too then I’d definitely recommend giving these a try. Personally I can’t wait for the next one to come out this September…

Kidneys, Thieves and Donne.

21 Jan

Hello! I hope you all enjoyed the plethora of scheduled posts that I arranged for this month so that I could sneak off and attend to some Serious Writing. They’ve run out now though so I’m back again, in body as well as spirit.

Before I continue, I’d just like to say a very profound and also gleeful THANK YOU SO MUCH to everyone who bought a copy of Before the Storm in its launch demi-week. It’s been selling brilliantly and the feedback I have had so far has been extremely encouraging! As you can imagine, bringing out a book is more than a bit nerve wracking but you’ve all been so kind, which has made the experience so much less hideous than it might otherwise have been. All it needs now are some reviews on Amazon and Goodreads… *hint hint*

Oh wait, reviews have appeared! Bless your hearts!

You can all add me on Goodreads by the way. If you WANT to, that is. Don’t feel like you HAVE to or anything. Did I sound a bit peremptory there? I do hope not.

Anyway! I have been busy writing, writing, WRITING this month (and also getting my hair cut, parenting, reading, KNITTING a Kindle case and possibly arranging getting at least one if not two kittens) about Henrietta and also my poor girls from 1888 and it’s been pretty good. I’ve bitterly resented the bits where I have had to attend to my actual day job but as I work from home it hasn’t been as bad as it could have been – especially as my smallest boy started pre-school at the start of the year which means I now get THREE BLESSED HOURS to myself every weekday morning. I’ve been ripping out chapters, adding extra bits and killing off characters before they’ve had a chance to let out so much as a strangulated squeak. Poor things.

Two things have happened anyway:

1. The seventeenth century novel is now just about Henrietta Stuart, who is, as an aside, my most delightful heroine to date. She’s just so darn sparky. I’m giving in to my love of metaphysical poetry with this one and have had people quoting Donne, which never fails to make my heart sing. I love Donne, don’t you? He wrote my favourite poem, you know.

2. I find that I am not very good at writing murder mysteries so have made the decision that the 1888 book is not going to be a whodunnit. Is it possible to write about Jack the Ripper without a bit of sleuthing? Well, we will see. I have already written the last two paragraphs where all or nothing is revealed and now have to kind of rush headlong towards that point. Isn’t that what Agatha Christie used to do? The book has the working title ‘Whitechapel‘, but somewhere along the line it decided that it wanted to be called ‘The Secret Keeper‘. I’m in the dark about what this actually MEANS but the book, as always, knows best, I’m sure.

RESEARCH is the thing that I love the best though. RESEARCH. I like to be hands on and actually GO to places (remember the incident with Pulteney Bridge when I was writing Before the Storm? Actually making an effort to visit the places that you are writing about avoids all manner of embarrassments) which means that I have to make some trips to London and Paris this year. Oh hardship. One of the trips is to see Hampton Court, which has been facilitated somewhat by an invitation to the press launch of their new exhibition about degenerate seventeenth century courtiers. I’ll also be at the press day for the reopening of Kensington Palace, which will be rather marvellous.

I also appear to have bought a ticket late last night to the 2012 Jack the Ripper Conference, which is being held in York. I know, I know. WHY is it not being held in Whitechapel? I grumbled a bit about this on Twitter and Facebook and seem to have aroused the ire of various York sorts, who didn’t realise that I wasn’t so much grumbling about WHERE it was being held but where it WASN’T.

Anyway, yes, on the anniversary of the Double Event, I will be at a formal dinner in York and surrounded by my fellow Ripperologists. It’s like the start of a particularly lively episode of Morse isn’t it? Except in York not Oxford, of course.

I also have to spend a bit of time in Whitechapel. This will probably involve booking a hotel near the Market and then staying up all night swigging gin, wandering around alleyways and taking photographs. It’s lucky that I have NERVES OF STEEL, isn’t it? I used to do that sort of thing rather a lot when I lived in London, slinking around alleyways and inhaling the sickly sweet scent of decay, bubblegummy joss sticks and spices…

Mmm, poignant decay.

Right, I should be off now to write some more while listening to Kidney Thieves ‘Before I’m Dead‘ on repeat because that, apparently, is how I roll. Or write. Or something.

