Eight Great Books - by Women!

Once again, I got emails - of a far less welcome kind this time, but book-bloggers can't be choosers. Many of you wrote in response to my recent "Eight Great Books" post not to share my enthusiasm or to discuss my choices but rather to point out that the eight novels I picked were all written by men. My very first internal response to this was "Yes? So what? It's possible they were all written by right-handers or blue-eyes too." My second internal response was "No really - so what? I was rhapsodizing about how much the books in question moved and delighted me - it never occurred to me to check who was going to which bathroom."

It shouldn't have occurred to me, and it shouldn't have occurred to any of you either. It reminds me of all the worst reasons why I left academia.

I dislike almost everything about this kind of non-issue. I dislike the insinuations that can't help but come along with pointing out that everybody on my first list is a man - the foremost such insinuation being, of course, that I intentionally planned it that way and was hoping nobody would notice, the insinuation of wrongdoing. I dislike the reductivism of it all, the sense that readers today aren't actually reading anything anymore but rather just checking off boxes and prepping their outrages for when they find trumped-up reason to pounce. Of course personally I dislike the inattention of it all - a casual glance at Stevereads over the years reveals absolutely no gender-bias (and, on a not-unconnected point, a casual glance at the books I've personally given to many of you reveals no such imbalance either). In short, the implicit accusation/complaint isn't valid.

It prompts what I think is a natural - though entirely wrong - response on my part, which is to defend myself. To point out how many female authors I've championed over the years, to marshal a barrage of links back to the appropriate Stevereads postings, and maybe links elsewhere as well. But not only is that impulse entirely wrong, but it's deeply unpleasant to feel, even for a moment, even long enough to call it wrong. Just like it would be deeply unpleasant for, say, the female readers making this point to go back over their last year's reading and count up how much of it was by black people, or gay people. The instinctive response to go  back and count up is irritating because it's already complicit, even when no guilt can be assigned.

Still, I did say I disliked 'almost' everything about such a non-issue, right? There is, in fact, one part of it I like: it gives me a reason to concoct another book-list, and that's fine by me (I also, as some of you were canny enough to point out, can't resist a challenge). So here are eight really, really good modern novels written by women, even though that attribution is entirely irrelevant!

When I Lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant (2000)

Grant's harsh and luminous novel about postwar British-administered Palestine stars strong-willed and intensely memorable Evelyn Sert, who opens things as forthrightly as she carries the whole book:

Scratch a Jew and you've got a story. If you don't like elaborate picaresques full of unlikely events and torturous explanations, steer clear of the Jews. If you want things to be straightforward, find someone else to listen to. You might even get to say something yourself. How do we begin a sentence? "Listen ..."

Twenty-year-old Evelyn journeys to the hot, mesmerizing international city of Tel Aviv (wonderfully evoked in these pages) and there finds every aspect of her relatively pampered and privileged life challenged by the no-nonsense women (and one sensuous but deceitful man) who are working to get a nation born:

I told her my Hebrew wasn't that good.

"Fine," she said. "I speak six languages. Pick one."

"English is all I know fluently."

"Then you are a fool."

When I Lived in Modern Times confounded a number of critics when it first appeared, and even now it holds the power to confuse in almost equal measure as it pleases. An apolitical novel about politics? A coming-of-age novel that seems at times almost disinterested in its heroine? And yet, re-reading it in 2011, I found it every bit as sharp and interesting as it was when it first appeared.

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (2008)

I haven't been a big fan of Morrison's writing over the years, usually finding it deceitfully arch and faux-oracular (whenever some young person tells me Beloved is their favorite novel, I always want to advise them to get out of the house more often). But this slim, almost mythic novella of a wild and disconsolate 17th century America reads like one long prose poem. At its heart is the question of ownership in the free world, and one of its main characters, Jacob Vaark, embodies all the contradictions of that question - he has slaves, servants, a mail-order bride, and is himself owned by his vanities. Morrison sets up the happy beginning of his married life to Rebekka so deftly you know it's all going to unravel horribly:

 

They settled into the long learning of one another; preferences, habits altered, others acquired; disagreement without bile; trust and that wordless conversation that years of companionship rest on. The weak religious tendencies that riled Rebekka's mother were of no interest to him. He was indifferent having himself withstood all pressure to join the village congregation but content to let her be persuaded if she chose. After some initial visits and Rebekka choosing not to continue, his satisfaction was plain. They leaned on each other root and crown. Needing no one outside their sufficiency. Or so they believed.

Morrison's handling of her human characters can be as arch and unconvincing as always, but there's a guiding spirit moving powerfully through this skinny book, elevating it from her usual stuff and repaying multiple re-readings.

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (1971)

This novel also features prominently on every 'Top 50 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Novels of All Time' list I've made since it was first published (all the other 49 are by men, of course), and like most of the best Sci-Fi and Fantasy, it can be read and enjoyed by strangers to the genre. It's the story of George Orr, a hapless citizen of the near future who seeks medical help for all the disturbing dreams he's having. Unfortunately for him, he goes to Doctor Haber, a budding megalomaniac, who quickly realizes the unbelievable: George Orr's dreams change reality itself. Haber of course wants to harness this power - first to get George to 'fix' everything that's wrong with the world, and then eventually to simply transfer the power to himself, so he's no longer limited by this well-intentioned milquetoast. And passive George is more than happy to let him shoulder the burden, although with a warning:

"Everything dreams. The play of form, of being, is the dreaming of substance. Rocks have their dreams, and the earth changes ... But when the mind becomes conscious, when the rate of evolution speeds up, then you have to be careful. Careful of the world. You must learn the way. The must learn the skills, the art, the limits. A conscious mind must be part of the whole, intentionally and carefully - as the rock is part of the whole unconsciously. Do you see? Does it mean anything to you?"

Haber doesn't see, and in true Frankensteinian fashion, his power goes horribly awry - and reveals a layer to the book which Le Guin prepares carefully but which will still catch the reader deliciously off-guard. This author is a legend for other works - her beloved "Earthsea" series, and her two landmark science fiction novels, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, but this is her best book, as tense and elegant as a modern myth.

A Much Younger Man by Dianne Highbridge (1998)

This beautiful, wise novel has been a source of frequent irritation to me since the moment it was published, and the reason is the only thing it shares in common with the great World War Z: it's virtually impossible to force people's minds to remain open long enough to recommend it. I plugged World War Z way back at the very beginning of Stevereads, and I'm plugging Highbridge's book now, for all the good it'll do me - those of you who haven't already dismissed it because of its cover will certainly read no further than knowing that the book's plot is summarized in its title: mid-30s school teacher Aly falls in love with Tom, the teenage son of her best friend. There: the world faces a zombie plague. Sigh. Highbridge takes this very simple premise and treats it in a manner, as one critic put it at the time, "openly sexual but without a hint of lewdness or smirking." Aly falls in love with Tom (and he very much with her) despite every caution sounding in her right from the beginning:

"Did you wonder why I didn't play [his lute, for company] the other night?"

"No. I just assumed you didn't feel like it."

"I didn't. Not like that, on show." Then he says, with the barest pause: "I would've played for you."

A small alarm bell rings somewhere in her head. She looks quickly at him, half-afraid to see the tell-tale intensity of an incipient crush in his eyes. Not really a problem if so, but better if not. He's looking straight back at her. His eyes aren't almost blue, as she thought, they're grey and completely guileless. Somehow this is not reassuring. "I'd like to hear you some day, but I don't know much about that kind of music," she says.

"You don't have to. You'll see."

And Highbridge unfolds it all with a deeply respectful intelligence. The result is one of the most honestly affecting novels of love and society that you're likely to read in a full year - but Heaven and Earth couldn't move you to try it, because you're still staring at that cover. Sigh.

