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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Clark, C. 2010 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
It is 1704 and, while the Sun King Louis XIV rules France from the splendour of Versailles, Louisiana, the new and vast colony named in his honour, is home to fewer than two hundred souls. When a demand is sent requesting wives be dispatched for the struggling settlers, Elisabeth is among the twenty-three girls who set sail from France to be married to men of whom they know absolutely nothing. Educated and skeptical, Elisabeth has little hope for happiness in her new life. It is to her astonishment that she, alone among the brides, finds herself passionately in love with her new husband, Jean-Claude, a charismatic and ruthlessly ambitious soldier. Auguste, a poor cabin boy from Rochefort, must also adjust to a startlingly unexpected future. Abandoned in a remote native village, he is charged by the colony's governor with mastering the tribe's strange language while reporting back on their activities. It is there that he is befriended by Elisabeth's husband as he begins the slow process of assimilation back into life among the French. The love Elisabeth and Auguste share for Jean-Claude changes both of their lives irrevocably. When in time he betrays them both, they find themselves bound together in ways they never anticipated.
With the same compelling prose and vividly realized characters thatnbsp;won hernbsp;widespread acclaim fornbsp;THE GREAT STINK and THE NATURE OF MONSTERS, Clare Clark takes us deep into the heart of colonial French Louisiana.
Author Notes
CLARE CLARK is the author of four novels, including The Great Stink, which was long-listed for the Orange Prize and named a Washington Post Best Book of the Year, and Savage Lands , also long-listed for the Orange Prize. Her work has been translated into five languages. She lives in London."
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Clark (The Great Stink) bases her third novel on the true story of the first French settlers in America and the women who are sent to be their wives. Her dual protagonists the novel begins as two narratives which then converge are the independent Elisabeth Savaret and the curious youth, Auguste. Elisabeth sets herself apart from her gossipy sister brides-to-be, finding solace in her books, but when she meets her rugged husband, she softens into a devoted wife and hopeful mother. Auguste is assigned the task of learning the ways and language of "the savages" since alliance with the native population is key to France's position in the New World. Throughout the novel Elisabeth and Auguste experience all the tropes common to life in the colonies. Clark has many graces as a writer, but while she brims with enthusiasm over her novel's world and delights in describing every facet of it, her penchant for overwriting makes what could be a fast-moving romp into a slog. She is an assiduous researcher, but too eager to show it. Still, Clark's passion for her story overcomes and will please lovers of historical fiction. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Poetic, powerfully visualized yet oppressive account of French settlement in Louisiana during the early 18th century. Clark (The Nature of Monsters, 2007, etc.) exchanges swampy London for fetid North America in her intense, closely detailed, female-driven narrative exploring the dogged struggles for coexistence and survival by European and Native-American communities. Her protagonist is Elisabeth Savaret, one of the "casket girls" contracted by the French government to sail to the New World as brides for the colonists. Elisabeth is not one of the "chickens" (her dismissive name for the other women); an independent, fierce and intellectual loner, she has the good fortune both to love and desire the man she marries, Jean-Claude Babelon. But the couple's happiness founders on his ruthless ambition and her failure to carry a pregnancy to term. Jean-Claude's drive for riches, which involves slavery, gun-running and betrayal, results eventually in his murder. Auguste Guichard, who loves both Babelons, is the third major character. Deeply involved in his friends' fates, he serves as the living antithesis of Jean-Claude's proto-capitalism: Auguste learns the Native-American languages, appreciates their cultures and grows indigenous plants. Later, with Elisabeth and Auguste married to other settlers, their paths cross again, and guilt is declared and shared. After much suffering, there is still hope. Although finely textured, this oblique, murkily downbeat tale often loses its thrust in the details. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Clark's third engrossing, painstakingly researched historical novel is set in the early 1700s in Louisiana, a colony populated by French settlers and named for Louis XIV. A group of 23 young girls is sent from France to be married there, among them Elisabeth Savaret, who is well educated and skeptical about finding happiness in the New World. Surprisingly, she falls almost obsessively in love with her husband, Jean-Claude, and their childless union becomes the core of the novel. Clark describes this backwater colony in meticulous detail the mud, the stench, the mosquitoes, the freezing winters and stifling summers, but it is above all a political quagmire, a quicksand of duplicity and shifting alliances, because the French are engaged in fierce competition with the English for this inhabitable land. Clark's third protagonist, whose life intersects with Elizabeth's and Jean-Claude's, is Auguste, a young Frenchman assigned to live with various Native tribes whose alliances will strengthen France's position against the English. Clark's vast store of historical and geographical detail enriches the portraits of her three vibrant characters, whose destinies are inextricably, and memorably, bound.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
