Thorn, by Michael Dean. Book review

Bluemoose Books 2011. ISBN 978-0-9566876-4-7. 252 pages.

Set in Amsterdam in 1656, Thorn centres on the (fictional) friendship between the philosopher Spinoza and the painter Rembrandt. All the major characters are historical figures, although in many cases their personalities as portrayed in the novel are imaginary.

Benedict, or Baruch, Spinoza is twenty-four, a Jew of Portuguese descent living in Amsterdam, where the Jews are accepted because of their trading skills. In theory, Spinoza is the majority shareholder in his deceased father’s trading company, but his passion is for philosophy (and for his nubile Latin teacher, Clara Maria van den Enden). A chance meeting introduces him to the great painter Rembrandt van Rijn, and despite their disparate backgrounds the two men strike up an unlikely friendship. Each is a giant in his own field, Rembrandt already acknowledged as a genius, Spinoza just at the start of his career. Each places the demands of his calling higher than any other consideration – including the need to fit in with the rest of the world. Their refusal to compromise brings them into conflict with just about everybody who matters in mid-seventeenth-century Amsterdam – the Jews, the Calvinists and the city authorities.

Thorn is a witty, intelligent black comedy, funny and sharp by turns. It is narrated throughout in first-person by Spinoza, in a racy and humorous style that makes it seem as though he is talking directly to the reader. I could almost hear his voice. The name Spinoza means ‘thorn’ (hence the book title), and it suits the character down to the ground. Witty, sarcastic and intellectually brilliant, Spinoza is also utterly clueless on a social level. He is sufficiently self-aware to recognise this in himself – he says to his sister, “The universe is so much simpler to me than any person in it” – but he can’t seem to stop himself causing trouble and even pain for other people. He never means to hurt anyone, but his breathtaking insensitivity made me both laugh and cringe. Watching Spinoza clomp his way through delicate situations – a tricky business negotiation, family relationships, courtship and a proposal of marriage – blissfully oblivious to the trail of disaster in his wake, is both funny and poignant. Spinoza as created here is an engaging character, but cannot have been easy to live with!

The other characters are also vividly drawn. Rembrandt is the character we see most of, after Spinoza (who naturally dominates the novel). Rough, honest and warm-hearted, Rembrandt places his art above all other considerations and, like Spinoza, is impatient with those who don’t share his opinions. The secondary characters are a colourful collection of eccentrics. Seen entirely through Spinoza’s eyes, their human foibles are magnified – demanding relatives, arrogant physicians, pompous burghers, thuggish businessmen. Rembrandt’s kind mistress Hendrickje and competent son Titus are the most sensible and well-balanced people in the book; just as well for Rembrandt and Spinoza, for whom things would have been much harder without their support.

In their different ways, both Rembrandt and Spinoza reject the hypocrisy and religious intolerance of contemporary society (though, to be fair, both of them can exhibit a fair degree of intolerance themselves to people they disagree with). Spinoza pursues his philosophy even though it marks him as a heretic and threatens his brother’s business. Rembrandt refuses to paint flattering portraits of self-important burghers. Both men stick to their honesty and integrity even though this earns them powerful enemies, who can – and do – make their lives very difficult indeed. Yet both are also flawed characters who bring many of their difficulties on themselves, Rembrandt through his financial recklessness, Spinoza through his social ineptitude and capacity to alienate people.

As well as its characterisation and humour, Thorn also has a lot of convincing background detail about life in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, from the political situation of the Jews to details of domestic life to a memorable description of a public dissection. I’m not familiar with the period, so almost all of this was new to me; hence I can’t comment on the accuracy, but I can say that it felt authentic.

A helpful Author’s Note at the end outlines the underlying history and the fictional interpolations that make up the story, and provides a list of further reading for those who would like to explore the period in more detail.

Witty, intelligent black comedy exploring religious and social intolerance, centred on the (fictional) friendship between Rembrandt and Spinoza in Amsterdam at the height of the Dutch Golden Age.

