Book Review: The Cry of Her Heart

Title: The Cry of Her Heart

Author: Ora Smith

Publisher: Lighten

Date: 2020

Quote: "But your protector pays for your chastity."

In 1632, being the wrong kind of Protestant was a crime in England. Peninnah is in the Clink Prison, a real place, where prisoners were charged high prices for everything--including freedom from sexual abuse, not to mention time at a window facing the street where prisoners are allowed to beg for money to pay the high cost of being locked up. She can't afford to pay not to be raped. Somebody, she learns, is paying at least that price for her. 

Over the months in prison, during which she holds the baby after another prisoner dies in childbirth and develops some sympathy for the one woman on the women's side of the Clink who seems to belong in prison, Peninnah learns who her "protector" is. She had a crush on Robert Linnell, years ago, but he married another woman, She learns that that woman is dead. Her heart leaps, but she reminds herself that he wasn't interested in her when she was clean and pretty. Now she's dressed in rags and, unavoidably, infested with lice, and on page one she let her long red hair be chopped off as close to the scalp as possible to pay for a chance to beg.

All she can do is pray. When she finds Robert on the men's side of the Clink, she realizes that he can do nothing more than pray, too. This is the historical record, not a novel written to please modern readers; the main characters don't control their destiny in the way we might want them to do. It's up to God to hear the cry of Peninnah's heart. 

In historical fact, she thought God did. 

This is one of a series in which Ora Smith fleshes out what's known about Christian women of the past, including Pocahontas Rebecca Rolfe. The reality of their lives isn't always nice or politically correct. This book contains synopses of the books that came before it, so readers can decide which stories they want to read. 

Recommended to readers who are ready for historical novels that are more fact-based than the usual romantic stories.

Book Review: The Irrationalist

Title: The Irrationalist

Author: Andrew Pessin

Date: 2017

Publisher: Open Books

ISBN:978-0998427447

Length: 508 pages

Quote: “For a moment the two men glared at each other, their breath steaming in the air. From the side, from a certain angle perhaps, they almost resembled each other...”

The Irrationalist by Andrew Pessin (Kindle Locations 24-25).

And neither of the poor fellows, one of whom was to become known as René Descartes, was much to look at. The short pudgy guy with the sneery face at the right side of the red-draped table, in the jacket drawing? People who drew or painted Descartes’ face agreed that he really did look like that, or sort of. As this novel suggests, the facial expression may have been produced by scarring. 

Of the things for which Descartes is remembered, a mysterious death isn’t one. He wrote brilliant late-Renaissance-to-early-modern works of scientific philosophy, was famous, invited to teach in all the best universities but attacked by would-be rivals at each of them, and died middle-aged, possibly from pneumonia or tuberculosis. He was the first of many authors to use the phrase “Cogito ergo sum,” or “I think, therefore I am,” in a book. He wrote that dogs had no consciousness and couldn’t feel pain, but he lived with a dog and was accused of making a ridiculous fuss over it, pampering it in its old age, probably having some sort of sick and perverted relationship with the animal...in the seventeenth century fear of “witches” and “wizards” whose religious cults allegedly worshipped animals ran high, and it was a dangerous time for anyone, however devout a member of the church, to have a pet. During his carnivorous phases Descartes ate some remarkably disgusting meals (Pessin relishes the yucky seventeenth century recipes), coughed a lot, and was believed to be unhealthy. During vegetarian phases he apparently felt better. He outlived many people of his own age.He was a Catholic school product and, though not a priest himself, never married; he was the quintessential nerd-who-never-outgrows-it.

But could he have been murdered? His contemporaries didn’t think so, but who knows? Apart from a facial expression he may have been unable to help, how obnoxious was Descartes? He had enough enemies to generate an intriguing murder mystery with a heart. Pessin invents a young ministerial student, troubled with nightmares and lost memories, who discovers his own courage and maturity in the process of trying to solve the mystery of Descartes’ death. (The fictional student Baillet shares the name of a real Adrien Baillet who wrote a biography of Descartes, but the real Baillet was born much later than the fictional one.)

A good detective story should keep readers guessing. I congratulate Pessin on that. Although I guessed part of the ending after reading the prologue, I didn’t guess the other part up to the end.