I love insane lip synching fan videos on YouTube.

Oh wait, did I tell you all that I am going to see Emilie Autumn again this March? I did? Oh well. That constitutes research as well, right? I’m already planning my outfit…

Before the Storm, my homage to Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers is available for Kindle and its associated apps from Amazon UK and Amazon US for less than the price of a pint of GIN or an aspirational magazine or a REALLY nice tub of ice cream.

Cross Bones graveyard

20 Jan

‘I have heard of ancient men, of good credit, report that these single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death. And therefore there was a plot of ground called the Single Woman’s churchyard, appointed for them far from the parish church’ - John Stow, Survey of London, 1598.

One of the saddest spots in central London, a few minutes walk away from the busy, thriving Borough Market in Southwark, Cross Bones graveyard is the final resting place of around 15,000 Londoners, mostly women and infants who were denied a proper burial in consecrated ground, either because of profession (prostitutes and, for a long time, actresses were banned from proper burial) or because they died before they could be baptised.

The earliest burials at the site were of local prostitutes, who were also familiarly known as Winchester Geese as they had been licensed since 1161 by the Bishop of Winchester to work the streets and alleys of the Liberty of the Clink area of Southwark, which was well known to be a squalid den of vice, iniquity and crime. In Medieval London, ‘goose bumps’ was a charming and somewhat alarming term commonly used to describe the first signs of venereal disease, most probably caught in the stews of Southwark around the notorious Clink prison.

Photo – Inspector Juve.

Denied proper burial thanks to their trade, the prostitutes of the area were instead buried without ceremony in the Cross Bones graveyard, where the bodies were piled in an undignified heap on top of each other. Excavations have revealed that most of the skeletons in Cross Bones belong to either women or infants who had either been born dead or tragically expired shortly after birth. Later on in its long and miserable history, the euphemistically named ‘Single Women’s Graveyard’ was used as a general pauper’s cemetery for the poor of the area. It was also a favourite hunting ground for bodysnatchers, seeking out specimens for the teaching hospitals of London and after all, who would miss the poor, sad souls of Cross Bones?

In 1853, Cross Bones was closed due to overcrowding and being a risk to health and would have been built over had not the local residents, fiercely protective of the final resting place of so many of their own, strongly resisted any attempts to develop the spot. Nowadays it is a strange place, loved by locals and strenuously defended by them against the occasional attempts to gain planning permission for office blocks and car parks on the site. The gates to the burial ground are constantly festooned with tributes and flowers left by visitors, turning it into a makeshift shrine to the lost and forgotten women and children of early modern London.

Since 1998 it has become traditional for hundreds of people to gather at Cross Bones with candles, songs, gin and flowers on Halloween night to pay tribute to the ‘outcast dead’ of the graveyard. It’s my intention to join them this year with a bottle of gin to sprinkle in tribute. It’s interesting that when I first visited the grave of Mary Jane Kelly in St Patrick’s, Leytonstone (where it turns out members of my own family of dispossessed Irish Catholic immigrants are interred, although I didn’t know it at the time), I instinctively took along a bottle of gin to leave on her grave. It now seems that this is the right and proper thing to do when honouring a dead lady of the night, which pleases me rather.

Photo – The Centre of the World.

‘For tonight in Hell

They are tolling the bell

For the Whore that lay at the Tabard,

And well we know

How the carrion crow

Doth feast in our Crossbones Graveyard.’ — John Crow’s Riddle, John Constable.

 

Thanks to Lucy Fur Leaps for alerting me to Cross Bones! I’ve been thinking about it ever since…

(Originally posted last year, but I was thinking about it this morning and thought I’d share it with you all again.)

The fabulous and somewhat odd life of Hortense Mancini

19 Jan

Ortensia Mancini was born in Rome in 1646, the fourth of the five celebrated Mancini Sisters, daughters of the sister of Cardinal Mazarin, the chief advisor of the young King Louis XIV of France and reputed lover of his mother, Anne of Austria. After their father’s death in 1650, the Mancini girls were brought to France by their mother, who hoped that her brother would help find rich and titled husbands for her brood of girls: Laure, Olympe, Marie, Marie Anne and Ortensia, who obligingly became Hortense as soon as her exquisitely silk shod feet set foot on French soil.

