The Journey of Anders Sparrman by Per Wästberg

To say that The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg is a tale of two halves would transcend cliché. Rarely will one encounter such an apparently complete transformation of a character mid-way through a story, and even more rarely will one encounter such a thoroughly credible transformation.

This is a story about a scientist, a botanist explorer of the eighteenth century. Anders Sparrman was Swedish and was raised in a straight-laced society. He studied with Linnaeus at a time when a thoroughly new notion of biological species was emerging from beneath the stone laid by the creationism of Christian doctrine. A sense of discovering empiricism pervades this story of a real historical figure. The result is neither biography nor fiction, whilst simultaneously combining elements of both. Events are drawn directly from Sparrman’s life, as recorded in his own journals, but dialogue and encounters between characters are created to embroider the backcloth of fact. This may sound like conventional historical fiction, but the sense of biography in this work is always strong enough to dominate.

Anders Sparrman’s story is told chronologically, a device that only magnifies the eventual transformation of his life. We follow him to sea as a young man. We accompany him on board Captain James Cooke’s voyages of so-called discovery. One feels that Sparrman’s work in natural history is where the real discoveries are taking place, whilst Cooke’s more grandiose and historically more consequential claims might just be a tad overstated. Throughout, Anders Sparrman comes across as a dedicated, perhaps rather staid, sober and conventional documenter of experience. His quest for truth seems nothing less than single-minded, perhaps myopic, and his thirst for detail sometimes seems to exclude any view of a bigger picture.

Back at home in Sweden, he moves from one apparently well done but unappreciated job to another. He takes over the management of an institution and attempts reform, and thus makes enemies and friends, as might be expected. As the years pass, his memories of and achievements within his years of seafaring and travel begin to fade.

But then he discovers sex. She is not particularly young, beautiful or desirable, apparently. Lotta and Anders, we are told, choose one another not because of their merits, their appearance or anything else we might usually associate with breeding partners. Rather, in their case, it was a mutual sense of desperation that brought them together. It is as if both of them clutched at and grasped an opportunity life had resolved to deny them. And then, without qualification, they took a firm grip on their opportunity and went for it.

Anders Sparrman seems suddenly reincarnated. At least his relation to biology is redrawn, since he suddenly transformed from observer to participant, from the narrow end of the microscope onto the slide, so to speak. A bland and probably predictable life suddenly blossoms by virtue of involvement, and simultaneously the empiricism that discovered becomes personal experience that feels and creates.

The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg thus becomes a difficult kind of reading experience. Lulled into a sense of predictable safety by the devotion and dedication to its subject, we spend most of the book taking risks at sea and in far-off lands without sensing danger. And then, in the comfort of our own home, we are suddenly propelled into a vivid universe of emotional and sexual fulfilment that is as threatening as a warm hearth, but literally takes the breath away. The Journey of Anders Sparrman, by Per Wästberg is a remarkable experience, both as a book and a life.

History, Myth. Fact, Fiction – Several Points Of View: A Review Of Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir

Reviews often begin by warning of spoilers. Neither excuse nor warning here for saying that Alison Weir’s book, Innocent Traitor, recounts the public and political life of Lady Jane Grey. She was sixteen years old and married by agreement when, in 1554, she was beheaded upon the order of Queen Mary of England, after being convicted of treason. Mary, you see, was a Roman Catholic and Lady Jane Grey was a Protestant. The young lady had been elevated to the throne by interested parties and had herself been Queen of England for just nine days after the death of the juvenile, and himself manipulated, Edward The Sixth. Jane Grey’s elevation to the throne had been nothing more than a blatant plot to hold on to power by a group led by the dead King’s Proetctor, if that be the word to use. The plot, which had not involved Lady Jane herself, was a ploy to maintain the Protestant identity of the English crown. Mary, Henry The Eighth’s daughter by Spanish Catholic Katherine of Aragon perhaps had the greater claim to the throne. She was the old king’s daughter, but she had been born of an annulled marriage to a queen who had also formerly been married to Henry’s brother, a fact that in some eyes rendered the marriage to Henry illegal from the start. Opinion was determined by which side of the religious divide was asked. But, as ever, pragmatism surfaced and interests ruled. But no-one can hold on to usurped power without support. And when what you have ebbs away, you get it in the neck. Here endeth the spoilers.

Innocent Traitor is an historical novel. It sticks to the facts, embroidering them only when records are scant. This is not Hollywood, and so reality cannot be edited. And we all know the facts, so it is neither cliché nor spoiler to re-state that “she dies in the end”. What is crucial to Alison Weir’s scheme, however, is how things happen, how motives and allegiances shift and coalesce to create what eventually feels like an inevitable fate for Lady Jane, who became the only remaining and unwilling pawn in a vast power play. And, in describing these events, motives, allegiances and deceits, Alison Weir creates a rich tapestry of fact, embroidered with minimal invention, depicting how fate unfolds to take the life of Lady Jane. If you did not already understand the history, then by the end of Innocent Traitor, you will. If you did already have a grasp on events, then by the end of the book you will see them clearer.

