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WORK TITLE: The Scapegoat
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CITY: London
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 269
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PERSONAL
Born December 7, 1951, in London, England; daughter of Michael (a land agent) and Penelope (a university lecturer and writer) Hughes-Hallett; married Dan Franklin (a publisher); children: Lettice, Mary (twins).
EDUCATION:Bedford College, London University, B.A. (with first-class honors), 1973.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Vogue magazine, writer, 1974-79; London Evening Standard, television critic, 1983-87.
MEMBER:Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Historical Association (honorary fellow). Was chair of the judges of the 2021 International Booker Prize.
AWARDS:Catherine Pakenham Award for journalism, 1980; Emily Toth Award, 1991; Fawcett Book Prize, 1992; Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, Baillie Gifford Prize for biography, and Costa Award for biography, all 2013, the Duff Cooper Prize, 2014, and the Sunday Times’s Biography of the Decade, all for The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions, a book that examines the enduring historical character. Cleopatra was an Egyptian girl of Greek descent who came to the throne of Egypt in 51 B.C. She had a productive reign of twenty years and, by most accounts, killed herself when she lost control of Egypt to the Roman empire. However, these facts are not what sustains Cleopatra as an icon. Rather, as Hughes-Hallett’s book delineates, Cleopatra exists for many as an archetypical temptress and an example of feminine power. She is often portrayed as an extravagant, power-hungry nymphomaniac—one who had well publicized affairs with two prominent Romans, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony. While it is fact that Cleopatra did have relationships with both men, the author contends that much of the Queen’s libidinous excess was fabricated. Hughes-Hallett postulates that, by the standards of the era she lived in, Cleopatra’s sexual habits were relatively abstemious. In addition, Cleopatra provides evidence that the young queen was a gifted diplomat, an astute businesswoman, and a respected philosopher, attributes that provide a more accurate view of her clouded past.
Hughes-Hallett’s book goes beyond the mere separation of fact from fiction and seeks to address why such contrivances arose regarding Cleopatra. The author sees her subject as a victim of deconstruction; the facts have been ignored and distorted in the search for deeper, subliminal meanings. People have, she alleges, chosen their own truths about Cleopatra, shaping her to their ideals. To illustrate this, Hughes-Hallett charts Cleopatra’s status as an icon through the centuries, from early fictional accounts, to depictions in art, and finally to the Cleopatras portrayed in movies by such actresses as Theda Bara, Sophia Loren, and Elizabeth Taylor. Hughes-Hallett notes that each era and each school of thought has taken Cleopatra and molded her into its own creation, reflecting that period’s mores. In conservative times, Cleopatra was seen as a manipulating, materialistic jezebel who would stop at nothing to attain her goals, while in more liberal eras, the young queen was perceived as a progenitor of woman’s rights. Through these interpretations, Hughes-Hallett contends, Cleopatra personified societal views of women. As Sara Nelson wrote in her review of Cleopatra in People: “How we have viewed Cleopatra … amplifies how our societies have viewed women.” Or, as Tim Heald observed in the London Times: “Cleopatra is a beholder’s vision, fashioned by the times, the prejudices, the lusts and the proclivities of her interpreters.”
“This is a gripping book. Miss Hughes-Hallett is magnificently scholarly, yet she writes with ease and fluency,” lauded a reviewer in the Economist. Critical reaction to Cleopatra often praised Hughes-Hallett’s exhaustive research and literate compilation of such diverse information. “Lucy Hughes-Hallett writes very well,” wrote novelist John Updike in the New York Times Book Review, “and she has … done perhaps all the Cleopatra research that can humanly be done.” Heald wrote in the London Times that “Hughes-Hallett writes a witty style. … She never descends to the arid obscurities of the professional academic.” Praising the author for her penetrating study of both Cleopatra and the injustices wrought on women through the ages, Joan Smith wrote in New Statesman and Society that Hughes-Hallett “brings … trenchant intelligence to bear on the subject, and in doing so throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy.”
In 2013, Hughes-Hallett published Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War. In the United Kingdom, the book appeared under the title The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War. In this work of creative nonfiction, Hughes-Hallett presents an account of the life and legacy of the little-known Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, a poet who also claims to have created Fascism. Hughes-Hallett abandons chronology in her telling of this extraordinary narcissist and nationalist, preferring instead to piece together fragments of a life that becomes a disturbing window into his place and time.
“It was a good idea of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s to retrieve someone so ambivalent and hold him up for inspection,” remarked David Pryce-Jones in the National Review. He continued: “Here is a determined effort to provide all the evidence for and against D’Annunzio, no matter how trivial the details. … Lucy Hughes-Hallett has done her level best to be dispassionate, but there can be no mistaking that she is recounting a parable about the decline of European civilization.”
New York Times Book Review contributor Sheri Berman was critical of the work, writing: “Despite her ostensible emphasis on politics, Hughes-Hallett spends little time discussing or analyzing actual political events or trends, focusing more on d’Annunzio’s admittedly remarkable personal life. The picture she paints is unedifying. … He comes off less as Übermensch than as Real Housewife of Rome. The biggest problem with the book, however, is that it never really substantiates its case for d’Annunzio’s extraliterary significance.” Ray Olson, writing in Booklist, was more complimentary, asserting that “D’Annunzio is appalling but, as Hughes-Hallett presents him, completely enthralling.” “Once set against the unbearable waste of war, and the terrible blood-letting at Caporetto in 1917 that precipitated Italy’s postwar constitutional crisis, D’Annunzio’s vicious ideals and vacuous morality are stripped of all disguise,” wrote Andro Linklater in the Spectator. “They do not make for easy reading. Despite [its] flaws, The Pike stands out for its imaginative exploration of a poet who, although barely read today, still serves as a template for the politics of bombast and bunga-bunga.”
While some critics took issue with Hughes-Hallett’s creative nonfiction approach, others praised it. “Bland chronology is the opposite of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s beautiful, strange and original structure. The Pike—named after D’Annunzio’s quick grasp of new ideas and fashions—sets out the inner life of this fascinating man and does so in a dazzling jumble of fragments and obsessions.” [OPEN NEW] The book was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction, the Baillie Gifford Prize for biography, the Costa Award for biography, and the Duff Cooper Prize. It was even named by the Sunday Times as the Biography of the Decade.
