[Book 2016] Historical crime
Oct. 30th, 2016 06:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
inulro50. Beloved Poison by ES Thomson
I heard about this in the Guardian. It's shortlisted for a Scottish crime fiction award (the McIlvanney). The rest of the contenders are the usual suspects, but, as a historical novel, this caught my interest. Not enough to buy it, obviously, that's what libraries are for.
It's set in a crumbling hospital that used to be a monastery in 1850s London which is being shut down to make way for a railway station. Everything we learn about the place leads the reader to believe this is no bad thing.
The narrator is Jem Flockhart, the hospital's apothecary, who is a woman living as a man because there has been a Flockhart as the apothecary at St Saviour's for generations and her father had no sons. A lot of readers have complained that this is a cliche (I went on to Goodreads and immediately needed to shower.) Look, assholes, there's three choices to deal with women as protagonists in historical novels and apparently they all make people bitch. Either you don't use women, and that's just not acceptable to a lot of modern readers. Or you have women as women, and the sexists masquerading as sticklers for historical accuracy shout you down. Or you can use the cross dressing trope (and, interestingly, more evidence is coming to light that this actually happened a lot more than has been previously thought) and get accused of being a cliche. Representation matters, people, so STFU if that's the worst criticism you can come up with.
Interestingly, as the novel goes on it becomes more obvious that Jem and his/her father haven't been fooling many people but they've all gone along with it.
Jem becomes friends with a young architect sent to supervise the demolition works. They find six tiny coffins hidden in a disused chapel (more than a little reminiscent of the real-life mystery of the six miniature coffins found in Scotland which has been used as a basis for many a modern book). They start to investigate and people start dying.
I had a mixed reaction to this book. Thomson has a PhD in the history of medicine so that part is spot on. She captures the Victorian era reasonably well. It falls short of pitching you right into the era as the Shardlake books do to the Tudor era, but those books are my benchmark. She makes an overly heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. However, the literal and figurative claustrophobia of the hospital environment is unsettling and there was enough going on that I wanted to find out what happened next.
Overall, not bad for a first book. However, it's supposed to be the first in a series and while I think it was a good stand-alone book, I didn't find anything about it a good basis for a series. Not convinced I will be following up.
I heard about this in the Guardian. It's shortlisted for a Scottish crime fiction award (the McIlvanney). The rest of the contenders are the usual suspects, but, as a historical novel, this caught my interest. Not enough to buy it, obviously, that's what libraries are for.
It's set in a crumbling hospital that used to be a monastery in 1850s London which is being shut down to make way for a railway station. Everything we learn about the place leads the reader to believe this is no bad thing.
The narrator is Jem Flockhart, the hospital's apothecary, who is a woman living as a man because there has been a Flockhart as the apothecary at St Saviour's for generations and her father had no sons. A lot of readers have complained that this is a cliche (I went on to Goodreads and immediately needed to shower.) Look, assholes, there's three choices to deal with women as protagonists in historical novels and apparently they all make people bitch. Either you don't use women, and that's just not acceptable to a lot of modern readers. Or you have women as women, and the sexists masquerading as sticklers for historical accuracy shout you down. Or you can use the cross dressing trope (and, interestingly, more evidence is coming to light that this actually happened a lot more than has been previously thought) and get accused of being a cliche. Representation matters, people, so STFU if that's the worst criticism you can come up with.
Interestingly, as the novel goes on it becomes more obvious that Jem and his/her father haven't been fooling many people but they've all gone along with it.
Jem becomes friends with a young architect sent to supervise the demolition works. They find six tiny coffins hidden in a disused chapel (more than a little reminiscent of the real-life mystery of the six miniature coffins found in Scotland which has been used as a basis for many a modern book). They start to investigate and people start dying.
I had a mixed reaction to this book. Thomson has a PhD in the history of medicine so that part is spot on. She captures the Victorian era reasonably well. It falls short of pitching you right into the era as the Shardlake books do to the Tudor era, but those books are my benchmark. She makes an overly heavy-handed use of foreshadowing. However, the literal and figurative claustrophobia of the hospital environment is unsettling and there was enough going on that I wanted to find out what happened next.
Overall, not bad for a first book. However, it's supposed to be the first in a series and while I think it was a good stand-alone book, I didn't find anything about it a good basis for a series. Not convinced I will be following up.
