Review: "Hide Me Among the Graves" by Tim Powers

A couple of observations about Tim Powers and the books that he writes--First, he can weave a hell of a tale!  Second, he certainly does his homework, as his blending of historical fact within his fiction borders upon both the sublime and brilliant!  Hide Me Among the Graves is only the third novel by Powers that I've read, but it is easily the best.  The other two were The Anubis Gates and The Stress of Her Regard.

By way of background, and as some of you may know, I am a huge fan of the Victorian poet, Christina Rossetti.  Christina was the youngest sister of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founder, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (a poet in his own right).  While a pious woman, Christina, for much of her life explored the breadth and depth of human emotion in her amazing poetry such as her long narrative epic poem, Goblin Market, or the intensely personal series of Monna Innominata sonnets, or in her slightly creepy poems The Ghost's Petition, My Dream or Love and Death. 

Portrait of Christina by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Christina Rossetti's poetry evokes a similar response in me as that when I view the art of William Holman Hunt or John Everett Millais, or even Christina's brother, Dante Gabriel--the paintings are lavishly colorful, ornate, detailed and bring to life the natural, spiritual and mythological world.  Christina Rossetti was, if you will, a charter member of the 'PreRaphaelite Sisterhood' and her poetry, in my opinion, was as intellectually creative and emotionally visceral as that of her male contemporaries in the visual and literary arts.  While Christina is perhaps best known for her epic poem, Goblin Market (1859), she was a prolific poet  who, through the course of her life, wrote something over 1,000 poems.  Like her older sister, Maria, Christina never married, and she ultimately died of cancer at the age of 64 in 1894.

What Powers has done in Hide Me Among the Graves is to create an entirely compelling and virtually believable and macabre story involving the Rossetti family and some of the characters from his earlier novel, The Stress of Her Regard.  Is it necessary to read The Stress of Her Regard first? Probably not, but I thoroughly recommend that you do so, as it will make your overall experience that much more meaningful.  In both, The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves,  Powers has created a unique blend of historical, horror and fantasy fiction in a style that hearkens back to the Romantic period and Gothic revival portrayed in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and even Coleridge, and in the fiction of Matthew Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Ann Radcliffe.  Interestingly, and relevant to both  The Stress of Her Regard and Hide Me Among the Graves, shortly after Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1817, the maternal uncle of the Rossetti siblings, John Polidori, wrote a short story entitled The Vampyre (1819).  Polidori, who was also Byron's personal physician while Byron was in Europe, figures prominently in Hide Me Among the Graves as one of the immortal race of horrifying vampires known as the Nephilim.

While a horror story from start to finish, Hide Me Among the Graves is also a family story told on a Dickensian scale.  Powers completely captures the devotion to family that each member of the Rossetti family so zealously guarded and protected.  And while the Rossetti siblings, William, Dante Gabriel, Maria, and Christina are trying to rid London of their undead Uncle Polidori, the fictional characters John Crawford and Adelaide McKee are trying to find and save their young daughter, Johanna, from the clutches of the evil vampire.  During the course of the novel the reader encounters other such real-life characters as the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artistic muse and wife Lizzie Siddal, the linguist and Dante translator Charles Cayley, and the author and adventurer Edward John Trelawny.  The other major character featured in the book is the City of London and its history, from the depths of the oldest sewers to the "Whispering Gallery" in the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.  Powers' portrayal of his characters in the London landscape increasingly reminded me of Charles Dickens' magnum opus Our Mutual Friend, both in the descriptive talents of the two writers, but also in the sheer elegance of each written word on the page.  These are characters that you can believe in, admire, and be repulsed and horrified by.  At the same time, over the course of the novel, the gritty and seamy urban environment of London is described so realistically that one almost expects to encounter little 'Jenny Wren' or the 'Artful Dodger' as one rounds the corner in the footsteps of Christina Rossetti on the trail of her vampire uncle.