Hughes-Hallett shifted to fiction with her debut novel Peculiar Ground. Set in both the seventeenth century after the end of the civil war in England and in the second half of the twentieth century, the story takes place on the Wychwood estate. In the first section, the landscape designer Mr. Norris has walled in the estate and turned it into a kind of private world, where some of the religious dissenters who lost in the war have taken refuge and others are pursuing their own private pleasures. The twentieth-century section opens in 1961, with the building of the Berlin Wall and goes through 1989 as it is about to be torn down. The theme of walls extends to the family drama that takes place on the Wychwood estate.
As Ruth Scurr noted in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, the novel is “structured as a series of jumps in time,” going from the 1660s to 1961 to 1973 and then 1989. She called it an “elegant and witty novel of ideas,” and she praised Hughes-Hallett for how she explores “the attractions and dangers of enclosed communities and nations.” A contributor in Publishers Weekly described the novel as an “enjoyable, sprawling epic.” They compared it to Alain Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and predicted that “readers will delight” in exploring the Wychwood estate.
“A first novel stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They called it a “timely meditation on walls, on what they keep in and what they keep out,” and they were especially pleased by “Hughes-Hallett’s choice to turn minor players into major characters.” Erica Wagner, in the New Statesman, also used the word “timely” in describing the novel, and she praised it for how the novel’s setting is “magically and moving evoked.” She wrote that it will remain “in the imagination long after the reader passes beyond its gates. Andrew Barrow, in the Spectator, described the book as a “rewardingly heavyweight novel.”
Hughes-Hallett explored another genre with Fabulous, a collection of short stories that are based on ancient myths, medieval folklore, and the Bible, but are all set in modern Britain. Characters include everyone from an elderly musician suffering from dementia to an arrogant real estate agent to a well-behaved but single librarian. The stories’ influences are timeless, but they focus on contemporary issues such as the #metoo movement and the problems with Britain’s National Health Service. Summaries of the ancient writings Hughes-Hallett is referencing are included in the back of the book.
Writing in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, Barbara Graziosi wrote, “Once you have entered the world of Fabulous, you are unlikely to leave until you’re done.” She praised the “magnetic quality to the writing” and noted that the stories return to key themes such as “predatory men” and “strangely resilient women.” “This collection shows how classic themes continue to inform the fiction of today,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, but they also stated that “each retelling works as a modern story in its own right.”
With The Scapegoat: The Brilliant, Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, Hughes-Hallett returned to biography. The book chronicles the life of George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham and an advisor to both King James I and King Charles I. Although Villiers was assassinated at the age of thirty-five, he had an important impact on seventeenth-century England, and Hughes-Hallett describes what Villiers was like and how he fit into the court life of his time.
Ophelia Field, in TLS: Times Literary Supplement, wrote that Hughes-Hallett “proves herself alive to the nuances of gender and sexuality in the early seventeenth century.” Field appreciated how the book’s history has modern resonance: “It is about how two things can be true at once: how people with power, wealth and privilege might act without evil intent, and in line with societal norms, yet be responsible for immense harm.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews called the book a “delicious account of English politics in the decades after Elizabeth.” They praised it as “great men and politics history at its best.”
Lisa Hilton, in the Spectator, found this book even better than Hughes-Hallett’s earlier award-winning biography. She called The Scapegoat “brilliant” and “balanced” and an “almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I’s reign in all its glittering strangeness.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews agreed, describing it as “exhilarating” and a “captivating study of the psychodrama of power.”
[CLOSE NEW]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2013, Ray Olson, review of Gabriele D’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, p. 13.
Economist, March 17, 1990, reviews of Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams, and Distortions, p. 87; January 12, 2013, review of Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 75.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2013, review of Gabriele D’Annunzio; November 1, 2017, review of Peculiar Ground; November 15, 2019, review of Fabulous; November 1, 2024, review of The Scapegoat: The Brilliant, Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham.
National Review, October 28, 2013, David Pryce-Jones, “The War Lover,” p. 58.
New Statesman, May 26, 2017, Erica Wagner, “Crowded House,” review of Peculiar Ground, p. 47.
New Statesman and Society, February 9, 1990, Joan Smith, review of Cleopatra, p. 37; February 8, 2013, Daniel Swift, “The First Skinhead,” p. 44.
New York Times Book Review, June 10, 1990, John Updike, review of Cleopatra, pp. 9, 40; August 30, 2013, Sheri Berman, review of Gabriele D’Annunzio.
People, July 16, 1990, Sara Nelson, review of Cleopatra, p. 23.
Publishers Weekly, May 20, 2013, review of Gabriele D’Annunzio, p. 44; November 6, 2017, review of Peculiar Ground, p. 56; November 25, 2019, review of Fabulous, p. 81; September 23, 2024, review of The Scapegoat, p. 46.
Spectator, January 19, 2013, Andro Linklater, “Italy’s First Duce,” p. 36; May 20, 2017, Andrew Barrow, “Paradise or Prison?” review of Peculiar Ground, p. 36; October 19, 2024, Lisa Hilton, “Mad about the Boy,” review of The Scapegoat, pp. 36+.
Telegraph (London, England), January 21, 2013, Jonathan Keates, review of The Pike.
Times (London, England), February 17, 1990, Tim Heald, review of Cleopatra.*
TLS. Times Literary Supplement, June 9, 2017, Ruth Scurr, “Those Other Edens,” review of Peculiar Ground, p. 28; June 28, 2019, Barbara Graziosi, “Girlfriend in a Coma,” review of Fabulous, p. 22; October 11, 2024, Ophelia Field, “Favourite’s Fortunes: George Villiers Made Himself Indispensable to Two Kings,” review of The Scapegoat, p. 11.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lucy Angela Hughes-Hallett (born 7 December 1951)[1] is a British cultural historian, biographer[2] and novelist. In November 2013, she won the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction for her biography of the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike.[3] The book also won the 2013 Costa Book Award (Biography)[4][5] and the Duff Cooper Prize.[6]
Biography
Lucy Hughes-Hallett has written four works of nonfiction: Cleopatra, Heroes, The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio, and The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham.[7] She has also written a novel, Peculiar Ground, set partly in the 1660s and partly during the Cold War. In her collection of short stories, Fabulous, she reimagines stories from classical mythology, the Bible, and folklore, setting them in modern Britain.
