Beryl Bainbridge again makes history Beryl Bainbridge seems attracted to historical doom. Four years ago she produced a novel, The Birthday Boys, about the ill-fated 1910-12 Scott expedition to the Antarctic. Two years after that she wrote Every Man for Himself, about the maiden, and only, voyage of the Titanic.

Now, two more years later, she has brought out Master Georgie, a novel that takes as its background the consummate slaughter that was the Crimean War.

Viewing her career overall, since the 1960s when she began writing about working-class and lower-middle-class lives filled with violence, this attraction is not surprising. She has simply dropped historical in front of a career-long preoccupation with disaster and menace. The world is not a cheerful place in Bainbridge’s fiction comic and absurd, certainly, but rarely cheerful.

Unlike the other two novels, which tell the stories of their events, Master Georgie does not tell about the Crimean War. It is set against the background of, rather than being about, the war.

The novel is told in seven sections, called plates in reference to its photography sub-theme, starting in Liverpool in 1846 and ending in the Crimea in November 1854. Each section is told in the first person by one of three characters, all revolving around and commenting on the central character, George Hardy, a surgeon and amateur photographer.

Myrtle, a foundling whose devotion to Hardy is intense: I’d freeze stiff for Master Georgie. Their sexual relationship is as strange and shadowy as Myrtle’s position in the Hardy household; there is even a hint that she somehow clandestinely may have borne Hardy the children that his wife could not have.

Pompey Jones, an urchin who helps Hardy with his photography experiments and other, less savory activities. He develops into a photographer’s assistant and something of an entrepreneur. Pompey’s attitude I didn’t wholeheartedly despise George Hardy differs from Myrtle’s, not so much because of a homosexual advance Hardy made, but because of the class distinction between them. Likewise his attitude toward Myrtle, who he feels has been raised above him: All I ever wanted, as regards Myrtle, was the recognition that she and I were of a kind. Dr. Potter, Hardy’s brother-in-law. Though a pedant and a cipher in general, he is the least subjective observer. Along with the other two, he is with Hardy when Hardy hauls his father home after dying in a whore’s bed and props him up for a posthumous photograph, showing him lying peacefully, and seemingly alive, in his own bed.

Eventually, all four hie themselves off to the Crimean War. If it is unclear why Hardy goes, since he has been rejected as a military doctor, it is even more unclear why the others, except for blindly devoted Myrtle, follow. Still unclearer yet is why, when conditions become squalid and perilous, they remain, since they are not obligated to. You want to holler at them, the way you want to holler at the movie screen when a person perversely remains in a haunted house: Get out of there! But life is not like that, and to insist that motives in a novel be any more rational than they are in most of our own lives is to opt for the pot-boiler. Which Bainbridge has not written. She has written, once again, an outstanding novel about weak and essentially clueless souls caught in a situation of danger and violence.

And God bless her for her minimalist approach to historical fiction. Rather like Brian Moore, whose The Statement and The Magician’s Wife were based on historical events, she has produced a work of reasonable length, not a thumping great historical doorstop.

If there is less of the historical in this than in her previous novels, that is all right. Bainbridge still imparts a sense of time and place with deft, almost casual references to contemporary conditions rather than a catalog of the times. For example: Poor people appear predatory owing to their bones showing, Myrtle thinks, and bones were in abundance among the gaggle of ragged boys on the corner, the wild children squabbling in the gutter, the stupefied men slouched against the railings. Nothing is neat in this novel save, perhaps, the ending. It ends with another corpse being propped up, this time for a photographer who wants a posed group of survivors to show the folks back home. It wouldn’t be fair to divulge the corpse’s identity beyond saying that what goes around, comes around.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com

All my life I have hesitated about writing another Oz book, Martin Gardner says in his introduction to Visitors from Oz. Readers will be glad to know that Gardner has overcome his doubts and written a splendid addition to the many adventures by L. Frank Baum. Gardner confesses, Like Baum, I cannot decide whether this book is solely for youngsters, or also for older readers who are still young at heart. Even in the age of electronic toys, many young readers will enjoy this book. It boasts enough outrageous characters and suspenseful adventures to populate a summer blockbuster. First and foremost, of course, are Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman. However, like the Alice books, this novel offers even more to adults. More than a sequel, it’s very much a Martin Gardner book. Readers familiar with Gardner’s perennial interests will find several here science, chess, wordplay, Alice, parodies of famous poems. His studies of mirror images provides a new take on Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And Gardner definitely shares Baum’s love of wordplay and shameless puns, as in the old comedy routines performed by the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. A safe’s combination is 5-13-5-18-1-12-4, obviously the word emerald. In case you know Oz only through the famous movie, it’s worth mentioning that among Baum’s many books were 13 others in the series launched by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Gardner adopts Baum’s breezy, lively style to tell a story that is half homage and half something else entirely.

Hollywood producer Samuel Gold plans to turn another Baum novel into a movie. Convinced that Oz is real, Gold contacts the famous Glinda via the Internet and asks Dorothy and her friends to come to the U.

S. to promote his new movie. Eager to see her homeland once more, and having never aged in Oz, Dorothy agrees, and her pals come along for the ride. Along the way, they must battle a rival producer and his slapstick henchmen.

You could fill a book with the adventures that occur before the travelers even leave Oz. They traverse Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world and dine with the gods on Olympus. But the story really takes off when it reaches more familiar terrain.

Visitors from Oz satirizes many aspects of contemporary life. A new version of Peter Pan stars Madonna as Peter and Roseanne as Tinkerbell. Dorothy and her pals are welcomed by Rudolph Giuliani and appear on Oprah Winfrey’s show. Their plane is hijacked by an Iraqi terrorist. They also watch the 1939 film of their adventures, complaining about some parts and exclaiming over others, That’s exactly how it was. The sheer inventive lunacy of Visitors from Oz is as contagious as one of Baum’s own novels. But the contemporary satire lends it all a unique flavor and results in the feeling that, sequel or not, there is nothing else like this charming, amusing book. Michael Sims is the author of Darwin’s Orchestra (Henry Holt) and a frequent contributor to BookPage.