This novel's heroine is sent to Louisiana to marry a colonist she's never met. A PROMINENT historian once asked if I didn't get tired of the sort of research novelists often feel obliged to pursue. Must we really know how 19th-century Latvian lumberjacks brushed their teeth? Aren't you tempted to make things up? Coming from a historian, this sounded like heresy - or perhaps the historian's dream vacation. "Of course I'm tempted," I said. "I fudge, I make things up, but I also pounce on arcana." Moreover, to work under the constraints of historical fact can spur the imagination, just as working with rhyme and meter does for poets. Clare Clark's "Savage Lands" combines a well-researched historical context, many hogsheads full of period detail and a fictional story to make a novel that requires no spur to its imaginings. Rather, just the opposite. "Savage Lands" tells the story of the first French colonists in Louisiana and their struggle to survive in a ruthless time and place. In 1704, 23 women are sent to the colony to marry men they've never met. One of them, Elisabeth Savaret, is Clark's heroine. To her credit, Clark does not sentimentalize the presumably intrepid character of the colony's pioneers. Most are either coarse and depressed (the women) or greedy, brutal and remorseless (the men), and the man Elisabeth marries, Jean-Claude Babelon, may be the worst of the lot. He's an equal opportunity scoundrel, duping his friends as well as his enemies and enslaving the local "savages," including those friendly to the French. He even hatches a scheme to trade Indian slaves for Africans, pointing out that "the Negro makes an altogether better slave. That is why I propose to offer three savages for every two of them." Yet Elisabeth loves him with a passion Clark strives repeatedly to describe, in the process barely skirting the slippery slope to supermarket romance. "When he touched her," we learn, "his lips and fingers exquisitely unhurried, every freckle, every tiny hair was his, each one charged and spangled with the light of him." Under his influence, "her skin eased and opened. Her muscles melted. Even her bones softened, so that she moved with the indolence of a sun-drunk cat." The strongest character in the novel, Elisabeth is also the weakest when it comes to Jean-Claude, whom the book's jacket copy describes as "charismatic." Charisma, admittedly, is almost as difficult as virtue to depict in fiction. Clark's solution to this problem is to leave Jean-Claude's inner life alone. Of the novel's three main characters, Elisabeth and a young former cabin boy named Auguste are the more fully portrayed, and each comes under Jean-Claude's spell. He's the apex of their triangular desire - or, more accurately, their vanishing point, but that isn't enough to make him real. In many respects, "Savage Lands" is a good old-fashioned (that is, slow and deliberate) 19th-century novel, with all the weight of material detail and all the unexpected turns of plot and shifts of time and place that we expect from such productions. The physical world of Louisiana, its bursting ripeness and rot, becomes a metaphor for the characters' inner lives, and this is undoubtedly where the novel's strength lies. Clark's descriptive prose contains some startling metaphors. In one passage, the night sky at dawn curls up at its edges, "exposing the gray-pink linings of the day." In another, a man's hand, extended for a handshake, swings "as if the bolts that attached it to the wrist had worked loose." BUT the descriptions mount, and too often they read as though they're on steroids: "In the wilderness savages lurked in the shadows and the prodigious forest nosed and slid and crept and coiled upward without ceasing. The licentious suck of it rotted the roots of the trees and pushed blindly up through the decaying luxuriance of its half-digested self, an eruption of snaking coils and crude excrescences bursting from the thick black slime. Its fecundity was as grotesque as it was shameless. It throbbed in the ceaseless thrum of the cicadas, in the suck and gasp of the reed-choked bayou. It draped itself from the trees, smearing their trunks with velvet, hanging in gluttonous hanks from their branches and exploding into pale, fleshy mushrooms at their roots. There was no shape to the forest, no order. There was only ungovernable profusion, blotting out the light, gorging on the lush compost of the dead." This leaves an indelible impression - but it strains for effect, as does much of Clark's writing. Indeed, the straining is a part of its effect, describing not only a swamp but the author's language, its fecundity as grotesque as it is shameless. Throughout "Savage Lands," the figurative language piles up like heavy jewelry, like layers of clothing, like armor, like. . . . You get the idea. It drags down the poor sentences forced to wear it. As H.G. Wells said about Conrad's first novel, "His sentences are not unities, they are multitudinous tandems, and he has still to learn the great half of his art, the art of leaving things unwritten." In 1704, 23 French women are promised to a rough band of pioneers. John Vernon's most recent novel is "Lucky Billy." He teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton University.
Library Journal Review
Clark follows up her acclaimed The Nature of Monsters with another historical novel set in the same era (the 18th century) but in the New World. This tale of French Louisiana revolves around the arrival of the first casket girls, virtuous poor girls of good families guaranteed good husbands in the colony and carrying their belongings in small chests called caskets. Among them is Elisabeth Savaret, who falls in love with her soldier husband, August. Meanwhile, the French officials responsible for the survival of the little colony realize they must cultivate the native tribes in the area. Their success is achieved with varying levels of integrity, providing much of the plot and considerable exploration of the novel's title. Verdict The author treats the founding of French Louisiana with her signature dark realism and beautiful handling of character, plot, and pacing. Readers of Clark's earlier novels will enjoy this; it should also appeal to those interested in women's, French, New Orleans, or colonial-period history and in Native Americans. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/09.]-Mary Kay Bird-Guilliams, Wichita P.L., KS (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.