Why can't we all just get along?

I read an interesting book about the Mayflower and the Pilgrims and the first fifty years of New England. We don't get the mythology over here to the same extent, but it's still rather surprising to discover that the picture-book version of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims and the 'Indians' sharing a meal together and being generally thankful for it, is actually quite accurate. The event does seem worth celebrating, in its own way -- the Pilgrims were occasionally a bit rubbish, but on the whole both groups of people at this date acted in ways that seem to suggest that it might be possible for people all just to get along. Alas within fifty years it had completely broken down, there was a terrible war with mass killings and horrendous atrocities on both sides, and the English in particular became very racially motivated, incapable of seeing differences between different tribes, and generally fulfilling all the vague impressions I had in my mind of the appalling behaviour of the early American colonists to the native people. It's interesting that this book tries, like so many, to throw a 'lessons-from-history' spin on it at the end and make it all relevant to the war on terror etc, with limited success. I suppose that people reading a hundred years from now will notice this in many books from our time, and find it poignant, though they of course will know how it ends.

I also read Resurrection by Tolstoy. It's about a young nobleman who is called to serve jury duty. In the defendant, a prostitute accused of murdering and robbing a client, he recognises the girl he seduced and abandoned ten years before. The book is bitterly satirical in places; it's very good, but I can't help but feel I should have read it when I was eighteen and ardent. It's interesting seeing the contrast with Dostoyevsky's portrayal of prison life in The House of the Dead; it seems to me like Tolstoy is always more concerned with theory, and Dostoyevsky with people. Obviously that's a very broad generalisation, but I think that's why I usually prefer Dostoyevsky.

Love and Louis XIV by Antonia Fraser is quite good, and interesting because the stories are interesting. It does read as if it has been a little clumsily edited down from a much longer work, though . It doesn't give much credence to the accusations of black masses and poisoning against Madame de Montespan, and doesn't give that sense of the sheer mass hysteria of Louis XIV's court which you get from other accounts. Probably she's right. I didn't know that Athenaîs continued to have the status of maîtresse en titre long after she and the King were no longer having any sort of physical relationship; and even after Madame de Maintenon had started sleeping with him on the grounds that if she didn't then he'd just get it somewhere else, and that that would interfere with her project to reform him.

The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke is an excellent collection of short stories, some relating to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I love the one with Anthony a Wood in it, and also the excellent Bess of Hardwick, who always seemed a bit uncanny in her housewifely social advancement. Corpus Christi features in one of them; a greedy and conceited fellow gets in trouble in a remote parish.

And for some light relief I read the third Temeraire book, Black Powder War. I enjoyed it as much as the previous ones. It's like baby Patrick O'Brian; it's what the midshipmen would be reading. I should think even Maturin wouldn't spurn it in lighter moments -- perhaps while recovering from a broken leg, or if deprived of his supply of coca leaves.