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Hunters in the Snow
After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather’s farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916.
These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too – about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian’s own.
Hunters in the Snow marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer.
These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too – about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian’s own.
Hunters in the Snow marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer.
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 4, 2013
2 people are currently reading
351 people want to read
About the author
Daisy Hildyard
7 books53 followersDaisy studied English at Oxford, graduating in 2006. Her AHRC-funded MRes focused on taxonomic literature in the second half of the seventeenth century, and was awarded the Marjorie Thompson Prize and the Drapers' Company Postgraduate Prize. Her PhD, also funded by the AHRC, will investigate some early Royal Society projects. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 9, 2015
As I'm going on holiday tomorrow I wanted to get my thoughts on this book written down before I've read too many other things to remember much about it. I've been struggling, though, because I just can't think of a great deal to say about it. I didn't dislike it at all, and I can't find much to criticise, but nor did I find it particularly memorable, and it certainly wasn't the brilliant debut I expected (or hoped) to read.
The narrator is a young woman who returns to the Yorkshire farm owned by her late grandfather and starts gathering together the notes he made for an unfinished history book. This book follows journeys made by four historical figures: Edward IV, King of England; Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia; Olaudah Equiano, former slave turned anti-slavery campaigner; and Herbert Kitchener, British army commander and politician. Interwoven with these real historical accounts are the narrator's own memories of her grandfather, their relationship, and the stories and anecdotes he told her.
Perhaps my expectations were raised too high by the blurb, which makes the book sound rich and interesting, and claims it 'marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer'. In theory, this ticks all my boxes. And it's true that it's very well-written, intelligent and original. However, I never really 'got into' the story and wouldn't have been bothered if I'd never finished it. At times I found the narrator's dry humour so entertaining that I laughed out loud, but much of the time I felt her voice was quite cold and I couldn't get 'close' to her, so to speak. Most problematic of all was the fact that the historical elements of the narrative didn't really interest me, and I often thought they were rather dull: I enjoyed the narrator's interjections, but I would rather have had more of a story about her personal history with the odd factual titbit thrown in.
As it is, this reads like more of a semi-autobiographical history book than a novel. I know that's an absurd thing to say against it because that's exactly what it's supposed to be, and in that sense, the author has done an excellent job. But I, personally, would have got more enjoyment out of it had it been more novelistic.
The narrator is a young woman who returns to the Yorkshire farm owned by her late grandfather and starts gathering together the notes he made for an unfinished history book. This book follows journeys made by four historical figures: Edward IV, King of England; Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia; Olaudah Equiano, former slave turned anti-slavery campaigner; and Herbert Kitchener, British army commander and politician. Interwoven with these real historical accounts are the narrator's own memories of her grandfather, their relationship, and the stories and anecdotes he told her.
Perhaps my expectations were raised too high by the blurb, which makes the book sound rich and interesting, and claims it 'marks the debut of a truly remarkable young writer'. In theory, this ticks all my boxes. And it's true that it's very well-written, intelligent and original. However, I never really 'got into' the story and wouldn't have been bothered if I'd never finished it. At times I found the narrator's dry humour so entertaining that I laughed out loud, but much of the time I felt her voice was quite cold and I couldn't get 'close' to her, so to speak. Most problematic of all was the fact that the historical elements of the narrative didn't really interest me, and I often thought they were rather dull: I enjoyed the narrator's interjections, but I would rather have had more of a story about her personal history with the odd factual titbit thrown in.
As it is, this reads like more of a semi-autobiographical history book than a novel. I know that's an absurd thing to say against it because that's exactly what it's supposed to be, and in that sense, the author has done an excellent job. But I, personally, would have got more enjoyment out of it had it been more novelistic.
May 9, 2013
[3.5] With some Asterix panels as a first epigraph, followed by a quotation from Tristram Shandy, Hunters in the Snow announces itself as a novel which plays with form.
Mingling fiction and fact in the form of memoir has become commonplace recently though it can still generate both controversy and playfulness - e.g. in the hands of Karl Ove Knausgård and Sheila Heti. But what about something which is part novel and part non-fiction information book? Such an exciting idea. I remember occasional examples from childhood, but can't think of anything similar written for adults. There's no book released this year which I've looked forward to more, and (prior to the Booker Longlist) none by which I'd been more frustrated.
