Black Harbour, by Xaiver Michael Campbell and Heather Barrett

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This local book, subtitled “Slavery and the Forgotten Histories of Black People in Newfoundland and Labrador,” made a great companion volume to The Black Tudors, the last book I reviewed. Co-authors Xaiver Michael Campbell and Heather Barrett are engaged in a similar, though less in-depth, project to Kaufmann’s, in that they take the scant records of Black people, enslaved or otherwise, in Newfoundland between from about 1600 to the late 1800s, and try to put these references in context of what we know about life and culture at the time. Like Kaufmann, Campbell and Barrett (and the historians they interviewed for the project) believe that these scant traces indicate the unrecorded presence of many more Black people than we usually imagine as part of Newfoundland history — and also that many, if not most, of these people were enslaved.

Campbell and Barrett are not professional historians, though they draw upon the work of historians, and this is much more than a work of popular history like The Black Tudors. It also has elements of memoir, with Barrett, as a white person born in Newfoundland, reflecting on the pervasive whiteness of Newfoundland history and culture, and the unseen presence of Black people within that history. Campbell, as a Black Jamaican who makes his home in Newfoundland today, reflects on these same connections from a different perspective, as well as on the persistent othering of being not just a “come from away,” but a come from away whose difference is evident in his skin colour, within our supposedly welcoming culture.

A thread woven throughout these more reflective, memoir-like chapters (which are interspersed among the more directly historical parts of the books) is the place of food in this history. Both authors write about salt fish, molasses, “screech,” all foods that link Newfoundland and Jamaica. But rather than the narrative I’ve known for years (“Isn’t it interesting we share all these foods in common with the Caribbean islands; Newfoundland sailors and fishermen travelled there and we traded with those islands!”) the authors encourage readers, especially Newfoundlanders of British descent like me, to probe deeper into the reasons why those connections exist, the more sinister links. Newfoundland and Jamaica don’t just happen to be two islands where people like to eat salt fish and have made it central to their food culture; Newfoundland fishermen made their living catching and processing salt fish, the cheapest kind of which (“Jamaica grade”) was sold to the Caribbean as an inexpensive source of protein to keep enslaved people fed just enough to continue working.

Black Harbour urges us not to avert our eyes from these and other connections between Newfoundland history and the history of the slave trade, the enslavement of Black people, whether directly here on this land or in other places where Newfoundlanders’ labour directly or indirectly supported that trade. As a writer of historical fiction, I picked up this book (much as I did The Black Tudors) because I was interested in whether Black settlers might have been part of the population here in the early 17th century. However, reading it challenged me as a white settler-descended Newfoundlander, to think about the pieces of our history we don’t tell, and what we learn when we confront those unspoken stories. This book is short and deceptively light, but it packs a lot into its few pages and I highly recommend it.

The Black Tudors, by Miranda Kauffmann

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The Black Tudors is an interesting piece of social history that follows the common approach for this type of book: piecing together the little bit we know from historical records about the lives of a few people, then extrapolating what their lives might have been like from what we know of similar people and experiences at the time. Using this method, UK historian and journalist tries to flesh out the lives of the handful of Black people whose names appear in English historical records during the Tudor period.

Her thesis is that, first, there were more Black people living in Britain at that period than commonly assumed, and second, that their lives and experiences were more diverse than we might expect. While some were enslaved, many, at that period, were not (the English were only just starting to explore the slave trade by the end of the Tudor period, and would not get into enslaving and selling human chattel in a big way until the following century). Many, even if not technically enslaved, were servants, but some were independent, with a handful of artisans even owning their own small business enterprises and property. Some appear in the records because, though born in largely Muslim North African countries, they converted to Christianity in England. Some married their white English neighbours. Some prospered; some lived in poverty. And, Kaufmann points out, the fact that these few Black people appear by name in public records, suggests that many more people of African origin lived in Tudor England — many more who, like the vast majority of poor people of all races, left no trace in official records.

I found this an interesting audiobook to listen to; it was useful in correcting the all-white impression we often have of England (and Europe more generally) in the pre-modern era.

How to Build a Boat, by Elaine Feeney

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This Booker-prize-longlisted Irish novel tells a small, poignant story of a neurodivergent 13-year-old boy and two teachers who make a difference in his life simply by accepting him as he is. Jamie is the main character and is an engaging first-person narrator for some sections of the book. I always wonder when a writer recreates the thoughts of an autistic young person (as in this book or in one like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) whether what they’re recreating would feel authentic to the experience of someone on the autism spectrum. That’s not a question I can answer, although I’m interested in what people on that spectrum would think of Jamie’s portrayal in this book. All I can say as a reader is that I believed in Jamie as a character; his actions make perfect sense in the context of how he thinks, even if they don’t always to people around him, and for me his attempts to carve out space in the difficult world of adolescence, and to process his grief over the mother he never knew, were the heart of the story.