What I didn't like (and the only thing I didn't like) was the polite, but trite, presentation of Christina of Sweden (Descartes' last employer). Male historians always tend to focus on her sexuality rather than her achievements of the young Queen Christina of Sweden. Like other ruling queens of her era, Christina was sometimes titled "king" (in some languages "she-king"), described as "manly," and generally conceded the benefits of being an honorary man. Unlike some other ruling queens of this era, Christina at least didn’t develop a reputation for flirting with or sleeping with other people’s husbands, and it just tears some male readers up to imagine that she might really have been capable of self-control. What options did she have? Well, Elizabeth of England wasn’t very kind to other women, ordering her male "Peers" to report to court and leave their wives at home, and was vindictively accused both of being male and of having secretly disposed of unwanted babies. Catherine of Russia spared her court ladies’ reputations by overtly using men as sex objects. Nzinga of Angola officially married wives and, as tradition required, claimed paternity of some of their babies, too. (Angolans, at least, apparently managed not to laugh.) Christina summoned men to her court as counsellors and teachers and, apparently, resisted all of their charms, or at least avoided pregnancy, though some of her court gentlemen had to have been more attractive than Descartes--in their day fifty really was old. Christina slept with other women for security, and possibly for other reasons; she called Ebba Sparre "Beauty," but I've seen no other writer claim that they smooched in public.

But The Irrationalist generally steers clear of graphic sex, apart from noting the number of seventeenth-century working women who didn’t own rental property, were barred from most legitimate jobs, and therefore earned their livings as legal or semilegal prostitutes. Descartes at least tried to appear to be chaste; Pessin’s fictional detective really is chaste. Instead the lives of real and fictional characters are fleshed out with lots of historical details...and with murders. This is a murder mystery after all. There are fights, some of which are kept miraculously bloodless, some of which are not, and there are freshly and not so freshly killed bodies.

There are moments when I’m aware of the presence in the novel of a narrator from my own time: people protested Christina’s edict changing her legal gender, we’re told, until she “nipped them [the protests] in the bud by nipping a few of their [the commoners’] heads in the bud.” And there are a few computer-editor typos: a “pour hound,” and a priest wearing a nice “cossack.” (Cossacks, or Kazakhs, were not Catholics, and the possible ways a Catholic priest might have been described as wearing one--or maybe just the fur hat?--beguiled me for a few seconds before the thought “Cassock, of course” came to mind.) And then there are the flashes of genuine wit that a novel about seventeenth century writers needs. Their own sense of wit could be dry, obscure, longwinded and sometimes rather horrible (among the attractions of a “Gala” is a fight staged for a buffalo, a lion, and a bear), but at their best people like Descartes could be as funny as Shakespeare. Witty epigrams were much admired, and definitely belong in this novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Irrationalist and imagine a lot of people in cyberspace will, too. What U.S. students read of European history tends to fixate on England and France, probably due to the idea that foreign history is more palatable if your own personal ancestors are mentioned in it. (This is true, but a lot of people's ancestors did not come from England or France.) Dutch and Swedish history is fresher. Descartes is part of both, and Pessin sketches lively, plausible pictures of both of those countries in this novel. If you like armchair tourism, buy The Irrationalist now. It's long enough that your eyes will thank you for buying the printed book, although I received a review copy via Kindle and can report that, yes, Kindle was able to handle its length, sacrificing only page numbering.

Book Review: Hobberdy Dick

Title: Hobberdy Dick

Author: K.M. Briggs

Date: 1955 (U.K.), 1977 (U.S.)

Publisher: Greenwillow (U.S.)

ISBN: 0-688-84079-5

Length: 239 pages

Quote: "But he...had only known the Culvers for a little over two centuries. He would stay with the old place a little longer."

Fair disclosure: This is a book that  libraries across the United States added to their "children's" collections, and then discarded due to complaints from parents and teachers. And those parents and teachers were right: it's not really a children's story at all.

Not that it's a book that needs to be hidden from children, particularly. In fact it's almost free from sex and violence, certainly tastefully written, and a delightful read for anyone who likes English Literature--a suitable companion for other books Greenwillow was bringing to the U.S. at the time, notably Briggs' own Kate Crackernuts and Robert Westall's splendid Devil on the Road. 

But few modern children are likely to like it. They don't "get" it. Although Hobberdy Dick is a novel set in the world of the old English fairy tales that used to be told to children, it's outside the frame of reference of children who absorb more modern fairy tales from TV broadcasts. It may attract some middle and high school students to English Literature courses (probably the author's intention) but it won't make much sense to the students until they've taken the courses.

Even for adults C.S. Lewis's Discarded Image may be the best introduction to this book. Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising quintet is a set of young adult novels that may help introduce young readers to the medieval lore from which the speculative world of this story is made.