Told By An Idiot by Rose Macaulay (1923)

Macaulay is unknown today except for her quirky The Towers of Trebizond (those NYRB people again!), and I myself treasure her Personal Pleasures as I treasure few other books of occasional essays, but this book is her masterpiece, and it's a mystery to me why Told by an Idiot isn't both recognized as a masterpiece and taught as one (I can only assume it's because made the tactical mistake of being a woman). It's the story of the unforgettable Garden family - the clergyman father, his saintly wife, their vibrant, incredibly diverse children, whose stories unfold over decades and are chronicled by their sister Rome, the ultimate family-observer, who first goes through her own heartbreak, when the man she loves confesses that he's already married and gets a typically Garden-family rejection:

"Rome, you can't do it. Don't you know, now you're in my arms, that you can't, that it would be to deny the best in us?"

"What's the best, what's the worst? I don't know, and nor do you. I'm not an ethicist. All I know is that your wife, while she wants you, or thinks she wants you, has first claim ... It's a question of fairness and decent feeling ... or bring it down, if you like, to a question of taste. Perhaps that is the only basis there really is for decisions of this sort for people like us."

"Taste! That's a fine cry to mess up two lives by. I'd almost rather you were religious, and talked of the will of God. One could respect that, at least."

"I can't do that, as I happen not to be sure whether God exists. And it would make nothing simpler, really, since one would then have to discover what one believed the will of God to be. Don't do religious people the injustice of believing that anything is simpler or easier for them; it's more difficult, since life is more exacting ... But it comes to the same thing; all these processes of thought lead to the same result if applied by the same mind. It depends on the individual outlook. And this is mine ... Oh, don't make it so damnably difficult for us both, my dearest ..."

Miss Garden, who never swore and never wept, here collapsed into tears, all her urbane breeding broken at last. He consoled her so tenderly, so pitifully, so mournfully, that she wept the more for love of him.

The Virago Press reprinted this great book in the 1980s twice - once with a hideous cover and once with a good cover. I'd take a plain brown wrapper, if I could see it reprinted today.

Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree (1985)

No, I'm not losing my nerve and desperately trying to work in a hated man onto our list! James Tiptree is of course the pen-name used by the late Alice Sheldon to write some of the best science fiction of the 20th century. Her novel Up the Walls of the World is a tour de force, and her short stories (such gems as "The Women Men Don't See" and "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," and "Painwise") likewise superb, but this novel - the last one she wrote before she killed her husband and herself - burns with a genius all its own, a genius I was at first slow to grant. The book tells the story of the planet Damien, where years ago the beautiful native species was horrifically tortured to produce a wildly valuable substance called Star Tears. In the present, a mixed group of tourists comes to visit the planet and threatens to re-awaken the tragedies of the past, since, as we're told, the darkness that bred those tragedies never went away:

"All over this Galaxy, for as long as you live, there will be big crooks and little crooks and lonesome weirdos, Human and otherwise, dreaming up ways to get their hands on Star Tears stuff. Too abhorrent? Don't you believe it. On the Black Worlds there are Human beasts who salivate over the prospect of torturing children. And passing in any crowd are secret people whose hidden response to beauty is the desire to tear it into bleeding meat."

This dark and almost hopeless note is struck throughout this novel (horrible to think of the suffering Tiptree must have been enduring herself, to tap into all this and then put it down so cleanly on the page), and yet, impossibly, hope looks to prevail. Even if you think you don't like science fiction (and surely you don't think that, right? Wouldn't want to be discriminatory, would we?), you'll like this book, one of the late classics of the genre.

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (2000)

Those of you who've known me personally for a while might recall that I've been fervently recommending this book for over a decade, despite the fact that I'm a well-known Internet misogynist; even before The Last Samurai achieved its current mind-boggling and entirely deserved status as both a cult classic (this is one of those books that makes you feel like it was written for you, personally) and a literary landmark, I was telling any open-minded reader I could find that this was a literary landmark destined to be a cult classic. It's one of the most dazzling literary debuts since This Side of Paradise - indeed, it raised the bar for dazzling literary debuts so high most first-time novelists can't stand to look at it. It's the story of a harried, hopeful young single mother named Sibylla and her odd, prodigiously gifted son Ludo, a monster autodidact whose intellectual appetites quickly outstrip even his mother's high expectations:

Early March, winter nearly over. Ludo still following scheme I do not understand: found him reading Metamorphoses the other day though he is only up to Odyssey 22. Seems to have slowed down on Odyssey, has only been reading 100 lines or so a day for the past few weeks. Too tired to think of new places to go, where is there besides National Gallery National Portrait Gallery Tate Whitechapel British Museum Wallace Collection that is free? Financially in fairly good position as have typed Advanced Angling 1969 - present, Mother and Child 1952-present, Horn & Hound 1920-1976, and am now making good progress with The Poodle Breeder, 1924-1982. Have made virtually no progress with Japanese.

The irony threaded through even that brief passage (with the texts Sibylla is typing for money silently commenting on her efforts to raise Ludo on her own) is choice, and it's on display throughout the whole of this novel, which delights and surprises and ultimately moves with its strangeness and stanzas of staggering virtuosity. If Open Letters Monthly had been around in 2000, this is exactly the kind of book I'd have hoped Sam Sacks or John Cotter would decide to review.

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009)

If this last title seems familiar, it should: not only did I give it rapturous praise over at Open Letters Monthly, but I was the very first person anywhere in the world to pronounce it brilliant, long before its publication, long before it won its shelf of awards: when two bits of it were excerpted in the Penny Press, I confidently predicted it might well end up being the best Tudor novel ever written - and I did all that despite the fact that its author is a woman!

Very few of the novel's characters are - this is mostly a man's book (with the very notable exception of the odious Anne Boleyn), featuring one of the most brutishly masculine main characters in recent fiction: Thomas Cromwell, the mysterious street lawyer Henry VIII came more and more to rely upon to do his dirty work, a character virtually all Tudor fictionizers have almost automatically chosen to portray as a plain-and-simple villain. In Wolf Hall, we don't think of Cromwell that way, even though he's ruthless and dangerous. We see him being underestimated by every grandee in the land (except for one devastatingly sharp moment with the king, where Cromwell learns the unpleasant lesson that having a Tudor estimate you accurately is most definitely NOT a pleasant experience), even when, as with the old Duke of Norfolk, they know they're underestimating him while they do it:

"I spoke to the king for you and he is also content. You will take his instructions in the Commons. And mine."

"Will they be the same, my lord?"

The duke scowls. He paces; he rattles a little; at last he bursts out, "Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a ... person? It isn't as if you could afford to be."

He waits, smiling. He knows what the duke means. He is a person, he is a presence. He knows how to edge blackly into a room so that you don't see him; but perhaps those days are over.

"Smile away," says the duke. "Wolsey's household is a nest of vipers. Not that ..." he touches a medal, flinching. "God forbid I should ..."

Compare a prince of the church to a serpent. The duke wants the cardinal's money, and he wants the cardinal's place at the king's side: but then again, he doesn't want to burn in Hell. He walks across the room; he slaps his hands together; he rubs them; he turns. "The king is preparing to quarrel with you, master. Oh yes. He will favor you with an interview because he wishes to understand the cardinal's affairs, but he has, you will learn, a very long and exact memory, and what he remembers, master, is when you were a burgess of the Parliament before this, and how you spoke against his war."

"I hope he doesn't think still of invading France."

"God damn you! What Englishman does not! We own France. We have to take back our own." A muscle in his cheek jumps; he paces, agitated; he turns, he rubs his cheek; the twitch stops, and he says, in a voice perfectly matter-of-fact, "Mind you, you're right."

