The Book of Fires

When I first read the blurb on the back comparing this book to Tracy Chevalier's "Girl With A Pearl Earring", my first reaction was, "Yeah right".

My, was I wrong!

But I can see the resemblance. Both "Girl With A Pearl Earring" and "The Book Of Fires" are not your average historical fiction novel. They both have strong heroines and intriguing male counterparts.

But there, the comparisons end. You have a great deal more sympathy for Agnes, as a penniless impregnated girl who is fleeing her rapist when she arrives in London in 1753.
In a typical historical fiction novel, nearly the same two things always happen to a pregnant heroine.
One: She miscarries
or Two: she is "rescued" and married to a man in the nick of time.

Well, lets just say one show more of these things happens, but in an extraordinarily fresh way that makes for a wonderfully different and fully realized story.
I'll reread this book over and over again! show less

What a lovely story, beautifully written, that is intriguing and rich with content about a bygone world. Jane Borodale succeeding in immersing me in her fictional world with her richly detailed second paragraph. Perhaps reading it here will entice you to read her book: "I am inside the house, bending over the hearth. I lay pieces of dry elm and bark over the embers and they begin to kindle as the fire takes. A warm fungus smell rises up. And the logs bubble juices and resin. The fed flames spit and crackle, colored jets hissing out wet. A column of thick smoke pours rapidly up the chimney and out into the sky like a gray liquid into milk. I hang the bellows from the strap and straighten up. Fire makes me feel good. Burning things into show more ash and nothingness makes my purpose feel clearer." show less

It’s rare for me to read without eating sunflower seeds in the shell at the same time. I can only eat so many before my lips begin to wither from the salt, and in this way, I limit the amount of time I spend reading. Once I’ve had my fill of seeds, I invariably set the book aside.

Not so with The Book of Fires. I can’t remember the last time an author held me so enthralled that I continued on long after the seeds were gone. I began the book on Saturday, picked it back up on Sunday and found myself ignoring a rather pressing list of chores and obligations just to finish it.

I tend to keep my reading light, so I generally stick to genre fiction. Literary fiction often hits too close to home for me; I do not like to cry, but am easily show more susceptible. And there is often a surplus of description to be found in serious works. Description can make or break a book for me. I prefer to find it sprinkled in among the action so my imagination can fill in the blanks. If it gets too heavy-handed, it becomes tedious and I begin flipping past entire sections. Jane Borodale’s debut novel is brimming with detail that I would find annoying in a lesser work. It takes an uncommonly well-written book for the minutia to fascinate me.

This story begins in England in 1752, after Parliamentary Enclosure has begun fencing off property and raising rent. In the country, the poor are forced to work harder for less. The narrative is told first-person-present by seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel, a country girl with a large family. Immediately Agnes plunges into meticulous detail of place; sights, sounds, smells. Her family is forced to slaughter the pig early this year. It is a family event that most everyone participates in; a grim, specific series of tasks. Throughout the rest of the novel, small incidents cause Agnes to recall the particulars of the slaughter, a theme depicting how commonplace the gruesome was in those times.

Agnes is unmarried and hiding an early pregnancy that came about from what would be considered rape in this day and age. To prevent her family suffering from her shame, she runs away to London with gold coins she stole from a dead neighbor. The theft haunts her both as a morally reprehensible thing to have done, and as fear that she will be caught and hung.

Lost in London, she has a great stroke of luck securing employment as assistant to Mr. John Blacklock, pyrotechnist. A widower, he is aloof, gruff, and consumed by his work. Agnes, who was taught to read but cannot write, is eager to learn. The reader learns along with her about fireworks in the eighteenth century, an indulgence of the rich; how they were made; the alchemy and danger. She works hard, impressing Blacklock with her enthusiasm and understanding of his obsession. She has no illusions about her future there—when the pregnancy is discovered she expects to be turned out into the street.

This is not a romance novel. Agnes is young and naïve, but has no romantic flights of fancy. Her example of love is a mother harried by country life and worn down from having babies and a mercurial father who drinks. As the fetus grows within her, Agnes is consumed by fear. There is no one she can turn to. Within the Blacklock household, she knows she’ll be able to conceal her pregnancy from the blowsy, death-obsessed housekeeper and the dim-witted but watchful maid for only so long. Blacklock is chronically ill and nursing the agony of losing his wife in childbirth. Agnes’ one acquaintance is a young woman of questionable means who directs her to an abortionist. Her one chance for salvation is the flirtatious Cornelius Soul, a gunpowder distributor with loose business ethics. Agnes is faced with choices, none of them good.

If I haven’t made myself clear, let me reiterate: this is an exceptional novel. There is nothing I found lacking, not in characterization or motivation or even in the description which immerses the reader in Agnes’ world. The ending is ultimately satisfying and strangely plausible despite the way the narrative spirals down, down into a despair that seems insurmountable.

HIGHLY recommended.

(Review originally posted to Booksquawk) show less

I have just finished The Book of Fires and it is a 5 star read for me!! I don't generally do reviews, but I have to give this one a go since I liked it so well. **I also have to note that although I have not usually been a huge fan of historical fiction, this book may have changed my mindset.

