Harriet and Isabella
By Patricia O'Brien
Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25
The Mathematics of Love
By Emma Darwin
Morrow, 416 pp., $24.95
The Sound of Language
By Amulya Malladi
Ballantine, 256 pp., paperback, $13.95
January brings a remarkably engaging historical novel about a famous American preacher, an ingenious historical romance that spans two centuries, and a quietly powerful story about a young Afghani woman adjusting to a new life in Denmark.
Patricia O'Brien's "Harriet and Isabella" is inspired by a 19th-century sex scandal, the 1875 trial of the celebrated minister Henry Ward Beecher for adultery with one of his parishioners. A shining star of the brilliant Beecher family, Henry was a charismatic orator who drew crowds to Plymouth Church in Brooklyn to hear him preach about a loving and forgiving God, a radical idea at the time. O'Brien's novel focuses not on Henry but on the two women of the title, his sisters, and the rift that developed between them over the question of his guilt or innocence. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the renowned author of the antislavery "Uncle Tom's Cabin," remained loyal to Henry, while Isabella Beecher Hooker, a well-known suffragist and advocate of women's rights, wanted him to admit his guilt publicly and ask his congregation's forgiveness.
The novel opens in March 1887 as Henry lies in a coma. Nearby, in a shabby rooming house, Isabella waits, shunned by the family for 15 years but hoping for the chance to see her brother one last time. Writing from the women's different points of view, O'Brien uses flashbacks that shed light on Isabella's role in the suffrage movement and Harriet's influential role as a novelist. "Harriet and Isabella" is a sympathetic, intimate portrait of the two sisters. O'Brien describes vividly and economically the dynamics within the famous Beecher family, a fascinating - and far from flawless - assortment of abolitionists, preachers, writers, educators, and social reformers.
In her impressive first novel, "The Mathematics of Love," Emma Darwin uses photography as a metaphoric device to develop hauntingly parallel stories about two people who inhabit the same English manor more than 150 years apart. In 1819 Major Stephen Fairhurst, a wounded veteran of Waterloo, has inherited Kersey Hall in Suffolk. Rebuffed in his courtship of a young widow, he eventually finds solace and intellectual stimulation in a platonic correspondence with her independent-minded sister, an artist interested in early forms of photography.
In 1976, 15-year-old Anna Ware is packed off by her mother to spend the summer at Kersey Hall, now a failed girls' school run by her uncle Ray, her mother's brother, whom she barely knows. Anna's careless mother is off to Spain with her latest boyfriend, pursuing some half-baked business deal. Anna is befriended by Eva and Theo, two photographers who rent the converted stable. They give Anna a job. Theo teaches her the fundamentals of photography, and she begins to see a larger world of art, intellect, love. She also acquires copies of a cache of Fairhurst's letters and, reading his formal 19th-century prose, becomes curious about his world.
A brief synopsis of characters and plot can't capture the flavor of this beautifully written, intricately constructed novel. The stories, especially the one set in the 19th century, are complex and sometimes meandering, but Darwin is such a skillful writer that the momentum never flags. It's not, strictly speaking, a historical novel, or a romance, although Fairhurst's story has all the elements of romantic melodrama. It's an intelligent novel that addresses war, cruelty, love, and loss in a thoughtful way.
In Amulya Malladi's "The Sound of Language" a young Afghani widow struggles to start a new life in a baffling new country. Raihana's husband, a teacher, is taken prisoner by the Taliban and never seen again. After a miserable year in a refugee camp in Pakistan, she's offered asylum by the Danish government and sent to live in a small town in northern Denmark with distant relatives who also fled Afghanistan. Raihana's cousin Kabir and his wife, Layla, are young and kind and more than willing to take her in. Raihana is required to attend language school and struggles to learn Danish, which sounds to her like the buzzing of bees. As part of her studies she must complete a work internship. Raihana is assigned to a beekeeper, Gunnar, so deeply depressed by the recent death of his wife, Anna, that he has been neglecting the bees they used to tend together. Kabir and Layla don't approve of Raihana working for a strange man, but she persists. Reading the late Anna's beekeeping diary, Raihana soon becomes fascinated with bees. She and Gunnar forge a tentative friendship, but his daughter-in-law and some of his neighbors don't approve of him employing a Muslim. A violent assault tests their friendship, as does Raihana's determination to make a new life.
Malladi's story of two wounded people beset by prejudice has a ring of authenticity. "The Sound of Language" is finely written, spare but eloquent, sensitive but free of false sentiment. Malladi was born in India, lived in the United States, married a Dane, and now lives in Denmark. This is her fifth novel.
Diane White writes every month about new light and popular fiction.