I also liked the stories of the two teachers, Tess and Tadhg, people both stuck in their own lives and grieving their own losses, but able to reach out to a young person in need — as well as to each other. The project of building Jamie’s boat — begun in Tadhg’s woodworking classroom — turns into a little community that encompasses not just Tess, Tadhg, and Jamie, but a small group of other students, as well as Jamie’s loving but often overwhelmed father and grandmother. I found this a heartwarming-without-being-sentimental story that is ultimately about community and accepting other people for who they are.

Much Ado About Nada, by Uzma Jalaluddin

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Uzma Jalaluddin is one of those writers that I can always rely on for an enjoyable, feel-good romance with enough distinctive flavouring to make it interesting (since I find some romances quite bland). Once again, as with her first two novels, Jalaluddin introduces us to a twenty-something Muslim woman living in Toronto. And once again, while the novel is not as faithful a tribute to Jane Austen as Ayesha at Last was, there are strong echoes of an Austen plot here: in this case, Persuasion.

Nada has a secret, and she’s kept it from her friends and family for a long time. But when her best friend Haleema drags Nada off to a big Muslim convention in downtown Toronto, Nada’s afraid her secret may come out. Haleema’s just gotten engaged to wealthy heart-throb Zayn, and Zayn’s brother Baz is … well, he’s someone Nada’s been hoping not to run into. The story is told in chapters that alternate between the present day and flashbacks to Nada’s past, and it’s a very satisfying journey.

The Witch Elm, by Tana French

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I found The Witch Elm very easy to get into and very hard to put down, but also hard to categorize. Tana French is a mystery writer, and the only other book of hers I’ve read, The Secret Place, is definitely a mystery. There’s a mysterious death and an effort to figure out who done it in The Witch Elm too, but the story isn’t structured like a typical mystery novel; maybe I’d call it a psychological thriller, with more emphasis on the psychology and less on the thrills. I’ve seen many reader reviews online complaining that the book is too slow-paced, but I personally enjoyed the pace as it gave plenty of time to build up my knowledge of the characters, who they are and what motivates them, and that knowledge is crucial to appreciating the mystery that unfolds in the second half of the book.

The novel’s main character is Toby, a young man in his late 20s living in present-day Dublin. Toby’s pretty much got it made: he’s well-off, well-educated, has a supportive family behind him, a good job, and a lovely girlfriend. He’s never had to work too hard for anything and admits to himself that he’s always been lucky. Suddenly his luck changes: a seemingly random break-in at his flat leads to a brutal assault which leaves Toby with significant injuries and a long recovery ahead of him.

Not being able to bounce back effortlessly from this incident — having to re-orient his idea of himself to accommodate his new disabilities — bothers Toby even more than the attack itself, although that bothers him too: was it really random, or was he targeted for some reason? In the middle of his recovery, still unable to go back to work or cope with everyday life, he moves into the old family home to help care for an uncle who is dying of a brain tumour. It’s there, in Ivy House, that a shocking discovery (well, I’m not going to be coy because it’s in every blurb of the book: they find a relatively recent human skull in the titular elm tree in the garden) makes Toby re-examine everything he thinks he knows about himself, his past, and the people closest to him.

Toby’s unquestioning approach to his own privilege shows up most starkly in his relationship with his two same-age cousins, Samantha and Leon. While they both share Toby’s well-off family background and other advangages, Samantha as a woman and Leon as a gay man have had to encounter barriers that Toby not only never faced, he’s never even been aware of. When they share their recollections of a school acquaintance that Toby remembers as a pretty decent guy, it turns out that both Samantha and Leon have much darker memories of their encounters with this boy, which in turn leads Toby to question his own judgement not just of this old school friend but also of himself as “a good guy.” In the end, Toby will question everything about who he is and the life he’s lucked into. There’s no guarantee of a comforting ending here, but I found the journey fascinating.

Back in the Land of the Living, by Eva Crocker

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Eva Crocker follows up her highly successful debut novel, All I Ask, with another story of a young queer woman from Newfoundland who is trying to figure out her direction in life. In this novel, Marcy Pike moves from St. John’s to Montreal after a breakup with her girlfriend and tries to support herself with a series of unpromising jobs while looking for love.

