'Casual Vacancy' + two more noteworthy fall novels

'Casual Vacancy' + two more noteworthy fall novels

2. 'Beautiful Lies,' by Clare Clark

If there's one thing we've lost in the Facebook age, it's the ability to rewrite our history. People can't get away from bad yearbook photos anymore, let alone unfortunate pasts.

Secrets were easier to keep in the Victorian era, but society was far less forgiving.

In Beautiful Lies, Maria Isabel Constancia de la Flamandiere, a Chilean heiress and wife of a Scottish laird, gets the one thing that could destroy her happiness and her husband's political career: A letter from her mother.

Clare Clark's first novel, “The Great Stink,” established her ability to recreate history accurately while still keeping pages flipping. The London sewers-set thriller was so atmospheric you almost needed a gas mask to read it. In her fourth novel, she based Edward and Maribel on Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, a radical politician and a founder of the Scottish Labour Party, and his wife, Gabriela.

She also highlights certain similarities between 1887 and today. In Queen Victoria's Jubilee year, there was a growing gap between the haves and the have-nots. Wages were falling, unemployment was high, and hundreds of the poor occupied Trafalgar Square (the fountains were a handy source of water).

Chain-smoking, poetry-writing Maribel would hardly thrive in today's political environment, but then, neither would her husband, Edward.

“Morality, he said simply, did not yield to self-interest. It was hard to imagine a man less suited to a life in politics than Edward.”

Not to give too much away, but Maribel may have been less than forthcoming about certain aspects of her past (up to and including her real name).

The letter from her family could not come at a less opportune time: Alfred Webster, muckraking editor of The Chronicle, has taken an interest in both Edward and Maribel – one that may not be as admiring as he first professes.

Clark plays with the ideas of identity and image, while incorporating the Bloody Sunday riots, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, and the growing interest in Spiritualism.

While photographing the native American cast behind the scenes at the show, Maribel looks at how a picture “if not strictly true, had the weight of truth about it.”

Clark takes a similar approach to fiction and her free-thinking, iconoclastic couple. “Beautiful Lies” takes its time to develop, but its portrait of a woman determined to decide for herself who she is and a society less stable and comfortable than it imagines is a rich one well worth studying.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

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The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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