Hughes-Hallett was a Vogue Talent Contest prizewinner in 1973 and subsequently worked for five years as a feature writer on the magazine. In 1978 she won the Catherine Pakenham Award for Young Female Journalists for a profile of Roald Dahl. Since then she has written on books and arts for all of the British broadsheet newspapers including The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She was television critic of the London Evening Standard for five years.
She has judged the WH Smith Literary Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Encore Award, the RSL Jerwood Award, the Rathbones Folio Prize, and the Hawthornden Prize.
In 2021 she was the Chair of the Judges of the International Booker Prize.
She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of the Historical Association.[8]
In 1984, she married publisher Dan Franklin. They have two daughters.
Selected publications
Hughes-Hallett, L. (1990). Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions. New York: Harper & Row.[9]
Hughes-Hallett, L. (2004). Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. London: Harper Press;[10] Heroes (no subtitle), New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Hughes-Hallett, L. (2013). The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, London: 4th Estate; Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, New York: Alfred A. Knopf
Hughes-Hallett, L. (2017). Peculiar Ground: A Novel, London: 4th Estate
Hughes-Hallett, L. (2019). Fabulous: Stories, London: 4th Estate
Hughes-Hallett, L. (2024). The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham, London: 4th Estate; New York: HarperCollins Publishers.[11][12][13][14]
THE SCAPEGOAT
The brilliant brief life of the Duke of Buckingham
LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT
640pp. Fourth Estate. 30 [pounds sterling].
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was "a man who lived a woman's life". This is how Lucy Hughes-Hallett introduces her richly multilayered, Life of the royal favourite who was only thirty-five when he was assassinated in 1628. Her assertion that Buckingham would have faced less criticism if he had been a woman is debatable --his "pushy tiger-mother", Mary, might have begged to differ--but elsewhere Hughes-Hallett proves herself alive to the nuances of gender and sexuality in the early seventeenth century.
She shows how gender was defined by power hierarchies rather than merely constrained by them, such that both Buckingham and parliament, viewed by James I as his subordinates, were therefore referred to as his "wife". She also emphasizes that "everyone knew that he [King James] loved men", and concludes, after analysing one of James's letters to his favourite: "Whatever species of emotion is being described here--sexual or paternal, benign or abusive--it is certainly love". This must surely remain a central biographical truth about James, irrespective of whether penises entered orifices, and despite the compelling case made by Noel Malcolm in his recent book, Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, that James's relationships have been misread against a Mediterranean model that was rare in England and Scotland. Whatever his models, Hughes-Hallett sees the king as having grown up "emotionally ravenous" for intimacy, which he satiated through his relationships with attractive younger men, then finally by surrounding himself with Buckingham's relations.
Like the ideal courtier described by Castiglione, Hughes-Hallett possesses the quality of sprezzatura ("doing difficult things and making them look easy"). She brings an immense allusive range, from Hindu spiritualism to Shakespeare's Ulysses, while often writing in short, pithy sentences. Similarly, the book contains 114 snack-sized chapters. Many of these are thematic, like Francis Bacon essays. One on "Chivalry", for example--interjected near 1623, when Buckingham and the future Charles I were playing chivalric knights on a quest not only to woo the Spanish Infanta, but thereby, they hoped, to rescue Charles's dethroned sister Elizabeth, the "Winter Queen" of Bohemia--shows how the 1620s were a time when courtly love and chivalry were "at once obsolete and still potent", rather like nationalism today. Other chapters contain short lives of secondary characters and in one case a fascinating mini group biography of ambassadors and artists: Balthazar Gerbier, Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Dudley Carleton and Sir Henry Wotton.
Many other chapters are written in quasi-list form. These include one setting out the rungs of Buckingham's advancement; another listing his property dealings; one that weighs up a particular military strategy; another that details the pressing concerns that show why the Count of Olivares, Buckingham's Spanish counterpart, treated negotiating with the English as unimportant. These chapters are not a lazy putting of notes between covers, as they might have been in other hands. Instead they make this brick of a book feel refreshingly light and contemporary, while at the same time suited to the seventeenth century. They are akin to the wish list of exotic marvels that Buckingham gave to his adventurer gardener, John Tradescant, or to the list of "Particular Misdemeanours of the Duke" composed to impeach Buckingham in 1626. This is biography as part Jacobean tragedy and part Wunderkammer.
Chronological narrative increases as the book goes on, and by the time the story reaches James's death in 1625, it is used with precision to emphasize how the (recently revived) allegations that Buckingham murdered James did not really start circulating until a year later, in spring 1626, and that an important eyewitness (Buckingham's barber) was not produced to defend him until 1648, when Charles I, a prisoner of parliament, was charged with having been Buckingham's accomplice.
Hughes-Hallett mostly follows Roger Lockyer's Life of Buckingham (1981) as her default, but she foregrounds her primary sources--literally, giving them their own cast list in the book's frontmatter --and has a reliable ear for their best turns of phrase, some of which are well-known chestnuts, others newly foraged. She quotes the Duke's contemporary biographer, Wotton, for example, on how "the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will and rarely transmitted"--underlining that Buckingham's political survival into Charles's reign was an exception that proved that rule. Unfortunately for Buckingham, another rule--that royal favourites should serve as the monarch's "human shield" proved less breakable. But if he was a scapegoat, this was less for the failings of the king--whose pacificism Hughes-Hallett obviously admires--than for the failings of seventeenth-century taxation, constitutional arrangements and military funding.
"Buckingham's critics thought he was a self-indulgent flibbertigibbet. They had no idea how hard he worked", she writes. Her point that Villiers lived an early modern woman's life is sometimes strained by these simultaneous attempts to make him more than "a merely decorative figure". In fact, his main talent as a politician was delegating to hard-working men such as Bacon or Lionel Cranfield (just as his main talent as a connoisseur was in hiring Gerbier). When one contemporary bemoaned the fact that, in the Duke's absence, military preparations suffered "extreme delays", this was a problem of an absent gatekeeper at a locked gate, rather than proof of exceptional work ethic or meticulousness. Similarly, readiness to believe that Buckingham's "modesty, mollification and obligingness" were sincere, that he was not implicated in betraying Bacon in 1621, or pocketing his townhouse, and that he was always "doing his best", all make it harder to understand him as a consistent personality. Why would this sweet-natured George Villiers suddenly have started bullying James in front of others after 1623?
