I have previously liked all of Simon Mawer’s novels that I’ve read, but Ancestry didn’t quite work for me. Not enough to abandon it, but enough to make me scamper sometimes over some pages with little interest in their content.

(Especially those interminable pages about the Crimean War.)

Ancestry is a fictionalised version of Mawer’s family history, which is intended to bring his ancestors to life. But like most people who trawl in their family history, Mawer knows little more than his ancestors’ patchy history in official documents. Births, Marriages, Deaths, Census records, some military history. Women, especially illiterate ones, fade into the shadows. Poor people don’t leave Stuff to inherit, stuff that might (or might not) give descendants some indication of what they were like. Just occasionally there is a bit of ‘family lore’ that might (or might not) have a grain of truth in it.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/01/15/ancestry-2022-by-simon-mawer/ ( )

Abraham lives an impoverished life in Suffolk. He cannot read or write but he dreams of more and is finally apprenticed to become a seaman. Naomi has moved to London to become a dressmaker but fate has more in store. Ann and George are newly wed and living in Army barracks. The lives of these individuals in 1850s England will link through their families.
This is the story of Mawer's own ancestors, he has taken a few facts and written a gripping fictionalised account of their lives. The stories are wonderful, Abraham's life at sea and the difficulties faced by his family as news is often months late, George's adventures in the horror of the Crimean War. Of course there is a lot of literary licence taken to fill in the gaps but this is where Mawer's expertise as a novelist really shines. This is a wonderful book ( )

This is the sort of book that may give catalogers (or anyone trying to figure out what shelf a book belongs on) fits. It's a novel, but it's history. It's a primary-source-based retelling of the past, but it's mostly invented. It's a gifted author shuffling a handful of clues and filling in the vast gaps between them, using the inventive process as an opportunity to reflect on the narrative threads that tie history and fiction together.

In Ancestry, Mawer imagines the lives of two couples, his 19th-century great-great-grandparents. The first ran away from the dreary life of agricultural labor to become a seaman and later married a dressmaker who had a child out of wedlock. The other was a soldier who married an Irishwoman who had to manage alone in a hostile world when he was sent to fight in the Crimean war. Their stories are anchored with scraps of paper - birth, marriage, and death records, some marked with an illiterate's X - but the documentary evidence is scant for people who are poor and landless. What Mawer accomplishes is an imaginative reinvention of these families and their worlds, which I found absorbing and illuminating. The women, in particular, are vividly brought to life, and their hard-scrabble determination to create a life for themselves and their children is more dramatic than ocean crossings or battles. At a time when I often despair of our world, it's eye-opening to see how difficult ordinary lives were not all that long ago. It's an immersive reading experience.