A Period Piece
Jul. 3rd, 2018 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford
I picked this up in the work book sale on the basis of my enjoyment of a previous work by the same author, Red Plenty. It turns out that this is Spufford's first novel, and perhaps it should be no surprise that he has chosen to be inventive.
The story is set in New York in 1746, when Mr Smith disembarks from a ship and proceeds to a banking house, where he presents a bill for one thousand pounds, on sixty days' notice. The banker is suspicious, and Mr Smith is himself economical with the truth of the purpose of his visit and the source of his funds. In the mean time, he attempts to settle in to the society in which he finds himself, with mixed results. New York is, on the surface, a civilised place, but it is a colony full of political intrigue, and also readily apparent that it is vulnerable to social disquiet in much the same way as the archetypal London mob. Smith's reluctance to adhere to convention places him in frequent self-inflicted difficulty, and he makes friends and enemies, sometimes of the same people, regularly. The trials and tribulations of the book's characters, and the way they are described, are apparently contemporary to novels of the period, and I suspect people with a deeper historical or literary grounding will find much in the way of allusions to enjoy from it. Although I found one or two sections tedious, as a whole I enjoyed it.
I picked this up in the work book sale on the basis of my enjoyment of a previous work by the same author, Red Plenty. It turns out that this is Spufford's first novel, and perhaps it should be no surprise that he has chosen to be inventive.
The story is set in New York in 1746, when Mr Smith disembarks from a ship and proceeds to a banking house, where he presents a bill for one thousand pounds, on sixty days' notice. The banker is suspicious, and Mr Smith is himself economical with the truth of the purpose of his visit and the source of his funds. In the mean time, he attempts to settle in to the society in which he finds himself, with mixed results. New York is, on the surface, a civilised place, but it is a colony full of political intrigue, and also readily apparent that it is vulnerable to social disquiet in much the same way as the archetypal London mob. Smith's reluctance to adhere to convention places him in frequent self-inflicted difficulty, and he makes friends and enemies, sometimes of the same people, regularly. The trials and tribulations of the book's characters, and the way they are described, are apparently contemporary to novels of the period, and I suspect people with a deeper historical or literary grounding will find much in the way of allusions to enjoy from it. Although I found one or two sections tedious, as a whole I enjoyed it.