James and Buckingham are also presented here, more accurately, as relatively naive international statesmen. The king is said to have written to the Pope about peace-making amid the Thirty Years War "as Jesus might have done", while Buckingham is repeatedly shown as unable to grasp the real-politik of diplomacy. But such naivety does not let them off the hook. We are reminded how to read the pearls swagged across Buckingham's chest "as thick as a horse's tail" in terms of the hundreds of people who had risked their lives to dive for them, and when he readies himself to take command, it is noted that "what he spent on equipping himself and his household would have maintained an entire regiment for six months". This is observed in the context of starving, unpaid troops, and of horrific battles lost on the Ile de Re.
The introduction offers just one explicitly modern analogy--to Dominic Cummings as an unelected adviser--but the book's implicit modern resonance runs much deeper. It is about how two things can be true at once: how people with power, wealth and privilege might act without evil intent, and in line with societal norms, yet be responsible for immense harm. How you can be a guilty scapegoat.
Ophelia Field is Director of the London-based MA/PhD Biography Programme at the University of Buckingham. Her books include The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 2002, second edition 2018
Caption: Detail of a portrait of George Villiers by Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, c.1625
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Field, Ophelia. "Favourite's fortunes: George Villiers made himself indispensable to two kings." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6341, 11 Oct. 2024, p. 11. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812248004/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=12a0f601. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy THE SCAPEGOAT Harper/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $40.00 11, 19 ISBN: 9780062940131
A delicious account of English politics in the decades after Elizabeth.
Historian Hughes-Hallett, author ofGabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, concentrates on the relations between middle-aged, unattractive but competent James I (reigned 1603-1625) and Henry Villiers (1592-1628), Duke of Buckingham, his "favorite." The word is passe, but even today's national leaders have a chief of staff or special advisor who owes their power to that leader alone and is often sacrificed to placate the populace. English monarchs in that era enjoyed great land wealth and executive authority but did not have absolute power and were usually short of money because taxes were temporary and required parliamentary approval. James had the enormous advantage (in our eyes) of being opposed to war and easygoing in matters of religion. This put him at odds with parliament, dominated by Puritans who considered British Catholics to be traitors and Catholic Spain a loathsome enemy. Mostly, he tried to rule without parliament. He had run through several favorites before Villiers joined the king's bedchamber in 1615. All were handsome young men, and modern scholars now accept that James was homosexual. Villiers and James developed a passionate relationship that seemed both sincere and physical. James showered him with estates, titles, and offices, provoking jealousy from peers and salacious commentary from the populace. This had little effect until 1624, when Britain went to war against Spain with enthusiastic support from parliament, Buckingham, and young Charles, who succeeded his father the following year. Combining lively prose and skilled scholarship, Hughes-Hallett describes the catastrophic military debacles that followed. With attacks on royalty off-limits, blame focused on Buckingham, but newly crowned Charles cut short charges by dissolving parliament, beginning the interregnum that ended with civil war and his own execution long after Buckingham himself had been assassinated to widespread applause.
Great men and politics history at its best.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hughes-Hallett, Lucy: THE SCAPEGOAT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883535/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4233f47c. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
4th Estate, [pounds sterling]30, pp. 640
The Duke of Buckingham, wrote Alexandre Dumas, lived 'one of those fabulous existences which survive... to astonish posterity'. In the summer of 1614, a young man from a modest gentry family was invited to a hunting party in Northamptonshire to meet a very special guest. George Villiers was affable, not terribly bright and superlatively beautiful. His mother Mary, a practical and ambitious woman, knew what his looks could do for the family, and she aimed high. The mark was King James I, a monarch who openly loved men. The king had lavished his then favourite, Robert Carr, with titles, wealth and great offices, but the finest pair of legs in Europe extinguished his star. James was to remain utterly enthralled by Villiers for the rest of his life, so ensorcelled that it was believed the author of Daemonologie had himself been bewitched.
The period between 1603 and 1625 hovers on the brink of modernity, its mores both recognisable and elusive; if the Jacobean age were to be personified in a masque, the bizarrely beautiful art form it created, it would dance as Janus, the god of duality and transition, looking simultaneously forward and back. As 'a man who lived a woman's life', Buckingham (as he became) is its alien familiar, the unique creature of a unique time.
Clever, coarse, suspicious and passionate, James I had endured an emotionally starved and frequently terrifying childhood, shadowed by the fate of his mother, Mary Queen of Scots. The precise nature of his physical relationship with Buckingham remains uncertain. More relevant, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett observes, was the king's need to make a whole family of his favourite. 'God bless you, my sweet child and wife,' runs an early letter, 'that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.' Buckingham was nicknamed 'Steenie' by the king, after St Stephen, who was said to have had 'the face of an angel'. In return, he happily described himself as James's 'dog'.
The contest between parliament and royal prerogative, which would ultimately end in civil war, had its roots in James's reign; but Buckingham benefitted from a monarchy which was still almost absolute. Knighted in 1615, he was a marquess by 1618, aged 25, and Lord High Admiral a year later.
In 1623, James made him a duke, the first time the title had been granted outside the royal family since the beheading of the Duke of Norfolk in 1572.
The Puritan writer Lucy Hutchinson sniffed that Buckingham had risen to 'a pitch of glory... upon no merit but that of his prostitution'. Yet, unlike a royal mistress, he was able to translate his position into one of genuine political influence, maintaining his domination into the next generation after James's death in 1626 with Charles I. The son may have loved Steenie almost as much as his father had, but Buckingham's career as the most powerful man in England, after two kings, can best be described as mixed.
An avid collector and genuine connoisseur of art, he was instrumental to the cultural flowering of the Caroline court (though Hughes-Hallett points out that James's neglected Danish Queen, Anne, who was mocked for spending so much time among her pictures, was the true founder of the Royal Collection). Aided by his dealer, Balthazar Gerbier, Buckingham amassed works by Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Raphael, Giorgione and Correggio, and employed Orazio Gentileschi as an interior decorator. A lost work by Rubens, 'The Apotheosis of the Duke of Buckingham', designed as the centrepiece of his London palace York House, can be seen in a sketch in the National Gallery, vast, magnificent and, inevitably, 'splendidly hubristic'.