Like many people in this splendid, bottomlessly re-readable novel, Norfolk finds himself casting around searching for a reason to validate the visceral dislike he feels for Cromwell. In this case, the duke (whose spindly body Cromwell has already taken in with a glance) pounces on Cromwell's admission that he himself had once been a soldier:

"I was a soldier myself."

"Were you so? Not in any English army, I'll be bound. There, you see." The duke grins, quite without animosity. "I knew there was something about you. I knew I didn't like you, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Where were you?"

"Garigliano."

"With?"

"The French."

The duke whistles. "Wrong side, lad."

"So I noticed."

The fast-paced bounce of this dialogue is maintained throughout the book, which is similar to The Lathe of Heaven in being a genre-buster, something you can hand to even the most adamantly anti-historical fiction reader, confident that the book will hook them. I've never known it to fail, which certainly hasn't been the case with any of Mantel's earlier books. This one is a bolt from the sky, it's so good.

And there you have it! Eight great novels - by women! The cosmic scales of justice are re-balanced, although how they could ever have been un-balanced I don't know. After all, the field of fiction is almost thoroughly dominated by women. Against our paltry Tolstoy, Thackeray, and Fielding, women have a dozen giants right off the tip of the bat - a preponderance so great it's only become seriously endangered since the late 20th century, when the proliferation of make-weight MFA programs with delusions of cultural oppression began graduating legions of utterly talentless female degree holders, thus muddying the waters almost opaque for genuinely promising young women like Tea Obreht.

But that's a worry for another day - for right now, the universe is restored to order, and with luck Stevereads is restored to the good graces of all those of you who wrote in giving me dirty looks! I whole-heartedly recommend each of these woman-authored books, and I could easily double the length of this post with additional names, many of whom I've also praised on Stevereads in their own right over the years. So now perhaps the issue of my raging misogyny can be tabled, and I can return my attention to higher literary matters ...

Queen Catherine! (no, not that one)(no, not that one either)

Our two books today are historical novels dealing with the same figure: Catherine Parr, the staid, prudish hickory stick who was the last wife of Henry VIII. Readers who have a nodding familiarity with Tudor history will likely be more familiar with any of the five wives who preceded this one - there's the Rightful Queen, the Witch, the Mother of the Heir, the Dearest Sister, and the Slutty Girl - but by the time most people get to Catherine Parr, the whole point of keeping up with all the wives seems vitiated. What difference does it make what Catherine Parr was like, after all, if the whole gaudy show of it now moves to young Edward VI, and then on to Mary I, and then to Elizabeth I?

Blind spots like that are cat-nip to historical novelists. These writers correctly divine that often the most interesting things happen outside the bright spotlight of history - the key to effective historical fiction is to step just far enough outside that spotlight to let those interesting human details creep in but not so far outside that spotlight that you leave your readers groping around in the dark for something interesting. Set the entire story of Wolf Hall in the murky boyhood of Thomas Cromwell and you lose the background electricity of his interactions with the Tudor court. Set the climax to Gone with the Wind in the 1840s and you might have a pretty good book, but it wouldn't glow with the light of burning Southern plantations.

So writing about Catherine Parr can be tricky. Historian Carolly Erickson takes perhaps the safer route in her 2006 novel The Last Wife of Henry VIII by using as its setting the whole of that lady's life, the better to give us all the drama of that life's intersection with last dying embers of Henry VIII's insane personal life. Erickson's book is extremely good (a bit ironic that both she and fellow historian Alison Weir have done their best recent work in fiction), and the Catherine she gives us might be a bit stiff and a bit haughty, but she ends up being all the more real for it:

"Ah, so pale," said the sleek, moustachioed Duke of Najera as he took my hand to kiss. "I trust your majesty is not in poor health."

"I confess that I am in indifferent health, milord duke," was my response. ...

"May we hope that this indisposition betokens the arrival of an heir?" His tone was polite and his words formal, but the question was overly bold, even rude. He presumed too much. Just because he was the emissary of the Emperor Charles V, and charged with a very important mission to our court, he imagined that he could ask me bold questions and ignore the ordinary rules of courtesy.

"Milord, you forget yourself," said my friend and lady-in-waiting Kate Brandon, coming to my rescue. "The queen's health is a matter of state and cannot be talked of lightly."

A far riskier strategy is adopted by Susannah Dunn in her spectacularly good 2008 novel The Sixth Wife (not to be confused with the Jean Plaidy novel of the same title - and, um, about the same subject)(don't even get me started on the subject of incomprehensible choices in book-titles...): in that work, Katherine (so Dunn styles her) Parr is neither in power or the teller of her own story - the latter task falls to that same Kate Brandon, here given magnificent life and voice by Dunn as the novel's narrator. The book focuses on the stunning immediate aftermath of Henry VIII's death, when his still-young widow stunned the court and the whole country by quickly marrying Thomas Seymour, brother to the realm's new Lord Protector - and brother too to the mother of the realm's new king, young Edward. Thomas Seymour had a feckless, headlong quality about him that seemed drastically at odds with Parr's slightly beady-eyed calm; he seemed the very last person she might marry, let along marry impulsively. Again, catnip for historical novelists, most of whom (including Erickson) have assumed that the turn of events can only be explained if Seymour and Parr had been in love - and perhaps lovers - long before Henry took a liking to his prospective new queen.

Dunn (whose work I've praised before) skirts making such an easy, explicit explanation in favor of what is clearly one of her focal points as a novelist: the unpredictable, twisty ways of human emotions. Shortly after her Kate Parr reveals her marriage to Kate Brandon, the two of them go out riding, and when the former queen gallops away, Kate is left to wrestle with the whole mystery:

"He makes me laugh," Kate yelled of Thomas as she thundered away from me.

I didn't come back at her with, Yes, but my dog makes me laugh and I haven't married him, have I.

Nor, Yes, but I make you laugh.

People underestimated Kate in one respect: kind but serious, was a lot of people's opinion of her. Maybe it was as simple as that, it occurred to me as I trailed in her wake: maybe Thomas Seymour truly appreciates her.

Yes, but why marry him, and so soon?

Well, that was quite simple, too, in the end, it seemed. He'd asked her, she told me later. Marry me, he'd said: that's what she told me. Marry me, marry me, marry me: he'd said it a lot. So that it seemed less and less ridiculous, presumably. Why not? he said. I've been away for years and you've been - well, you haven't had an easy time of it for years, for your whole life, in fact, so ... and then that smile of his.

Dunn's book is the wiser book of the two emotionally, but it's a decidedly 20th century wisdom. Erickson's book is a more conventional historical novel (you'll find no 'milady's in Dunn's period fiction) but succumbs at times to the lure of the scenery. Many of the same characters come and go through these pages, and it's fun to see how differently the two authors portray them - including the young Princess Elizabeth, who's a monstrous enigma in Dunn and an enigmatic monster in Erickson. The exception seems to be Edward Seymour's wife Anne Stanhope, who's hated equally by both our authors - automatically making me wonder if somebody's out there right this moment penning a Tudor historical novel in which a thoroughly sympathetic Anne stars as the oft-misunderstood heroine. I'll keep an eye out at the Boston Public Library for The Lord Protector's Wife.

Keeping Up With The Tudors: The Other Boleyn Girl!

Our book today is the one that started it all: Philippa Gregory’s totally unexpected runaway bestseller, The Other Boleyn Girl (originally titled The Other Boleyn Sister – obviously it was feared that historically illiterate American audiences would feel they were reading a sequel, as with The Madness of King George III)(although I myself actually prefer the American title here – it has a slightly more brutal, impersonal tone, one that fits the book’s mercenary tale better than the more familial ’Sister’).