Author Michael Dean – book signings and talk in Colchester and Chelmsford

Michael Dean, author of The Crooked Cross (reviewed here in 2009), will be signing copies of his new novel, Thorn, at Waterstones in Chelmsford on Saturday 17 September 2011 12 noon – 2 pm.

Michael will also be giving a talk about the book and signing copies at Colchester Library on Saturday 24 September 2011, 11 am – 12 noon.

Thorn is published by Bluemoose Books, ISBN 9780956687647. It’s a historical novel set in mid-17th-century Amsterdam, and featuring the philosopher Spinoza and the artist Rembrandt.

Here’s the blurb:

THORN is a Rabelaisian tour through Amsterdam in the mid-17th Century and very, very funny.

In 1656, at the height of The Dutch Golden Age, two giants of European culture meet: philosopher Baruch Spinoza, a Jew of Portuguese descent, and Rembrandt van Rijn, the greatest Dutch Master, find themselves inextricably linked through a failed mercantile venture and membership of the freethinking ‘Waterlanders’ which, in challenging the Calvinist doctrine of the day, pits them against the authorities in Amsterdam.

I’ve read THORN and I think it’s an astonishing book; very powerful, exciting, disturbing and also very funny. It is true to the ideas of its great protagonists Spinoza and Rembrandt and makes the parallel that their lives were made almost impossible because they both sought the truth. It’s a powerful, shocking and moving story of religious intolerance and, as such, more relevant today than it might appear on the surface. DAVID NOBBS

So if you're in the Chelmsford or Colchester area of Essex, UK, over the next couple of weekends, you may like to go along. I expect to review Thorn here in due course (I have a copy on order but it hasn't arrived yet).

Daughters of the Witching Hill, by Mary Sharratt. Book review

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010, ISBN 978-0-547-06967-8, 327 pages. Review copy kindly provided by publisher.

Set in the Pendle district of east Lancashire in 1582-1612, Daughters of the Witching Hill tells the story of Elizabeth (Bess) Southerns (nickname, Old Mother Demdike), her daughter Elizabeth (Liza) Device and granddaughter Alizon Device, and the other men and women accused of witchcraft at the Pendle witch trials of 1612. All the main characters are historical figures. Some of the secondary characters have been re-named or are composites of historical figures, as explained in the Afterword.

Bess Southerns is a poor widow aged 50 with a grown-up son and daughter, living in poverty in the crumbling Malkin Tower near Pendle Hill. Without a trade or land to farm, Bess and her family eke out a precarious existence, living hand-to-mouth from begging or casual labouring work and never know where their next meal is coming from. Then Bess meets her familiar spirit, Tibb, who appears to her sometimes as a handsome youth and sometimes as a dog or a hare, and discovers that she has supernatural powers to heal the sick and see the future. Bess quickly gains a reputation as a ‘cunning woman’, and her family’s fortunes take a sharp turn for the better. Her daughter Liza marries a farmhand with a steady job, and Bess’s charms and herbal cures bring in a useful income. But Bess’s oldest friend, another poor widow named Anne Whittle (nickname Chattox), is in dire need of Bess’s powers to protect her daughter from sexual assault by their landlord’s brutal son. Reluctantly, Bess teaches Anne and her daughter to work dark magic to rid themselves of him, and soon the two families become enemies and rivals. Bess’s lovely granddaughter Alizon has inherited the power and shows promise to become as powerful as Bess herself – but when a pedlar is crippled after an argument with Alizon, the old feud gives the zealous local magistrate the perfect opportunity to make his name as a witch-finder and to destroy Bess and her family for ever.