As a diplomat and military leader, however, Buckingham was swiftly exposed as an amateur. His 'incognito' gallop to Madrid with Charles in pursuit of the Infanta Maria as a bride was a flamboyant fiasco, described by the Venetian ambassador as 'an abyss of marvels, a monster among decisions'. A second wedding mission produced a wife for the prince, the future Queen Henrietta Maria, but failed to secure the French alliance that was the object of the match. While James's diplomatic policies were directed at maintaining peace to preserve lives and money, Charles and Buckingham squandered both. A conscientious but incompetent commander, Buckingham became a positive liability in action. When he arrived at La Rochelle to 'liberate' the Huguenot city from Catholic oppression, the mayor met him at the gates and begged him to go away. Nor did he seem so splendid to the 5,000 (out of 8,000) men who lost their lives at the disastrous siege of the Ile de Re.
If Buckingham's ascent was due to the magic of the divine right, his fall may be attributed in part to a far more modern phenomenon: the press. The early 17th century witnessed a vast rise in publications for an increasingly literate and news-hungry public, which focused its discontents on the favourite. Rumours of sorcery, and even the murder of James I with a poisoned posset, gathered such force that parliament moved twice to impeach Buckingham on 13 charges, which included corruption, conspiring with the Pope and attempting to convert Charles to Catholicism. Buckingham implored Charles to allow him to answer the accusations, but the young king impetuously dissolved parliament to protect him. In 1628, Buckingham was stabbed to death by a disgruntled army officer, John Felton. Hailed as a hero before he was hanged, Felton had deprived the nation of the one man to whom Charles I listened.
Francis Bacon had warned Buckingham that royal favourites might be 'offered as a sacrifice to appease the multitude'. Scapegoat is a largely sympathetic portrait of a man trailed as sexual bait before the throne. Hughes-Hallett proved her exceptional scholarship with The Pike, her 2013 biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, but this balanced, brilliant book is even more ambitious. Pacing is dramatic: punchy, factual round-ups move along in tense, shifting montage, interspersed with disquisitions such as 'Advice on Bargaining' or dealing with ghosts. The author revels in the oddities and excitement of Jacobean language--the newsmart of St Paul's cathedral is 'the ears' brothel'; Buckingham on trial is the 'causer of causes'. Like its subject, this biography is a prodigy, an almost bewilderingly skilful portrait of James I's reign in all its glittering strangeness.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Hilton, Lisa. "Mad about the boy." Spectator, vol. 356, no. 10234, 19 Oct. 2024, pp. 36+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813145539/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da217fb6. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Life of the Duke of Buckingham
Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Harper, $40 (688p) ISBN 978-0-06-294013-1
This exhilarating biography from historian Hughes-Hallet (The Pike) recaps the life of George Villiers, an obscure son of English gentry who skyrocketed from cupbearer to King James I in 1614 to near-absolute power as James's (and his son Charles I's) prime minister, Lord High Admiral, and Duke of Buckingham. Villiers owed his rise to his intimate--likely sexual--relationship with James, who swooned over his good looks and elegant dancing. Hughes-Hallett's colorful narrative highlights Villiers's glamorous exploits--her account of his and Charles's journey in disguise to Spain to negotiate Charles's marriage is full of twisty intrigue--and his skill as a courtier and power broker who was charming, well-spoken, and ingratiating even to his enemies. She's also insightful on Villiers's undoing as a result of his ill-advised campaigns against Spain and France, which ended in bloody fiascos, partly because his forces fumed over lack of pay--it was a disgruntled soldier who assassinated him in 1628. By that time, Hughes-Hallett demonstrates, Villiers was the most hated man in England, accused of everything from witchcraft to killing King James; Parliament's attempts to impeach him sparked the antagonism between Charles and Parliament that would lead to civil war. Hughes-Hallet paints a glittering portrait of 17th-century court life, where authority often flowed from intense emotional rapport with the king and could lead to stunning falls from grace. It's a captivating study of the psychodrama of power. (Nov.)
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"The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Life of the Duke of Buckingham." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 36, 23 Sept. 2024, p. 46. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810712174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b081fd66. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
FABULOUS
224pp. Fourth Estate. 12.99[pounds sterling].
978 0 00 833485 7
It takes a few pages to get in there but once you have entered the world of Fabulous, you are unlikely to leave until you're done. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is best known for her cultural histories and biographies, including that of the Italian poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Pike (TLS, March 8, 2013); recently she published her debut novel, Peculiar Ground (TLS, June 9, 2017). The stories in this debut collection are based on ancient myth, the Gospels and medieval folklore, but they play out in various London boroughs, a small town with a library and a war memorial, a seaside resort with "a cafe that used to be a dance hall", and a Suffolk shore. Throughout, there is a magnetic quality to the writing, and a compelling uncertainty of purpose.
Orpheus, we learn, is a countertenor with recitals at the Maltings and the Wigmore Hall to his credit, "a middle-aged person's kind of artiste". He has dementia. Eurydice is not exactly ravishing ("thinning hair and scaly elbows") but she is lovely to him, even in her coma, which he manages to will himself into:
From morn to noon he fell, from noon to dewy
eve, and all that time he saw no one, and breathed
air that smelt of coal, and there was no dew, only
clamminess, and then he was in a room, or a
cavern--a finite space at least with black walls,
and shaded lights that set the blackness glittering
--and there was Eurydice, not the limp and pitiful
residue that had lain in the hospital bed, but
Eurydice herself, smiling at him with her
slightly crooked mouth.
"This is a bit drastic," she said. She disliked
theatrical gestures.
"I had to come," he said. "I'm no good without
you."
"Hey ho," she said, and he could see her
bracing herself to resume the business of being
loved.
Jesus and his disciples hang around in a pub and "make noise, not for purposes of communication but to show affection for each other. Got you! They holler. Nice one! Hear that, Andy?" Tristan works for an art dealer.
For readers straining to remember what exactly happens in some of the ancient fables revived in this collection, Hughes-Hallett provides brief summaries at the back. She acknowledges that they have "many variants and ramifications", but proceeds to "include only those parts of them echoed in the stories in this book". This eliminates the need for recollection and simultaneously discourages any attempt to delve further into the lore beyond what the author herself chooses to include: the focus should stay instead with its modern reincarnations. Hughes-Hallett lets us hear how people talk: doctors ("adequate level", "our experience tells us"), estate agents ("comprising", "utility room"), parents ("you know what they're like", "we've tried counselling"). And then, breaking through these platitudes, we hear the ancient tales, with their strange words and sudden wonders. Rather than showcase variety, the collection revolves around recurrent themes: several stories involve predatory men (often in packs) and "tremulous", "vague", yet strangely resilient women.