Hunters in the Snow is narrated by a PhD history student in her twenties who is going through the papers of her late grandfather, once a professor of history at a barely disguised York University. (The thing I liked best about the narrator is that their gender was essentially irrelevant and rarely mentioned: interests and memories which could equally belong to a boy or a girl were what defined this person, and more than most novels I've read, that made it sound very much like the way I tend to remember daytrips or visiting relatives when I was a child.) Excerpts from his notes and historical stories he used to tell her are interspersed with childhood memories and paragraphs about sorting out his house in the East Yorkshire countryside. Anecdotal narratives about Edward IV, Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano and Kitchener dominate the four parts of the book respectively.
The main problem: it's low on academic rigour and deep subject knowledge. It's discordant with the characters and makes a flimsy, but nonetheless cosy, scrapbook-like novel out of something that could have been an impressively playful and erudite work. It's too obvious that Hildyard is not a historian but an English Lit [postgrad] student who researched the book casually*. The historical narratives slip in and out of a detached factual style (of basic non-academic narrative history) and that of historical fiction (imagining characters' feelings and mundane scenes such as getting up in the morning). The fourth section mentions that her grandfather was becoming senile and in it he gives too much credence to a conspiracy theory about Kitchener; it seems quite an authentic change, but the rest of his work, earlier in the book, doesn't sound like it belongs to this opinionated and somewhat intellectually elitst man with particular ideas about his subject. Most of it sounds like the sort of history you used to get in children's books, which assumed a higher level of knowledge than new ones do. (Not sure what age they were aimed at, but I was reading them aged 8-12.)
Reviewing in terms of what an artist could have done instead is regarded as somewhat dubious, but here I find it irresistible. The potential inspirations that sprung to mind were David Foster Wallace's ability to take on and use the jargon and knowledge of a discipline and have it accepted by a fiction audience - 'Mr Squishy', the short story about marketing in Oblivion to take an extreme example - and Possession by A.S. Byatt. I desperately wanted to read (or write if only I were able to) a radical reworking of this book which a) writes solid footnoted academic history about real topics b) is about the practice of history on a much more detailed level and c) is the story of the historian-characters themselves.
The grandfather is a bluff character with some old-curmudgeon views about what constitutes proper history. I would have loved to know what his relationship was like with other strong personalities among his generation of historians such as Geoffrey Elton. (There could have been some comic anecdotes here along the lines of David Lodge's campus trilogy.) Or how the narrator, who would have absorbed newer ideas about the methodology and philosophy of history at university, had gone through stages of questioning and disagreeing with his approach and was now conflicted about how to finish the work he'd left behind. Which could also be about changed social and cultural attitudes in a wider sense.
Imagining this hypothetical book was more satisfying than reading the one in front of me, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy Hunters in the Snow sometimes. (I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more pre-university when I wouldn't have been able to see how much was missing.) I liked it better than several of the Booker longlisted novels, although that's not really saying much. It's more of a winter book, and not just because of the title, something to curl up with by the fire on a cold dark evening. It was quite an easy read - more so than the footnoted behemoth of my fancy - and seemed to drift by in its fragmentary way. Quite easy to take in if tired or light-headed. And it also reminded me why I probably started liking non-fiction history: the detached style which doesn't provoke so many emotions as fiction; the frisson and safety of the past ... it's dark, but it's over.
It's also a book about how some of us, at least, remember people primarily by their interests and opinions – these are what define the narrator's grandfather for her.
There is a thematic link of disguise in the stories, which correlates with my view that people, if given a full choice, will study topics that are expressions of theirs own interests, opinions and experiences, however, they still seem somewhat thin and contrived and there is no sense of what project(s) he was even attempting. There is little sense of his life's work as a whole, what he published and taught on. That sounds to me like a writer who didn't burrow enough into a subject not their own. If you have relatives who have an academic or professional specialism and who talk about their subject, you do get a very good idea of their field.
One Amazon review commented on the lack of emotion (discussion of fact is usually substituted) or reflection on the grandparents' relationship. This was an interesting book because there are plenty of people like this, it's a fairly normal mode of existence (which aligns with what psychologists would see as the more functional forms of the dismissing attachment* style) yet they are rarely shown in literary novels without being marked out in the narrative, as if by, or for the benefit of, people unlike them, as a particular type of person who is relatively unemotional. A type more often associated with studying the sciences or the more fact-based arts subjects – like history – than literature, fine art etc.