Along with their two cousins, Laura and Anne Marie Martinozzi, the five Mancini girls were to become the talk of Paris thanks to their sumptuous dark haired, olive skinned beauty and wild, flamboyant manners. The young Hortense, her uncle’s favourite niece was the most badly behaved of them all as she grew up into a bold eyed beauty, who was absolutely impossible to resist.

Madame Mancini’s ambitions were not to be disappointed as one by one her daughters married into the oldest families in France, attracting aristocratic husbands with their winning combination of good looks, family connections and enormous dowries, which were provided by their doting uncle.

For a brief while it looked as though the loveliest of the girls, Marie would end up married to Louis XIV himself – she was his first ever love and he even bought the exiled English Queen Henrietta Maria’s pearls for her as a present, but it was not to be and instead she was packed off back to Italy to marry the Prince of Colonna.

Then, in 1659, it was Hortense’s turn to have a brush with a royal engagement when the exiled and impoverished Charles II asked her uncle for her lovely hand in marriage, hoping that a combination of her wealth and family connections could be the answer to a lot of his problems, which were numerous and seemingly unsurmountable. Alas for Hortense, his proposal was swiftly turned down. Of course the Mazarin family would have felt differently had they known that only a few months later, Charles II would regain his throne and be invited back to England to rule again. Mazarin effected a rapid about face and offered Charles an astonishingly huge dowry of 5 million Livres to take on his favourite niece as his bride, but Charles, perhaps still chagrined and humiliated by their reaction to his original proposal turned down both Hortense and her money.

Not that Hortense seemed to mind for on the 1st of March 1661, at the age of fifteen she was married to one of the richest men in all Europe, the Duc de Meilleraye, with the couple being declared Duc and Duchesse de Mazarin after their wedding day. If anything proves the old adage that money can’t buy you happiness, it is the badly matched marriage of Hortense Mancini.

Her new husband, Armand-Charles was twenty nine years old and, probably due to his enormous fortune, had been allowed to have his own way for a very long time. This can be the making of some men, but in the case of the Duc de Mazarin, it meant that he fell into some very peculiar modes of behaviour. Amongst his many iniquities, it is said that he coupled extreme sexual jealousy towards his young wife with an over the top sense of morality, which led to his insisting that the front teeth of female servants be knocked out lest they attract men with their toothsome smiles and that dairy maids be forbidden from milking cows lest the sight of their hands manipulating udders inflame the sexual ardours of any passing men.

To Hortense’s annoyance, his behaviour towards herself was insanely jealous and distrustful, involving nightly searches of her rooms to look for hidden paramours, forbidding her from being alone with any men and insistence that she spend much of her day praying in the chapel for forgiveness for the sins of the flesh.

In the end and rather inevitably, Hortense decided that she had had enough and began a relationship with a female friend of her own age, one Sidonie de Courcelles. Both girls were very happy with this arrangement until Hortense’s outraged husband had them both packed off to a convent (one wonders what Sidonie’s family thought of this), where they spent their days playing pranks and trying to escape by climbing up the chimneys.

It is astonishing perhaps to learn that in the midst of all this marital woe, the ill assorted pairing that was Hortense and Armand-Charles managed to have four children before she decided on the night of the 13th June 1668 that she had had enough of him and his prayers and toothless maids and general weirdness and ran away to Rome to live with her sister, Marie.

Life for a woman separated from her husband could be vilely unpleasant in the seventeenth century, a time when women were considered nothing more than the property and chattels of their menfolk but Hortense was no ordinary woman and managed to obtain the support of Louis XIV himself. The King gave her a large pension that enabled her to live independently, which she proceeded to do – setting up home in Haute-Savoie, where she became the mistress of the Duke de Savoie until his death in 1675, whereupon his jealous wife sent her packing.

At this point, fortune struck Hortense a further blow when her spiteful husband took control of all of her finances, including her pension from Louis XIV, leaving her totally penniless. The situation was looking dire indeed until Ralph Montagu, the English ambassador to Rome saw in her the perfect opportunity to improve his own situation in England, where one’s influence at court depended on how well you got on with the latest of the King’s mistress. Montagu hoped that if he managed to insert Hortense into Charles’ bed and get rid of the current occupant, Louise de Kerouaille, then he would be able to curry favour with the King and secure for himself all manner of untold loot.

