The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono (1953; translated by Barbara Bray, 1995). See, the thing about tree-planting is that I read Oliver Rackham at a formative age and so whenever I hear any encouraging good-news conservation story about big tree-planting efforts I just think 'is this really a good idea?' (the trees planted may not be suitable for the local conditions; planting trees can destroy ecologically valuable non-woodland habitats) and, perhaps more importantly, 'but is it even necessary?' (trees don't need humans to plant them! Anywhere where the local conditions are suited to woodland, as long as it's not overgrazed or too far from established trees to provide a source of seeds, will succeed to woodland on its own if you just leave it alone for a few decades*, and so you should save your active conservation efforts for places that need them, e.g. ecologically valuable non-woodland habitats which will succeed to woodland in a few decades if you don't keep cutting down all the birch saplings). All of which is to say that I was sceptical going into this book. But to his credit, while Giono isn't making any particularly careful effort at realism, he does address ecological issues: the tree-planter finds that some species do well in particular areas and others don't, and has to adapt to local conditions; he starts out as a shepherd, but ends up getting rid of the sheep because they graze the saplings (he becomes a beekeeper instead). More unexpected and more troubling was Giono's consistent and deliberate deceptive presentatation of the story as non-fiction, as described by Richard Mabey in the foreword and Giono's daughter Aline in the afterword of the edition I read. It was apparently widely effective and he regarded it as a good joke. I could get all high-minded and talk about our twenty-first-century knowledge of the harm done by misinformation, but to be honest, I am actually just a 'reader with no sense of humour' as Aline puts it. Still, that rather soured the whole thing.
*
This can happen even despite tree-planting efforts: there's an area of my local wood where some people earnestly planted a lot of oak trees twenty or thirty years ago, and now the patch is mostly scrubby birch woodland full of brambles, because that's what does well in early-successional woodland habitat.The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell (1984). The second Hilary Tamar book has confirmed the series as a fave for me! It's a really enjoyable, well-constructed mystery with clues intricately worked into apparently incidental details; it's just the kind of absurd humour I love, an absurdity of character and incident perfectly confident in its own internal logic and reasonableness; Hilary is a great narrator and detective; have I mentioned how much I love the prose? etc. I don't know whether you could have worked out the solution to the mystery ahead of time: I realised early on that
spoiler
the twins not seeing Deirdre fall was an important detail but didn't trouble to reason any further beyond 'well, maybe they did it then, let's see'. I am definitely shipping Julia/Selena.
The White Cockade: or, Faith and Fortitude by James Grant (1868). A fairly early Jacobite novel, as far as I can tell: on
my list only Scott's novels and
The Pastor's Fireside are older. And I think it has more affinity with those older books than with later adventure novels like
Kidnapped, at least in style—it's fairly long, wide in scope and written with proper mid-Victorian density of prose. It's also rather oddly structured. The first half or so follows our Jacobite hero Henry, Lord Dalquarn as he returns to Scotland in advance of the '45 and has an original adventure plot involving dramatic smuggling, Dalquharn's romance with the lovely Bryde Otterburn, the dastardly schemes of the evil Baillie Balcraftie and a lot of scenic description of East Lothian and the Firth of Forth, while the early part of the '45 happens in the background. But then Prince Charles arrives in Edinburgh and Bryde and Dalquharn join him there, and from that point onwards the book closely follows the historical course of the rising, apart from the odd detour for things like Bryde getting rather tediously abducted by a moustache-twirling Frenchman; the earlier plot is largely forgotten, and what loose ends remain from it are eventually dealt with really rather perfunctorily.
There's a lot of long-winded and not always very relevant historical exposition, and I suppose both this and the plot that follows the '45 so closely (only not the first bit between Eriskay and Edinburgh, for some reason) seemed more interesting and original at a time when few Jacobite novels had yet been published. Several incidents bear amusing similarities to later Jacobite novels, and again, I may have read those other books first but the incidents are more original here! Grant makes a couple of odd historical errors: e.g., he places both John Cameron of Fassiefern and Simon Fraser of Lovat in Edinburgh with the Prince in September 1745, when in reality the former never joined the rising and the latter only did so much later; he also makes, amusingly, the same mistake Edward Prime-Stevenson does in
White Cockades of describing Charles's eyes as blue (they were actually brown). His actual view of the Jacobites is more positive than Scott's or Porter's: he balances an acceptance of the moral rightness of their cause according to the ideas of the time, and a lot of admiration for their loyalty and tragic nobility, with a very Victorian Whiggish 'well, the defeat of the Jacobites ultimately led to the present state of affairs, which—God save Queen Victoria and the Empire—is obviously the best possible, so all's well that ends well, right?'. The characters and relationships are not very interesting, apart from a few details that could have gone somewhere good but don't, but the adventure is enjoyable, especially the pre-rising bit. Overall I'd say this is not one of the best Jacobite novels, but it is worth reading—the first half more in its own right, and the second for historical development of views of the Jacobites and the '45.
Also read 'Hornblower and the Big Decision' or 'Hornblower and the Widow McCool', a short story written and set shortly before
Lieutenant Hornblower. It's a very interesting story and has given me much to think about vis-a-vis how Hornblower's attitude to an Irish rebel (and deserter) might inform 1750s!Hornblower's attitude to a Scottish Jacobite (and deserter). I was a little bit sceptical of
spoilers
how possible it would really be to conceal a mechanism in those carved letters, but charmed by Hornblower carefully inspecting the mechanism and experimenting to figure out how it works alongside agonising over his moral quandary.
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independence1776
