This book was five hundred pages long and I could easily have read another five hundred. I am in mourning that it’s over. It’s set in the English Civil War, and I now feel a weird sense of ownership of this period like: don’t you KNOW how terrible the siege of Basing House WAS? This is a fairly big leap from the beginning, when I was not sure which side Cavaliers were vs Roundheads.
It tells the story of one Jacob, and is mostly a love story about him and a man he meets in the army. Interestingly though, Jacob is not what you would call a nice man. He is very very needy and possessive, and this shows up, in time-honoured fashion, in domestic violence. And just regular violence. I read one review that said that put them off, but for me it made it more interesting. It was very compelling to see how it all made sense to him in his own warped world. Plus which, I am not sure that people who had to deal with the rigours of servant life in the seventeenth century, and then were in a terrible war, and then, and I didn’t really understand this part, were in some kind of utopian effort to claim common land as farm land (?) and then emigrated to America, are necessarily ready to be judged by today’s morality. The siege of Basing House alone!
I am desperately trying not to just immediately start another McCann. I don’t know who this lady is but I LOVE HER.