Change Everything No 24: Female Imagineries - Favourite light fiction series

Featuring Kerry Greenwood's Phryne Fisher, Gillian Linscott's Nell Bray, Margaret Frazer's Dame Frevisse and Connie Willis's Kivrin Engle,

Book news

Change Everything, the book, is going to Edinburgh, to the wonderful Lighthouse Bookshop, on September 26! All welcome - and you can also join online from anywhere in the world.

Female imagineries

I’m sometimes mocked for putting forward serious books for “book of the year” lists (as I did last year for the Publishers’ Association parliamentary list, with English Food: A People’s History and The Near Future in 21st Century Fiction). No apologies: there are a lot of important, readable, just fascinating non-fiction books out there.

And I mostly do read non-fiction, but enjoy a bit of escapism as much as the next reader, and so I thought for this mid-summer edition I’d list my Top Five light read books (series, because if you like an imaginary world, you really don’t want it to end). It turns out mysteries predominate, because I’m not one much for romance, and while I read quite a lot of science fiction, it tends to be the heavier and more “political” end.

You might notice a bit of a pattern here - female authors and main characters and historical settings. I didn’t set out to get that result, it just turned out that way. I might have also added Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma (a Celtic nun and Irish court advocate who travels widely across 7th-century Europe, those are the books I prefer - I haven’t read all 34! of the series) and CJ Sansom’s Shardlake (just to break the gender pattern), but got to stop somewhere. So here goes…

1.        Kerry Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series

You might know the 1920s Australian “flapper” detective Phyrne from a quite faithfully conveyed recent video series, but I’ve been buying the new book each year for decades. (Is a complete set of paperbacks worth anything? Probably not.)

This is definitely “cosy” mystery, readable by all but the most easily shocked by a little not very explicit sex. I’m not much into the focus on fashion, as Phyrne is, but love her fearless, fierce intelligence (although like many such series, she’s improbably effective at escaping from danger). Most books are set in a very faithfully conveyed and heavily researched Melbourne, from the theatres and Chinatown (the Chinese community features heavily as Phyrne for some time has a Chinese lover). It ventures sometimes into the bush (I love the wombat that stars in The Green Mill Murders, when Phyrne flies a Tiger Moth into the Australia Alps - probably my favourite in the series). Also occasionally into Phyrne’s back story, as an ambulance driver on the Western Front and habitue of the avante garde in post-War Paris. (A fairly late introduction to her story.)

While she’s not the marrying kind, Phyrne gradually acquires a substitute family of servants who are really friends and children who she rescues during various adventures along the way, neatly portrayed with very individual characters. Phyrne grew up in abject poverty but the Great War enriched her father and thus herself and her sister, a lesbian social activist who like her came to Australia to get away. That backstory helps explain her sympathy for and engagement with multiple underdogs, including Bert and Cec, communist allies who pop up regularly.

2.        Gillian Linscott’s suffragette detective series starring Nell Bray

Most of the Nell Bray books, for all they are by plot pretty standard detective fiction, are set within (with a great deal of research) the Suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union. Nell is not an uncritical member, and she’s not great fan of Emmeline Pankhurst, while regarding her as a powerful voice. Nell is force fed in Holloway Prison, she gets to meet Lloyd George and is tangled up with Henry Asquith. I confess to something of a busman’s holiday.

Nell’s story in chronological terms starts with Dead Man Rising, when she’s a 20-year-old Oxford student on holiday in the Lake District finding her place in the changing world of 1900. My favourite has to be Absent Friends, when Nell is a candidate in the December 1918 election. (Lots of fascinating insights into what that was like.) Although I’m also a big fan of Widow’s Peak, when Nell ventures off for a break in Alps, in Chaminox. The politics is lighter here, but there are some great socially transgressive female characters amid the British-dominated climbing and tourist crowd. (Although it is the local guides of course who battle to keep everyone safe, frequently despite visitor stupidity.)

3.        Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series

I frequently fume about how obsession with ancient Rome - particularly the late Republican and early Imperial period - means so many other fascinating ancient civilisations hardly get a moment of attention, but the survival of so much written material does make it a huge source for authors. Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy is, I have to admit, pretty good, but nothing beats the enormous labour of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series, which I bought and read as they came out, and have re-read several times since. (Okay, I admit light reading is not quite the right word, but beware, once you start one, you’re unlikely to stop until the end.)

They are tremendously, enormously, voluminously researched, and bring the city and empire vividly to life, but while the narrative arch of Marius and Sulla, then Pompey, Caesar and Octavian/Augustus is obvious, the female characters, both historical and fictional, are vividly portrayed and highly significant in explaining events. Caesar’s mother Aurelia is particularly outstanding as a sensible, capable, extremely smart character. (Interesting academic commentary here.)

4.        Connie Willis’s time travel series

I’m not sure that you can call “time travel” a genre. This series perhaps best fits in the “historical adventure” frame, although given that the main character Kivrin Engle is a Cambridge time-travelling historian from mid-21st-century Oxford, you could - sort of - call it science fiction. Although the two World War Two-set volumes are kind of “who-dunnit”.

