Booklog 7/2020: Guinevere Glasfurd: The Year Without Summer

[jacey]

In April 1815, Mount Tambora on the Island of Sumbawa (Indonesia – then the Dutch East Indies) erupts, the cataclysm killing thousands. Ship's surgeon Henry Hogg is on the British ship sent to investigate. It's the largest volcanic event in recorded history. The lush island paradise is now solid ash, the surrounding sea solid with pumice. But the explosion isn't an isolated incident. Volcanic activity continues for six months and doesn't settle down for three years. The ash cloud rises into the atmosphere with disastrous consequences for the whole planet. 1816 becomes the year without a summer with dramatic episodes of unseasonal weather. Rain and cold weather ruins harvests, leading to starvation and civil unrest.

Here are six separate interwoven stories, connected only by the effects of the Year Without a Summer. In Switzerland Mary Godwin with her (then) lover, Shelley, and their young son, spend the summer with Lord Byron, John Polidori and Claire Clairmont near Geneva. They are confined inside by the incessant and unseasonal rain, and this is where Mary hatches the idea for Frankenstein. In Vermont, preacher Charles Whitlock encourages his followers to keep faith as drought dries their wells, their cattle die, and their crops fail. In Suffolk the painter John Constable struggles to establish himself in the Royal Academy while worrying how he can possibly support a wife on his meagre income. He can't reconcile the idyllic England he paints with the misery that surrounds him. Sarah Hobbs, a pitifully poor farm labourer has had enough of starving, barefoot in the icy mud, while the farmers grow fatter. Hope Peter, a soldier who has survived Waterloo returns from the Napoleonic wars to find his mother dead, his family home demolished, and the land he thought he had waiting for him fenced in by the local landowner. He flees to London, where he is seduced by a group of revolutionaries fighting for a better life.  

As desperation sets in, Britain is beset by riots. Rebellion is in the air. The Year Without Summer connects six separate lives in the aftermath of the explosion of Mount Tambora.

 

 

 

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Comments

[cmcmck]

Read this one on publication a while back.

Fascinating.

[jacey]

It's not generally the kind of book I'd go for but I was quickly drawn in. It's really 6 short stories but they fit together so well.