"Frenchified bottoms" and other shady tricks

According to my records I had already read Thomas M. Truxes’ Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, but I absolutely do not have any memory of reading the entire thing, and I do have what might be false memories of reading only selected chapters as assigned in my Pirates and Smuggling in the Atlantic class, back in 2009 or whenever the hell I was in college (help, I’m old). My professor for that class, Wim Klooster, is cited in the acknowledgements for this book, which is perhaps why all of us had to go out and buy it. That sounds cynical but is not actually a complaint; that was one of my favorite classes and I got to write a really fun paper on rum-running for it.

Anyway. Defying Empire is definitely an academic rather than a journalistic read and as such feels a little drier than a book about smuggling and defying empire (and water, heh heh, sorry I’ll see myself out) ought to be. On the other hand, the subject matter, while classed under the sexy term “smuggling,” is largely just a bunch of rich merchants falsifying paperwork, and “falsifying paperwork” can only carry so much drama on its own. There are however also a lot of ship captures and that ought to be Fun And Exciting; alas, one must sub in one’s own pre-existing mental footage of eighteenth-century boat chases since the captures themselves are heavy on “who was captured and what they had in the hold at the time” and light on the details of the battles. Nevertheless, while it doesn’t make much of an adventure novel, if you are interested in How Colonialism Works it offers some interesting light into the contradictions of mercantilist economics.

All that said, I did find the subject matter here very interesting! It specifically focuses on the Seven Years’/French and Indian War, and the various ways in which merchants in New York and surrounding ports managed to keep regular business going, directly or indirectly, with the French, with whom they could get pretty good prices, instead of patriotically allowing themselves to get fucked over by only trading with the British, who necessarily needed the Crown to be the ones to make the profit off the trades and not the merchants. Also, the people wanted sugar, dammit. It’s not really the kind of story that has good guys but it was sort of satisfying seeing the Crown, having set up all these guys as British citizens for the purpose of doing trading, be all “no, not like that” when they insisted upon exercising their liberties as British citizens to do trading. Like all American history it makes me wonder what the world would look like if the British and French empires had ground each other down to attrition and the “Indians” had reconquered North America, but alas, I don’t think that was ever going to happen.

There is a sort of plotline, or at least recurring figures, surrounding a whiny failed wine merchant who decides to turn informer for the Crown about all these rich guys breaking the trade laws, and has a very bad time finding anyone on this side of the Atlantic to inform to who will take him seriously. He is almost killed in a riot instigated by the rich guys he’s accusing and spends quite a while in jail, at the center of a whirl of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits, while Crown forces struggle to install some people into the New York administration who will crack down on trading with the enemy. It really highlights how small and incestuous the old New York power elite was, but eventually two merchants are publicly tried for smuggling, where their main defense is that they are being unfairly singled out for punishment because, like, everyone is doing it, man.

Overall I did find this a really intriguing and informative look into a very specific aspect of pre-Revolutionary America, and the workings and contradictions of the British empire at this time. I’m definitely keeping the book around as a future writing resource in case I ever get back to writing silly piratey historical fiction, because it has a lot of really solid information about smuggling practices and popular semi-legal trading ports.

A handful of Arabian nights

About ten years ago, someone I knew through my writing group had a book published, and they had a book event in conjunction with a few other authors. In an abundance of social awkwardness/wanting to be supportive I bought the book being advertised of each of the four authors, the other three of whom I had not heard of. One of these books was The Wrath and the Dawn, a YA fantasy (they were all YA fantasies) from then-debut author Renee Ahdieh.

My honest to god opinion is that I should have read this book when I first bought it ten years ago, because I would have had a much higher tolerance for its general YA-ness at the time.

The book is, roughly, a retelling of the tale of Scheherazade, although in this one our heroine Shahrzad only has to tell about one and a half stories before other plot stuff intervenes to keep her alive. Shahrzad volunteers to become the bride of the murderous boy-king Khalid because he married and then killed her best friend, and Shahrzad intends to stay alive long enough to figure out how to kill the king. This gets derailed because Shahrzad also falls in love with the king, and figures out the secret reason he had been killing all those girls, in that order. There is much heterosexual angst when Shahrzad finds herself falling in love with her best friend’s killer, who doesn’t seem like a psychotic madman. This might have sat better with me if it didn’t take all of three days to happen, but whatever. If this were message fiction we would have to be very concerned about what message we are sending to young girls about handsome young men who do terrible things but don’t seem like total psychos, but this is not message fiction, this is a heterosexual power fantasy about the power of teenage love (and not really storytelling, which is odd for a Scheherezade adaptation) to overcome all obstacles, presumably including breaking curses in the sequel. Shahrzad is also a master archer, although this doesn’t end up being quite as relevant to the plot as I’d hoped.