The Pendle witch trial of 1612 was a real event, recorded in detail and published a year later by court clerk Thomas Potts. James I/VI* had recently published a book on witchcraft called Daemonologie, and hunting witches offered a promising avenue for advancement to ambitious officials. On top of this, anti-Catholic hysteria had gained ground after the Spanish Armada of 1588 and especially after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and Catholicism became partly conflated with witchcraft. In the novel, Bess remembers the pre-Reformation Church with its saints and feast days and the abbeys with their charity to the poor, and many of her charms and ‘spells’ are Latin prayers. However, the novel makes clear that Bess’s supernatural powers are not purely Catholic rituals, and her familiar spirit is clearly not a Catholic saint. Bess and Alizon believe explicitly in elves, fairies, familiar spirits, and the power of their own magic to kill or cure, and so, perforce, must the reader.

Daughters of the Witching Hill is narrated in first person, by Bess for the first half of the book and by Alizon for the second half. Written from their point of view, it gives a sympathetic portrait of the accused witches and, by extension, a decidedly unsympathetic view of the prosecuting magistrate Roger Nowell and those of the local gentry who abused their positions of privilege. For me, the most compelling feature of the book was the detail of the women’s lives, as they scrape a precarious living and try to hold their families together in the face of hardship and suspicion. If you want to imagine how hard life was for those clinging to the margins of society in early seventeenth-century England, this is the book for you. The injustice and unfairness of it all – the grinding poverty that reduces a beautiful young woman to a hag in a few years, the law that does nothing to protect the poor, the complete absence of any way in which Bess and her family can improve their situation, the appalling conditions of their imprisonment (one of the accused died in prison, and no wonder), and the apparently foregone conclusion of the trial – provoke sympathy and indignation in equal measure.

The price for the amount of detail is a long book and a slow pace. The narrative covers thirty years, and at times it feels like it. Although the social history is moving, I found the characters’ individual stories less compelling, perhaps because it was weighed down by the bleak descriptions of their lives. For example, the feud between the Demdike and Chattox families never really came alive for me, and I would have liked to explore the change in the relationship between Bess and Anne from close friends to bitter enemies in more depth. This may be because I’m familiar with the story of the Pendle witches, so I already knew what happened to everyone before reading the novel; another reader encountering the story for the first time may react differently.

Both Bess and Alizon experience supernatural visions and dreams that are used to foreshadow events – e.g. Bess’s prediction that Alizon will lead the procession on Assumption Day, poignantly fulfilled – and to provide glimpses of happenings in the outside world when both narrators are incarcerated in a lightless dungeon in Lancaster Castle. The mystical angle also allows the ending to be less desolate than the actual outcome might suggest (Google for Pendle Witches if you want to know what happened).

A detailed map sets out the locations of the various houses and farms in the story for readers unfamiliar with the local area, and a helpful Afterword outlines the historical background and suggests some books for further reading.

Sympathetic, slow-paced retelling of the sad story of the Pendle witches.



*He was James I of England and James VI of Scotland, hence the somewhat clumsy notation

The Firemaster’s Mistress, by Christie Dickason. Book review

Edition reviewed, Harper 2008. ISBN 978-0-06-156826-8. 507 pages. Review copy kindly provided by publisher.

Set in London and Brighthelmstone (modern Brighton) in 1605-1606, against the background of the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605, The Firemaster’s Mistress features Robert Cecil, Francis Bacon and the known members of the plot, particularly Robert Catesby and Guido Fawkes (Guy Fawkes), as secondary characters. All the main characters are fictional.

Francis Quoynt is a military explosives expert – a firemaster – newly unemployed after the end of a war abroad. Francis dreams of harnessing gunpowder not for destruction but for entertainment and delight, in the form of fireworks. He also dreams of repairing the run-down manor house, Powder Mote, where he lives with his retired father, and possibly of a reconciliation with his former lover, Kate Peach, whom he abandoned two years before. Dreams need money, so Francis accepts when the devious Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, hires him to investigate a mysterious explosion in a warehouse near London Bridge and its possible connection to some nefarious plot. But unknown to Francis, Kate Peach has been instructed to find him by her sinister protector, Hugh Traylor, for reasons unknown but unlikely to be benign. And at Powder Mote, Francis’ father Boomer Quoynt encounters a menacing new neighbour, who is clearly up to no good and whom Boomer knows has no qualms about murder. As the threads twine together, gunpowder, treason and plot, all three find themselves drawn ever deeper into a net of treachery and deception that threatens their lives, their fragile trust in each other, and the future of England itself.