Safe to say no historical novel written in the last thirty years has been as influential as this one. In only ten years, The Other Boleyn Girl has generated five spin-offs, two different movie adaptations (one for the BBC and one for the mysterious ongoing purpose of keeping Eric Bana employed), an ongoing HBO series (since The Tudors would be unthinkable without the success of the book), and a vast, untrackable ocean of like-minded books set in the Tudor era (I plumb that sea at greater depth here). And like great touchstone historical novels before it, The Other Boleyn Girl has exerted its main influence as a kind of imaginative primer. Just as Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur opened the floodgates for Roman historical fiction, just as Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber opened the floodgates for a brief resurgence of Restoration bodice-rippers, so The Other Boleyn Girl has taught a generation of readers that the Tudor era isn’t something they need a Ph.D. in history to enter and understand. Such teaching often pays long dividends, and this time is no exception: Hilary Mantel owes her recent Man Booker win as much to Philippa Gregory as to the intrinsic strength of Wolf Hall.

Gregory’s book stands like an imperturbable tower above the brick-bats that have been hurled at it by its critics (myself included, way back when and under a pen-name), who for years have assailed its historical accuracy. Those critics, being critics, would have done that anyway, although in this case they were egged on by Gregory’s own claims for the historical accuracy of her book. Historical novelists almost always make such claims, and critics are well-advised to ignore them and concentrate on the important things about fiction, foremost of which is this: does it work?



The Other Boleyn Girl incontestably works. Gregory had written extremely competent if tweedy historical novels earlier in her career (including a whole series chronicling the exploits of a family of gardeners to royalty – how’s that for an English double-whammy?), but in this book she makes some key decisions, and they all pay off.

As you all know, this is the story of Anne Boleyn’s sister Mary, who was the first of Thomas Boleyn’s daughters to catch the roving eye of King Henry VIII, who’s portrayed here as tiring of his aging Spanish queen and hungry for sexual adventures – and a male heir. Gregory decides to tell the story from Mary’s point of view, to tell it sharply with none of the fustian palaver that had usually infested Tudor novels, and to shape her characters into resolutely modern people in period costume. Scenes unfold and transform with almost time-lapse rapidity, and Gregory’s previously languid approach to character development is here whittled to a series of mostly pointed observations. In crafting such a narrative, Gregory inadvertently grants Mary far, far more intelligence than she really possessed, but it’s a minor infraction, especially considering the sheer amounts of fun that result. The Other Boleyn Girl is above all a quite fantastic read. It’s comforting to think that alone might account for a great deal of its success.

Despite the cavils of historical critics, there’s a good deal of accurate research at the back of this book. But its main delight comes in it quick exchanges of dialogue, as in the tense little scene in which Anne sends her sister off to be with Henry:

“Are you clean?” Anne asked sharply.

I nodded.

She looked at me anxiously. “Go on then. And you can resist for a bit, you know. Show a little doubt. Don’t just fall into his arms.”

I turned my face away from her. She seemed to me quite unbearably crass about the whole matter.

“The girl can have a bit of pleasure,” George said gently.

Anne rounded on him. “Not in his bed,” she said sharply. “She’s not there for her pleasure but for his.”

I didn’t even hear her. All I could ear was the thud of my heart pounding in my ears and my knowledge that he had sent for me, that I would be with him soon.

“Come on,” I said to George. “Let’s go.”

Anne turned to go back into the room. “I’ll wait up for you,” she said.

I hesitated. “I might not come back tonight.”

She nodded. “I hope you don’t. But I’ll wait up for you anyway. I’ll sit by the fire and watch the dawn come in.”

I thought for a moment about her keeping a vigil for me in her spinster bedroom while I was snug and loved in the King of England’s bed. “My God, you must wish it was you,” I said with sudden acute delight.

She did not flinch from it. “Of course. He is the king.”

You can see several of the basic ingredients of The Other Boleyn Girl in that little scene (and a few of its key weaknesses, here symbolized in that repeated ‘sharply’): the modern speech cadences, full of contractions and free of ‘thee’ and ‘thou,’ the economical evocation of setting (characters in the book imagine each other doing things almost as often as they actually do things), and of course a free-wheeling willingness to make a scenery-chewing Lucifer out of Anne Boleyn.

Gregory’s also not above winking a little at her audience, as in this much later scene in which Mary and George attend the banquet in honor of Anne becoming the Marquess of Pembroke (and honor bestowed by the besotted Henry):

At the banquet George and I sat side by side and looked up at our sister, seated beside the king.

He did not ask if I was envious. It was an answer too obvious to be worth inquiry. “I don’t know another woman who could have done it,” he said. “She has a unique determination to be on the throne.”

“I never had that,” I said. “The only thing I’ve ever wanted from childhood was not to be overlooked.”

“Well you can forget that,” George said with brotherly frankness. “You’ll be overlooked now for the rest of your life. We’ll both be as nothing. Anything I achieve will be seen as her gift. And you’ll never match her. She’s the only Boleyn anyone will ever know of or remember. You’ll be a nobody forever.”

It was the word “nobody.”At the very word the bitterness drained out of me, and I smiled. “You know, there might be some joy in being a nobody.”

“You’ll be a nobody forever” indeed. There are Other Boleyn Girl tours, Other Boleyn Girl garden parties, Other Boleyn Girl stationary lines and book clubs … and I already mentioned the legion of knockoff novels set in a Tudor court suddenly become so lusty it’s a wonder anybody ever had time to trade dispatches with the Venetian ambassador.

We all owe that renaissance – the good and the bad of it – to Philippa Gregory and her improbable blockbuster of a book. Each publishing season, roughly 400 hopefuls plop their Tudor wares on the counter and hope the public will consume them in equal quantities, but so far that kind of success has evaded them all (and Gregory herself – none of those sequels sold more than a fraction of what the original did and still does). This is only natural, though the poor things don’t see it. The next lynch-pin book that catches and sparks the public’s imagination will be as unexpected as The Other Boleyn Girl was, and it will turn all eyes toward a different era entirely. The Windsors, anyone?

I Am Mary Tudor!

Our book today is Hilda Lewis' magnificent 1971 novel I am Mary Tudor, in which the only surviving child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon narrates her own tempestuous history, from the earliest years she can remember (and since she was a Tudor, that was pretty damn early) to her triumphant entrance into London upon successfully seizing her crown from the usurper Northumberland and his puppet poppet, Jane Grey, the famous nine-days queen.

When Mary's half-brother King Edward VI finally died after a sudden illness (I am Mary Tudor agrees with those suspicious Aloysiuses out there who think the boy was poisoned), Northumberland had everything planned: his son would marry Jane Grey, who had just enough royal blood on her veins to qualify her as a legitimate candidate for the job of queen - and presumably Northumberland would rule through the two young people. Henry VIII's daughter Elizabeth couldn't be seen as standing in the way of this plan; not only was she virtually a prisoner of the state, but her mother, Henry's second wife Anne Boleyn, was no more popular dead than she'd ever been alive. The real fly in the ointment was Mary, the fully-grown daughter of the old king and his Spanish queen - Mary had never backed up one inch from the assumption that the crown should come to her before it ever went to Elizabeth or any other woman (remarkable as she was, even Mary was a creature of her times ... she'd have been willing, though not exactly eager, to see Edward rule). Edward's death gave her what she knew was her only chance.

The really inexplicable thing is that Northumberland must have known it too, yet Mary wasn't immediately taken into custody - instead, she was able to rally the shires and counties to her banner, remind the majority of the nobility where their loyalties lay, and beat Northumberland to all the vital stores of weapons and money outside of London proper. By the time the lords of that city informed Northumberland that they were supporting Mary, he must already have known how badly he'd botched things. His protestations of a hasty conversion to Mary's cause were an insult even to her ordinary counsellors - goodness knows what they must have sounded like to Mary herself, who had all the Tudor scorn for anybody who thought they could out-think the royal brood.