The demented Orpheus and the colourful Piper, who open and end the book, cause problems with their songs. Minos, a drug dealer, pimp and people-trafficker, punishes insubordinates by making them wear "a manky great bull's head that used to hang in the pub". Seen from a distance and in the falling light of evening, this form of punishment (ultimately leading to a broken neck) acquires a mesmerizing beauty. Hughes-Hallett uses myth to get at the shimmering violence underneath the dowdy trappings of little England. With some exceptions, the way she handles male characters echoes her preferences as a biographer: whatever attracted her to write about D'Annunzio, it was not his politeness. Unlike her magnetic men, her women seem distant, even desensitized. Diana exacts her revenge by proxy, never really showing her face. Psyche, on the verge of gang rape, is surprised to find "that the mind can keep coming up with ideas and observations". Pasiphae chooses to live underground, never leaving the orbit of her pimp. Isolde agrees to marry someone she does not love. And yet, somehow, these women endure--as the recurrence of myth suggests.
Caption: Orpheus in the Underworld, Young Vic Theatre, London, 2011
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Graziosi, Barbara. "Girlfriend in a coma." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6065, 28 June 2019, p. 22. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632058326/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=7f01838c. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Fabulous
Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Harper, $25.99 (224p) ISBN 978-0-06-294009-4
The characters in the eight clever stories collected for this offbeat volume include estate agents, window washers, and pest controllers, all of whom have the souls of gods and legendary beings from myths and folktales. In "Orpheus," a music hall singer named Oz is devastated to discover that his wife Eurydice's essence has been trapped in the underworld, leaving her comatose body aboveground. The title character of "Piper" is a bus-driving exterminator who abducts a town's children to become his traveling commune of performing "folkies" after the parents refuse to pay him for remedying their rat infestation. In "Pasiphae," Minos is a refugee-exploiting business manager and his consort gives birth to a bull-like son spawned from her liaison with a short-order cook nicknamed Toro. "Joseph" and "Mary Magdalene" both present characters from the Bible in inventive modern scenarios. Hallett (Peculiar Ground) forges novel situations for her quirky characters, and each retelling works well as a modern story in its own right. This collection shows how classic themes continue to inform the fiction of today. (Jan.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 PWxyz, LLC
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"Fabulous." Publishers Weekly, vol. 266, no. 47, 25 Nov. 2019, p. 81. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A607661836/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c4b0b674. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy FABULOUS Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $25.99 1, 14 ISBN: 978-0-06-294009-4
The author of Peculiar Ground (2018) reimagines familiar stories in the contemporary United Kingdom.
The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Orpheus, and Mary's husband, Joseph, are among the figures Hughes-Hallett lifts from mythology, fairy tales, and other traditional forms for this collection. In reimagining these characters, the author is participating in a tradition as old as storytelling itself. Much of the appeal of borrowing well-known characters and time-honored tropes lies in making the familiar fresh again. Writers from Ovid to William Shakespeare to Angela Carter show readers why particular narratives and narrative types endure by making them newly relevant. Hughes-Hallett's efforts to perform this same magic are mixed. Here, Mary Magdalen is a prostitute--not asserted in the New Testament but definitely an element of her legend--as well as an aesthetician who performs intimate waxes on clients. Psyche is a young woman so self-possessed and beautiful that she terrifies and enrages men. Actaeon is a wildly successful real estate agent and committed voyeur. Each of these stories has its charms, but none is particularly successful. Hughes-Hallett doesn't seem to grasp that her Mary Magdalen is so much more interesting than the Jesus figure who beguiles her; indeed, Mary Magdalen's attraction to this charismatic cypher is her least compelling feature. At the end of Psyche's tale, the author switches to a sort of postmodern voice that doesn't feel so much like an intriguing stylistic choice as like the author has lost interest in the story. And "Actaeon" suffers from two issues that are endemic in this collection. There is a heavy reliance on exposition, to the point that these tales read more like outlines for novels than short fictions. And these stories only come to life when knowledge of the source material isn't necessary to find the story compelling. "Orpheus" is a fantastic piece of short fiction even if you don't know anything about this musician as he appears in Greek poetry and multiple modern iterations. Hughes-Hallett's Oz is an old man among many old men hanging around a hospital ward. "Some of them had big trainers, shiny white shoes made for athletes, but here nobody sprang, nobody leapt." That's excellent anyway, and it's gorgeous if you know Oz's Greek antecedent.
A writer adept at long-form narrative delivers an uneven collection of short stories.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hughes-Hallett, Lucy: FABULOUS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Nov. 2019. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A605549549/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=85320f7a. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
PECULIAR GROUND
475pp. Fourth Estate. 16.99 [pounds sterling].
978 0 00 812650 6
Paradise is a Middle English word of Old French, Latin, Greek and Avestan derivation. Its literal meaning is "walleden-closure". In her debut novel, Peculiar Ground, Lucy Hughes-Hallett explores a quintessentially English understanding of paradise: a walled enclosure surrounding a stately home.
The fictional Wychwood resembles an estate in Oxfordshire that Hughes-Hallett "once knew well". In 1663, when the novel begins, the old house is securely back in Lord Woldingham's possession, after his exile under the Commonwealth, when a different branch of the family, "not of the King's party", took Wychwood over. To celebrate and consolidate his renewed dominion, Lord Woldingham decides to enclose his park "in a great ring of stone". In his journal Wychwood's landscape-maker John Norris records:
My task is to create an Eden encompassing the
house, so that the garden will be only the innermost
chamber of an enclosure so spacious that,
for one living within it, the outside world, with its
shocks and annoyances, will be but a memory.
Despite these aspirations the paradise of Wychwood entails permanent paradox because a wall is both protective and imprisoning. Moreover, the distinction between the privileged space within the wall and the inferior world without cannot be maintained. There are "sunken ways of such ancient use that they traverse the park like trenches", and even if the new wall can temporarily keep out trespassers, dissenters and sorcerers, it will not do so forever.