The Book of Fires by Jane Borodale is set in 18th century England. The narrator -- and unlikely heroine -- is Agnes, a country dwelling girl with an incredibly tough life. Early in the book she is raped (my word, not the author's) and becomes pregnant. In this century, her fate is unimaginable so she runs away from home after stealing money from a dead neighbor. Sounds odd? It was.... but an interesting sort of odd. In London, she walks until she show more can no longer bear to move and knocks on a random door. She begs to do any type of work and the home / business owner (Mr. Blacklock) agrees to a temporary arrangement. Mr. Blacklock is a pyrotechnician -- a maker of fireworks. Agnes becomes his apprentice and shows remarkable talent for the craft.

The characters in the tale are real; some likeable, some not but Borodale gives each character a great voice and personality. I fell in love with Agnes, faults and all. I also fell in love with Borodale's writing style. Here, Agnes describes the first time she sees fireworks (keep in mind this is in the days before the science of colored fireworks was discovered)...

"It is so close that I can hear the hiss of the quick match rush to the lifting charge of each flight of rockets, before the pound and roar of the ignition, and then the burst, and the sky is riddled with twists of fire, feathers of fire, billhooks of light, snakes of fire and smoke. The breaks are a spill of prickling white light across my eye, crackling the glaze of the sky into bitter shards. I blink. I cannot breathe for whiteness everywhere. I am blinded by it. The sky is burnt with purple shadows when the whiteness is done, when there is a pause for darkness, though the smoke swirls about, and then more gerbes start up, pulsing sheaves of orange sparks, with stars shooting out like grains of polished light that lift, drift, stop and then fall slowly, smooth as glass, winking out into the darkness. The world is either fire, or water, or darkness, nothing else. An unformed sob gathers in my chest."

I was hoping for a happy ending.... I'm not giving any spoilers but the book doesn't end as you might imagine. However, the ending was nice -- although it does not meet my definition of "happily ever after", I would categorize the ending as leaving me 'comfortably contented.' show less

Agnes Trussel is a seventeen year old girl whose life is thrown into turmoil when she discovers she is pregnant and runs away to London to start a new life. In London she is lucky enough to find employment as an assistant to the firework maker John Blacklock but as she desperately tries to hide her pregnancy from everyone around her, she starts to realise that she's not the only one with secrets...

When I first heard about this book last year I was immediately interested in reading it but eventually decided to give it a miss - until I saw that it had been shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers. Of course, being shortlisted for an award doesn't guarantee that a book will be good, but it does usually mean that there will at least show more be something different or special about it that makes it worth reading.

Well, it was worth reading, but I did also have a few problems with the book - the first being that it's written in the first person present tense. There have been a few books written in the present tense that I've enjoyed, but usually I find it distracting - and that was the case here. I also found it difficult to connect to any of the characters, even Agnes herself. It wasn't that they were badly drawn or uninteresting - Cornelius Soul the gunpowder seller, Mrs Blight the housekeeper and the mysterious Lettice Talbot wouldn't be out of place in a Dickens novel - I just couldn't engage with them or care about them very much. When I read historical fiction I like to feel as if I've been transported back in time and as if I'm there experiencing things along with the characters. Unfortunately I didn't feel any of that with this book.

The plot itself was interesting enough. I struggled with the opening chapters -which described the slaughter of a pig in an unnecessary amount of detail - but after that, when Agnes arrived in London I started to enjoy the story more. The descriptions of firework making were fascinating. It was particularly interesting to learn about the early experiments and research that would eventually lead to the discovery of coloured fireworks.

Despite the negative points I mentioned above, I kept on reading to the last page because I wanted to know how the story ended - and I was rewarded with a surprising ending that I hadn't been expecting. In fact, the final few chapters were great and made me glad I'd persevered with the book.

Would I recommend it? I'm not sure - there are much better historical fiction novels out there in my opinion - but if it appeals to you then give it a try and see what you think. show less

This is (sorry for the pun) a dreamy slow-burner of a novel. The prose is lyrical and intensely descriptive, but also provides a powerful picture of the novel's main character, Agnes Trussel, as she comes to terms with the crisis she experiences.

Agnes is a fascinating and clear-sighted woman, with a touching innocence about the people she encounters. Her quiet strength of mind is also a driving factor of her story. Not a great deal happens, but the key events which do take place are absolutely crucial and a turning point for Agnes' life. The historical settings are keenly felt and, indeed, London becomes a character in its own right within the book.

I very much enjoyed the relationship of pupil and teacher (and, later and subtly, more) show more between Agnes and the firework-maker, Blacklock, who takes her in and teaches her his trade. Perhaps the various methods of creating fireworks might be - for me - rather too much depicted in the story and I didn't need to know that level of information, but Agnes remains strong enough to carry me through the occasional plot weakness.

The final chapters are very powerful indeed, and I appreciated the open-ended and ultimately hopeful conclusion. A novel to savour. show less

This book had some potential, and I found the parts about the firework-makers and the innovations in pyrotechnics during the 17th century the most interesting. However, what is it with this trend to write books, historical fiction in particular, in the present tense? It really doesn't work for me. Ok as a library read.