barbara fister reviewed Ancestry by Simon Mawer
Review of 'Ancestry' on 'LibraryThing'
This is the sort of book that may give catalogers (or anyone trying to figure out what shelf a book belongs on) fits. It's a novel, but it's history. It's a primary-source-based retelling of the past, but it's mostly invented. It's a gifted author shuffling a handful of clues and filling in the vast gaps between them, using the inventive process as an opportunity to reflect on the narrative threads that tie history and fiction together. returnreturnIn Ancestry, Mawer imagines the lives of two couples, his 19th-century great-great-grandparents. The first ran away from the dreary life of agricultural labor to become a seaman and later married a dressmaker who had a child out of wedlock. The other was a soldier who married an Irishwoman who had to manage alone in a hostile world when he was sent to fight in the Crimean war. Their stories are anchored with scraps …
This is the sort of book that may give catalogers (or anyone trying to figure out what shelf a book belongs on) fits. It's a novel, but it's history. It's a primary-source-based retelling of the past, but it's mostly invented. It's a gifted author shuffling a handful of clues and filling in the vast gaps between them, using the inventive process as an opportunity to reflect on the narrative threads that tie history and fiction together. returnreturnIn Ancestry, Mawer imagines the lives of two couples, his 19th-century great-great-grandparents. The first ran away from the dreary life of agricultural labor to become a seaman and later married a dressmaker who had a child out of wedlock. The other was a soldier who married an Irishwoman who had to manage alone in a hostile world when he was sent to fight in the Crimean war. Their stories are anchored with scraps of paper - birth, marriage, and death records, some marked with an illiterate's X - but the documentary evidence is scant for people who are poor and landless. What Mawer accomplishes is an imaginative reinvention of these families and their worlds, which I found absorbing and illuminating. The women, in particular, are vividly brought to life, and their hard-scrabble determination to create a life for themselves and their children is more dramatic than ocean crossings or battles. At a time when I often despair of our world, it's eye-opening to see how difficult ordinary lives were not all that long ago. It's an immersive reading experience.