More immediately, Lord Woldingham loses his eldest son and heir to the kind of random drowning accident no man-made barrier can prevent. When people on the estate try to blame the child's death on an old woman suspected of witchcraft, Lord Woldingham makes a noble speech from the plinth on the parterre, denouncing violence, vengeance and sectarian strife: "It is my wish, as it is His Majesty the King's--and he is wise in this--that we should put aside our quarrels and strive to make this a peaceful nation, whose people are united in their desire to see their country prosper". While he is delivering his ageless speech, a preening peacock appears on the elevated lawn, competing with Lord Woldingham for attention. In a later section of the novel, set in 1989, another peacock appears in front of a Mughal-style pavilion at the head of an ornamental canal. Selim, a journalist from Pakistan who has been given sanctuary at Wychwood after publishing an extract from Midnight's Children, reflects: "There are no nations, only places. Everything mingles. Nothing can be excluded. Birds, gazebos, assassins. You can't keep them out".
Peculiar Ground is structured as a series of jumps in time "like a gramophone needle leaping a groove". After the seventeenth-century construction of the wall at Wychwood, we shift to 1961, 1973 and 1989 when the gardens, birds and animals seem unchanged; there is still a pug called Lupin, pheasants to shoot and deer in the park, but a new cast of characters frequents the old house. Christopher Rossiter and his wife Lil are now the proprietors. Like their predecessor, they have lost a son. Christopher's grandfather bought the estate, largely for the pleasure of possessing its beech trees, which are "older by several generations than his traceable family tree". Hughes-Hallett summons a continuous house party of guests, some of whom might have strayed from the pages of Evelyn Waugh, others from Anthony Powell, or A. S. Byatt. Two in particular stand out. Benjie, the lascivious restaurateur and interior designer, making passes in full view of his wry, long-suffering wife, "at the hostess, or the host. Or the dog, for goodness sake". And Nicholas, the newspaper editor, besieged by younger visitors to Wychwood, hoping for careers in journalism. In 1973 one of them sends a lengthy dispatch from Berlin:
Walled-in West Berlin is a walled garden of
earthly delights positively writhing with the
serpents of temptation. It's full of fetid cellars
where boys and girls as beautiful as angels drive
themselves out of their minds every night, and its
music scene is sublime. Take the concert from
which I've just reeled away....
Nicholas's editorial response is: "Thanks. We
can use this, but we'll have to chop it. Keep to
length next time".
The rise and fall of the Berlin Wall is distantly observed from Wychwood, where storm damage destroying many of the majestic beech trees seems more significant. By 1989 the estate is being bankrolled by its wildlife park: "The number of animals that died there, unable to acclimatize to Cotswold winters, was carefully kept from visitors". Behind every Eden there is trickery and contrivance. The novel ends with an imagined conversation between a beetle and a mouse in the original Garden of Eden: "The beetle said, 'These are formidable defences. No one can enter Eden. But I do not see that there is anything to prevent us leaving'".
The novel's title comes from Isaac Watts's early eighteenth-century hymn: "We are a garden walled around, / Chosen and made peculiar ground; / A little spot enclosed by grace / Out of the world's wide wilderness". But the Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher song of the 1930s, "Don't Fence Me In", is equally important in this elegant and witty novel of ideas. Lucy Hughes-Hallett could not have known when she made the bold decision to turn to fiction after the success of her biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, The Pike (TLS, March 8, 2013), how topical the subject of boundary walls would be in 2017. But the attractions and dangers of enclosed communities and nations are also timeless.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Scurr, Ruth. "Those other Edens." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5958, 9 June 2017, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A634850024/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=224dd482. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett. Harper, $28.99 (464p)
ISBN 978-0-06-268419-6
Author of an acclaimed biography of the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, Hughes-Hallet offers an enjoyable, sprawling epic debut about an enclosed paradise. Populated by a large cast, its subject is singular: Wynchwood, a lavish English country estate that weathers centuries of upheavals, from civil war to its transformation into a theme park for the aristocrat-obsessed. The novel concentrates on two historical eras. The 17th-century scenes, which bookend the novel, focus on John Norris, a prim landscape architect with extravagant Eden-like visions for the estate. Magnificent though his designs may be, the outside world creeps in, notably in the form of tragic accidents and the plague that ravaged England in 1665. These sections, which include flourishes of historical and cultural detail (witchcraft, folklore, secret religious Sects), paint a vivid picture. The novel's middle episodes, which check in on the fast-living set congregating at Wynchwood during key moments throughout the Cold War, are the highlight: consistently witty, they are reminiscent of another country house saga, Alain Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. Hughes-Hallett effectively expands the domestic drama to touch on class resentment, religious conflict, and international affairs. Her Wynchwood is a remarkable, ambivalent creation, "at once a sanctuary and place of internment," and readers will delight at strolling its grounds under her guidance. (Jan.)
Caption: Lucy Hughes-Hallett's debut novel, Peculiar Ground, follows events on a lavish English country estate over the centuries (reviewed on this page).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
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"Peculiar Ground." Publishers Weekly, vol. 264, no. 45, 6 Nov. 2017, p. 56. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A514056578/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d1b9d3e4. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Hughes-Hallett, Lucy PECULIAR GROUND Harper/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $28.99 1, 9 ISBN: 978-0-06-268419-6
An award-winning historian (Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War, 2013, etc.) makes her fiction debut with a story vast in scope but intimate in its details.
The year is 1663. England's civil war has ended. Newly returned from exile, royalist Arthur Fortescue, the Earl of Woldingham, has hired the landscaper John Norris to turn his ancestral home into a private paradise. As he is drawn ever deeper into the life of Wychwood, Norris discovers that the Earl's plan to enclose his new gardens, fountains, and tree-lined avenues within a wall will be a disaster for the religious dissenters who live and worship in the forest around the estate. The Earl's land, Norris learns, is crisscrossed with secret paths used by people scorned and abused for their faith. When Hughes-Hallett brings the narrative 300 years into the future without first resolving this issue, the shift feels abrupt. But it soon becomes clear that the temporal leap makes perfect sense: the issue of the wall is unresolved because it is irresolvable. Who owns the land, who has right of way, what the very wealthy owe everyone else: these are questions that never go away. Hughes-Hallett explores how the past persists in other--more personal--ways as well. Relationships between masters and servants recapitulate themselves across generations. Family tragedies repeat with slight variations. Wychwood remains a world unto itself even as people come and go and the property changes hands. Time feels like a circle, and the novel brings us to 1989 before taking us back to the 17th century. There are multiple narrators and perspectives here, but the text never feels cacophonous because each voice is so exquisitely limned. Hughes-Hallett's choice to turn minor players into major characters is especially satisfying; of course those who rely upon the wealthy and powerful must be canny observers of the wealthy and powerful. The novel is a pleasure to read for the loveliness of its language. It's also a timely meditation on walls, on what they keep in and what they keep out.
