Review — Black Silk and Sympathy by Deborah Challinor

Good historical fiction shouldn't be just contemporary plots with crinolines. Characters should think differently, act and aspire differently, convince us that the past is indeed a foreign country (thank you, L P Hartley).

But it mustn't be too foreign. We also want the reassurance that 100.... 200....etc years back, there were people and problems we can relate to; that as with all fiction, we can live vicariously through others' experiences. It's a balancing and measuring act for any writer in the genre.

Deborah Challinor's latest, her 18th by my guesstimate, achieves that balance. 

She sells big in Australia, and this niftily-titled story is mostly set there, during the 1860s. Tatty Caldwell of the coal-black hair has been doing pretty damn well in Sydney, after arriving alone and orphaned from London a few years before. Marriage and determination have brought mild prosperity, plus a precarious social position as the town's first female undertaker. Indeed, I said undertaker. But now she faces financial ruin – and the hangman's noose. Yes, I said that as well.

There's never any shortage of drama in a Challinor plot, and our gutsy, bolshie young heroine, who's already shown her mettle by teaching literacy to 26 kids on an emigrant ship, endures an ugly union with Titus of the ''subtle persuasion'' business techniques that include blackmail and probable homicide. 

Very soon, Tatty knows all about shroud-makers, how and when to dress a corpse, why the drowned dead cause extra problems. We hear details of mourning rings (''black enamel on eighteen-carat gold''), the importance of mutes, gutta-percha crosses, the value of Belgian Black horses with appropriate plumes, and other tricks of her trade, including – this is wonderful – funeral biscuits with psalms inscribed on their wrappings. She also comes to know Sydney's grand buildings, exiguous but improving parks, the ''narrow laneways and closes....hovels and sheds'' of the poor.

A phoney medium flits by. Deaths of kids shatter even hardened workers.  A stroppy servant offends society ladies. There's dastardly arson, a decent suitor (but for multiple reasons, Tatty has reservations about all XY chromosomes). That hangman's noose keeps dangling between background and foreground. We get a tidy wrap-up where the good mostly end happily, with some reunions and a spot of decent cooking thrown in, while the bad are satisfyingly miserable, demented or suicidal.

Challinor is a strong, steady narrator; you don't expect stylistic surprises from her. You do expect a roll-call of characters, and you get them here. Tatty appeals from the start, vital and vulnerable.  People are inclined to speak in flawless sentences, but they're enjoyably diverse. Oh, and there's even a baker called Mr Crumb. Excellent.

You can't avoid learning a lot of history. If you're a Challinor fan, you won't want to avoid learning it. Places such as those hovels, the Sydney Female Immigration Depot (top floor an asylum), sparkling harbour and spider-plagued bedrooms are evoked neatly. A substantial Author's Note indicates how meticulously plot, people, places have been prepared.

Black Silk and Sympathy is the first in a planned trilogy featuring the doughty Miss Caldwell. Deborah Challinor's stadiums-full of devoted readers have many more pleasures ahead.

Review by David Hill

David Hill is a New Plymouth author. His books for young adults and teenagers are published in several countries.