I wonder how many of you reading this remember devouring Labyrinth in 2005? For most people this was our introduction to Kate Mosse and for me it was one of the only books where I reached the end and immediately turned back to the beginning and read it again. In time this was followed by Sepulchre and Citadel and formed the Languedoc Trilogy. This was a few years after the DaVinci Code by Dan Brown was published and it was the start of a certain genre of hefty volumes that were part history, part thriller with just a dash of the supernatural.
Kate Mosse is the reason that I first visited Carcasonne in south west France as I wanted to see the Languedoc, this fascinating land with a language of its own, so heavily weighted with religious, historical and cultural baggage; part of France, but in a way not really.
A decade later a new treat was released: The Burning Chambers which was the beginning of the Joubert Family Chronicles. This was followed by The City of Tears and subsequently The Ghost Ship and The Map of Bones. It is the last two books that I have recently enjoyed reading and very rich and rewarding it has been.
The Joubert family are Huguenots, French Protestants with decidedly Calvinist leanings. At the beginning of the chronicles we are in Carcasonne in 1562, right at the start of the French Wars of Religion. The Catholic monarchy over the following years see-sawed between allowing some sects religious freedom and at other times crushing everything other than strict Roman rites. The Languedoc was long a thorn in the flesh, as in previous centuries the area was a stronghold for Cathars, seen as heretics as they held duallist beliefs and did not hold with the trinity.
I learn so much from this sort of reading and it sends me online to research and investigate ideas that I feel I don’t know enough about! Anyway, in amongst all this history, meticulously researched by the way, there is plenty of story I promise you. We move through the Joubert generations, focusing heavily on the women, and The Ghost Ship is a sweeping epic of a love story with some unexpected twists. We are in 1621 and on the Barbary Coast with Louise, the unlikely owner and captain of a ship. She is constantly trying to escape the Huguenot strictures of her past family life but also to break free of everything that is expected of a woman. From beginning to end this story feels to be on a knife edge and the reader really doesn’t know how it will resolve. Dramatic, immersive and full of secrets; a great read.
I was delighted when I could buy the conclusion to the Joubert family story. Again, I learnt so much in such a powerfully interesting way. The Map of Bones sweeps in both time and geography from the late 1600s to the 1870s and from South Africa to London, via the Canary Islands and Amsterdam. I am sure I did not know how widely the Huguenot diaspora spread and I certainly had no knowledge of the South African connection. In this book, another Joubert female, Suzanne, a Huguenot refugee from war torn France, journeys to the Cape of Good Hope in search of Louise, her notorious cousin who disappeared over 50 years ago. Six generations later Isabelle follows in her footsteps, intent on investigating her ancestors. She finds many evils of the past but also, for reasons that gradually become clear, evils that are far from buried and might threaten her own life. This is exciting adventure of the sort that prevents me switching off my bedside light until well after the witching hour.
Throughout these four books Kate Mosse very definitely has an agenda that she is at no pains to hide. It is about feminism and misogyny and is something about which she has written another book: Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries: How Women (Also) Built the World. A couple of years ago I went to see her talk about this book at Wycombe Town Hall and she was passionate about the ways in which for many centuries women’s place in history has been ignored, erased and belittled. Her fiction endeavours to shed light on this and her storylines aim to shift the focus and paint a different and more positive picture.