Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen

Reading Prairie Fires, I realized that historical fiction was my first genre.  Laura Ingalls Wilder's books were the first I remember re-reading multiple times, and like many little girls in the 70s, I played "pioneer" (rather surprising for a fastidious, super-indoorsey city girl). The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Johnny Tremaine also fell apart due to multiple re-readings, but as an adult, I stayed away from the genre until I was re-introduced through the hybrid sub genre of historical mysteries.

It helps that Alison, Weir, one of my favorite biographers, decided to start writing novels.  Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen, her 6th novel, starts series animating the six disparate women who married Henry VIII.

Weir begins Katherine's story when she's Catalina, Infanta of Spain, betrothed to Arthur, Prince of Wales, and about to land at Plymouth.  There she will become Kathrine, and eventually Queen.  Her Prince, however will never be King, and Katherine's first meeting with Arthur disappoints her.  Not only is he rather shy, but he's clearly ill, pale and weak and frequently coughing from a "lingering rheum."  He's too weak to consummate their marriage (although like a teenager, even one whose kingdom doesn't depend on it, he brags of his conquest).  The young newlyweds are affectionate, though, and Katherine mourns not just her lost position but her husband when he dies from tuberculosis a few months later.

Arthur's death plunges Katherine into several years of uncertainty as a political pawn.  After some talk of marrying her to the new heir, 11-year-old Henry, Duke of York, she falls into limbo. After Queen Elizabeth dies in childbirth, Henry VII considers marrying her, then abandons that in favor of this alliance or that, always looking for the most lucrative option - and not supporting the Dowager Princess and contractually required.  Parsimonious Henry Tudor didn't just want the best alliance; he wanted the best dowry.  Katherine spent her widowhood acting as a go-between for her father and father-in-law, trying to enforce he contract which held back her plate and jewels.

It's during this period that the always devout Princess met her new confessor, Frey Diego.  A magnetic personality and hard line moralist (at least in appearance), he encourages her to confess deep sins and mortify her flesh (Weir hints at the possibility that Katherine's devout fasting was a form of anorexia nervosa, as theorized by Giles Trement).  Diego, who comes across ad manipulative but without a known agenda, enters her household after the Spanish Ambassador, Dr. de Peubla, forces out Katherine's protective but cunning duenna, Dona Elvira in yet another battle over the dowry.

Katherine's uncertain youth ends with Henry VII's death (also from tuberculosis) in 1509.  Already 24, she finds a love match in the 18-year-old Henry VIII who ends their betrothal with a quick wedding so that they may be crowned together.  Weir shows us the young, passionate, athletic king; one whom we can find attractive and yet, in his mercurial moods and extravagance, we can also see hints of the despot to come.  At first, though, he's a loving and doting husband, more suited to be a courtier than King. He celebrates Katherine's pregnancies as a father as well as a King, and mourns with her when the first two end with a stillbirth and a young Prince who only lives a few weeks.  Five more pregnancies over the next decade leave only Mary living, and although Henry is discreet, Katherine hears rumor of Bessie Blount and wonders why her still youthful husband flies a chivalrous banner at certain tournaments.  Eventually, Katherine learns that Henry feels their marriage is cursed because (even though their marriage was never consummated), she is Arthur's widow

Weir wisely keeps the political and theological arguments as the background of the third section of Katherine of Aragon. Instead, she shows a stubborn but righteous woman who still loves her husband (who may still love her).  As Katherine's status and household shrink, we see the personal toll it takes, tearing her from the devoted friends who have made up her inner circle and planting the seeds of dogmatic intolerance in Princess Mary.  Weir also subtly hints at how closely intertwined five of Henry's six wives, were, with a cameo by Jane Seymour and references to Maud Parr's daughter Kate.  Although of lasting political import, Henry's break with Rome and marriage to Anne Boleyn was a personal tragedy to Katherine and her ladies. Weir really brings that across, and even gains  bit of sympathy for Henry who, at least when he begins his quest for an annulment,s seems driven in part by grief. He's wrong, of course, but it's this sort of nuance that makes me look forward to Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession.  I'm sure many characters will reappear there, but in a different light.

The Iris Fan

Warning - spoiler for The Shogun's Daughter

There's something bittersweet about reading the last book in a series.  Laura Joh Rowland published The Iris Fan four years ago, but because I fell behind, I've known for three books that she was winding up the Sano Ichiro mysteries.  Four years after The Shogun's Daughter, Sano has been demoted, Masihiro has no hope of a decent marriage or advancement through the Samauri ranks, and the family is living in cramped and straightened circumstances with Midori and her children (Hirata, still mired in his supernatural subplot, is missing).  He's hunting for evidence that Ienobu ordered Yoshisato's death while Yanigasawa is looking for evidence that his son is still alive.  The enemies and their quests collide when someone stabs Shogun Tokugawa (bedridden with measles), with an iris-decorated fan.

Sano's investigation leads to the women's quarters of the palace.  In prior cases, his wife Reiko helped him with these interviews but four years after her stillbirth, his devotion to the Samauri code and her lingering postpartum depression have driven them apart.  The case piques her interest, though, and reluctantly at first, she begins to investigate.  With help from a surprising person and both personal and professional roadblocks thrown up by Yanigasawa, Sano solves the case and achieves the happy (or at least bittersweet) ending that a reader expects from the final installment in a long-running series.  One warning, though.  The Sano books have always been a bit dark, and there's one scene in The Shogun's Daughter, where a beautiful but intellectually disabled young woman mentions her "special friends" that's particularly disturbing.

