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4.0 out of 5 stars
"But you can have no respect at all for me", Mar 9 2009
This vast and sweeping Victorian drama crosses the decades moving between Italy and London, the English county of Derbyshire, and onto the bloody battlefields of the Crimea where the two heroine of this novel are determined to find love and connections amongst a bloody and body-littered landscape. Filled with the graphic details of the most horrific war fought between the Russian Empire on one side and an alliance of France, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Sardinia, and the Ottoman Empire on the other, The Rose of Sebastopol is a indeed stark testament to an age of social and medical uncertainly. Ever since her impetuous and free-spirited Rosa Barr came to London to stay with her more conventional cousin Mariella Lingwood, Mariella seemed to be similarly repelled and attracted by Rosa's penchant towards rebellion. Ever since childhood, Rosa has a fierce altruistic streak and dreamed of becoming a proper nurse, or even a doctor if only that were possible in this day and age. Certainly Rosa is like a sudden burst of sunshine in Mariella's life even though Mariella is appalled when Rosa takes her to spend an afternoon with Barbara Leigh Smith, a notorious artist who considered by proper society to be one of "the wild people of London."
A somewhat stuffy girl, Mariella spends much of her time stitching and mending and tucking. Up until now she has found satisfaction in her exquisite sewing, playing the role of the young-lady-waiting betrothal to Dr Henry Thewell, one of the country's most promising and ambitious surgeons. Yet Mariella, like Rosa, cannot escape danger, her journey beginning when a letter arrives at her home telling her that Henry has survived the first wave of battle and is convalescing in the Italy after a bout of illness. Traveling to the town of Narni, Mariella endures the smell of fever still on Henry's breath even as he murmurs the word Rosa. Although Henry is too ill and too insistent to resist, there could be little doubt that Mariella is answering the wish of a dying man - and that of his frantic concern for Rosa who pig-headily vanished off to the Front, thinking that she could be everyone's savior.
Determined to find out the truth of Rosa's whereabouts Mariella makes hasty plans, bound for the Crimea with her trusted maid Nora McCormack, who becomes an indiscernible traveling companion and who surprisingly finds her own value after becoming a victim of a cholera outbreak. Mariella's eventual goal, of course, is to revisit the place where Rosa was last seen in Sebastopol, but she has no way of knowing all of the difficulties and problems that await her on this momentous adventure, nor the value of those she meets along the way, especially her friend, the tall and board dark eyed Captain Max Stukley, all flashing braid and gilt buttons, with his ostentatious moustache. A soldier from youth who has been guided by the battlefield, perhaps it is Max who can finally unlock the door to Rosa's whereabouts.
Dividing her narrative up into three prime locations and interspersing two different time periods each approximately a decade apart, McMahon sets herself an Herculean task in this novel as the action gravitates between the gentle solace of England with its green fields and narrow lanes, " the benign woods full of green and golden light and wonderful shifting shadows," to the horrors of the Crimea with all of the rats and the pestilence, the death and dying, young soldiers without limbs, and the nurses who attend them while battling limited resources, even as day and night there continues the incessant boom of guns firing in the distance. The author's attention to period detail is meticulous, from the sick and the helpless that Mariella eventually begs to care for, to the lead works in Derbyshire that feed the munitions for the massive war effort, to the poor sanitation of the Victorian hospitals and the lack of clean water, both for cleanliness and for drinking, where the wards become an inadvertent breading ground for cholera. All the while McMahon's heroine morphs and changes, her Mariella steadily driven to maturity by the perpetual essence of Rosa, her smell of lemons, the fragrance of her hair and skin. Although the extended battle scenes towards the end test the reader's patience a bit, especially in terms of the framework of Mariella's complicated emotional state, the author mostly draws us totally into Mariella's epic journey as she, like Rosa before her, shimmers through hospitals, leaving her name on a dozen suffering tongues, remaining haunted by her memories of her life with Rosa in a more innocent and gentle time. Mike Leonard March 09.
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