Book Review: Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear

Journey to Munich (Maisie Dobbs #12)

By Jacqueline Winspear

Published by Harper and Sold by HarperCollins, March 29, 2016

Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle

Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's

Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

So, there I was, back to blogging at a faster pace… for awhile.  Then, well, things got busy.  First of all, we had event after event at The New Job.  Then, as I think I’ve mentioned, I’m a pretty active adult recreational musician.  I both sing and play an instrument, and there was a week in there when I had a rehearsal or a performance every night.  Then I got a sinus infection.  So, as you can see, blogging fell by the wayside.  The good news, though, is that I haven’t stopped reading.

One of the books I read in the midst of all the busyness was Jacqueline Winspear’s latest entry in the Maisie Dobbs series.  I really, really like this series.  It’s quite sophisticated and well-written and, on the whole, the characters are much more psychologically complex than those in your average historical mystery series (that’s not a ding at other writers—just a compliment to Winspear).  The early Maisie Dobbs books are set in the 1930s and they explore the ongoing effects of World War I on the British public.  In the first 10 books, Maisie is a private detective whose business takes her all over England and occasionally across the channel.  Book 11, A Dangerous Place is a reboot of sorts; after losing a husband and a pregnancy, Maisie finds herself on Gibralter, where she functions, essentially, as a British spy (as well as having a mission of her own).

Journey to Munich continues the espionage plotline, as Maisie is sent to Munich to recover a British inventor who has been imprisoned by the Nazis for distributing anti-Hitler propaganda.  While there, Maisie also looks for the daughter of her nemesis, John Otterburn.  She runs into trouble with Nazi high command, of course, but she does not give up on either of her missions.

I really enjoyed this book.  A Dangerous Place felt sort of gloomy and weird to me, and I was glad to see Maisie back in action here.  I’m still not sure how I feel about Maisie as a spy, and I miss her interactions with her assistant Billy and receptionist Sandra.  I think there’s potential for Maisie to return to more mundane detecting, though, and this book sets the stage for that to happen while also allowing for the possibility that she’ll still work for the Secret Service from time to time. 

I do think the series has changed fundamentally, and that given its historical setting it almost had to.  World War II was devastating in very different ways from World War I, and Maisie’s social conscience won’t allow her not to be involved in some way.  I hope that as the war progresses, Maisie will use her skills to benefit both her country writ large and individual clients, paying or not, to whom she always been so personally and professionally committed.

Book Review: Habits of the House by Fay Weldon

Habits of the House (Love and Inheritance #1)
By Fay Weldon

Published by St. Martin’s and Sold by Macmillan, 2013
Purchased and read on Amazon Kindle
Links: Amazon, B&N, Powell's
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

Habits of the House is the first of Weldon’s trilogy set at the turn of the twentieth century.  It concerns the plight of the Hedleigh family, including the Earl of Dilberne, his wife Isobel, and their two children, Rosina and Arthur.  In the opening chapter, we learn that family is deeply in debt and that their South African gold mine has been flooded in the Boer War.  Most of the plot concerns the family’s attempt to become financially solvent, and the primary method of recovering their wealth involves Arthur’s marriage to Minnie O’Brian, an American heiress of questionable reputation.  Points of view vary, but we see the Dilberne story primarily through the eyes of Arthur, Minnie, Isobel, and Isobel’s maid Grace, with occasional forays into the minds of the Earl, Rosina, and other servants.

Because it was published at the height of Downton Abbey’s popularity and tells the story of English aristocrats and their servants, comparisons to the TV show are inevitable, and some reviewers have described Weldon’s novel as a Downton knockoff.  I’ll not deny that Weldon capitalized on Downton’s popularity with the timing of this release, but given that she wrote the pilot of Downton’s predecessor Upstairs, Downstairs it’s hard to say she “copied” Downton.

Habits of the House is a quick, enjoyable read.  It’s not psychologically dense; while we get a sense of why they characters act the way they do, the narrative often skims the surface of characters’ feelings and motivations, and Weldon relies to an extent on familiar types.  That is, the Earl is a wastrel aristocrat, and his son is a wastrel aristocrat in the making.  Rosina is a spinster-reformer, too intent on her various causes for her family’s liking.  There’s even an upstart Jewish lawyer on whom the Earl is far too dependent, though Weldon fortunately does not indulge in much stereotyping of Jewish characters.

It probably goes without saying that Weldon is a good writer (she’s been wildly successful for quite some time).  Her prose never bugs, and the pacing of the story is good.  That said, for the first half or so, I found this book rather hard to get in to. The surface-skimming nature of the narrative, alongside Weldon’s use of types, made it difficult to care about the characters.  By the end, though, I wanted to know what happened to Arthur and Minnie, and I had come to care for Minnie—she and her mother might be the only characters in the story allowed psychological complexity.  I’m also curious about Rosina’s fate and Grace’s.  For these reasons, I added the second book in the trilogy to my Wish List, though reading it isn’t really a priority, I’ll admit.