Lewis gets this characteristic down perfectly in I am Mary Tudor. Here's Mary writing about the cozening attempts of one of Edward's uncles to win the boy's favor with handouts of pocket cash (while conniving to marry Elizabeth):

You are the King. Over and over again; nor had Seymour been ashamed to bribe the boy with money. Somerset kept the King with a lean purse. He had everything a boy could wish - horses, hounds, clothes and jewels - but money to make a gift or to reward a service, he had little. So Seymour would put his hand into his pocket and bring out a handful of gold. It is disgraceful to keep a King so short. Say nothing to my brother. There's plenty where this comes from. You have but to ask. I'll not see you go short!

And Yes, the boy would say, Yes, you are my dearest uncle! And never a sign on that pale face of the anger that consumed him; anger that this fool should not only try to fool the King but dare aspire to the King's own sister.

Mary had a largely unhappy life. She was devoted to her mother (and, according to I am Mary Tudor, to her father as well), mourned her deeply, and suffered intentional humiliations at the hands of Anne Boleyn, who made her one of the maids-in-waiting to the infant Elizabeth. Mary's own lady-in-waiting, her beloved Lady Somerset, was shamefully executed by a vengeful Henry in retaliation for her son Reginald Pole publicly denouncing the king's remarriage. Mary herself was often ill and oftener thought she was. We find in her all the steel of her father but none of his mercurial gaiety (which her sister Elizabeth had in full measure); she clung to her rights because she had nothing else to cling to - no poetry, no hunting or hawking, no suitors or illicit lovers, no larger worldview. It's likely she wouldn't be an attractive figure in the roster of England's rulers even if she'd stayed on the throne for twenty years, instead of five.

Still, she was remarkable, and Lewis captures her perfectly, including the unpredictable paroxysms of rage that could come upon her with little provocation. As with Henry her father and both her aunts (and very, very rarely, her grandfather - Henry VII's reputation has come down to us as an ice-ruler, a Lancastrian Vulcan, but it's often the case that a person is exercising such control specifically because their temper is so vast; Americans can look to George Washington for the same phenomenon), she could lose herself completely when such a fit was on her:

And so my thoughts came again to that other prisoner - to Jane Grey, her royal escutcheon torn from the Presence Chamber in this same Tower, by the hands of her own father. For nine nights she had slept in this very chamber, in this my very bed. The thought was sudden, and sudden my anger. I could scarce breathe until reason came to lighten my wrath and give me back my breath again.

I am Mary Tudor is one of the strongest, best, most involving and thought-provoking Tudor novels ever written, mostly because Lewis finds the perfect narrative voice for her central character, but also through the judicious application of a little dirty pool. The book ends just as Mary is entering London in triumph - virtually on the last page of the novel, she's still determined to spare the life of Jane Grey no matter what her Council wants. We, the readers, know that she will not spare Jane Grey - that the girl's execution will be just the first in a long list of moral - and mortal - compromises Mary will make in her reign. Lewis is smart and also tactical to end her book before Mary starts burning accomplished statesmen and village simpletons for their religious beliefs, before she convinces herself that she's pregnant and invites a Spanish lout to rule England in her name. Mary Tudor up until 1553 deserves to be the hero of her own novel, and she couldn't do better than this book. I whole-heartedly recommend it, should you ever come across it (it's out of print, of course).

Books! Fiction, fiction, and more fiction!

Every afternoon, the delivery man drops off his pallet of book-boxes to our loading dock here at Stevereads. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of advance galley copies are in those boxes, all sent by publishers and agents living in the forlorn hope of a mention here on the literary tastemaker of the Interweb.

Browsing at your local Barnes&Noble might give you the impression you've seen the whole spectrum of books on offer, but you'd be wrong. Oh, you'd be wrong. There are things that exist in galley form that seem like elaborate pratical jokes rather than forthcoming books.

Fortunately, the central miracle of publishing still holds true: somehow, against soul-crushing odds, people write good books and then push, push, push to get them into the light of day.

That process of pushing is odious - classes, glad-handing, conference-going, junket-going, back-patting, drink-swilling, more glad-handing ... all done to such an extent that in almost all cases, the person who throws himself into it becomes LOST, becomes basically a living commercial for himself, 24 hours a day.

However, as disgusting as all that sounds, increasingly it seems to be the basic minimum you need to do to get your works before the public eye. To those of us here at Stevereads, this seems a faustian bargain at best - but entering into it has brought some good and interesting reading to our loading dock in the last few days.

Gawd only knows how much of themselves the authors in question had to sacrifice - and lie about - to get their books before us. But nevertheless, some of the books themselves are pretty good. Some of them are better than pretty good.

We'll put three of them before your notice today. We have gamesome, active readers here at Stevereads - people like ourselves, always eager for that next great reading experience. We offer the following three titles for your consideration, in ascending order of their likelihood to provide that experience:

Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett - The woman in question is Meg Giggs, a young ward of Thomas More, and the novel also features another such young ward, John Clement, and the romantic connection between them. That oonnection is complicated by the feelings she developes for the painter Hans Holbein, and it's complicated by the turmoil of the English Reformation, and it's complicated by the wopper of a secret John Clement is carrying around.

The secret stretches the bounds of credulity, and the portrait of More is boringly pious (wouldn't it be refreshing to see a TRUE portrait of More, the ultimate junkyard-dog lawyer? Saints melted pretty quick in the heat of Henry's England), but the novel works on you anyway. As we've mentioned in this space before, Tudor fiction is especially tricky to write - almost everybody who tries it ends up swamping their book with their research. Certainly Bennett is guilty of this too - keep an eye out for paragraphs longer than ten sentences - but she compensates with a nice sense of how people interact. And it doesn't hurt that Erasmus (surely the patron saint of the Internet, and certainly our guiding spirit here at Stevereads) is all over this thing like poison ivy ... scarcely a page goes by without a mention, which will just have to do until a full-dress Erasmus NOVEL comes along ...

Ascent by Jed Mecurio - This is a better book than Bennett's, and at half the length, a wry, sharp book with a killer premise: what if, under a shroud of Soviet secrecy, Russia got a man to the moon before the United States?

Mercurio takes that premise and fleshes out his enigmatic central character, Yefgenii Yeremin, against its backdrop. Yeremin becomes a crack MiG pilot (the aerial combat sequences are absolutely thrilling, easily the most virtuoso writing in the book) and eventually gets selected for a space program so secret his participation will never be known (we defy you, however, to look at pictures of the Apollo missions the same way again once you've read this book).

Although Mercurio never says it outright, the best part of Yeremin is that he's got the 'right stuff' ... his hunger for the open skies is identical to that of Yaeger, Aldrin, Armstrong and the rest. There's a great little moment in the novel where Yeremin's been grounded by heavy rains for four days. When the sky finally clears, Yeremin's soul itself exults:

"Yefgenii's mask moulded to his face. His harness felt snug. The aircraft fitted him and he fitted it. The picture outside the cockpit represented a universe in its most comfortable and understandable aspect: a patchwork of land below, a sky above, and in between a sport of death and survival for men to play.
The rains had given him a glimpse of life without flying, of his life as it would be without his becoming any more than he already was. In an ordinary life, opportunities never come, or they come and aren't taken, or they're taken and squandered. Whatever the reason, the obituary is blank."

