Very readable, well done historical novel that is a little too forgiving of its protagonists, for my taste.
Told from the POV of one of the most notorious condemned murderers of the reign of King James I, I found this very well-written and engaging. Not "Wolf Hall" (but, in the immortal words of Billy Wilder, "Nobody's perfect ..."), but as someone who is usually very, very fussy with this sort of thing, if there were any howlers in the dialogue or detail, they didn't grate. Like the Blessed Hillary, Jago is trying for a delicate alchemy: the illusion of historical accuracy, with a modern consciousness draped over her characters. Insights and attitudes that would probably never have occurred to her early 17th century characters, but sound and feel right to our modern ears. A disconnect that gives us the illusion of understanding -- and relating to -- people who are as distant from our experience, and unrelatable as Thomas Cromwell, Mistress Anne Turner and Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset.
And Jago almost succeeds: it's hard not to be sympathetic to the marital misery of Lady Frances Howard, and to relate to the ambition and maternal instincts of Anne Turner. Given the "institutional misogyny" (to introduce my own anachronism) of the time in which they lived, it's difficult to be too outraged by their increasingly desperate and hare-brained efforts to be rid of the men who stood in the way of their happiness and safety. And so, I read on, the pages turning, half-hoping that the magic of fiction was going to make it all end differently (because, knowing the bare bones of the story, I knew that it was not going to end well ...), seduced into complicity by my modern sympathies with two women who (in spite of the wealth of one, and the intelligence and go-getting spirit of the other) seemed to have all the cards stacked against them.
Told from the POV of one of the most notorious condemned murderers of the reign of King James I, I found this very well-written and engaging. Not "Wolf Hall" (but, in the immortal words of Billy Wilder, "Nobody's perfect ..."), but as someone who is usually very, very fussy with this sort of thing, if there were any howlers in the dialogue or detail, they didn't grate. Like the Blessed Hillary, Jago is trying for a delicate alchemy: the illusion of historical accuracy, with a modern consciousness draped over her characters. Insights and attitudes that would probably never have occurred to her early 17th century characters, but sound and feel right to our modern ears. A disconnect that gives us the illusion of understanding -- and relating to -- people who are as distant from our experience, and unrelatable as Thomas Cromwell, Mistress Anne Turner and Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset.
And Jago almost succeeds: it's hard not to be sympathetic to the marital misery of Lady Frances Howard, and to relate to the ambition and maternal instincts of Anne Turner. Given the "institutional misogyny" (to introduce my own anachronism) of the time in which they lived, it's difficult to be too outraged by their increasingly desperate and hare-brained efforts to be rid of the men who stood in the way of their happiness and safety. And so, I read on, the pages turning, half-hoping that the magic of fiction was going to make it all end differently (because, knowing the bare bones of the story, I knew that it was not going to end well ...), seduced into complicity by my modern sympathies with two women who (in spite of the wealth of one, and the intelligence and go-getting spirit of the other) seemed to have all the cards stacked against them.