Briefly: this is not a story about the real world we know, past or present, U.S. or U.K. It's about the world as English people in the seventeenth century seem to have imagined it to be. And although that speculative world is bounded by Christian beliefs, in between the boundaries set for it by Christian beliefs it's full of traditional pre-Christian beliefs; things handed down to English Christians from their preliterate British Pagan ancestors, things that are neither supported nor specifically contradicted by the Bible or by modern science. English Christians took those things very seriously. Some believed very seriously that whatever wasn't Christian was of the Devil and must be untrue; others believed, equally seriously, that whatever wasn't specifically anti-Christian was likely to be true, and worth preserving.

For the folk whose lore Briggs made a career of documenting in scholarly books and recycling into novels, however, there was a third "spiritual" realm in addition to Heaven and Hell. There were longaevi, long-livers. The idea of these humanlike creatures was probably based on the idea of departed ancestors living on in some way, but the longaevi were thought to be a separate race, not humans, and certainly not the ghosts of dead humans (although many seventeenth century English Christians believed devoutly in ghosts, too). They were mortal but their lifespans were counted in centuries not decades. Probably the most thorough and sympathetic treatment they have ever received in literature was Tolkien's Rings books; there were lofty, poetic, glamorous longaevi like the Elves and small, homely, amusing, relatively short-lived ones like the Hobbits.

Although stories about them had been told before Britain became Christian, and several sources (like Cooper) maintain that they had their own alien purpose that was neither good-for-humans nor evil-for-humans, the longaevi were fitted into the Christian worldview by a tradition Briggs mentions in this story: They were that "host of Heaven" of whom one third were faithful to God and became angels, one third rebelled with Satan and became devils, and one third never made up their minds and became the various kinds of "wights" (faeries, elves, pixies, nixies, leprechauns, gnomes, sylphs, the Old Gods, the goblins...) found in British and European folklore. Depending on their individual qualities and characters some of them were glamorous and aristocratic, and some were humble and homely, perhaps even subject to confusion with ordinary mortals who might have been unable to find steady jobs and tried to attach themselves to households where they were allowed to work for food and shelter. In some stories some of the smaller, humbler ones, like brownies, were quite geriatric and had been condemned to live until they'd done something good enough to merit another offer of spiritual salvation.

So here is Dick, an ordinary decent hobgoblin, not exactly miserable but able to empathize with another bogle (from an older tale) who lamented, "Woe's me" that he thought he was many generations away from the reward from a human "that'll lay me" to rest with the hope of restoration to Heaven. He looks like a little old man, but he's not a man--closer to a Hobbit, or to a brownie. He's not hoping to be released from his life as a "hob," exactly. He's just determined to be the best little hob he can be. In this story we see him doing all of a hob's traditional jobs, as well as he can, considering his great age, small size, limited powers, and lack of sympathy from the dominant humans in the family that move into his home.

Though Hobberdy Dick was marketed as a story about the family being "unloving Puritans," that's not exactly accurate. All Puritans practiced a strict form of Protestant Christianity, some much stricter than others; like devout people today, they were supposed to be quiet, sober, modest, and frugal, but kindness, generosity, and even cheerfulness were encouraged. Briggs' Puritan family are portrayed as real Puritan families undoubtedly were: some easier to like than others. The young man Dick does most to help has a bossy but not unreasonable father, an unlovable stepmother, some witless but not unlovable stepsiblings, a wonderful grandmother whose closeness to Heaven intimidates Dick but also helps him, and a girlfriend who seems almost as perfect to Dick as she does to her admirer.

Medieval Europe was Catholic, of course. Medieval studies can easily become Catholic Studies (or, if determined not to be Catholic, Islamic Studies); that's what medieval literature was about, mostly. The English Civil War embodied the conflict between Catholic or at least High Church of England "Cavaliers" (the "conservative party" of their day, endorsing some traditional "revels" and rights for the lower class but mostly endorsing the traditional rights of the aristocracy) and Puritan or Low Church "Roundheads" (the "rebellious/progressive party," led by Oliver Cromwell, a man without an hereditary title, and often thought to represent a step toward egalitarian thinking). As usual when political polarization occurs, each side appealed to some people's ideals of truth, beauty, and honor, and to some people's selfish greed. In Hobberdy Dick Briggs does not actually assert that Cromwell's victory was a sad, bad thing; she lets some characters say that, and lets others find it a good thing.

In the end, for young Joel and Anne as well as for Dick, that "Puritan"/progressive/"Low Church" idea of a bourgeois family moving into a stately home and intermarrying with a "gentle" family seems quite satisfactory. The main difficulty Anne and Joel worry about is that, in the old Catholic system, that sort of thing was frowned upon; there was a strict hierarchy, in the physical as well as the spiritual realm, and a boy like Joel was supposed to be as far "below" a girl like Anne as Dick would have been below Titania, Queen of the Faeries. (That name...yes, Faeries were originally human-sized or bigger, and "Titania" was identified with the Greek Titans, who were giants.) In the new system, where people come from matters less than where they're going, and since Anne and Joel are presumably going to Heaven by the via positiva of good lives in this world, they have every right to marry each other.