Since we all know the Soviets didn't get to the moon first, you can all guess the ironic twist of the book's end ... but one of the best parts of rock-solid plots is that you can see their twists coming and still enjoy the hell out of them, and this is one of those times. 'Ascent' is one lean, wonderful novel, and you shouldn't miss it next year, when it comes out in paperback.

Mistress of the Arts of Death by Ariana Franklin - Of the three, this one wins hands-down in terms of writing (and damn near in terms of plot ... it's just that Mercurio's is SO perfect, so elegant and irrestible). The plot is no faint shakes either: it's Middle Ages England under the reign of Henry II, and in Cambridge little children are being murdered - and maybe crucified. The populace naturally suspects the Jews, who are confined to the town's castle indefinitely for their own protection. Henry II, dismayed by the fiscal absence of his Jewish subjects, contacts his kinsman the King of Sicily and has dispatched to England three remarkable individuals: a methodical female doctor, her Arab eunuch bodyguard, and their unflappable Jewish mission-leader.

The writing here is pitch-perfect, such a fast, unrelenting joy to read that we're sincerely hoping Ariana Franklin is at least seventy years old. That Franklin's book and Bennett's book are both historical fiction at all is as good a demonsration of the width of the spectrum as one could want.

No question about it, the show here belongs to the lady doctor of the title, Adelia, who's indelibly portrayed as a person entirely frustrated with the age in which she lives. But one of the sweetest little pleasures of Franklin's book is its handling of Henry II, a hugely complex character who's devilishly difficult to pin down.

Henry II was a fiercely strong and fiercely individual monarch, so it's to Franklin's credit that she refuses to portray him as a one-dimensional villain. Here he is in conference with a Jewish elder about this crisis that's afflicted them both:

"'Yes, yes. The real point is that one seventh of my annual revenues comes from taxing you Jews. And the Church wants me to get rid of you.' The king was on his feet, and once again harsh Angevin syllables blasted the gallery. 'Do I not maintain peace in this kingdom such as it has never known? God's balls, how do they think I do it?'
Nervous clerks dropped their quills to nod. Yes, my lord. You do, my lord.
'You do, my lord,' Aaron said.
'Not by prayer and fasting, I tell you that.' Henry had calmed himself again. 'I need money to equip my army, pay my judges, put down rebellion abroad, and keep my wife in her hellish expensive habits. Peace is money, Aaron, and money is peace.' He grabbed the old man by the front of his cloak and dragged him close. 'Who is killing those children?'
'Not us, my lord. My lord, we don't know.'
For one intimate moment, appalling blue eyes with their stubby, almost invisible eyelashes peered into Aaron's soul.
'We don't, do we?' the king said. The old man was released, steadied, his cloak patted back into shape, though the king's face was still close, his voice a tender whisper. 'But I think we'd better find out, eh? Quickly.'
As the sergeant accompanied Aaron of Lincoln toward the staircase, Henry II called, 'I'd miss you Jews, Aaron.'
The old man turned round. The king was smiling, or, at least, his spaced, strong little teeth were bared in something like a smile. 'But not near as much as you Jews would miss me,' he said."

Henry II was a lightning bolt in buckskins, a leader-thing of a kind largely unthinkable in the present world. None of the many biographies and novels written about him since his death has managed to capture more than a few facets of his character. James Goldman comes closest of all in his durable stage-play "The Lion in Winter," and even he has an audience to please, so he periodically pauses to make Henry cuddly before resuming the blood and mayhem.

Maybe someday a writer will come along who'll capture all of what Henry II was (bedecked in fiction, or otherwise), but in the meantime, the few snippets in "Mistress of the Art of Death" will have to suffice.

Books! a small selection from the pile!

We here at Stevereads are aware that some of you think we spend all our time either arbitrating lovers' spats between Hippolyta and Sebastian, or slapping down Kevin's comic book snobbery, or asking Jeff to explain something. or making smart-aleck remarks about the colossal failure of Beepy's one-woman Broadway play (a musical revue of the novel of Fanny Burney? Oh Beepy! This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you ...).

But such is not entirely the case. As hinted at in the title of our little community here, we do a fair amount of reading.

A suggestion was recently made that we at least mention - and preferrably review - every single book we read. We viewed the suggestion with a certain amount of doubt, since it seems pretty damn masochistic on the part of the suggester.

Our young friend and comrade in intoxication, TS Bacon, has already made himself merry by jibing at the obscurity we sometimes sink into here at Stevereads ('What obscure 16th century guy are you writing about now?' he's been known to waggishly call across the quad). If we were to annotate every book we read, this site would be SWAMPED with obscurity, and we surely don't want THAT.

Just the other day, for instance, we read a wonderful examination of the processes of the plebian voting assemblies of the Roman Republic. Days earlier, we read and very much enjoyed a long, annotated analysis of currency debasement in the reign of Queen Mary. Now we ask you: aside from provoking another sarcastic volley from TS Bacon, what good would it do for such books to be reviewed at length here?

Tedium is not our aim, but let's be honest: we here at Stevereads read deep in history and biography and the classics, just as many of our readers read deep in their own domains. Into what hinterlands of specificity could John lead us all on twentysomething poets, after all? Or Beepy on the complex societies of Guineau Pigs ***? Or Kevin on subatomic birds and beasts and their antics? Or Sebastian on ... well, on Sebastian. And so on.

We here at Stevereads read, for instance, every Star Trek novel that's written. We read every one of the burgeoning (and nauseatingly consistently crappy) line of DC Comics novels, though there's absolutely no reason to. We read at an enormous ground-clearing speed, and this tempts us into byways of both scintillating erudition and pure crapola so often that it wouldn't serve anybody's purpose if we were to dissect every single thing we read.

But that leaves plenty we CAN discuss! SO many books worthy of your consideration! Here are a few:

The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton - this wonderful book is all about recent advances in technology, but the catch is that 'recent technology' handily includes a great many things that feel like they've been around forever.

Edgerton's tone is wonderful - knowing yet wondering, smart without any condescension. It reminded us here at Stevereads of the calm, funny, wonderful voice of James Burke as he narrated the long-lost mini-series 'Connections' (we'd go on at great, detailed length about 'Connections' ... but alas, this isn't 'Stevesees' so it falls outside our jurisdiction)(on a side note, several of you have urged the CREATION of just such a site as 'Stevesees' .... partly because not all of you read nearly as much as you watch stuff, and partly, one assumes, because you just CAN'T GET ENOUGH of my sweet self - so what say the rest of you? That most awesome of all questions is upon you: do you want EVEN MORE Steveblogging in your future, for 2007? We abide by the will of the people)

Likewise there's an unexpected brio in Simon Baker's 'Ancient Rome,' the companion volume to the upcoming BBC documentary. Oh, don't get me wrong: these series are always (almost! almost always! We think, of course, of Ken Burns' magnificent 'The Civil War') imbecilic. They freeze-dry the past and then carve it up into pre-digestible packets and serve it up with hammy music and untrustworthy graphics. They're least-common-denominator history, and usually their book-companions are equally dumb.

But not in this case! Baker's book is smart and fast-paced and might prove very useful to the general reader who wants a good accessible introduction to ancient Rome.

Of course such an introduction will feature the Second Punic War and its epic confrontation between the Romans and Hannibal, and if that name doesn't sound right without 'Lector' added to it, you're probably the target audience for Thomas Harris' latest book, "Hannibal Rising."

Maybe you'll approach the book with the excitement, remembering how you enjoyed the good doctor's three previous appearances. We here at Stevereads thought 'Red Dragon' was an extremely well-done thriller. We liked 'Silence of the Lambs' even more, found it a broader and more beautiful work. And we thought 'Hannibal' was in almost all ways superior to both, a masterfully ambitious book of true wisdom and steep art (except for the wretched, awful, illogical, treacherous conclusion, for which Harris ought to feel ashamed for the rest of his life).