Lizzie Siddall by DGR

This is good stuff, folks!  A scary and macabre tale, yet at the same time a breathtakingly imaginative and creative story grounded in the real lives of a group of intellectually amazing poets and painters at the height of the Victorian Era in the 19th century.  Finally, there are two aspects of Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves that simply cannot be overstated or oversold.  First, Powers has managed to effectively and accurately portray the complexity of the relationships between Christina Rossetti and her other family members; the tortured relationship between Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his wife, Lizzie Siddall; and even the somewhat bizarre character of the poet, Algernon Swinburne.  Additionally, and most importantly from my perspective, Powers has managed to open a window and illuminate the magnificent poetry of a relatively obscure--but certainly not minor--female poet of the Victorian Era, Christina Georgina Rossetti.  I personally cannot thank Tim Powers enough for setting out and accomplishing both of these tasks in grand fashion in this truly excellent novel!

While cerebral, Tim Powers' Hide Me Among the Graves is entirely accessible to any and all readers and provides a wonderful exclamation point to his spectacularly successful earlier novel, The Stress of Her Regard.  I highly recommend both of these amazing novels!

Note--

I am rereading the novel right now, and revisiting some of Christina's poetry that was utilized as epigraphs and/or referred to throughout the book, and I am quite likely to come back and revisit the content of this review in the near future, but this will suffice for the time being.

***

Afterword--

If, after reading Hide Me Among the Graves, you find yourself becoming interested in learning more about the Victorian poet, Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894), I strongly recommend the following:

Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics, 2005.

Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography, by Jan C. Marsh, 1994 (My review here)

Review: "Isis" by Douglas Clegg

Fall is here!  It is the season for raking leaves, digging out the warm winter jackets and wool hats, and getting your pumpkin ready for the visits of your neighborhood's little ghosties and goblins on Halloween.  If you're looking for a spooky little literary 'treat' for yourself, look no further--I have a recommendation for you.

Two years ago, while wandering around my favorite bookstore, on a whim I picked up a hardcover edition of a novella by Douglas Clegg entitled, Isis.  This little book of just 113 pages is heartbreakingly good, and is profusely illustrated with beautiful and very detailed pen-and-ink line drawings by Glenn Chadbourne.  Honestly, I think the primary reason I purchased the book initially was because of the quality of the illustrations.  It really piqued my interest as soon as I picked it up and flipped through it.  

Isis is a gripping and truly macabre tale.  In essence, Clegg has given the reader a superb retelling of the ancient Egyptian Osiris and Isis myth.  Isis is set in Cornwall during the Victorian Period, and is a classic tragedy involving Love, Life, and Loss as experienced by a young woman, Iris Villiers, and her twin brothers, Harvey and Spencer.  The young people and their mother are staying at the decaying old mansion--Belerion Hall--that has been in the Villiers family for many, many years.  As befits a good scary story, there is an ancient and decrepit family burial ground next to the house that is known by the locals as "The Tombs", and the children are warned off of the place by the gardener, "Old Marsh".  While a quick read, Clegg's writing in this book is really quite good and deserves to be savored slowly.  Here's a little sample describing one of Iris's jaunts out across the Cornwall landscape--

"When the sun came out--for the summers at Belerion Hall were often long and pleasant--I saw the distant stone arches out along the tidal island that seemed to float atop turquoise waves.  I could sit near the cliff's edge on a beautiful summer's day and imagine the white sand below the cliffs to be full of pirate treasure.  My first governess told me of the seven stones in the old harbor to the west called "The Tin Men"; they had once been miners and had gone so deep into the earth that they were turned to rock itself.  Now they sat in the sea, having swallowed enemy ships that had attacked the port centuries before.  I loved the legends and tales, and in the village, where some of the folk spoke the old language, I began to learn a bit of it slowly and loved being able to say a word or two in Cornish."

Or, this wonderful description of Iris in her grandfather's library--

"On rainy days, I explored my grandfather's immense and musty library, with its volumes of strange and wonderful books. It had no windows at all, so I could forget the gray wintry world outside. Its ceiling looked like elegant chocolates from a London confectionery, and it had bookcases so high that I had to climb ladders to see it all. I crept over to the hearth rug with several books and lay there in front of the huge stone fireplace to begin my escape from Belerion Hall through the pages of novels and histories."

