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.

The Invisible Woman: the story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, by Claire Tomalin. Book review

Penguin 1991. ISBN 978-0-140-12136-0. 283 pages

The Invisible Woman is a historical biography of Ellen (Nelly) Ternan, a not-very-famous actress in Victorian London who had a close relationship with the writer Charles Dickens for thirteen years from 1857 to his death in 1870. It is also the story of Nelly’s mother and two older sisters, all professional actresses; of Nelly’s husband and children in the second life she built after Dickens’ death; and of the detective work required for the author to rediscover the story after the valiant attempts made by Nelly, Dickens and their families and associates to obliterate all evidence of their association.

I enjoyed this book very much more than I expected to. Although Nelly Ternan’s relationship – whatever it was – with Dickens is what she is now famous for and the reason The Invisible Woman was written, it turns out to be one of the least interesting things in a full and varied life. Nelly Ternan went from an impoverished child actress earning a precarious living touring provincial theatres with her two sisters and redoubtable widowed mother, to a well-off if not entirely respectable lady, to the popular wife of a provincial schoolmaster. Her two sisters, Frances (Fanny) and Maria, lived even more unorthodox lives. Fanny was by turns an actress, singer, teacher, novelist and biographer, and successfully made the Jane Eyre transition from governess to respected married lady. Maria left her businessman husband to earn her own living in Italy as an artist, journalist and foreign correspondent, travelling to Egypt and North Africa. All this in an age when women were expected to be entirely passive, dependent and confined to the domestic sphere (as exemplified by most of Dickens’ heroines).

The writing style in The Invisible Woman is clear, unfussy, lively and sympathetic without being sentimental. Nelly’s life is painstakingly pieced together from mere scraps of evidence – playbills, rates and rent records, obscure passing references, a diary so abbreviated it could almost be written in code – because Nelly, Dickens and their respective families went to considerable lengths to destroy all the letters and papers in their possession. Nelly herself deliberately created something close to a new identity for herself after Dickens’ death, taking twelve years off her age and hiding both her theatrical past and her association with Dickens from her husband and children. The result is a sort of cross between a biography and a scholarly detective story, as the author tracks Nelly from one fleeting appearance to the next, cross-referencing clues to build up a plausible picture. Numerous footnotes and references back up the statements in the text, and the author takes care to distinguish between evidence, inference and speculation.

The introductory chapters describing Nelly’s family background and her early life as a child performer, long before Dickens appeared in her life, are some of the most interesting in the book. This section forms a social history of the world of the professional theatre in Regency and Victorian England, a self-contained sub-culture with its own set of values and social norms. Women in the theatre were both expected and able to earn their own living independently of a man, and indeed the women in Nelly’s immediate family were frequently the primary breadwinners, even when there was a man in the family. This independent earning capacity conferred some resilience, so Nelly’s mother was able to support herself and her three small daughters when her husband died of syphilis. Some successful actresses managed to attain a degree of personal freedom otherwise unheard-of in respectable Victorian society, such as being able to leave an unsatisfactory husband, live with a man outside of marriage, and bring up children on their own. But it carried a price in terms of financial insecurity – even very successful actresses often died in poverty after they became too old to work – and in exclusion from and the disapproval of polite society. Two young actresses living in the theatre district could all too easily be mistaken for a different kind of working girl and subjected to police harassment with the threat of arrest and ruin, and for a lovely young actress touring in Ireland the risk of abduction and rape by an unscrupulous aristocrat was considered an occupational hazard. All three of the Ternan sisters ruthlessly suppressed their theatrical past when marriage allowed them entry into polite society. This was a fascinating glimpse into a world I knew almost nothing about, and The Invisible Woman was well worth reading for this alone.

There is an extensive bibliography for anyone who wants to follow up source material for themselves, and a detailed index for reference.

Clear, lively, sympathetic and scholarly biography of the unorthodox lives of Nelly Ternan and her sisters, combined with an illuminating social history of the Victorian theatrical world.

The Last Runaway, by Tracy Chevalier. Book review

Harper Collins 2013. ISBN 978-0-00-735034-6

The Last Runaway is set in Ohio in 1850. All the main characters are fictional.

Shy Quaker girl Honor Bright sails from her home in England to America, accompanying her sister who is going to join her husband-to-be. Honor herself is fleeing from having been jilted, hoping to start a new life in America. When her sister dies only a few days before reaching their destination, Faithwell in Ohio, Honor is left alone among strangers in a strange land. She finds an unexpected friend in the forthright milliner, Belle Mills, and a rather grudging acceptance among the small Quaker community of Faithwell. Ohio is still frontier country; most people are recently arrived and many are looking to move on in the future. It is also on the route used by runaway slaves from the Southern states, seeking to escape to freedom in Canada along the network known as the Underground Railroad. Honor’s conscience prompts her to help the runaways – but the Quaker family she has joined forbids her to break the law by doing so. Can Honor build a life for herself that will allow her to live with both her duty and her conscience?