Hortense, always intrepid, instantly agreed to this plan and in 1675 she disguised herself as a man and headed off to England, ostensibly to visit her cousin, Mary of Modena, who had married Charles’ younger brother, James but really with the absolute intention of making herself the King’s latest mistress.

Of course it didn’t take long for her plan to succeed and by the Summer of 1676, Hortense was sleeping with the King and had been granted a pension of £4,000 a year, which enabled her to live very well indeed in London, much to the chagrin of the displaced Louise de Kerouaille.

By all accounts (mostly her own), Hortense had a great time in England and took a procession of lovers including Charles’ daughter by Barbara Castlemaine, Anne, Countess of Sussex who was besotted with her. The two women are said to have had a public fencing match in St James’ Park while dressed in their night gowns and cheered on by a crowd of courtiers. This was to be the final straw for Anne’s long suffering husband however and he would promptly have her packed off to their country home, where she proceeded to pine for Hortense and spend days lying in bed, kissing her miniature.

Charles II seems to have been relatively good humoured about Hortense’s love life but then quarreled with her when she started sleeping with the Prince de Monaco, which seems to have been a step too far in his opinion – although how it was worse than his own daughter is anyone’s guess. The quarrel turned out to be a serious one and resulted in Hortense losing her all important royal pension and also her position as official mistress, much to the relief of poor Louise de Kerouaille who was promptly restored to her original position, presumably somewhere underneath the King.

Despite the end of her royal affair, Hortense and Charles remained good friends until his untimely death on the 6th of February 1685 and she would remain in the good books of his  brother and successor James as well as those of James’ daughter Mary and her husband William who succeeded him later on. Hortense was to remain in England for the rest of her life, living a comfortable and elegant life in her house in Chelsea, surrounded by books and art and the centre of a coterie of witty and intellectual friends.

The beautiful Hortense was to die at the age of fifty three on the 9th of November 1699 of unknown causes with some saying that she committed suicide while others, including John Evelyn, claiming that she had basically drunk herself to death. To the shock of everyone, her estranged husband (remember him? Did she?) insisted upon seizing her body after her death and then proceeded to take it with him wherever he went, much like Juana of Castile and the corpse of her husband, Philip the Fair, thus ensuring that she continued to be as much the topic of gossip and speculation after death as she had been during life…

In a way, Hortense was to have the last laugh in the end as the infamous and very beautiful Mademoiselles des Nesles (the five sisters, of whom four were to be mistresses of Louis XV) were descended from her via her son, Paul, Duc de Mazarin.

Marie Antoinette painted by Boze

17 Jan

Marie Antoinette painted by Joseph Boze. This rather unflattering and flat faced portrait was commissioned by her husband Louis XVI in December 1784 to the tune of 2,400 livres, which is peanuts compared to the 18,000 livres that Madame Vigée-Lebrun received for her painting of the Queen with her children.

Before the Storm is out now!

17 Jan

Yes, that’s right! My third novel, Before the Storm is available to download to your Kindle or Kindle app from Amazon US and Amazon UK right now!

‘Unable to attract suitably aristocratic suitors in London, a group of beautiful, wealthy and extremely ambitious English heiresses decide to try their luck in Paris instead. Although they initially take the city of light by storm, they soon discover that the glittering facade of social success hides a multitude of sins and iniquities while their own dark secrets could well destroy everything that they have worked so hard to achieve…

Based on The Buccaneers by Edith Wharton, Before the Storm is a tale of passion, betrayal and true love set against the backdrop of the opulent and often treacherous worlds of Georgian London, Versailles and Revolutionary Paris…‘

And that’s not all! The first ten people to download a copy will receive a beautiful print of Before the Storm’s gorgeous cover art by Lisa Falzon. All you need to do is email me the Amazon receipt to prove your purchase (I’ve looked at mine and the only sensitive information will be your address, which I need anyway to be able to get the print to you) and I will send one out to you!

Anyway, it’s taken me a year to get from the first tentative beginnings of this book to publication and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I really hope you all like it and please don’t forget to let me know what you think once you’ve had a chance to read it!

The poor old Princesse de Lamballe

17 Jan

The unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe, painted in 1788 by Anton Josef Hickel.

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