Marcy isn’t the same character as Stacey from All I Ask, but they are very similar types of characters, and the aimlessness and near-despair Marcy feels about both her present and her future is familiar. As the story’s calendar moves through 2019 and into early 2020, the character I identified most with was Marcy’s mom, who appears only via phone calls, and urges her daughter to come back to Newfoundland before Covid regulations close down interprovincial travel. Marcy’s mom is incredulous as to why her daughter would rather ride out lockdown in a Covid-riddled large city rather than safely in the island bubble where she has friends and family; I would have had the exact same reaction if either of my kids had been on the mainland at the time and determined to stay there. When Marcy’s response to her mother is “I have a life here,” as a mom-generation reader I couldn’t help mentally asking, “But do you really, honey?” having just read pages and pages about Marcy’s unhappy relationship and dead-end jobs.

That’s a note on the content (very much related to my “why are all the young people so unhappy, or is it just the writers” comment on Casey Plett’s Little Fish, a book that gets a passing mention in this book as a character is reading a copy of it). But that doesn’t touch on the main thing that Back in the Land of the Living does well, which is the kind of evocative, incisive descriptions that bring a moment or a scene to life so vividly.

It was interesting for me to compare this novel to another recent read: Morgan Murray’s Dirty Birds, another story of a young small-town drifter trying to find himself in Montreal. The stories are set nearly 15 years apart, and the gender and sexuality are different, but despite these differences and the fact that what Murray plays for larger-than-life laughs, Crocker is deeply serious about, there’s a similar grittiness to the reality of living in poverty in a big city. There’s a similar desperation to the kinds of jobs both characters are able to find, and a similar reminder that moving to the city of your dreams is not, in fact, a way to escape problems that might just have more to do with you than with your location.

If you like your millennial (or GenZ) coming-of-age with a side serving of queer community and a delicious glaze of beautiful writing, you will definitely want to read Back in the Land of the Living. (I honestly don’t know why I decided on a food metaphor right there at the end of this post, but I’m going with it. Sink your teeth into this book, if you will).

The Vaster Wilds, by Lauren Groff

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Typically, I don’t enjoy “person survives alone in the wilderness” stories (at one point I felt like the only girl of my age/generation who didn’t love Island of the Blue Dolphins). But I do love historical fiction, and given my current obsessions as a writer, I definitely love historical fiction set in and around the early 17th century English colonies in North America. So, what to do with this novel about a young girl escaping from Jamestown during the Starving Time and setting off alone into the wilderness to find a place where she can survive?

Read it in less than two days, as it turned out. Lauren Groff is a masterful writer and despite the fact that “the girl” (who is named Lamentations, although the author, writing in limited third person that sees almost everything through the main character’s eyes and memories, deviating only once from that perspective, usually refers to her just as “the girl”) is the only character for most of the book, it never felt boring, stifling, or claustrophobic to me.

Vivid descriptions of the wilderness through which the girl travels and her attempts to survive in it are interspersed with flashback scenes in which we learn about her life before leaving England, the voyage over, and the horrific conditions in Jamestown that led to her escape. Whether the action was in the past or the present, I always found it engaging and the character completely believable.

I have thoughts about the ending of this novel, but I don’t want to spoil it, so I’ll say that I had mixed feelings about whether it was the “right” ending for this book even if it wasn’t the most satisfying to me as a reader, and leave it at that. This is a novel well worth reading.

House of Odysseus, by Claire North

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House of Odysseus brilliantly fulfills the promise of Ithaca, North’s previous novel, in retelling the story of Penelope (and, indeed, of the Trojan war and possibly all of Greek mythology) from a woman’s perspective. The first book was narrated by the goddess Hera; House of Odysseus is narrated by Aphrodite, who makes a wonderful, funny narrator and gives us the goddesses’ perspective on all these human tragedies.

For the plot of this book (Odysseus still isn’t home!) North weaves together characters and stories from Homer and the other Greek tales and myths that don’t necessarily come together in the ancient stories. Orestes and Elektra have murdered their mother, Clytemnestra, and Orestes, who should be ascending to the throne of his father Agamemnon, is drive mad by guilt, or poison, or both. They take refuge on Ithaca, where Penelope is still trying to control her unruly suitors, and are pursued by their uncle Menelaus, with his returned wife Helen in tow. Menelaus would like to kill Orestes, conquer Penelope and Ithaca, and make himself “king of kings” over all the Greek states. Penelope and her wily crowd of women spies and warriors are out to stop him. It’s a marvelous romp through legend and myth seen through women’s eyes. And since Odysseus is still on his way home, we presumably have volume 3 to look forward to ….

