I have previously liked all of Simon Mawer’s novels that I’ve read, but Ancestry didn’t quite work for me. Not enough to abandon it, but enough to make me scamper sometimes over some pages with little interest in their content.
(Especially those interminable pages about the Crimean War.)
Ancestry is a fictionalised version of Mawer’s family history, which is intended to bring his ancestors to life. But like most people who trawl in their family history, Mawer knows little more than his ancestors’ patchy history in official documents. Births, Marriages, Deaths, Census records, some military history. Women, especially illiterate ones, fade into the shadows. Poor people don’t leave Stuff to inherit, stuff that might (or might not) give descendants some indication of what they were like. Just occasionally there is a bit of ‘family lore’ that might (or might not) have a grain of truth in it.
So Mawer makes up a story for his ancestors, always reminding the reader that this is what he’s doing. Some of these characters, based on names and dates that are known, are more interesting than others. Poverty and bad luck stymies some of them. Some of them get through with sheer will and determination, and the family photo from 1928 shows that the Mawer family has transcended its humble origins.
But because the story is tethered to the known facts, reinforced by authorial intrusions and punctuated by copies of documents inserted into the text, it keeps losing momentum. Jonathan Myerson at The Guardian felt the same: the sub-title of his review is The tale of his 19th-century ancestors in fictional form is undercut by the author butting in to remind us of his exhaustive research.
Yes.
But it was shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction so don’t take any notice of me.
(The prize was won by Lucy Caldwell’s These Days, see my review) and Mawer has won it previously in 2016 for his novel Tightrope, see my review).
Title: Ancestry
Publisher: Little Brown, 2022
Jacket design Whittaker Book Design
ISBN: 9781408714843, pbk., 414 pages
Source: Personal library, purchased from The Avenue Bookstore, Albert Park.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
God, I wish novelists would stop doing this. Just make it a bloody novel. We know that lots of novels take inspiration from true events anyway, so can’t they just do what they do best and spare us all the cumbersomeness?!
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By: Elle on January 15, 2024
at 10:01 am
LOL Elle, you know how people go on and on about their family history… obvs. some can’t resist the temptation to inflict on the world in a book!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 15, 2024
at 10:22 am
Nothing worse than biographies that are all dares and events with not much story. I don’t care for fictional biographies. There are so many interesting ones out there. Good to know how they go ahead of time of reading them.
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By: TravellinPenguin on January 15, 2024
at 7:55 pm
To be fair, there is plenty of story, in two parts following different branches of the family.
It’s just that the story just doesn’t flow, the way that a novel does when the characters just take the author along with them!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 15, 2024
at 8:17 pm
I can actually trace my family to tree to Sir William Hooker who is my 10x Great Grandfather. He gets a mention in Pepys diary, Pepys didn’t like him much but does like his “fat” wife. She was Lettice Coppinger who through her nobility I can trace back to Edward III, my 21st and 22nd GG, and hence finally to the Book of Genesis haa haa! Sorry, but the title and your review just made me think I had to put my credentials out there as to my royal connections. :-)
https://www.londonremembers.com/subjects/sir-william-hooker-lord-mayor
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By: fourtriplezed on January 15, 2024
at 7:56 pm
#Tsk,tsk I suppose you can’t help yourself either!
The Spouse claims an ancestor in the Domesday Book…
Mine, of course, are incredibly interesting, but the only one I’m really interested in is (would have been) my Uncle Ronnie, who died after service in the Hebrides, one of “a number of RAFVR who contracted pneumonia” in suspicious circumstances… which you can read about here:
https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/past-times/2759857/new-book-western-isles-operation-cauldron/
But guess what? I have his service records and there is not a word about him being anywhere near the Hebrides.
Which proves yet again that documents lie.
Especially when there is a cover-up of some kind.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 15, 2024
at 8:36 pm
I had never heard of Operation Cauldron. A fascinating link to your uncle’s past. I have just read the wiki on the operation as well.
