There was something very pleasing about the runaway success of Kate Mosse’s last novel, The Ghost Ship, the third of her Joubert family chronicles. The book received little critical attention but was glowingly reviewed by bloggers and became a publicist’s dream: the word-of-mouth bestseller. I interviewed Mosse at Faversham literary festival soon after the book was published and there was a palpable sense of excitement in the room that was easy to understand. Mosse has always been a wonderfully fluent and engaging writer, and here was a novel that drew on classic adventure tales from Robert Louis Stevenson to John Meade Falkner and delivered an explosive and propulsive story of life on the high seas.
Mosse’s newest book is the last in the Joubert quartet. The novel opens in 1688, with Suzanne Joubert, a Huguenot refugee, arriving at the Cape of Good Hope. While her immediate goal is survival in this unfamiliar and often hostile land, Suzanne harbours a deeper, more personal mission: to uncover the fate of her ancestor, Louise Reydon-Joubert, the brilliant she-captain hero of The Ghost Ship. This quest, blending adventure and historical intrigue, drives much of the novel’s narrative energy. Suzanne’s resilience in the face of danger and her dogged determination to uncover Louise’s fate make her one of Mosse’s most compelling protagonists, continuing the author’s tradition of presenting strong, independent women as agents of a history from which they have for too long been obscured.
The second narrative thread, set in 1862, follows Isabelle Lepard, Suzanne’s descendant, who retraces her ancestor’s steps in an effort to complete the family’s historical record. It’s a fascinating set-up, this twinning of historical sleuth narratives, although Isabelle’s mission, while noble, sometimes struggles to live up to the intensity of Suzanne’s struggle for survival in the wilds of 17th-century South Africa.
When a writer has an astonishing early success – as Mosse did with her third novel, Labyrinth – there can be a sense that works that came later live in the shadow of that book, read in a kind of competition with it.
I kept thinking about Hilary Mantel’s Reith lectures as I was reading the Joubert family chronicles. Mantel spoke about fact and fiction being blended in her work like olive oil and egg yolk in mayonnaise – you can’t return them to their original states. Here, Mosse gives us both the satisfying intricacy of historical fact and a fictional narrative that carries us along at a rollicking pace. The long, rich, tragic history of the Huguenots deserved a series of novels as brilliant and well researched as these, in which the past is felt deep in the reader’s bones.