A first novel stunning for both its historical sweep and its elegant prose.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hughes-Hallett, Lucy: PECULIAR GROUND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A512028684/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=221cfdb1. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Fourth Estate, 496pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling]
The great cutting heads of the Crossrail tunnel-boring machines were engines of the future drilling into the past. The whole railway project entailed a crawl back into history as archaeologists worked hand in hand with engineers, preserving--as far as possible--the ancient treasures they discovered along the way. One of the most striking finds, relics of which are now on display at the Museum of London Docklands, was a batch of skeletons, unearthed near Liverpool Street Station, in which the bacteria responsible for the Great Plague of 1665 were identified for the first time. Past and present are never truly separable.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's ambitious first novel ends in 1665 in the aftermath of that plague, and it, too, dances between past and present, history and modernity. Like those skeletons buried for centuries beneath Bishopsgate, it is rooted in the ground. The eponymous "peculiar ground" is Wychwood, a great house in Oxfordshire, a place where the wealthy can build walls around themselves to keep out ugliness, poverty, political change. Or at least that is what they believe they can do; it doesn't spoil the intricacies of this novel to say that, in the end, they will not succeed.
It is a timely idea. No doubt Hughes-Hallett was working on her novel long before a certain presidential candidate announced that he would build a great wall, but this present-day undiplomatic reality can never be far from the reader's mind, and nor will the questions of Britain's connection to or breakage with our European neighbours. Hughes-Hallett's last book, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, "the John the Baptist of fascism", won a slew of awards when it was published four years ago and demonstrated the author's skill in weaving together the forces of culture and politics.
Peculiar Ground does not confine itself to a single wall. Like Tom Stoppard's classic play Arcadia, it sets up a communication between centuries in the grounds at Wychwood. In the 17th century, John Norris is a landscape-maker, transforming natural countryside into artifice on behalf of the Earl of Woldingham, who has returned home from the depredations of the English Civil War. In the 20th century a new cast of characters inhabits Wychwood, but there are powerful resonances of the past in this place, not least because those who look after the estate--foresters, gardeners, overseers appear to be essentially the same people. It is a kind of manifestation of what has been called the Stone Tape theory, after a 1972 television play by Nigel Kneale in which places carry an ineradicable echo of their history, causing ghostly lives to manifest themselves through the years.
But the new story in Peculiar Ground broadens, heading over to Germany as it is divided between East and West in 1961, and again as that division falls away in 1989. Characters' lives cannot be divorced from their historical context. The English breakage of the civil war echoes through Europe's fractures during the Cold War. The novel asks how much human actors shape history and how much is beyond their control.
At times these larger questions can overwhelm the narrative. As the book progresses we dance between a succession of many voices, and there are moments when their individual stories are less compelling than the political or historical situations that surround them. But perhaps that is the point. Nell, the daughter of the land agent who manages Wychwood in the 20th century, grows up to work in prison reform and observes those who live in confinement. "An enclosed community is toxic," she says. "It festers. It stagnates. The wrong people thrive there. The sort of people who actually like being walled in."
The inhabitants of this peculiar ground cannot see what is coming. The novel's modern chapters end before the 21st century, but the future is foreshadowed in the person of Selim Malik, who finds himself hiding out at Wychwood in 1989 after he becomes involved in the publication of an unnamed author's notorious book. "The story you're all so worked up about is over," he says to a journalist writing about the sup posed end of the Cold War. "The story I'm part of is the one you need to think about."
A little heavy handed, maybe--but we know Selim is right. No doubt, however, Wychwood will endure. The landscape of this novel--its grounds and waters and walls--is magically and movingly evoked, and remains in the imagination long after the reader passes beyond its gates.
Erica Wagner's "Chief Engineer: the Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge" is published by Bloomsbury
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
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Wagner, Erica. "Crowded house." New Statesman, vol. 146, no. 5368, 26 May 2017, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A497729420/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ca9b7ed7. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.
Peculiar Ground
by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
Fourth Estate, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 475
This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story begins in 1663, jumps forward to modern times and then back to 1665.
On all occasions, our attention is less on the actual house, Wychwood, than on the power of nature, whatever's left of the surrounding primeval forest, ornamental lakesin-the-making, majestic vistas and, above all, the 'monstrously expensive' wall or 'the great ring of stone', built, or being built, around its park.
Those featured include the original landscape designer Mr Norris, his silk-coated, high-heeled employer Lord Woldingham and later the silk-and-chiffon-clad Rossiters, who rule the roost in the 1960s. And of course their assorted staff: slightly too many gardeners, foresters and farm managers, many of whom confusingly have the same names as their ancient predecessors. There are also two witches, both called Meg, and three dogs, all called Lupin.
Much of the action takes place in a fan-shaped hollow within the wall where masques, ballets and concerts are performed --one of them features Joshua at the walls of Jericho--and which often end with some natural disaster, an inferno or even a murderous 'punch of invisible energy'.
More than 100 pages are devoted to a 'fancy-pants' house party at Wychwood in the 1960s, attended by a classic young 'pooftah' art dealer and an up-and-coming journalist working in Fleet Street. The latter's presence provides a vital link with the ongoing Cold War, spies, atom bombs and particularly Berlin where, of course, another important wall just happens to be being built.
This happy, tragic, ever expanding and literally groundbreaking story focuses mainly on the ambiguous nature of walls. Has Mr Norris created a prison or a paradise? Do present-day prisoners sometimes dread their release? It also raises more amusing questions. Are pheasants really bad astronauts? What secrets lie in the ground beneath us? Can too much sex really contort a writer's syntax?
If this all-encompassing book had been written a few months later, it would surely have ended with a reference to Donald Trump's proposed wall on the Mexican border. Instead, a final flashback to the Garden of Eden, and the rack and ruin and multiplying serpents that take over after Adam and Eve get cast out, reminds us that we have always lived in a world divided by religion.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Barrow, Andrew. "Paradise or prison?" Spectator, vol. 334, no. 9847, 20 May 2017, p. 36. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A498478428/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=21c68150. Accessed 2 Mar. 2025.