There's been quite some disparity between the press and the punters' reviews of Hunters in the Snow. The professional reviewers in particular have compared it with W.G. Sebald. I want to come back to this post again after I've read more Sebald, but so far I've got the impression that Sebald makes more seamless, natural use of his non-fiction material. The Sterne epigraph makes it evident that the ragtag, sometimes almost forced, digression here (using more ordinary language) is deliberate. The book is companionable in the right mood, but it doesn't seem like great literature; it has the “lots of people could do that” feel of found-object art. As a friend said a while ago about another book, you could get a similar effect just by hanging around with some interesting people and listening to them talk.
[* It's over a year since I was pulled up on the use of such classifications and labels - regardless of the fact that I applied them to myself as well as others - by someone I greatly love and respect. I was already questioning it, and it was quite right and very welcome of him to do so. However I'd already made a bad impression by doing it. The sense of people's humanity and to describe them in other words is much stronger in me now, partly thanks to him and also to the novels of Edward St. Aubyn, however, there are times when I still can't get away from these things as the most succinct way to describe people - and which because the usage of them comes from reading a yard or so of specialist books, contains thousands of words worth of meaning in one or two.]
Half read in July, half read in November 2013. This is an amended version of a review first posted in July.
Mingling fiction and fact in the form of memoir has become commonplace recently though it can still generate both controversy and playfulness - e.g. in the hands of Karl Ove Knausgård and Sheila Heti. But what about something which is part novel and part non-fiction information book? Such an exciting idea. I remember occasional examples from childhood, but can't think of anything similar written for adults. There's no book released this year which I've looked forward to more, and (prior to the Booker Longlist) none by which I'd been more frustrated.
Hunters in the Snow is narrated by a PhD history student in her twenties who is going through the papers of her late grandfather, once a professor of history at a barely disguised York University. (The thing I liked best about the narrator is that their gender was essentially irrelevant and rarely mentioned: interests and memories which could equally belong to a boy or a girl were what defined this person, and more than most novels I've read, that made it sound very much like the way I tend to remember daytrips or visiting relatives when I was a child.) Excerpts from his notes and historical stories he used to tell her are interspersed with childhood memories and paragraphs about sorting out his house in the East Yorkshire countryside. Anecdotal narratives about Edward IV, Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano and Kitchener dominate the four parts of the book respectively.
The main problem: it's low on academic rigour and deep subject knowledge. It's discordant with the characters and makes a flimsy, but nonetheless cosy, scrapbook-like novel out of something that could have been an impressively playful and erudite work. It's too obvious that Hildyard is not a historian but an English Lit [postgrad] student who researched the book casually*. The historical narratives slip in and out of a detached factual style (of basic non-academic narrative history) and that of historical fiction (imagining characters' feelings and mundane scenes such as getting up in the morning). The fourth section mentions that her grandfather was becoming senile and in it he gives too much credence to a conspiracy theory about Kitchener; it seems quite an authentic change, but the rest of his work, earlier in the book, doesn't sound like it belongs to this opinionated and somewhat intellectually elitst man with particular ideas about his subject. Most of it sounds like the sort of history you used to get in children's books, which assumed a higher level of knowledge than new ones do. (Not sure what age they were aimed at, but I was reading them aged 8-12.)
Reviewing in terms of what an artist could have done instead is regarded as somewhat dubious, but here I find it irresistible. The potential inspirations that sprung to mind were David Foster Wallace's ability to take on and use the jargon and knowledge of a discipline and have it accepted by a fiction audience - 'Mr Squishy', the short story about marketing in Oblivion to take an extreme example - and Possession by A.S. Byatt. I desperately wanted to read (or write if only I were able to) a radical reworking of this book which a) writes solid footnoted academic history about real topics b) is about the practice of history on a much more detailed level and c) is the story of the historian-characters themselves.