Let It Bleed

Let It Bleed starts with a car chase out of a Hollywood action movie, a chase that ends with John Rebus's boss in the hospital and the men they were chasing diving off an icy bridge onto the deck of a police boat (as the coroner says, at least it saved the department the case of a water search).  Don't worry, after that Ian Rankin returns to his familiar ground, political and police corruption against the backdrop of Edinburgh's dreary weather.  A few days after the chase, crash, and suicide, Rebus is called out to investigate the suicide of a recently released, terminally ill prisoner who chose a local councillor's open hours as his place of death.  Rebus thinks they're connected, and finding himself on an involuntary vacation tells him he's right.  The plot was a bit convoluted, involving tech start-ups (the book was written nearly 20 years ago, and there's a prescient scene where Rebus's drinking buddy claims that eventually we'll all have pocket sized computers) and sham contracts for retraining unemployed workers.  Rankin sufficiently supported his conclusion, but I liked the book more for Rebus than for the plot.

A Most Wanted Man

John le Carre's heroes aren't heroic.  They're world-weary men and women for whom spying isn't exactly a game, but they realize they might not be on the side of right.  A Most Wanted Man makes everyone a pawn.  The young man who may be a terrorist sleeper or an aspiring medical student.  The family who take him in and may be an apolitical mother and son who wish to become naturalized German citizens or a religious fanatic and a budding terrorist.  The banker whose father laundered money smuggled out of the collapsing USSR for the young man's putative father.  The idealistic woman who works for a refugee agency and may be falling for her charge.  Le Carre portrays them all vividly, but they don't matter.  What matters is the trap they make for the most wanted man.  Whether by design or not, Le Carre's plot was secondary to the atmospheric vignettes he strung together, creating an interesting novel in which the espionage is more of a background than the primary reason for the book.

Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

There are so many threads running through Caroline Fraser's excellent Prairie Fires that I don't know  how to start my review.  I grew up on the Little House books, eventually realizing that as hard as life was for the Ingalls family, the novels were novels rather than history.  Beyond that, they were sanitized for their juvenile audience, something I slowly came to realize as I read other, less complete biographies.  None of them, even Wilder's memoir Pioneer Girl, told how unremittingly grim Laura's life actually was.  Prior books implied this, but Prairie Fires spells out how Charles Ingalls was an abject failure.  He moved the family along the frontier not because "the land was too settled" but because he was a terrible businessman who left every outpost out of desperation and a little worse off financially than when he'd arrived.  Even when he "won his bet" with the government, earning title to his claim near DeSmet, he soon sold his quarter section and moved into town, eventually dying of overwork and heart disease at 64.

Laura's adult life wasn't much easier.  She started working to support the family at age 9, as a dishwasher, companion, seamstress, and eventually a schoolteacher.  Once married, she experienced two difficult pregnancies, the death of her infant son, a near-fatal bout of diphtheria, her husband's disabling stroke, and a fire which destroyed her house.  The Wilders never proved up on their land; after brief sojourns with Almanzo's relatives in Minnesota and Florida, both took paid jobs (Laura as a seamstress, Almanzo as a day laborer and drayman) to buy property in the Ozarks.  Even there, they took odd jobs and took in borders until Almanzo's father bought their house for them.

There was also Rose.  Bright and strong willed, prone to depression (and possibly bipolar disorder - Rose called herself "manic depressive" in her diary), outgoing where her mother was reticent, extravagant where her mother was extremely frugal, they were alike and different in the most combustible pairings.  It was Rose who encouraged her mother to write her memoir; but it was also Rose who urged her parents to invest in stocks which vaporized in the Depression making the Little House books both possible and necessary.  And it was Rose whose rather bitter form of libertarianism overlaid the myth of self-sufficiency over a life of outside help and escaped debts.

The Homestead Act, when you get down to it, was a land swindle executed by the government.  The upper plains were originally described as desert land, and the mostly wheat monoculture practiced by the small landholders depleted the soil and adversely affected weather patterns.  No one could expect more than subsistence farming on the prairie, and yet the government led thousands to believe the they could make their fortune on just 160 acres.  Fraser expands on this, pointing out that we've lived with the myth of the small farmer for much of the country's existence, but that it's not true.  Small scale farming has never been able to feed our population and provide export income, and yet we repeat the myth, perhaps hoping that we can make it true.

This myth bloomed into both women's right-wing political views.  Laura's were a bit softer but despite knowing that her sister Grace and her husband were struggling before the Depression, she never forgave them for accepting New Deal relief.  You can almost understand how Laura came to her views, though, since years of hard work and struggle left her extremely frugal.  Still, she overlooked the help she and Almanzo received from his parents or the low interest federal loans they took out.  Rose's libertarianism (and she's considered one of the movement's founders), seems a bit more...personal?  She could be generous on an individual level, informally (and mercurially) adopting young men and supporting them for years and providing friends with extravagant gifts.  She also considered taxes to be theft and when her writing career (which included "fake news" biographies and novels taken heavily from her mother's life) floundered claimed that she'd stopped writing because taxes took too much of her income.

Prairie Fires bursts the myth built up around the Little House books, but it also fleshes out the story. Novelists need to leave out anything not necessary to the story, and even with Caroline Ingalls's emphasis on education there's not much room in the books for reading.  Fraser shows that Charles Ingalls wasn't just a storyteller, but as avid of a reader as was possible on the frontier, and that Laura devoured lurid crime tales as an adolescent.  It fleshes out DeSmet as a small but bustling town, one that could have grown into a twin of Gopher Prairie.  And in the epilogue, it shows how the towns which so vehemently oppose government help rely upon it, even as they flounder.

I'm afraid that my review has done less justice to Prairie Fires than the emetically sweet and hilariously melodramatic TV series did to the Little House books.  It's an amazing blend of joint biography and historical analysis that should not be missed.