Clegg's writing (this tale, at least) reminds me a bit of some of George Eliot's earlier works, or that of Thomas Hardy, as there's always that hint of bleakness or forthcoming tragedy lurking in the background. Clegg also does a superb job of blending bits of Celtic or Druidic legend and myth in with his retelling of the Isis/Osiris story, and it all works really, really well.  I'm not going to say any more about the plot of the book, but suffice it to say that it has a series of twists that you probably won't see coming and that will both surprise and horrify.  This is probably not a tale for the very young either; it is dark, gritty, realistic, and terribly bittersweet, with some pretty significant moral lessons throughout.  This hauntingly beautiful novella is one to read while safely ensconced in a warm living room in front of a crackling fire with a nice steaming mug of hot apple-cider.  Have a Happy and Safe Halloween and do let me know how you liked Isis.

Isis
By Douglas Clegg 
Vanguard Press, 2009
Hardcover edition, 113 pages.

***

Meme: Teaser Tuesdays

TEASER TUESDAYS asks you to:
- Grab your current read
- Open to a random page
- Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
- BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
- Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser is:

"Stepping forward in this direction yet a little further, he could see the tower of West Endelstow Church, beneath which he was to meet his Elfride that night.  And at the same time he noticed, coming over the hill from the cliffs, a white speck in motion."

This was taken from page 180 of my current read, A Pair of Blue Eyes, by Thomas Hardy (Wordsworth Classics edition).  This is considered to be the second in his series of 'Wessex' novels, and was the first published under his own name in 1873.  It is also considered quasi-autobiographical, reflecting some of the experiences associated with the courtship of his future wife, Emma Gifford.  It was from this novel that the literary term "cliff hanger" was presumed to have originated.


[The rules for Teaser Tuesdays comes from MizB at Should Be Reading]

Possession By A.S. Byatt & Some Musings on Poetry

By way of a bit of background, I should mention that I belong to two different on-line book groups. I guess they could both be best characterized as "Facebook," or social networking, for bibliophiles. I have an account with Shelfari.com and with Goodreads.com. They are both wonderful on-line book experiences; and allow members to join various discussion groups, based upon your literary interests. For example, on Goodreads I belong to a "Victorian Era" discussion group, and we are getting ready to do a group read and discussion of a "neo-Victorian" novel; and the book chosen by the group was A.S. Byatt's 1990 novel Possession: A Romance. I first read this novel shortly after it came out in 1990. The novel also won a prestigious Booker Award in 1990 (the British equivalent of the American Pulitzer Prize).

Possession is a beautiful novel, exquisitely plotted and written; and incorporates a substantial amount of Romantic and Victorian poetry. There's bits of Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, etc. scattered throughout. However, much of the poetry included in the novel is that written by Byatt herself, in the style of Alfred, Lord Tennyson or Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti. The poetry is critically important to the novel's dual plots too. All I can say is that it is all delightful to read!

Re-reading this novel has recently inspired me to pick up and begin reading selected poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, William Butler Yeats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I am pretty familiar with all of the Romantic Era poets, having taken a course in college, years ago. I was not, however, particularly familiar with the work of the prominent Victorian Era poets; and all I can say is, "Wow!"

For example, Christina Rossetti was the sister of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; and she is simply a fabulous poet. A wonderful poem to start with is her longish famous narrative Goblin Market. Well worth some careful study, it is an epic poem that touches on feminism, sisterhood, and strong mythological and religious themes. Alfred, Lord Tennyson is probably familiar to most folks. He succeeded William Wordsworth as "Poet Laureate" for the United Kingdom, a post he held for 42 years until his death in 1892. Tennyson is probably best known for his book-length Arthurian epic poem, Idylls of the King. Also, I dearly love his beautiful poem, The Lady of Shalott; and who has not read The Charge of the Light Brigade?

In closing, if you've not read a truly beautiful romance novel lately; I strongly recommend A.S. Byatt's Possession. You might mix it up with a little bit of poetry too, just to make the experience even richer. Go find yourself a collection of Rossetti, Tennyson, or Yeats; make yourself a pot of tea, and settle back in your favorite chair and have some quiet time.