The story is told through the eyes and thoughts of several characters. Lady Jane Grey herself is to the fore, but her scheming and unloving parents, Frances Brandon and Henry Grey make crucial contributions. We also meet several queens, Jane Seymour, Katherine Howard, Katherine Parr and Mary. We meet Elizabeth almost in passing, but her tricks spice the tale throughout. The book appears to concentrate on the women, which is interesting in itself, but then males appear, such as the inevitable John Dudley and the flighty Henry Fitzalan. All of these characters – and more! – relate their tales in the first person and the present tense.

Now here is the great shortcoming of Innocent Traitor, since each of these people ought to have a different perspective, a different point of view and might even use different types of language. They would certainly have brought different assumptions into focus, given their disparate backgrounds. Innocent Traitor, however, requires them to deliver facts to the reader, and they all do this efficiently, and in rather similar style. And yet we, the readers, are taken into the first person, present tense thoughts of a woman in childbirth, a person being executed, a maid dressing her mistress, and then, almost in the next breath, we are plotting potential treason, intrigue, or merely justifying religious difference. As such, these characters rather lose their identities and emerge as mere vehicles for delivering the plot of historical events.

But despite the required and rather lengthy suspension of disbelief that is required by the novel’s form, the complexity and jaw-sagging duplicity, recalcitrance and utter selfishness of these people make Innocent Traitor an absolutely riveting read. By the end, one wonders why it is that that these people, and probably others like them, who populated the centres of power throughout history are not today described simply as the two-faced, lying murderers they were.

And by the end we are also left with a certain emptiness of the stomach when we realise that all this scheming was all prompted by these people’s adherence or not to merely different versions of obvious myth. If we have to suspend belief to accommodate unlikely points of view, then we might also want to admit defeat in order to appreciate the fact that these people, and many thousands of others, were persecuted, executed or merely fell in war as a result of an argument about a largely mythical man who defied gravity and rose bodily into the skies, and an institution that maintains bread changes into flesh and wine into blood – and does it daily!

Innocent Traitor, despite faults generated by its form, is a highly successful book. It captures the motives very accurately and leads the reader into complete sympathy with the plight of Lady Jane Grey who, at just sixteen years of age when the axe severed her neck, just wanted to be left alone with her books. These, it seems, were the wrong books.

The Steps Of The Sun by Caroline Harvey, aka Joanna Trollope

I approached The Steps Of The Sun not knowing what to expect. Its author was listed as Joanna Trollope writing as Caroline Harvey. I had previously read nothing in either name. But it struck me that if you wanted a nom de plume, then Non de Plume was not a good choice. I persevered, however, largely because I have also never read a novel set in the Boer War. The Steps Of The Sun presents life amongst a middle-class set whose lives are turned upside down by the conflict. Matthew Paget is a college lad, son of a churchman, and he is seeking something exciting out of life. His passions sometimes take him that step too far. He enlists to fight in South Africa without his family’s backing or even knowledge. Will Marriott, his cousin, is a military type and also thinks that way to boot. He performs his duty when required and is proud to represent his country in battle. Hendon Bashford is the obvious cad. He’s half Boer but considers himself true-blood English. His contribution to the conflict will always be against his own people, which ever side he joins. 

There are women in The Steps Of The Sun. Adelaide is the most interesting. She flirts with pacifism, even meets journalists. But then she assists the war in her own way. Matthew’s sister, Frances, tends to the prissy. And then there’s a Boer girl who is twice excused her fate. First her home is not burned down – at least today – and second, apparently unlike all other Boer women, as we are told, she is not pregnant. There are some interesting aspects to the book. A description of the war’s concentration camps is welcome, as is Adelaide’s conflict of interest. But overall what promised to be an intriguing read tended to gloss over the military, fragment the history and barely visit the country. The Steps Of The Sun was still worth reading, but its high points were quite well buried.

Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge

At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined by confined, embroidering young women. Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie is anything but a tale of such saccharine gentility.

Master Georgie is a surgeon and photographer, and the book is cast in six plates – photographic plates, not chapters. Death figures throughout. From start to finish morbidity crashes into the lives of the book’s characters. We begin with Mr Moody, dead in a brothel bed, his host of minutes before in shock. Later we move to the Crimean War, where the carnage is graphic, extensive and apparently random. And even then individuals find their own personal ways of adding insult and injury to the suffering.

The book uses multiple points of view. We see things Master Georgie’s way. Myrtle, an orphan he takes in, adds her perspective. The fussy geologist, Dr Potter, imprints his own version of reality. And still there are less than explained undercurrents, undeclared motives which affect them all. Thus, overall, Master Georgie is a complex and ambitious novel. Though it is set in a major war, the backdrop is never allowed to dominate. The characters experience the consequences of conflict and register their reactions, but we are never led by the nose trough the history or the geography of the setting.

But we also never really get to know these people. Myrtle, perhaps, has the strongest presence. She has a slightly jaundiced, certainly pragmatic approach to life. But even she finds the privations of wartime tough. Why the characters of Master Georgie are all so keen to offer themselves as support for the war effort is an aspect of the book that never fully revealed itself. And ultimately this was my criticism of Beryl Bainbridge’s book. While the overall experience was both rewarding and not a little shocking, I found there was insufficient delineation between the characters and their differing motives. The beauty of the prose, however, more than made up for any shortcoming. The language created the mixed world of mid-nineteenth century politeness and juxtaposed this with the visceral vulgarities of soldiering and the general struggle of life. This rendered Master Georgie a complex, moving and quite beautiful book.

View the book on amazon
Master Georgie