If, like me, you forgot there was a Shakespeare play about Richard III, had never heard of the princes in the tower, thought plantagenet was something related to blood clotting, and thought The Tudors TV series would have been drastically improved without fighting the same stupid war with France and Spain every other episode, you should probably give this 1000 page tome a miss. How did I, terrible history student, get here? I blame goodreads recommendations.
This book is a very extensively researched and, as I now know, unusual perspective on Richard III (i.e. he's an insufferably good guy). By which I mean that it's perhaps the most entertaining history textbook ever written. It is however, a pretty ordinary novel.
It begins with lots of incredibly dry exposition, that's screaming "Look! Look at all the research I did!" Honestly I could not care less about why Edmund is a little bit sad at Christmas, it doesn't matter. I don't care how long it took to figure all this out, it's just boring.
After the July battle that had delivered the Kind into Warwick's power, Marguerite had retreated into Wales and then Yorkshire, long an enclave of Lancastrian loyalties. There she'd been reunited with the Duke of Somerset and Andrew Trollope, who'd spent several frustrating months trying to dislodge Warwick and Edward from Calais. These Lancastrian lords...Marguerite herself had ventured up into Scotland...And so Edmund found himself spending the Christmas season in a region he little liked...The imagery and raw emotion of Marguerite d'Anjou sinking to her knees in the snow was a welcome break from all the wooden third-person exposition, and things get a little better from there, but it's still a tough slog.
In trying to paint Richard in such a positive light Penman goes too far and makes him unbelievable. He's such a beacon of principles, loving father, faithful husband and all round honour-bound we-could-never-accept-French-wine-when-we-could-die-in-battle caricature that I found myself wishing for his downfall, anticipating a spectacular fall from grace. Sadly Penman only allows a little incompetence and poor character judgement.
To combat the dryness, exactly halfway through Penman decides it is time for sex. All of a sudden it's all kirtles, and body parts "gleaming soft and wet", and "feeling desire start to quicken again". This made things a bit more interesting at the expense of making the history nerds angry. Why are you ruining a perfectly good textbook?
But it takes until about page 715 before I get the first "huh, THAT's interesting" moment when Dr. Stillington drops his bombshell. At this point things start to unravel and the long, long, long anticipated climax made for good reading. A nice payoff, but it wasn't worth all the pain.
The subject material certainly has all the ingredients for a fantastic story, but history is a terrible editor. It could be a far better novel if the author was willing to give up on some of her research and make the history nerds angry by taking more liberty with the facts.
2 stars.