The grandfather is a bluff character with some old-curmudgeon views about what constitutes proper history. I would have loved to know what his relationship was like with other strong personalities among his generation of historians such as Geoffrey Elton. (There could have been some comic anecdotes here along the lines of David Lodge's campus trilogy.) Or how the narrator, who would have absorbed newer ideas about the methodology and philosophy of history at university, had gone through stages of questioning and disagreeing with his approach and was now conflicted about how to finish the work he'd left behind. Which could also be about changed social and cultural attitudes in a wider sense.
Imagining this hypothetical book was more satisfying than reading the one in front of me, but that's not to say I didn't enjoy Hunters in the Snow sometimes. (I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more pre-university when I wouldn't have been able to see how much was missing.) I liked it better than several of the Booker longlisted novels, although that's not really saying much. It's more of a winter book, and not just because of the title, something to curl up with by the fire on a cold dark evening. It was quite an easy read - more so than the footnoted behemoth of my fancy - and seemed to drift by in its fragmentary way. Quite easy to take in if tired or light-headed. And it also reminded me why I probably started liking non-fiction history: the detached style which doesn't provoke so many emotions as fiction; the frisson and safety of the past ... it's dark, but it's over.
It's also a book about how some of us, at least, remember people primarily by their interests and opinions – these are what define the narrator's grandfather for her.
There is a thematic link of disguise in the stories, which correlates with my view that people, if given a full choice, will study topics that are expressions of theirs own interests, opinions and experiences, however, they still seem somewhat thin and contrived and there is no sense of what project(s) he was even attempting. There is little sense of his life's work as a whole, what he published and taught on. That sounds to me like a writer who didn't burrow enough into a subject not their own. If you have relatives who have an academic or professional specialism and who talk about their subject, you do get a very good idea of their field.
One Amazon review commented on the lack of emotion (discussion of fact is usually substituted) or reflection on the grandparents' relationship. This was an interesting book because there are plenty of people like this, it's a fairly normal mode of existence (which aligns with what psychologists would see as the more functional forms of the dismissing attachment* style) yet they are rarely shown in literary novels without being marked out in the narrative, as if by, or for the benefit of, people unlike them, as a particular type of person who is relatively unemotional. A type more often associated with studying the sciences or the more fact-based arts subjects – like history – than literature, fine art etc.
There's been quite some disparity between the press and the punters' reviews of Hunters in the Snow. The professional reviewers in particular have compared it with W.G. Sebald. I want to come back to this post again after I've read more Sebald, but so far I've got the impression that Sebald makes more seamless, natural use of his non-fiction material. The Sterne epigraph makes it evident that the ragtag, sometimes almost forced, digression here (using more ordinary language) is deliberate. The book is companionable in the right mood, but it doesn't seem like great literature; it has the “lots of people could do that” feel of found-object art. As a friend said a while ago about another book, you could get a similar effect just by hanging around with some interesting people and listening to them talk.
[* It's over a year since I was pulled up on the use of such classifications and labels - regardless of the fact that I applied them to myself as well as others - by someone I greatly love and respect. I was already questioning it, and it was quite right and very welcome of him to do so. However I'd already made a bad impression by doing it. The sense of people's humanity and to describe them in other words is much stronger in me now, partly thanks to him and also to the novels of Edward St. Aubyn, however, there are times when I still can't get away from these things as the most succinct way to describe people - and which because the usage of them comes from reading a yard or so of specialist books, contains thousands of words worth of meaning in one or two.]
Half read in July, half read in November 2013. This is an amended version of a review first posted in July.
October 7, 2017
Hunters is the snow is written in the style of a non-fiction book. The conceit is that this is a book published by a young historian drawing together her memories of her grandfather with his late works on historical figures.
For me, the book was balanced too heavily in favour of the historical narratives. Maybe if I had a better grasp of the wider historical context I'd be able to see how the author drew on the stories they have to highlight parts of the grandfather's psychology but I'm not big on books that require extra knowledge to get them. The entire thing came across as a little dry. The heavy weight placed on the historical narratives basically leaves the reader in a position to try and build their own story about the Grandfather's life through these works but I felt like there wasn't enough to build on and, I'm sorry, but when reading a book I like to be told a story, not invivted to construct my own. There are themes running through the book, the idea of journeys is omnipresent and also disguise and lies. But I can't help but feel that the book repeatedly draws attention to these things but doesn't seem to reach any conclusion on them. Other symbols and repeated motifs seemed almost thrown in at random. It give the impression that the author wants you to think this is a more intelligent book than I actually found it to be. And, even at the end, I still wasn't entirely sure what the author felt about her grandfather. Hero worship, certainly, but there had to be something beyond that.
