Freedom and Necessity
Steve Brust and Emma Bull
608 pages
published in 1997

This is a historical novel set in England one year after the revolution year of 1848, when workers rose up in Paris and the German states, amongst other places in continental Europe. Though bloodily repressed, these revolts served as a wakeup call to the old order. Great Britain was one of the few countries which managed to escape much of the unrest though this doesn't mean the country was quiet. Chartrists are still active and gaining support amongst the upcoming middle and working class, Irish revolutionaries are becoming active and England has become a haven for revolutionairies of many countries, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

It's against this background that Richard Cobham gets a letter from his cousin James. James was supposed to be dead, having drowned two months previously, thought his body was never found. In his letter he writes how he came too again and discovered he had been away for two months, all memory lost.

Richard and James enter into a conspiracy to seek the truth behind his disappearance, supported by their respective lovers, Kitty Holbourn and Susan Voight. Together they discover a plot to root out the radical elements from England, a plot covertly supported by government but set in motion by the secret society run by James' father...

What I liked about Freedom and Necessity is the way it's written. Brust and Bull reached back to a 19th century literary device and presented the whole novel as a series of letters exchanges, occasionaly interspersed with telegrams, newspaper articles and similar. This removes a sense of urgency from the story and forces the reader in a different reading pattern then usual.

What I also like is that they managed to not make the mistake of following 19th century literary conventions too closely; that turns a book into pastiche. Nor are the characters 20th century Americans in drag. They're people of their time, with their own concerns, without falling into stereotypes.

The writers are better known for their fantasy novels and some people insist there is a fantasy element to this story. It is true that there are a few hints scattered here and there through the book, especially the later part, that something more is going on then is being told, but I personally don't think this makes the novel a fantasy. Nothing ever follows from those hints, unlike a book as Tam Lin, which has equally subtle hints of something magical in the background, but there those hints are actually substantiated later in the book.