2018/50: False Lights -- K. J. Whittaker

She realised with detached horror that she was in London – London – and soldiers were firing at will into a crowd of unarmed citizens. This wasn’t just an occupation. It was a tyranny. [loc. 3078]

An alternate history that opens in the Scilly Isles, eighteen months after a Napoleonic victory at Waterloo. England is occupied, with Napoleon's brother Jérôme and his ex-empress Joséphine (who, in this timeline, didn't die in 1814) holding court at Carlton House in London. In the Scillies, French soldiers kill Captain John Harewood, a black sea-captain who triumphed at Trafalgar, and capture his daughter Hester, who overhears her captors discussing a dangerous secret.

Meanwhile, the young Earl of Lamorna (John 'Jack' Crowlas; known as Crow) is trying to extricate his teenaged brother Kitto from a daring but doomed act of sabotage. Crow's groom Arkwright has an agenda of his own; so does Crow, who is juggling allegiances, plots and loyalties, along with hallucinations of the dead and memories of his own appalling failure in the line of duty. As for the female protagonists, Hester's childhood friend Catlin manages to surprise a Duke; Lady Louisa, stepmother to Crow and Kitto, is determined to get what she wants; and Hester herself, well aware of how society treats anyone with Black forebears, has to contend with jealousy, ostracism and treachery as well as explicit racism.

The novel's title is a reference to the wreckers of Cornwall and the Scillies, who lit false lights to lure ships onto the rocks, and salvaged whatever washed up. That sense of trickery and desperation weaves through False Lights. Although there's a classic romance with the usual reversals, there is also a story about rising up under an unjust dictatorship; a story about spies and double agents; Hester's story about confounding racism, sexism and prejudice; and Crow's story of a man trying to live with his memories and his mistakes. Whittaker is to be applauded for making Crow so thoroughly unlikeable at the beginning of the novel -- though to a certain extent that's through careful choice of narrators. (The novel is told in third person, with scenes from multiple characters: Whittaker does an excellent job of differentiating these, though some of them -- such as Arkwright -- are more effective than others.) Crow is clearly suffering from what we'd term PTSD, and even when he behaves heroically the horrors are with him.

Apart from one moment when I screeched aloud (no, nobody would have been galloping across Tower Bridge in 1817, as it did not exist), I found the novel convincing and compelling: there may be flaws in the historical research, but it hung together well. (There is an afterword in which the author discusses her approach, including the resurrection of Joséphine). Whittaker's writing is vivid and sometimes brutal: she doesn't romanticise warfare or poverty. I very much enjoyed False Lights, and I'm looking forward to the sequel, Russian Gambit, due in 2019.