Despite the title, the obligatory headless-woman-in-period-frock cover design and the somewhat breathless jacket copy (“In the midst of chaos and madness, the flame of their romance will be dangerously rekindled…..”), The Firemaster’s Mistress is much more of a thriller than a romance. Kate’s romantic relationships are part of the story but not the dominant component, and the three lead characters are about equally important (No, the title doesn’t refer to Kate). For me this was a definite plus; other readers may have different views.

The Gunpowder Plot, a failed attempt to blow up King James I/VI* and the London Parliament (and probably a good few hundred passers by), was discovered on 5 November 1605 and is still remembered, however sketchily, in the annual Bonfire Night celebration.

The best feature of the novel for me was the period detail, covering topics as diverse as bear-baiting and the technical methods for making, mixing and storing gunpowder. The vigorous, dangerous world of Southwark, seventeenth-century London’s red-light district, is vividly recreated in all its unsavoury glory. Teeming with thieves, whores, pimps, tavern-keepers and drunks – not to mention the shady fixers of the underworld where crime and treason merge – Southwark is no place for a respectable girl fallen on hard times. Kate Peach, alone in the world after her family died in the plague, is trying to earn a living at her craft of glove-making, but her survival in Southwark depends on the protection of the villainous Hugh Traylor and the rough friendship of the brothel-keeper Mary Frith (based on a real historical figure who was the prototype for Moll Cutpurse). Mary, a six-foot, cross-dressing, pipe-smoking dealer in stolen goods, as formidable as the bears in the next door Bear Pit and a leader among Southwark’s unofficial aristocracy, is one of the most memorable secondary characters in the novel. Hugh Traylor provides Kate with cheap lodgings and protection from the rougher criminals, but at the cost of using her rooms as a safe house for fugitive Catholics on the run from the authorities. Kate is a Catholic herself and glad to provide shelter for persecuted priests despite the risk, but she gradually comes to realise that Traylor’s motives are far from altruistic.

All three lead characters are engaging and interesting, with a variety of mysterious histories that are gradually revealed as the novel progresses. Francis needs all his wits and his firemaster’s expertise to tread the dangerous line between the plotters and the devious politicians in high office. Boomer also needs all his intelligence to unravel the deadly plot taking shape at a secluded manor near Brighthelmstone, and the professional and personal rivalry between father and son is well drawn. Kate is quietly courageous as she tries to rebuild her life within the very limited opportunities open to her. The climactic action sequence requires all three to work together, with an unexpected consequence for the relationships between them. Among the secondary characters, Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot, is an extraordinary contradiction, seemingly a thoroughly nice man who is conscientiously preparing to commit mass murder.

As befits a story centred around the most infamous political plot in English history, The Firemaster’s Mistress has an intricate plot with several interlocking strands. Conspiracy theories abound regarding what “really” happened in early November 1605 and what the government of the day covered up or made up, providing fertile ground for historical thrillers. The Author’s Note at the end of The Firemaster’s Mistress says, “This story might be true”, but doesn’t outline the evidence (if any) in support. I have to say that I have considerable doubts as to whether the well-documented reproductive history of Mary Queen of Scots can really accommodate the conspiracy theory underlying The Firemaster’s Mistress, but I found the plot enjoyable enough to go along for the ride.

A helpful sketch map at the front outlines the terrain around the fictional manor of Powder Mote. It would have been interesting to have a similar map of Southwark and London showing the main landmarks at the London end of the story, though it’s possible to follow the events without one. The Author’s Note is not very detailed, but is interesting as far as it goes.

Intricate historical thriller based on an ingenious (if in my opinion rather unlikely) theory about the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605.


