Ladysmith: Amazon.co.uk: Giles Foden: Books

Amazon.co.uk Review

In the dying days of the 19th century, the world's eyes turned to the small South African town of Ladysmith, whose inhabitants spent 118 days under siege from Boer forces, waiting for General Buller's relief forces. Giles Foden tells Ladysmith's story through a host of characters. There's the Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan and his daughters Bella and Jane; the barber Antonio Torres, from Portuguese East Africa; the various British war correspondents, including a young Winston Churchill; the Indian stretcher bearers, among them Mohandas Ghandi; a Zulu named Muhle Maseku, his wife Nandi and son Wellington; and two young English soldiers, Tom and Perry Barnes, whose letters home were apparently inspired by those of Foden's great- grandfather. It's a busy book, and it's not always clear what's going on. But that's Foden's point. At heart Ladysmith is a novel about the writing of history, set on the verge of modernity, where old ways of assessing historical truth were being cruelly questioned. So correspondent George Steevens still reads his Greek historians and Gibbons, while messages are being sent(and censored) by the new-fangled heliograph. "Sieges are out of date," Steevens realises. "To the man of 1899, with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us nothing!" With such pressures to provide news, news, news, it's no surprise when the correspondents end up producing the Ladysmith Lyre, full of fake news. And on the margins, there's the unnamed Biographer, eschewing words in favour of visual images with his Biography, but soon finding that he too can't tell the whole story.

Foden visits the pitfalls of historical fiction. Like Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes, there are moments in Ladysmith when research overpowers narrative. Like Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong, Foden's love story convinces far less than his war story. In its attempted range--Churchill and Ghandi's encounter prefiguring events of the 1940s, Bella's personal rebellion standing in for the advance of women, the place of Ireland in Britain's colonial plans, Wellington's experiences informing his work with the ANC-- Ladysmith sometimes falls short. But in his evocation of the town's drawn-out suffering, Foden is very good, producing some startling images such as the mockingbirds who "take to imitating the whine and buzz of shells". This is never anything less than a fascinating, ambitious novel, and to see a young author taking on the huge question of how to write history is inspiring indeed. --Alan Stewart

Amazon.co.uk Review

In the dying days of the 19th century, the world's eyes turned to the small South African town of Ladysmith, whose inhabitants spent 118 days under siege from Boer forces, waiting for General Buller's relief forces. Giles Foden tells Ladysmith's story through a host of characters. There's the Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan and his daughters Bella and Jane; the barber Antonio Torres, from Portuguese East Africa; the various British war correspondents, including a young Winston Churchill; the Indian stretcher bearers, among them Mohandas Ghandi; a Zulu named Muhle Maseku, his wife Nandi and son Wellington; and two young English soldiers, Tom and Perry Barnes, whose letters home were apparently inspired by those of Foden's great- grandfather. It's a busy book, and it's not always clear what's going on. But that's Foden's point. At heart Ladysmith is a novel about the writing of history, set on the verge of modernity, where old ways of assessing historical truth were being cruelly questioned. So correspondent George Steevens still reads his Greek historians and Gibbons, while messages are being sent (and censored) by the new-fangled heliograph. "Sieges are out of date," Steevens realises. "To the man of 1899, with five editions of the evening papers every day, a siege is a thousandfold a hardship. We make it a grievance nowadays if we are a day behind the news--news that concerns us nothing!" With such pressures to provide news, news, news, it's no surprise when the correspondents end up producing the Ladysmith Lyre, full of fake news. And on the margins, there's the unnamed Biographer, eschewing words in favour of visual images with his Biograph, but soon finding that he too can't tell the whole story.

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

Boer War: that's not cricket 3 Jun 2001

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This book tells the story of a period of history I regrettably know little about. The siege is very well-dramatised and, although not a lot can go on in a beseiged town, the author brings out the stories of many of the interesting characters who played their part. You really get to imagine what it must be like living in an ordinary town that's been turned into a battlezone. The contradiction between quaint English formalities and the brutalities of modern war is clear for all. My one criticism is that the anecdotes each character has to tell have been tied-together rather loosely, with the result that the book can appear rather disjointed in places. Good read.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

A hurried second novel? 17 Nov 1999

Having read and enjoyed Giles Foden's previous novel "The Last King of Scotland" I looked forward to reading "Ladysmith". It was, however, not a satisfactory experience. There are a number of problems with the novel which detract from it. First of all, there are far too many characters, none of whom are developed enough to carry the narrative or care about particularly. And as a consequence the story of the siege is confusing in parts and flat in others. There were some great possibilities. For instance, one brother being besieged in the town and another in the rescuing army. But on the whole these were not developed. There was also virtually no mention of the Boers and their reasons for fighting and the suffering of the Africans and Indians during the siege was scarely addressed. The author tried in numerous places to exhibit a writing style that was too ambitious and consequently it looked out of place and somewhat laboured. On the whole I was very disappointed. Sorry...

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

A Muddled and Wooden Stew 2 Sep 2003

By A. Ross TOP 500 REVIEWER

I generally enjoy historical and military fiction, and really liked Foden's first book (The Last King of Scotland), however this novel of the Boer War (which, according to Foden, was rushed to publication in order to coincide with the centenary of the war) did little to either entertain, educate, or move me. To be sure, the war-which bridged the 19th and 20th centuries-served both as another signal that the empire was dying, and as a portent of the horrors of World War I, and is thus noteworthy. Unfortunately, Foden's meticulous recreation of the three month siege of the town of Ladysmith, in which about 14,000 British soldiers and 5,000 civilians (of which half were Africans and several hundred, Indian) were subject to daily artillery barrages from huge Boer guns, suffers from an overwhelming number of characters and points of view. There were countless memoirs and histories of the siege, and one gets the feeling that Foden felt the need to cram every perspective into his book, which was apparently inspired by letters written by his great-grandfather, who was a trooper in the war. Indeed, those who've read Thomas Packenham's massive history, The Boer War, will recognize where certain scenes in the novel spring from.

The story is very loosely arranged around Irish hotelier Leo Kiernan's daughter Bella, and her alternating affections amidst the siege But that's only a small slice of the pie, and is rather clumsily portrayed to boot. The real story is about life in the midst of a siege, with all its familiar aspects: rationing, boredom, terror, filth, martial law, blood and guts, and so on. Chronicling all this are a good fifteen different characters, including fictional creations such as Bella, her sister, her father, various soldiers, a Portuguese barber, a Boer doctor, an early motion picture recorder, a Zulu and his wife and son, and real-life figures such as a young Winston Churchill, British journalists Nevinson and George Stevens, and an Indian stretcher bearer by the name of Gandhi. The book runs back and forth amongst these different perspectives, skimming lightly on each before a heavy-handed transition takes the reader to the next scene. None is fully-fleshed out, and Foden's interest in displaying the siege as emblematic of a sea-change in British imperial history leads his characters to speechify. The pronouncements of Churchill and Gandhi are particularly leaden. The resulting stew is an altogether wooden and unsatisfying one, and unlikely to enrich anyone's understanding of the events-although it does convey the sense of an aging empire muddling into quicksand.