There's virtually nothing of those books in this one. A well-etched scene here, a sharp turn of phrase there, but that's quite all. Everything else in it is thin gruel indeed and often inadvertently funny.

Harris here gives us the origin story of Hannibal Lecter, a noble childhood blighted by the barbarity of the Second World War.

Rich stuff, in potential - but the potential is entirely squandered. Hannibal the child is creepy and homicidal. Hannibal the teenager is creepy and homicidal. No attempt is made to probe what makes young people turn into the older men they become. Indeed, the strangest thing about this book might very well be the utter indifference it shows toward human psychology, the very bread and butter of all the previous books.

No, this just a tale of young Hannibal exacting revenge on the men who, during the war, killed and ate his sister. The revenges take all manner of baroque forms, and then the book ends. There's no life in it at all, and that's not even its biggest mystery.

No, the biggest mystery of this book is why we're still hearing about Hannibal Lecter at all. Oh yes, yes, there's the money being offered to Harris - but dammit, the man WRITES like somebody who values writing over money. Why aren't we reading about NEW characters from him, perhaps characters even more compelling than Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter? Why are we still reading about this one guy?

The book gives no hint of an answer, and for that reason and many others, it's the very first Thomas Harris book that's not worth reading. Let's hope it's the last such. We need all the good writers we can get.

Never, never would we have thought we'd ever have cause to segue to Norman Mailer - of all people - upon mention of 'good writers,' but facts must be faced.

And the fact confronting us here is this: at the end of his life, in his 80th year, after having mis-fired more often than black market Canadian fireworks, Norman Mailer has written a great book.

It's achievement enough to write one - all who write yearn to do so, and ninety-nine percent fail. The tiny fraction who succeed almost always succeed only once.

Mailer succeeded twice - first with 'The Naked and the Dead,' and then with 'The Executioner's Song' - and the law of diminishing returns demands that's enough. The same law certainly says no writer is going to hit the top of his game after the age of 60, much less 70. 80 is beyond the pale, and yet here is 'The Castle in the Forest.'

This is a mighty work, quietly so. It's a garrulous (this was unavoidable), wise, questioning, extremely detailed, historically acute, and dauntingly eloquent book, exactly the KIND of book so often written by a striving 23-year-old.

It's nothing short of miraculous that it's written by our Norman Mailer, in the 8th decade of his life.

But perhaps it's understandable, that fire should be struck from such an old flint. Not only is Mailer old enough to feel the ultimate motivating force of any writer (my voice is to be heard no more? MY voice? No! It must not be!), but in 'The Castle in the Forest' he's writing to his singular strength.

Mailer has always been a writer of ultimates. He's sought for them, for some clear and clean vindication of writing at all - the unspoken yearning of the so-called 'greatest generation' for .... well, for validation, though they (nor their subsequent advocates) would adamantly deny it.

Here Mailer takes on not God (he's tried that, disasterously) nor Jesus (he's tried that too, with results even more embarrassing than those achieved by his erstwhile sparring-partner Gore Vidal) nor even Hitler (though he's the heart and soul of the book) but Satan himself, Satan and the whole problem of evil in the world.

These are questions best fit for old men of fierce intellect, but I'd have been the last person on Earth to nominate Mailer - vain, posturing, misfiring Mailer - to that cast, until this book. Until this book, I'd have said there's no more reason for reading Mailer.

And lots of reason for reading Pynchon, but there's the rub: After a similar period of silence, both our lions have whelped betimes, and their offsprings will groan the bookstore tables side by side.

But Pynchon's huge book is a false-born monstrosity compared to this thing from Mailer, fierce and long and endlessly, angrily justifying its own length and complexity.

This is a book of an extremely young man. And so, the least likely words in the whole world: God bless you, Norman Mailer. This book took long, long brutal hours to write (at an age when most other men seek only rest), and it instructs and often scintillates. So we here at Stevereads undertake a re-consideration of Mailer's entire corpus, which is a mighty burden this late in the year.

And we can continue on an equally positive note: Philippa Gregory's sequel to her bestselling and intensely enthralling 'The Other Boleyn Girl,' 'The Boleyn Inheritance' is every bit as good as the original, a stunning, wonderful reading experience.

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads have not only read widely in Tudor fiction but also dipped our own oar into those turbulent waters. We can say with some authority: it's monstrous horrible hard, to write historical fiction in that particular time period. Everybody knew everybody, everybody intermarried with everybody, and everybody with a little money had three or four titles, and used any one of those titles as NAMES, on a randomly-rotating basis. Keeping it all straight was a burden even while LIVING through it. For the historical novelist, it's a minefield almost impossible to traverse.

Gregory pulls it off luminously. 'The Boleyn Inheritance,' the story of the largely unfortunate women who succeeded Anne Boleyn as Henry's queen, is a damn fine job. It will please the most exacting Tudor scholar, and like its predecessor, it will equally please someone completely ignorant of the period. One of the delights of 'The Other Boleyn Girl' was watching it WIN OVER people who never saw themselves reading 500-page historical novels. It's our pleasure to report that the sequel also has this magic about it.

So there you have it! A small nosegay of new, accessible books about non-obscure subjects! I'd go on longer, but I think I hear a ruckus in the comments field - I must go and see who's pulling whose pigtails ...

in the penny press!

The trifecta of book review organs - the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and of course the mighty Times Literary Supplement - are guaranteed to provide a solid hour of the highest quality mental stimulation when sat down and read in unison.

The highlight of the New York Review this time around, at least for me, was Joan Didion's forensic examination of Dick Cheney. She strikes an absolutely priceless tone (unintentionally, I assume), mandarin befuddlement threaded all the way through with deep distaste ... like a society doyenne hearing a loud, wet crunching sound and finding an unknown creature on the bottom of her shoe, half-crushed but still attempting to squirt venom.

She can't riddle him out into the light, of course. Morgoth is gone, but even his lieutenant Suaron is still largely incomprehensible to the minds of Men.

But in the process of her bafflement, she runs through the usual story with a wonderful, icey precision that's a joy to read.

The London Review of Books likewise had a highlight for me: Jerry Fodor's review of Michael Frayn's "The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe." It's a pan, but the peculiar combination of steep intellect and po-faced humor Fodor uses are more reminiscent of the TLS than the LRB:

As the blurb on the front of Frayn's book puts it:

'What would [the] universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there still be numbers, if there were no one to count them? Or scientific laws, if there were no words or numbers in which to express them? Would the universe even be vast, without the very fact of our tininess and insignificance to give it scale?'

Why, yes, it would. (Frayne often treats rhetorical questions as though they were philosophical arguments; it's a bad tactic.) The universe would still be just the size it is even if there weren't astronomers to measure it. And water would still be H2O even if there weren't chemists to analyse it. And water would still run downhill, and there would still be hills for it to run down, even if none of us were here to take note of its doing so. You can't pin the natural order on me, Frayn; I'm not guilty. I didn't make the universe; I wasn't even there at the time.

But it's the TLS that really comes through, as always. For instance, Oliver Taplin reviews two new books on ancient Greece, and in the course of doing so, he lets his favorite editorial hobbyhorse out into its paddock:

My philhellenism outweighs my admiration for the BM (great though that is), so I shall make up for these omissions. The ultimate legal claim of the Museum, which bought the goods from Lord Elgin, sheltering behind an Act of Parliament, is a fortiori even dodgier than his claim to legality in dismantling large stretches of ancient masonry to get at the frieze and other sculptures. It is a tasty irony that the piranhas of the press cluster round the Getty and other newer Museums who are being hounded to return antiquities that were taken after a certain legalistic date, while the great museums of Europe complacently give pride of place to all the booty that was expropriated before the barrier came down. But there is a crucial and underappreciated point about the Parthenon Marbles, regardless of legal questions. Elgin hacked them off less than twenty years before the beginning of the War of Independence which would liberate the core of Greece from centuries of Ottoman rule. Even as the swell of Hellenism was rising throughout Europe, he took advantage of a declining regime that cared nothing for the heritage of Greece; he snatched them from the outstretching hand of freedom.