*He was the first King James in England and the sixth King James in Scotland, hence the somewhat clumsy notation

The Conscience of the King: Henry Gresham and the Shakespeare Conspiracy, by Martin Stephen. Book review

Edition reviewed: Little, Brown, 2003, ISBN 0-316-86002-6

Set in London and Cambridge in 1612-1613, at the court of King James I/VI* and in the slightly seedy underworld of London’s thriving theatre scene. The main characters, Sir Henry Gresham, his wife Jane and his faithful servant Mannion, are all fictional. Numerous historical figures feature as secondary characters, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, James I/VI, Francis Bacon and Robert Cecil.

Sir Henry Gresham, gentleman and secret agent extraordinaire, is commissioned by the dying Robert Cecil to retrieve some compromising letters written by King James to his (homosexual) lover. Gresham knows the letters are only part of something much darker, connected in some unknown way with the vigorous and unruly new force of London’s theatres. Someone has already tried to murder actor and writer William Shakespeare, and Gresham himself and his wife are attacked on a visit to the Globe theatre. As Gresham unravels the net of deadly intrigue, a secret is revealed that reaches to the highest in the land, and that threatens the lives of Gresham, his beloved wife and even their two small children.

The Conscience of the King is a fast-paced spy thriller with an intricate plot and plenty of (often violent) action. It is told in straightforward prose with modern language and dialogue that doesn’t get in the way of the plot. If Tamburlaine Must Die was long on literary elegance and rather short on story, The Conscience of the King is the opposite way round.

The Conscience of the King should delight lovers of historical puzzles, cover-ups and conspiracy theories. Who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare? When and how did Christopher Marlowe really die? Why did the Globe Theatre really burn down in 1613? (No, of course the answers aren’t ‘Shakespeare’, ‘in a Deptford brawl in 1593’ or ‘by accident’. That would be much too simple). The author weaves these questions and their inventive answers into an espionage thriller with his fictional hero Henry Gresham at its heart. Spy thrillers are uniquely accommodating for fictional characters who interact decisively with real events and people. As long as the story stays mostly in the shadow-world behind the scenes, it doesn’t have to look for gaps in the historical records, since the whole premise is that the official version of history is not telling the whole truth. Naturally the fictional spy and his deeds would have been airbrushed out of the records, so the spy thriller has tremendous scope for invention. The Conscience of the King leaps into the possibilities with glee.

The characterisation is vivid and rather larger-than-life. Most of the politicians are thoroughly unpleasant (no great surprise there, perhaps), and the villain is an evil lunatic with not much in the way of redeeming features. Mannion is a paragon of loyalty and Gresham’s wife Jane seems almost too good to be true – beautiful, spirited, clever, courageous and loving. Gresham frequently reflects that he can’t believe his luck, and I’m afraid I had some trouble believing it too. Gresham himself is a sort of Jacobean James Bond. Handsome, rich, athletic, fearless, clever, ruthless, able to make a full recovery from serious injury, expert at violence and a master of intrigue and deception. I have the impression that male readers are supposed to identify with him and female readers are supposed to swoon. I’m afraid I didn’t swoon, though I can’t figure out why. One interesting contradiction in Gresham’s character is that he loves his wife and children dearly, yet he is hooked on the excitement of danger even though he knows this exposes his family to risk as his enemies will try to strike at him through them. Jane confronts him with this once, but then immediately apologises and backs away. I would have liked to see more of this dichotomy. James Bond was hardly a family man, and that inherent conflict has the potential to make Gresham an intriguing character. As the book is part of an ongoing series, perhaps it will be developed further elsewhere.

Apposite quotations from the King James Bible and the plays and poetry of Shakespeare at the head of each chapter add a neat touch. The epilogue, featuring a future scholar ‘discovering’ a lost letter from William Shakespeare among the Gresham archives in a Cambridge library seemed to me to be an unnecessary embellishment.

Action-packed spy thriller set at the court of King James I/VI in 17th-century England, with a James Bond-style hero and a plethora of historical conspiracy theories.



*James Stuart, son of Mary Queen of Scots and her second husband Lord Darnley, was King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England.