Technically, this was a well written book, but I didn't feel at the end like I'd been told a comelling story, met a compelling character or had a point made to me in some way that made me think. It wasn't a bad book, it just failed in almost every measuer to be a good book.
For me, the book was balanced too heavily in favour of the historical narratives. Maybe if I had a better grasp of the wider historical context I'd be able to see how the author drew on the stories they have to highlight parts of the grandfather's psychology but I'm not big on books that require extra knowledge to get them. The entire thing came across as a little dry. The heavy weight placed on the historical narratives basically leaves the reader in a position to try and build their own story about the Grandfather's life through these works but I felt like there wasn't enough to build on and, I'm sorry, but when reading a book I like to be told a story, not invivted to construct my own. There are themes running through the book, the idea of journeys is omnipresent and also disguise and lies. But I can't help but feel that the book repeatedly draws attention to these things but doesn't seem to reach any conclusion on them. Other symbols and repeated motifs seemed almost thrown in at random. It give the impression that the author wants you to think this is a more intelligent book than I actually found it to be. And, even at the end, I still wasn't entirely sure what the author felt about her grandfather. Hero worship, certainly, but there had to be something beyond that.
Technically, this was a well written book, but I didn't feel at the end like I'd been told a comelling story, met a compelling character or had a point made to me in some way that made me think. It wasn't a bad book, it just failed in almost every measuer to be a good book.
November 20, 2022
Not being an admirer of the current wave of fanciful historical fiction, I am generally wary of speculative 'faction', preferring to read history written by cautious historians. In this instance, however, Hildyard's creative account of the fictional grandfather's obsessive documentation of historical events easily overcame my resistance. Admittedly, it helped that the first of the four research 'documents' concerns Edward IV and the final battle of the Wars of the Roses, an event in which I have a particular interest. The grandfather's interpretation of historical events ranges from the persuasive to the perverse with the perceptible deterioration in his mental faculties. Hildyard presents not so much an unreliable narrator as the narrative of an increasingly unreliable emeritus historian who becomes a purveyor of literary fiction. Only in the case of the final study does the narrator contest the 'version of events' produced by the deceased grandfather, his reputation reduced in a newspaper obituary to that of 'local historian'. 'History,' the narrator observes, is not like fiction, in which someone has to hang on every knotted noose' (247). Ultimately, the zealous historian has become entangled in the knots of his own making. It is a tribute to the author's narrative that I, a sceptical reader, was ineluctably drawn into this intricate network of fact and fiction.
April 14, 2023
DNF: only got half way through the book when I decided to cut my losses and return it to the library.
2/5 feels harsh, as the writing IS good! The topic was just not that interesting for me. The vignettes about family life were golden, the historical narratives not so much. And there was a lot of the latter.
If it makes Hildyard feel better, please know that I also never finished Wolf Hall, despite having 3 different attempts. Historical novels are not my jam it seems.
2/5 feels harsh, as the writing IS good! The topic was just not that interesting for me. The vignettes about family life were golden, the historical narratives not so much. And there was a lot of the latter.
If it makes Hildyard feel better, please know that I also never finished Wolf Hall, despite having 3 different attempts. Historical novels are not my jam it seems.
October 24, 2022
Loved this; it reads so much like non-fiction, but as I read I wondered why I felt this way--isn't part of Hildyard's achievement that she has created a fictional world that feels so real, with the narrator and her grandfather Jimmy? I'm also a sucker for history, so I found this digressive novel just wonderful.
January 7, 2018
Bits of unusual history interspersed with anecdotes of personal experience. How much is true? Interesting.
July 1, 2013
A strange mix of history and fiction…
The unnamed narrator of this novel has returned to her late grandfather’s farmhouse to sort through his papers before the house is sold. Jimmy, the grandfather, was a historian and as she goes through his final unfinished writings she reminisces about the stories he told her when she was a child. These stories relate to four historical figures – Edward IV, Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano and General Kitchener. She intermingles these snippets of history with reminiscences about her grandparents.