What it is is unmistakeable brilliant, complex storytelling, which keeps multiple complex storylines running without every being confusing, and when things go wrong for the characters, and they’s usually at some of the most crunchy of crunchy moments of history. My favourite is definitely The Doomesday Book, when Kivrin arrives in England in 1348, the point where the Black Death arrives. Enormously powerful in both imagining the experience of those who actually lived through it, and through the frame of the time traveller, our own kind of perspective on it. If you haven’t read it, do!

(And writing this has just led me to discover there’s a new one in the series slated for June 2025, The Spanner in the Works. Definitely going on my to-read list!)

5.        Margaret Frazer’s series with medieval nun detective Dame Frevisse

One essential for a long-running detective series is that you want to spend time with the main character. You have to like them, but they also have to be sufficiently complex and their experiences varied enough, that you want to spend a lot of evenings with them. Dame Frevisse is perhaps a bit too much sensible and down-to-earth, she doesn’t develop much, but what really makes the series is the exposure to all different aspects of medieval life, convincingly portrayed. The titles all have to formula The XX’s tale, where the XXs are filled by a servant, a reeve, a bishop, a clerk, a midwife etc. There’s also a number of books featuring the run-up to what we know as the War of the Roses, which take us into the political intrigue of the time.

Picks of the week

Reading

I’m a fan of Tim Flannery, who might be described as Australia’s foremost science intellectual, and he’s both pioneered new thinking, particularly about the relationship between Aboriginal Australians and the land, and written some brilliant books. But he ranges across the world, and I’ve just had cause to revisit his brilliant Europe: A Natural History. Which covers the end of the aurochs (boy I’d love to see an aurochs, if not too close), and the longtime persecution of the wolf, and has continuing echoes today.

Wolf persecution was very personal for some important people: “Charlemagne was a great wolf hater. Between 800 and 813CE he established a special corps of wolf hunters known as la louveterie, whose only task was to persecute wolves with hunting, traps, or poison. La louveterie was organised as a military corps, and its salaries paid by the state. It worked pretty much continuously for more than 1000 years - except for a brief break during the French Revolution… And it was highly efficient, in 1883 alone accounting for the death of at least 1386 wolves. … finally put themselves out of business when they killed the last French wolf, in the Alps, at the end of the nineteenth century.”

Yet in Portugal, the BBC reported this week, the wolves were never exterminated, and in the areas they hung on, farmers have respect for them, acknowledge their right to exist, and have learnt how to get along with them. A model for us all for the future. We don’t have to continue making the disastrous mistakes of the past.

Listening

Hagia Sophia - Photo by Rumman Amin on Unsplash

Have discovered a brilliant new history podcast series, venturing deep into corners of history seldom traversed, in the form of the Ottoman history podcast. I delighted in Istanbul After Dark with Avner Wishnitzer, which is just magical in its embrace of the sensory and emotional experience of another time and place, although I also love the tale that if you were caught out after dark without a lantern (suggesting nepharious purposes) you’d have to spend the night stoking the furnaces at the baths, and go home in the morning filthy, so all of your neighbours would know what had happened. In this space I also have to mention the always excellent Byzantium and Friends podcast, this one with Emily Neumeier on Ali Pasha of Ionninna, the Albanian-original Ottoman governor who did a lot to recover and publicise antiquities in the lands he controlled. (No it wasn’t just Western Europeans coming in to “discover” such things.)

Thinking

Sorry, this one is seriously depressing, and deeply significant, but I talk regularly about our having exceeded six of the nine planetary boundaries identified by researchers (climate is just one of the existential risks we are facing), but I may not have to make that seven of ten, the newest being aquatic oxygen levels. “If water temperatures rise, the solubility of oxygen in the water decreases. … In addition, nutrient inputs from land support algal blooms, which lead to more oxygen being consumed as more organic material sinks and is decomposed by microbes at depth.”

Endangered. Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

Researching

I haven’t found a sensible and layperson-friendly explanation of this to link to, but there’s a big reminder this week that we understand very little about genetics - and we really should NOT be messing with things we don’t understand. Research has found that bacteria can create free-floating and ephemeral genes as part of their defence system against viral attack. To use the words of the authors, this “challenges conventional paradigms of genetic information encoded along the one-dimensional axis of genomic DNA”. No one has looked for this in higher organisms before. The hunt is now on.

Almost the end

Image: Cgoodwin

I feel like we need some more summer cheer. How about a Scottish woman breaking the world record for number of sheep shorn in one day: Una Cameron, 517? My back hurts just thinking about it. It reminded me of the sheering sheds in which I spent quite a bit of my agricultural science degree, where I was frequently the light entertainment. One day I was told to catch the last ram left in the pen, the biggest and orniest, a merino which weighed more than I did. I did get it down eventually, but the weight knocked me over too and I ended up underneath it on the floor. I looked up to see four shearers leaning over the pen wall laughing their heads off.

What did you think?

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