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Martin Cruz Smith’s Rose is a good read
Book Review
By Derryll White
Smith, Martin Cruz (1996). Rose.
I was lucky enough to have had at one time a beautiful woman in my life enraptured by Africa. She talked Africa to me at any given opportunity. Johnathan Blair, the American adventurer who is the centre of this work, had in 1872 just been chased out of West Africa. The first sentence reads: “The most beautiful women in the world were African.” Knowing Martin Cruz Smith to be a writer of deep talent, I was pulled in.
Well, ‘Rose’ is not about Africa at all. The reader is deposited in late nineteenth-century England, in the coal mining town of Wigan. One immediately thinks of George Orwell’s ‘The Road to Wigan Pier.’ Rose, of the title, is Rose Molyneux, a pit girl. Pit girls were seen at the time as lower than prostitutes on the social scale, labourers who stole work from mining men who supported wives and children.
Martin Cruz Smith is an engaging writer. He is quick to target his main characters and to build a separate mystique around each of them. In ‘Rose’ he gives a well-developed view of the social structure and commerce of 19th century England. The class structure is easily comprehended and the social life of working class coal miners is graphically presented, raw and interesting.
The author tells a long story with ‘Rose.’ a story that has a delightful twist at the end. I appreciated the ways in which he investigates the status of women in Victorian England. I haven’t read any history which gives such a clear picture of the limited possibilities for both working class and titled women. ‘Rose’ is a very good read.
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Excerpts from the novel:
PIT GIRLS – “I am a member of a parliamentary committee looking into the employment of women called pit girls in the coal mines. They’re women who work on the surface, sorting and moving coal as it comes up. We are, in fact, the third parliamentary committee that has tried to remove these women from the mines, but they are obstinate.”
MINERS – Brunel, the great railroad engineer, claimed that the drivers of trains should be illiterate because only the unlettered man paid attention. Miners paid attention, Blair thought. The faces in the cage were more concentrated than the School of Plato for the way they listened to the unraveling of round steel cable, the slightest yawing of the cage, the growing pressure on the wooden soles of their clogs.
PEOPLE – “What we are, Leverret, is a sum of our sins. That’s what makes us human instead of saints. A perfectly flat surface has no character. Allow some cracks, some flaws and shortcomings, and then you have contrast. It’s that contrast with impossible perfection that makes our character.”
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
