Thomas Gage Reviews

9 October 2004 -:
“Thomas’s sorry diminution from cheery, philandering patriarch to laudanum-quaffing spectre is handled with great skill, as is the subtextual tension between red-cheeked English pastoralism and red-toothed English industrialism. Fleming is a good all-rounder, his satisfying characterisation and plotting matched by a pronounced talent for simile and nature writing.”

1st November 2003 -:
“The account of Gage’s decline might have been merely morbid, but is leavened by the energy of the writing. Both the dark and the lighter elements of the novel are informed by a linguistic and imagistic freshness suggestive of a writer prepared to take risks in articulating his complex vision…The overriding impression is of a fertile imagination combining with a wealth of detailed knowledge to produce a work of considerable power.”

26th December 2004 -:
“ Historical fiction got a shot in the arm when James Fleming began publishing. The bluff Norfolk hero of Thomas Gage is a harmless relic from the age of squires, a Waterloo veteran who falls foul of progress: it is marvellous.”

10th October 2003 -:
“ A puritanical view insists the novel must deal only with the contemporary world. Well, goodbye War and Peace and Middlemarch. The value of an imagined past is that the novelist can make an extended metaphor for our times and show that our lives, like our forebears’, are every moment laying mines and traps into the future. The writer may use any material, including what George Eliot called “the varying experiments of Time”. Fleming’s experiment works very well indeed.”

19 October, 2003. John Spurling –:
“Settled happiness is difficult to write about without being boring. James Fleming, however, tackles it with such confidence that the gentle sunlit prelude of Thomas Gage lasts half the book. Indeed, this Norfolk idyll of 150 years ago is so delightful, so skilful in its mixture of historical detail, mild social satire and Norwich School landscaping that it makes the reader increasingly anxious. There is one little dark cloud in the distance – the possibility of a new railway being built through Thomas Gage’s land – but surely the author does not really mean to bring serious grief to these nice people…?

It is a lesson to us all. Comfortable circumstances and the geniality they sometimes nurture…are no protection against the cloudburst when it comes.
This is an old-fashioned sort of novel – well-fashioned, well characterised, wryly and suavely written, and very welcome.”

The Author and Thomas Gage as imagined by Alison Lang in the Sunday Times.

11th October 2003 -:
“At the heart of James Fleming’s second work of historical fiction is a personal tragedy that is as intricate and resounding as the prose that evokes it…Fleming’s subtle characterisation and beguiling descriptions of pre-industrial England make the poignancy of subsequent events all the sharper. This sensitive exploration of a man’s mind and how market forces impinge on it offers further proof that Fleming is engaged in challenging the conventions of a genre that is open to charges of escapism. There is no escape for Thomas Gage from the uncertainties of history or the ruthlessness of greed and social progress.”

25 June 2004. Sue Baker
:– “Thomas Gage is caught on the cusp of old and new, when railways are changing everything. Stocks and shares are taking over from old-fashioned savings and life will never be the same again. Either Fleming is a brilliant historical novelist, or he has travelled back in time, taking notes, spying on Gage, his family, friends and enemies to create this utterly convincing nineteenth-century portrait.” Made Book of the Month also by Sue Baker.

1st November 2003 -:
“A bleak, gripping story which has all the pessimism of a latterday Thomas Hardy…One of Fleming’s strongest cards is his ability to surprise – repeatedly. There are certainly some great characters here. There is Isabel, Thomas’s wife, an austere woman who has brought him a comfortable income from her father’s paint firm…But having given him two children, she has – how shall I put this – closed her bedroom door to him. Her decision will prove fateful.

There is the lawyer, Leonard Lutwylch, who effectively runs the family firm. He has great power, but can his loyalty be trusted?
There is Julius Gooby, a man of the future, manager of the proposed railway…an arch-manipulator, with the ability to read people all too well. But how far will he go for his railway?
And Jammy Peach, the simple and illiterate servant in Thomas’s house, whose greatest ambition is to “better himself” by becoming a guard on the new railways. His success in learning to value timetables and rulebooks will also play a key part…
The story merits a book twice as long. Maybe that’s the best compliment to Fleming, as a writer.

11th october 2003. Eric Anderson –:
“Fleming writes lyrically about the countryside and almost as well about the Victorian town. His gallery of characters ranges from new men like the unctuous railway manager, Gooby, and the upwardly mobile lawyer, Lutwylch, to the country boy who leaves home to work on the railway and finds that old notions of loyalty have to yield to commercial necessity. Fleming is best of all, though, at the moments of stress and elation, in the chapters where young Fred Gage is fighting for his life, where his father is infatuated by the vulgar Nina, and in the final scenes which bring two lives and an era to their end.”

Cold Blood Reviews | White Blood Reviews | Thomas Gage Reviews | Temple of Optimism