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By: fourtriplezed on January 17, 2024
at 8:35 am
Actually, there was germ warfare with anthrax before that, on Guinard Island, during the war. Anthrax symptoms look a lot like TB too. The Brits, with connivance from Canada and the US, were very busy indeed.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 17, 2024
at 9:03 am
Only readrge glass house by him when it was I. The Booker shortlist that was the last time I read the actual Booker shortlisted books for the year I remember I like it in part but also felt it wasn’t quite what it felt like it could be from the blurb if that makes sense
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By: winstonsdad on January 15, 2024
at 8:02 pm
I really like The Glass House, and also the two about the SOE women in the war.
So I’m not giving up on this author, not at all.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 16, 2024
at 8:15 am
You know, I’m always doubtful of a book that’s a fictionalized version of their own family history. But if it is very concentrated on just a single known fact or just a few facts during a certain, limited era, it can be very good. Sagas… hm…
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By: Davida Chazan on January 15, 2024
at 10:14 pm
I agree. There’s sometimes one really interesting person in a family, and just from what little is known, a terrific novel could be created.
The Spouse can trace his family back to The Domesday Book but there are only two interesting people out of all of them.
One is the woman who name is tagged “not a credit to the family” and she fascinates me. What did she do to be posthumously humiliated like this? I reckon I could whip up a great little bit of HistFic about her!
The other is ‘the Father of Cheddar Cheese’, and you can see his achievement at Wikipedia alongside his unnamed wife and his named sons who brought the cheese to Australia. But no, I am not going to write another of those yawnworthy ‘the woman did it but the man got the credit’ novels, there are too many of them already!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 16, 2024
at 8:24 am
Father of Cheddar Cheese? Cool! I love cheddar! You know, I have been dabbling in writing a novel myself based on my own family. You see, we found out that my grandmother lied on the 1940 census and said that my father (an only child) had two younger sisters! No one ever heard of them, no one knows who they were, but it was 1940, and we’re Jewish so… who knows? I thought up a few scenarios…
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By: Davida Chazan on January 16, 2024
at 6:15 pm
Well, I think that would not be for me either. Sounds very clumsy…
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on January 16, 2024
at 2:40 am
Not up to his usual standard at all!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 16, 2024
at 8:27 am
I think the best fun about investigating family history is making sense of what turns out to be slightly garbled stories that have come down the generations and changed along the way. I also had a great time with my paternal grandmother, whose information was different on every document, almost none of it accurate.
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By: Eleanor Dilley on January 16, 2024
at 10:57 am
Oh it happens. My father’s death certificate is wrong because the typist copied his birthplace incorrectly and getting it changed was all too hard. That’s only five years ago.
Plus, on his docs, his first name is sometimes spelled Laurence and other times Lawrence.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 16, 2024
at 11:02 am
Oh my grandmother could have fibbed for England if it had been an Olympic sport – her name, age, an invented spouse to be my father’s father … I did come to it knowing there were (ahem) inaccuracies in my father’s birth certificate!
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By: Eleanor Dilley on January 16, 2024
at 11:23 am
It’s sad really, that they had to fib their whole lives to cover up (ahem) indiscretions that wouldn’t make anyone bat an eyelid today.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 16, 2024
at 11:26 am
It sounds like he’d be better off using his family as a starting point rather than getting constantly waylaid – what a shame. Your comment about family lore made me laugh – one side of my family in particular has so many tales, none of which stand up to any scrutiny!
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By: madamebibilophile on January 17, 2024
at 3:15 am
Sounds like Fibbing could indeed be an Olympic Sport!
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By: Lisa Hill on January 17, 2024
at 9:22 am
I wasn’t all that keen on the first book I read by him – can’t remember the title now but it was about a female agent in WW2 France. So I never read anything further. This one sounds a right old mishmash, as if he couldn’t quite make up his mind whether he wanted to right a purely fictionalised account or a historical record version
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By: BookerTalk on January 23, 2024
at 9:15 am
There were two of those: The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, and Tightrope. I liked them both, but I thought the first one was better than the second.
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By: Lisa Hill on January 23, 2024
at 9:37 am