The Fraud, by Zadie Smith

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Absolute literary powerhouse Zadie Smith takes on historical fiction with a novel about a nineteenth-century legal case, a failed novelist, and a woman who, like many Victorian women, wants more from life than her society offers a woman of her station.

At the heart of the novel is the Tichborne case which fascinated 1870s England, in which an apparently working-class Englishman who had emigrated to Australia returned to England claiming to be the long-lost heir of a wealthy family. Among the many people intrigued by this case is the novel’s main character, Eliza Touchet. Eliza is the cousin of a prolific but not very successful novelist named William Harrison Ainsworth (a real 19th century writer I had never heard of, and the many summaries of Ainsworth’s books in this story make it clear why I never have). While attending the Tichborne trial with Ainsworth’s wife, Eliza is most fascinated not with “The Claimant” himself, but with one of the family servants who loyally and consistently supported his claim to be the missing heir: a Black servant original from Jamaica called Andrew Bogle.

There is, to put in mildly, a lot happening in The Fraud. There’s Eliza’s own story of genteel disappointment and frustrated ambition, a common enough one in any story about a woman in Victorian England, but it’s spiced up by memories of her sexual adventures with both Ainsworth and his first wife. There’s the up-and-down tale, told through Eliza’s eyes and almost mostly in flashbacks (lot of jumping around in the timeline here) of Ainsworth’s literary career and his feuds and jealousies with other writers (cameos by Dickens and many others). In the present-day timeline of the story, there’s the Tichborne trial itself, and the fascinating ways in which it divides English society and plays on class distinctions and resentments. Then there’s a very long section in which Eliza sits down to talk to Bogle and learn his story: the scene shifts to Jamaica and we get a whole other novel-within-the-novel about Bogle’s family and his early life — this part felt to me almost like a different book, very reminiscent of Andrea Levy’s The Long Song or Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black in its exploration of the years immediately before and after the ending of slavery in British colonies.

It’s an ambitious novel, and I’m not sure every ambition is realized — I believe the author sees threads tying all these storylines together that weren’t entirely apparent to me, and while Eliza is a great character through whose eyes watch all these stories unfolding, I was never entirely sure what Eliza herself wanted. The Tichborne Claimant is the obvious “fraud” of the title, but there’s much more playing around with ideas of fraud, identity, and selfhood as well. While I didn’t entirely feel like everything came together the way I as a reader wanted it to, reading this book was a thoroughly fascinating experience, and I can’t help but admire the vast reach and scope of Smith’s storytelling here.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte

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This book provoked reactions of shock and horror when it was first published in 1848; although it quickly became popular, the general feeling was that ladies shouldn’t be reading about such sordid subjects as alcoholism, abusive marriages, and infidelity. Of course, to the 21st century reader, the depiction of all these issues is quite tame and couched in the most delicate terms possible, but writing about these common societal issues in the mid-1800s was a big no-no.

What’s more surprising to me is that the author’s sisters, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, disapproved of Anne’s book, and Charlotte tried to supress its re-publication after Anne’s death. This is ironic, considering that Charlotte and Emily both wrote about immoral, cruel men and made them the romantic heroes of their most famous novels (I’ll conceded that Emily probably didn’t intend Heathcliff to be a romantic hero, but casting Heathcliff and Cathy as eternal lovers united in death does make him seem attractive even if she didn’t mean him to be; as for Mr. Rochester, honestly, the less said about that awful man the better). In Tenant, Helen’s husband Arthur is an attractive, moody, alcoholic, unfaithful, and at least emotionally if not physically abusive jerk — but he’s not the hero of the story, and the happy ending (spoiler!) is Helen finally getting free of him and marrying a much better man.

The structure of the novel made it drag a little for me — the first part, narrated by the impulsive young man Gilbert who meets Helen when she is in hiding from her husband, and makes all kinds of assumptions without knowing anything about her life — is entertaining, and fast-paced by Victorian novel standards, because Gilbert is a witty and interesting narrator. The bulk of the book is Helen’s diary, chronicling in extreme detail her marriage to Arthur and the reasons she left him. It’s possible to empathize with the terrible situation a Victorian wife like Helen is placed in, while at the same time recognizing that she’s not a great narrator or a very compelling character — to me anyway. I wanted her to get away from Arthur and live happily ever after, either with Gilbert or on her own — but I didn’t need her take quite so long telling me about it, or be quite so moralizing and preachy in the process of telling her tale.

Even so, I enjoyed this book and am glad this is another unread classic I’ve finally caught up with.