The Last Runaway beautifully creates the world of small-town Ohio in the 1850s. Landscapes, buildings and way of life are described in detail, seen through the eyes of Honor to whom all is new and strange. As a result, this is a lovely book for the day-to-day detail of domestic life. Honor expects to earn her keep, and learns to apply her skill with a needle to hat-making and the unfamiliar American style of quilt-making, which uses applique designs in bold colours instead of the pieced patchwork of English quilting. Later, she turns her hand to the daily tasks of a dairy farm and the enormous amount of preserving required to store enough food to withstand an Ohio winter. I enjoyed the domestic detail, which I thought built up a convincing picture of Honor’s new world without ever becoming dull. However, I should add the caveat that I have an interest in needlework and have tried my hand and both patchwork and quilting, so these details appealed to me (and I picked up one or two useful tips from Honor and Belle). For readers without this interest, I could imagine that the detail might seem repetitive.

Honor also has to become accustomed to American social conventions – Americans are more ‘direct’ in their way of speaking (as Honor diplomatically puts it to herself) and more focused on their own concerns, compared with Honor’s previous community in England. The biggest contrast is the sense of impermanence Honor experiences in America. Coming from an established English town with a thousand years of history behind it, Honor finds the rootlessness of Ohio as disorienting as the harsh winters and the isolation. Most of the social differences, however disorienting for Honor, are relatively minor, leading to discomfort rather than disaster. The big exception is slavery. Honor abhors slavery. In England this was a simple principle to uphold, as slavery had already been abolished. In America, however, slavery is still a major part of the slave states to the south, even if not permitted in Ohio, and Honor comes into contact with it via the runaway slaves. Now she has to act on her principles, not merely think about them. If she gives aid to the runaways she risks ruin not just for herself but for her new family; if she does not, she has to live with her conscience. There is no easy answer.

Perhaps because the novel has a domestic focus, the women are the most strongly developed characters. Belle Mills in particular is a delight – generous, forthright, courageous and warm-hearted, she is just the sort of friend anyone would be glad to find in a strange country. By contrast, the men seemed almost interchangeable and a bit dull, with the exception of the rough slave-hunter Donovan who was by far the most lively and complex.

A useful Acknowledgements section at the back lists some suggestions for further reading for those who want to explore the underlying history.

Quietly insistent tale of an English Quaker girl trying adjust to a new life in small-town mid-ninenteenth-century Ohio, against the background of slavery and the Underground Railroad.

Affinity, by Sarah Waters. Book review

Virago Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-86049-692-9. 352 pages

Affinity is set in Victorian London in 1873-1875. All the main characters are fictional.

Lonely Margaret Prior, unmarried at twenty-nine, has not recovered from the recent loss of her lover and her father in quick succession. Facing a bleak future as a companion to her controlling mother, Margaret becomes a Lady Visitor at Millbank women’s prison, hoping to find a purpose in her empty life. There she encounters the enigmatic Selina Dawes, a spiritualist medium imprisoned for fraud and assault after a séance went disastrously wrong. Margaret finds herself drawn to Selina, first by curiosity and then by an infatuation bordering on obsession, leading her to run a terrible risk...

Affinity is a dark, atmospheric psychological drama. The dreary, dehumanising environment of Millbank women’s prison is superbly realised, as is the stifling world of the wealthy middle-class lady to which Margaret belongs.  Most of the novel is set in a London winter, and the short daylight hours, gaslight and ever-present fogs add to the atmosphere of oppression.  This makes the book rather a gloomy read to begin with; the reader is drawn all too readily into Margaret’s depression.  Because it is so well written and the settings are so well portrayed, I carried on reading despite the dreary subject matter, partly in a spirit of antiquarian interest in the late Victorian prison system and the strange world of Victorian spiritualism.  Then the plot takes a sudden shattering twist right at the end.  It’s impossible to say much about this without spoiling the surprise, so I will just say that the ending made all the gloomy build-up worthwhile.  This is definitely not a novel to give up on halfway through; the revelations continue literally to the last page.

The novel is told in the form of two alternating first-person diaries.  Margaret’s diary forms most of the book, and tells of her experiences as a prison visitor, her meetings with Selina and the consequences. Selina’s diary outlines the events that led up to her imprisonment. The paperback helpfully typesets the two diaries in different fonts, although the two women have such distinctive voices that they are easily distinguished by style alone.  Margaret’s character emerges clearly from her diary, almost as thoroughly imprisoned by social conventions and duties as Selina is by the walls of Millbank. The recent death of Margaret’s beloved father, following close on the loss of her love (a woman, who married Margaret’s brother) have left her terribly emotionally vulnerable. When she believes she glimpses even the faintest possibility of love, Margaret is prepared to do almost anything in its pursuit. The result is heartbreaking.

Selina’s diary is oddly emotionless, and she remains something of an enigma, at least to me.  I still cannot make up my mind about her: charlatan or victim?

The novel is beautifully written in clear, stylish prose.  Margaret’s diary contains a clever mix of reported speech (“She said, Had I seen….”) and actual dialogue, adding to the sense of Margaret’s emotional detachment from most of the routines of her life.

There is no historical note, perhaps because the characters and events are all fictional.

Dark, stylish psychological drama set against the eerie background of Victorian spiritualism.