A Conspiracy of Paper

I'm finishing up the 2014 TBR Pile Challenge with David Liss's A Conspiracy of Paper.  I didn't care for his The Whiskey Rebels, but found this one much more to my liking and would've given it 5 stars instead of just 4 on GoodReads if the plot hadn't been so darn complicated.

Set in 1720 on the eve of the bursting of the infamous South Sea Bubble, the first stock crash, in London, I found A Conspiracy of Paper to be a wonderful historical novel on several fronts.  First, it gave me a juicy historical event--I've heard about the South Sea Company for years, but never dug into it enough to really know what it was all about.  In his notes at the end of the novel, Liss says that he wrote the novel after researching the South Sea Bubble for his doctorate and felt writing a novel about the situation was the best way to wrap together the various complicated threads that he researched.

Unlike The Whiskey Rebels, the characters in A Conspiracy of Paper are realistic, well-drawn, distinguishable from each other, and his dialogue is convincing.  I really like his main character, Ben Weaver, a prodigal son of a Jewish family who left the fold to become a pugilist and then turned thief-taker, an occupation which has morphed into sort of a nascent private-eye at the novel's start.  Liss does a good job of showing us around early 18th century London through the eyes of someone who is both an insider and an outsider.  Ben works mostly with the seedy underbelly but also has clients among the peerage, and I found myself looking up place names regularly.  I knew nothing about the Jewish community of Dukes Place, for example, before reading this novel.

The novel is really a mystery and is structured that way, with Ben not discovering the truth behind his estranged father's murder as well as four other individuals, until the final pages of the novel.  I found the plot incredibly complicated and sad to say a bit tedious with all its twists and turns.  The premise of the novel--that the South Sea Company and its dealing with the Bank of England and the British government was complex, shady, and secretive--I can totally buy into, but I'm not sure the plot needed to be so intricate for the message to come through loud and clear.  I think I would've grasped Liss's assertion that paper securities are a flimsy foundation for a nation's well-being to rest upon without all the maneuvering.

I don't want to suggest that this isn't a good historical novel--it definitely is--Liss just got a bit carried away is all.  I will definitely look for other novels by Liss--I do like his approach and his history is sound, which is very important to me.

The Whiskey Rebels

The Whiskey Rebels, by David Liss, is one of the most disappointing books I've read in a long time. Based on the many 5-star reviews that it has on Amazon and Goodreads, I expected it to be great but despite a strong plot and more than occasional flashes of brilliance, I found the book to be deeply flawed.

One of the two protagonists (the Joan Maycott character) was so annoying that I almost couldn't stand to be in the same room with her. She was unbelievable for starters--the most beautiful woman, charming, a natural born leader (the other characters compared her to Washington!), a born writer (she read a few novels, a couple of book on political economy, and then in her free time on the frontier wrote the first great American novel--puh-lease!), a born financial wizard (remember those couple of books on political economy, they gave her everything she needed to know to best Alexander Hamilton in high-stakes finance). She talked in platitudes--blathering on and on about her patriotism and that of her husband and the other veterans of the Revolutionary War. It seemed whenever the author had to write her dialogue he couldn't come up with anything fresh. I found her repetitive, sanctimonious, wooden, boring, and false as a character. Give me womanizer, drunkard Ethan Saunders (the other protagonist) any day--he was interesting with an authentic voice.


Given how much I disliked Joan Maycott, why did I still give this book 3 stars on Goodreads? Because it's a great story about an interesting time in American history and most of it is well-crafted and well-written. I wish the author had figured out how to tell the other side of the story without resorting to the likes of Joan. Had he, it probably would've been a 5-star book for me.

I think any author who decides to have a double narrator is going to have a major challenge, but I've seen this successfully done.  Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier is a good example, but in that book the two narrators are working towards a common goal, being together.  In The Whiskey Rebels, the two narrators are antagonists and so it's natural for the reader to favor one over the other.  It's hard for me to understand why Liss would pick such a difficult narrative style.  Granted, it does seem like a clever way to to tell the two opposing sides of a story, but for me it really didn't work.  Perhaps if I had liked Joan more, I might have wanted to see her succeed.  As it was, I was really rooting for her downfall.

The other big problem I had with this book is that I think the title misrepresented the story.  I wanted to read about the people behind the Whiskey Rebellion.  Apart from the backstory it gave Joan and her "band" and their motivation to destroy Alexander Hamilton and the Bank of the United States, the story didn't have anything to do with the actual insurrection and the newly formed government's methods of dealing with it.  The story was really about financiers and their plans to manipulate the markets as the financial infrastructure of the country was being developed.  That was an interesting story, but not the one I had hoped to read.  Since the novel did have two narrators, and Ethan Saunders was not a Whiskey rebel, I think I am justified in griping about the novel being mistitled.

I have another David Liss historical novel, A Conspiracy of Paper, on my TBR shelf.  I wonder how it compares to The Whiskey Rebels in terms of living up to its reputation.  A Conspiracy of Paper was first published in 2000 and takes place in 18th century London.  The Whiskey Rebels was published in 2008 and takes place in 18th century Philadelphia, New York, and the Pennsylvania frontier.  A Conspiracy of Paper won the 2000 Edgar Award for Best First Novel.  I think I will eventually read it, but if it disappoints me as The Whiskey Rebels did, I will have to simply write off David Liss as an author whose books I want to read.

To be fair, I did earmark a couple of pages in which Liss really did show his chops as a writer.  Here is my favorite (from one of the Ethan Saunders' chapters):

All these things were bound together, but that did not mean they originated from the same point.  Another thing I had learned during the war was that unrelated threads become entangled because important men can be important in more than one sphere at a time.  Hamilton's secretive dealings with Duer's men might have nothing to do with the threat against the bank or Cynthia's husband's disappearance.  On the other hand, just because these things might begin as unrelated didn't mean they stayed that way, and it would be best to assume connections even when there could be no logical reason for them to exist.  Mysterious actions and unknown plots are uncovered not by understanding motives but by understanding men.

I think the line that I highlighted is absolutely true and applies to fiction writing in spades.  My problem with The Whiskey Rebels is that I don't think Liss demonstrated that he understood women, which is why the character of Joan feels so false to me.

This was the second book in the TBR Challenge for 2013 that I have read.  Great progress in making room on my TBR shelves for more books!  This book also counts for the Historical Fiction Challenge.