Joel's stepmother doesn't seem to love her own children very much, and if she's too "Puritan" to want Joel dead, she certainly makes no secret of wanting him out of her way.  She is a classic example of an unloving person who happens to be a Puritan. Some of Dick's fellow longaevi, including the splendid old Grim "who had been a god" (in Norse lore Grim was a nickname for Odin), feel unloved by Puritans who don't want to notice or believe in them--or offer the traditional ration of bread that probably sustained some real homeless laborers in Merrie Olde Englande. Nevertheless Joel and Anne have to be considered "loving" people, over and above their chaste romance with each other. What Dick actually does, in this story, is help some "loving Puritans" overcome the baleful influence of some "unloving" Puritans.

So whose side is Briggs on? It's hard to say. She wouldn't have thought it was polite to dispute her publisher's decision about how to advertise her book, if she had disagreed with it. I suspect that she wrote as a detached historian. Dick, who exists in the old Catholic worldview but not in the Puritan one, would probably never have much to say in favor of the Puritans...but Anne and Joel might be considered a pro-Puritan statement, too.

And I suspect that seeing "unloving Puritans" in reviews and summaries of the book did much to prejudice people against it, to prompt librarians to discard it rather than reclassifying it--as they should have done--as a work of speculative fiction for adults.

(Briggs could hardly have been expected to foresee how much merely calling her protagonist "Dick" would do to prejudice people against this book. I've seen people who obviously had no idea what "Hobberdy" meant pick up a copy of the book and say "Hobberdy Dick? What kind of book is that for children?!" Relax, people. Even after the Nixon Administration, for many English-speaking people it's just a man's name. Briggs was English, and old, and probably didn't realize it was anything but a man's name.)

Dick has to be the most lovable of all his kind. The working-class longaevi, according to stories Briggs cited in her nonfiction books, preferred "wights" as a general term for themselves; one who was otherwise hard to classify considered, in snappy rhymes, words like "faery" and so on, and concluded "But if you call me 'seelie wight' I'll be your friend by day and night." Some of them were consistently friendly to humams, although the stories about them tend to be shorter than the ones about the nasty ones. Many stories about the friendly wights who attached themselves to prosperous farms sound like stories about homeless men, often small, elderly, and disabled or deformed in some way. Goblins, however, despite their gnomelike habits, tendency to live in caves and be able to find underground watercourses, mineral seams, or buried treasure, were often considered ugly, hostile wights. The Princess and the Goblins and "Goblin Market" are late stories, but some older goblin stories are nastier. Dick is, however, a real sweetheart, not only nicer than most goblins but nicer than some brownies and piskies. He prefer that humans not call him, but he is a friend to Anne, Joel, and their grandmother by day and night.

Ghosts, we learn, are part of Dick's world--boring little parvenus that come and go; Dick is pleased to help one of them fade out. Wicked witches, humans who have sold their souls to the Evil Principle, are real for Dick; they have little power over humans but considerable power over hobs, and since they are deeply nasty people it takes real courage for Dick and a few goblin buddies to rescue a child from one of them. (Wiccans, or "white witches" who had not sold their souls and had mutually respectful or human-dominant relationships with longaevi, were still part of nineteenth century folklore but are not represented in this story.)

If you agree with the Puritans that all beliefs not specifically supported by the Bible are antichristian, then you won't like Hobberdy Dick or much of anything that K.M. Briggs wrote. If you're either a folklorist or a Neo-Pagan, you'll love all of Briggs' thoroughly researched nonfiction and imaginative folklore-based fiction. I'm a folklorist and I enjoy Briggs' books...but I recommend them to adults who are, or are becoming, reasonably well educated, not to kids. I think this writer expected all kids to be as familiar with her material as the children she knew were, and they're not.

Because bad marketing made this wholesome little tale of Merrie Englande so controversial, it's a collector's item. This web site blushes to ask for $20 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment. Briggs' other books aren't much cheaper; Kate Crackernuts, the most successful seller in the U.S., is currently available at prices that force us to demand $10. And Briggs isn't even here to enjoy her 10% of those payments. However, you can add books by living authors, which are likely to be cheaper, to the package (three other books of the same size will ship together with Hobberdy Dick in one $5 package), and 10% of the cost of those books will be sent to those authors or their charities.