The writing style is a bit overwritten in the way that YA so often is, where there are too many descriptive words but the result isn’t writing that’s dense, just sort of loose. I had more patience for this before spending years as a copy editor and now it’s hard to turn off the part of brain that wants to cut the extraneous words from every sentence, so at least for the first few chapters I had a constant running internal monologue that was just like “You don’t have to say ‘grains of sand,’ you can just say ‘sand,’ the default way sand comes is in grains” but once I got more engaged in the action-adventure stuff that voice moved more to the back of my head. The book is nearly 400 pages long and took me about half a day to read, so it’s fair to say the extra description didn’t slow me down too much.

Apart from our feisty but easily seduced heroine, the only other female character in the book who shows up for more than three pages is her Greek handmaiden, who appears to exist mostly to be more normal than Shahrzad but they’re still friends so we can show that this author doesn’t hate women, despite the otherwise all-male cast. We are not going to resolve the age-old question of “Is feminism when you chase boys” in this book review, so I will only say that this book was a bit too heterosexual for me personally, which is why I don’t read as much straight people romantasy stuff as I used to.

Overall this book isn’t bad for the type of book it is, but it doesn’t exactly transcend the genre, and this is no longer quite my genre the way it used to be. It is unlikely I will read the sequel unless it basically falls into my lap, but I wouldn’t particularly object to reading it if it does.

They can't kill a million of us... or can they?

I don’t like having series split up on my shelves and yet for some reason I read Walter Macken’s Seek the Fair Land back in 2015 and have had the two sequels sitting around separated from their fellow for nine years now. Anyway I decided that was enough of that nonsense and it was time to continue the trilogy; while I didn’t get around to it during Sad Irish Literature Month or my first foray to Maine this year, this weekend it was time! I was determined to at least start on the very depressing-looking The Silent People, and next year I will read The Scorching Wind, for reals.

The Silent People follows the life of a Connemara man named Dualta Duane, starting when he is in his late teens in the 1820s. Duane’s parents died in a famine and he has been raised by his uncle, the schoolmaster, so he can read and write and speaks English pretty well. Trouble begins when the landlord’s son hits him with a whip for not getting out of the way fast enough at a market fair, and Dualta, in the manner of strong young men who have just been physically assaulted for no reason at all, knocks the rich asshole off his horse. This obviously is the morally correct and badass thing to do, but tactically was not so smart. Both Dualta and his uncle have to flee the village, going in separate directions. The novel then follows Dualta’s adventures and misadventures as he makes his way from the Connemara hills to the valleys of Clare, where he meets up with various people who all have various opinions and theories of change about how Ireland will win its freedom–when to fight and when to endure, what sacrifices are worth it and what isn’t, what type of fighting is noble and honorable and what is cowardly and base. The conversations don’t sound at all like the “dialogue lifted from Twitter” type of conversation about politics written by modern writers who are all on Twitter, probably because Macken was writing in the 1960s; I cannot say if the conversations however are particularly authentic to the 1820s or if they are too 1960s to be good historical fiction. All I can say is that they are just as frustrating and stupid as listening to real ordinary people talk about their theories of change in politics, especially the type of ordinary people who don’t know terms like “theory of change” and are only just starting to examine their own assumptions enough to articulate them. Daniel O’Connell (here “O Connell”) makes a set of cameos as the man who basically introduced the theory of nonviolent mass pressure to Ireland singlehandedly; we see his theory, like so many others, work up until the point where it doesn’t.

Dualta crosses paths occasionally with a young lady named Una, whose mother was a McMahon who converted to Protestantism upon marriage, and whose father is a wealthy Protestant landlord. Dualta meets her when he gets hired into the man’s household as a “Trojan horse” from his previous job, which was ostensibly helping a local shopkeeper run her shop but actually using his rare bilingual literacy (the literacy was rare; the bilingualism wasn’t) to write threatening letters on behalf of the local agroterrorist organization. Una converts to Catholicism and is kicked out of the house; later, Dualta runs into her again when she sets up as a day school teacher in a random valley in Clare. Dualta manages to snag a ten-year lease on a bit of property no one else wants in the same valley, and, being both newcomers and the best-educated people in the valley, they eventually join forces, first wrangling the weans at the school and then getting married. They adopt some other misfits over the course of their time in the valley as various political happenings come and go, such as the election of Daniel O Connell to Parliament–a massive event that involves thousands of people all walking to Ennis, because apparently in the 1820s a county would only have one polling station–until the famine hits in 1845 and their painstakingly scraped-together life falls apart.

The book is sad but also dryly funny at times, which is a common enough combination in Irish literature. The writing style has something very midcentury about it that I can’t quite put my finger on, where it includes a lot of small details but they are all in very plain, unflowery language. There is a wealth of information about rural life in 19th-century Ireland woven into the story, a way of life that’s not only lost to time but also which none of us who grew up with running water would put up with for a single second. These people were poor as dirt, did backbreaking labor, owned nothing, and had no security. They rented land, but not houses; they had to build their own houses on the land they rented, and when they were evicted the houses were torn down or set on fire. This meant that what passed for a house for tenant farmers then wouldn’t pass muster as a garage now.

Overall this was, I wouldn’t say a fun time exactly, but a very immersive one.