Sadly I can’t find much positive to say about this book. It reads as if the author has jotted down lots of snippets of history that she has learned over the years and then tried to find some way to link them. The pieces of history are simply retellings, or often slightly reworded quotations, of fragments of the work of real historians and, although they are occasionally mildly interesting, there is no depth to them, nor any particular link between them. Hildyard also quotes copiously from the original chroniclers and, from time to time, from the essays of Virginia Woolf. In fact, I began to wonder what percentage of the book could really be said to be original. In her notes at the end, Hildyard says ‘the reading for this book was done haphazardly and for pleasure over several years’ and that, I’m afraid, is exactly what it reads like – unconnected notes made by a recreational reader.
On the whole the writing is technically fine, although the misuse of appendices for appendages when talking about soldiers’ wounds did cause me to giggle. I wouldn’t have been so mean as to mention it, except that Hildyard frequently patronises the reader by explaining the meanings of words or phrases that anyone with a passing interest in history or, indeed, reading would require no help to understand. The sections where she talks about her grandfather read like a rather dull travelogue as they visit real museums and galleries, where she lists and describes the various exhibits. And she frequently throws in irrelevant little factlets as if, because she knows a thing, she’s going to get it in somehow.
"Much of the Society literature boasts about the cattle’s ‘pure white coat’, even though white is a convergence of rays from a whole spectrum of colours, and therefore, in one sense, the most impure."
The book has no emotional heart to it and no real narrative drive. I suspect the author was trying to make the point that the telling of history is always affected by the filter of the historian but, if that is the book’s purpose, then it’s hardly a new thought nor is the point particularly well made. While it’s well enough written in a technical sense and even moderately interesting in parts, overall I’m afraid I can’t recommend this one.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
The unnamed narrator of this novel has returned to her late grandfather’s farmhouse to sort through his papers before the house is sold. Jimmy, the grandfather, was a historian and as she goes through his final unfinished writings she reminisces about the stories he told her when she was a child. These stories relate to four historical figures – Edward IV, Peter the Great, Olaudah Equiano and General Kitchener. She intermingles these snippets of history with reminiscences about her grandparents.
Sadly I can’t find much positive to say about this book. It reads as if the author has jotted down lots of snippets of history that she has learned over the years and then tried to find some way to link them. The pieces of history are simply retellings, or often slightly reworded quotations, of fragments of the work of real historians and, although they are occasionally mildly interesting, there is no depth to them, nor any particular link between them. Hildyard also quotes copiously from the original chroniclers and, from time to time, from the essays of Virginia Woolf. In fact, I began to wonder what percentage of the book could really be said to be original. In her notes at the end, Hildyard says ‘the reading for this book was done haphazardly and for pleasure over several years’ and that, I’m afraid, is exactly what it reads like – unconnected notes made by a recreational reader.
On the whole the writing is technically fine, although the misuse of appendices for appendages when talking about soldiers’ wounds did cause me to giggle. I wouldn’t have been so mean as to mention it, except that Hildyard frequently patronises the reader by explaining the meanings of words or phrases that anyone with a passing interest in history or, indeed, reading would require no help to understand. The sections where she talks about her grandfather read like a rather dull travelogue as they visit real museums and galleries, where she lists and describes the various exhibits. And she frequently throws in irrelevant little factlets as if, because she knows a thing, she’s going to get it in somehow.
"Much of the Society literature boasts about the cattle’s ‘pure white coat’, even though white is a convergence of rays from a whole spectrum of colours, and therefore, in one sense, the most impure."
The book has no emotional heart to it and no real narrative drive. I suspect the author was trying to make the point that the telling of history is always affected by the filter of the historian but, if that is the book’s purpose, then it’s hardly a new thought nor is the point particularly well made. While it’s well enough written in a technical sense and even moderately interesting in parts, overall I’m afraid I can’t recommend this one.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
December 6, 2014
A woman goes through the papers of her historian grandfather upon his death. The narrative veers between the historical periods he was researching/writing about, the protagonist's memories and what she was doing to clear her grandfather's house and possessions. The only word I can think of to describe this book is interesting. It wasn't bad but I didn't think it was great either.
March 4, 2015
I thought this would be much more original and interesting than it was.I decided to finish it, mainly as it's not very long and I kept thinking soon it will engage me....I was quite bored by the story and it wasn't particularly well written.
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