Sorry - no sale. The 'outstretching hand of freedom' in this case cared no more about Hellenistic treasures than the lazy old Ottomans did. Lord Elgin almost certainly SPARED the Parthenon friezes from destruction. And even if he hadn't, he still did the right thing.

The British Museum has nothing to apologize for. It spends millions every year on expert restoration, meticulous upkeep, and state of the art climate control for all of its archeological treasures. England's breathtaking cathedrals are guarded and upkept by a veritable army of caretakers. The same thing is true even moreso in the United States.

As far as I'm concerned, ANY country that can't say the same should cough up its art treasures. Those treasures, cultural or otherwise, belong to the whole world. Young children yet unborn deserve to experience root wonder-shock of looking up at the Great Pyramids. Hungrily sensitive artists who're only babies now deserve to stand in silence before every Vermeer there is.

Been to the Hermitage lately? Seen what the rampant smog and pollution (not to mention teenagers with spray-cans) have done to the Acropolis? Anybody know until how recently docents were allowed to smoke in the Sistine Chapel?

Send the big, Atlas-class medivac platform-helicopters to every corner of the globe, as far as I'm concerned. Pluck up every great building and work of art currently being dripped on or cluttered with McDonalds wrappers and deposit them in carefully manicured grounds in Japan, Switzerland, England, and the United States. If Egypt objects to the resulting big parking lot at Gizah, tell them they should have thought of that when they were looking the other way while kids on mopeds took runs half-way up the sides of the pyramids, or while drunken wedding parties were allowed to cavort deep inside them. Then tell them to shaddup. Tell you what - when you go to canopied, climate-controlled Sphinx Pavillion in the gorgeous country of Kent, you can have free admission with proof of your Egyptian citizenship.

Elsewhere in the issue, Eric Griffiths turns in a wonderful review of the new Royal Shakespeare production of 'Troilus and Cressida' - which, as many of you may know, is one of Stevereads favorite Shakespeare plays. At some point, every halfway creative type who's been heavily influenced by Homer feels the urge to take a whack at the master's material, and this is Shakespeare's (serving double duty as a reference to Chaucer as well, although it's best not to explicitly compare the two; great as Shakespeare is, he's no match for Chaucer when they're both working the same material at the height of their respective powers)(arguers feel free to Comment ... and of course any of you who feel like piping up in defense of the artistic merits of Troy War are welcome to do so)

Griffiths largely dislikes the new RSC production, but he has marvellous things to say about the play itself and its dynamics - all good stuff, like this:

Of all Shakespeare's works, 'Troilus and Cressida' is set furthest back in time, while it simultaneously bristles with idioms jazzy in their day.

Of course, with all this brilliance comes some trepidation as well. It turns out that virtually all of this edition's fiction reviews were devoted to historical fiction. This is where the ice water came into the afternoon's reading, because, as some of you know, I myself am that most improbable of beings, a historical novelist. And I can tell you this: we live in terror of two things: 1) some closeted, micro-obsessive expert calling us on some fact in our books ('it wasn't sunny on the 14th of May 1202'), and 2) the TLS (let's be honest: the only review organ that realistically could) taking us out behind the woodshed. Even seeing this happen to others produces not the faintest hint of schadenfruede.

One of the novels in question, C. J. Sansom's Sovereign, just barely gets a pass. It's a Tudor novel (again, a close call - I myself have written a Tudor novel), and although the reviewer, Michael Caines, calls it 'less demanding' than such Tudor-fiction classics as The Man on a Donkey or The Blanket of the Dark, he largely absolves it of blame, albeit grudgingly:

Sovereign is sore afflicted with outbreaks of humourless, barking laughter, sighs, frowns, raised eyebrows, and the setting of lips. It has a bad case of 'Jesu!' - the expletive for all occasions - and at least one impassioned cry of 'Fie!'. These are things to make the reader smile and read on.

Two of the other specimens under review are of particular interest to stevereads: Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night because we largely kinda-sorta liked it, and Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale because, as some of you may have noticed, Barnes & Noble has decided, for reasons known best to themselves, to strip down to its skivvies and hop into bed with this book - huge, eye-catching displays at the front of every B&N in the whole country, huge amounts of money spent to make this author the next Dan Brown (all based, one likes to believe, on one buyer's joyful reaction to the book, somewhere way back along the chain of evidence). Sheer human nature prompts a body to want the TLS to savage the book.

Sadly, the dice fall otherwise. Judith Flanders (a psuedonymn) doesn't exactly savage The Meaning of Night but she doesn't leave you any reason to go out and buy it either:

The Victorian elements are intensively researched - there are references to Evan's Supper Rooms, the Toxophilite Society in Regent's Park, mudlarks scavenging in the Thames - but throughout there is a sense of a list grimly being got through, each item ticked off and out of the way. Glyver does nothing at Evans's; he visits it simply so that it can be described.

On the other hand, Setterfield's book gets a sanctioned pass: "Setterfield is singularly successful in her aims." So those of us wanting to hate The Thirteenth Tale must hold our breath until we've actually read the book (I have, and I largely share the verdict of my esteemed colleague The Mama Chan: it's hyperventilated boilerplate, not entirely without literary merit but two fat fingers' worth away from actually being good).

Our final item? Druin Burch's good-cop/bad-cop review of David Wooton's Bad Medicine and Katrina Firik's Brain Matters.

Burch loves the first, and it quickly becomes apparent that he's going to USE that love to jump up and down on Firlik's book, in absolutely delightful fashion:

Katrina Firlik's Brain Matters makes a stimulating change from all this compelling originality and provocative thoughtfulness. If you have ever suspected that pushing a finger into the soft goo of another person's brain leads to fresh and startling conclusions about human life, this is the book to disillusion you. Firlik is full of breathless enthusiasm; so full of it, unfortunately, that other qualities are kept at bay. She wants to tell you about her life as a neurosurgeon, and her best point is her infectious eagerness. The style is reminiscent of a teenage essay on 'what I did during my neurosurgical training', and the insights are at roughly the same level. She reveals that sick patients are people too, 'not just a collection of clinical data'; she lets us into the fact that 'life is not a dress rehearsal', and that 'you can't judge a person's intelligence by his outward appearance'.

Initially, it's hard to pin down exactly why her thoughtless and cliched anecdotes are so insufferable. Blind adoration is appealing in its way, but Frilik seems to worship even the most stupid and destructive aspects of the American hospital system. Teaching by humiliation, pointlessly long hours and the infliction of needless operations on damaged patients are all held up for praise. But the source of the real chill gradually becomes apparent. It is Frilik's conviction of her own superiority, and her misguided overestimation of her own dull, workplace thoughts. At the end of 'Brain Matters' she invites us to marvel with her at the superlative intelligence of a group of her colleagues. 'What might be accomplished,' she asked, awed at the qualities of people like herself, 'if the same group lent their collective brain power to, say, improving public health education or homeland security?' Both books demonstrate the dangers of doctors who think too much of themselves.

Hee.

And that's all we have for you at this moment in the penny press ... sure, there's news tonight of a marauding bobcat out in Grafton - and the consequent bobbling-newshead paundering about the THREAT TO OUR SUBURBS, but nevertheless: reading-wise, that's all you need to worry about.