A Day In The Life

For once, I manage to write my book reviews on a Wednesday.

Sam Bourne: To Kill the President

It was to be expected: the first Donald Trump era thriller (that I've read). Which takes full advantage of the fact that when previously any critic worth their salt would have complained about the one dimensional characterisation of the villains and the lack of realism in the US voting someone like that into power and then the Republican Party falling in line, followed by no checks and balances from any institution after even the Supreme Court caves due to the stolen seat being filled by the new President's choice, now all this looks like, well, realism.

( Spoilers from an age where reality beggars caricature )

Philip Kerr: March Violets.

This is the first novel of a mystery series which I heard/read about via The New Yorker. The article in question was enthusiastic enought to overcome my instinctive squick at the premise, to wit: hard-boiled/noir detective novel set in the Third Reich. Basically, what if Philip Marlowe was German? Wandering those mean streets as a cynic with an ethical core takes a whole new meaning if the authories aren't just corrupt but a dictatorship preparing for war and genocide. Our hero is Bernie Gunther, former policeman who quit the force in 1933 for the obvious reason given that the novel positions he has ethics, and became a private investigator instead. Kerr serves up all the usual hard boiled/ noir tropes - untrustworthy millionaire clients, corrupt cops, shady dames -, complete with Chandleresque language, and he did his research - the novel's setting is Berlin in 1936, around the Olympic Games, and in addition to the well drawn Berlin geography, there are some great nods to Fritz Lang's movie M via some of the supporting cast, gangsters (given that Bernie Gunther originally gets hired to recover some diamonds, though of course it turns out it's far more complicated and what everyone is after is something else altogether. The brief appearances by historic figures (Göring and Heydrich, to be precise) are drawn credibly, which is to say their vileness comes across without Kerr employing sledge-hammery moustache twirling; in fact, he uses Göring's bonhommie manners to make him chilling.

As opposed to To Kill a President, this actually is a good novel. But. I still struggle somewhat with the basic premise. This is the first novel of what according ot the New Yorker article I'd read are twelve so far, and already I'm having to suspend disbelief about Bernie's continued survival. There's no reason why Heydrich at the end of this first novel shouldn't have gotten him killed, for example. And since we're in 1936, Bernie would still have the possibility to leave the country, and given what happens to him in this novel, it's hard to wonder why he doesn't, given he has no dependants who'd suffer for it. Yes, the decision to emigrate wasn't as easy as hindsight would have it if you weren't rich and didn't have friends abroad, but again, some truly harrowing things happen to Bernie in this novel which would serve as an incentive to get the hell out of Germany if ever there was one beyond the general situation of the country.

With this caveat, I'll keep reading.

Kieron Gillen: Darth Vader IV: End of Games (Aka issues 20 – 25, the end of Gillen’s Vader story bridging the time between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back): A good conclusion. Any story which has to handle the prequel and continuity fixed points, i.e. your intended readership already knows exactly how your main character will end up, and nothing he does or experiences in your story can change that, and pulls off an interesting narrative regardless, proves the skill of the writer, and Gillen maintains his momentum till the end. He also finds a satisfying conclusion (for now) for his OC, Aphra, whose fate wasn’t pre-ordained by existing canon and thereby provided suspense – which it wouldn’t have if Gillen hadn’t made me (and presumably a lot of other readers) care about Aphra as much as for many of the old characters.

( spoilery details ensure )

In conclusion: a much appreciated by me story. I’ll see Rogue One tomorrow.

Neil Gaiman: Sandman: Overture.

Another prequel that pulls off the art of telling an interesting story despite the fact the main character’s fate is fixed. Did we need to find out what Dream (and other Sandman characters ) had been up to before Roderick Burgess captured him, and what kind of struggle it had been that had weakened him enough for Burgess to do so? No. But was it great for me to read it regardless? You bet. Also, the art by J.H. Williams III is drop dead gorgeous. Sandman always kept changing its artists, and sometimes that was confusing - Seasons of Mist - and sometimes the merging of visual art with narration was just perfect - The Kindly Ones and The Wake - very different visually, but a perfect match for the story in question.

Overture is another such case in point. Outstanding visuals include the panels where we meet additions to the Sandman myth - ( spoilery beings named )

-, the set piece where Morpheus encounters a lot of other different aspects of Dream, then later his confrontation with the mad star -, and of course the neat visual giveaways (but never too blatant!) to the true identity of a key character.

There’s just one appearance by a fan favourite character which I thought was there for the sake of it, not organic to the story Overture told, and that was the original Corinthian. Then again, the Corinthian being unmade and remade in the course of the Sandman saga foreshadows what will happen to Morpheus, so maybe that’s the narrative justification for the guy showing up in Overture. Otherwise, everyone’s appearances have a point to them. Case in question: when we find out, via a story Dream tells, who the Alienora we briefly see at the end of Game of You was, why he created that world for her, and what happened between them. At first you think, well, Dream = Worst Romantic Prospect in a Gaiman story, plus ca change, we knew that, but then later you realize the point of the story was something else altogether, and aha!

Part of the appeal of Sandman was always the mixture between myths, pop culture, dysfunctional family soap (the Endless) and whimsy, and all aspects are present in this prequel. That, and Neil Gaiman indulges his things for cats in the best way, which, since I also have a thing for cats, was very pleasing to me. (Also, hooray for making the issue Dream of a Thousand Cats into the key for ( cut just in case though the spoiler is very general )

.

In conclusion: loved it, will reread as soon as time (ha!) permits.

Which is a not-really-memoir, a collection of autobiographical stories, several of which have been earlier published, here arranged not in linear order but thematically, in a way. Le Carré puts himself in the observer role in most of the stories, which are focused on the various people, famous or not, he encounters. For all that he's a superb raconteur about them, he keeps his own emotions about the people he describes mostly in check; understatement is the name of the game. The big exception, and unsurprisingly the chapter that got the most attention in reviews when this book was published, comes near the end, in the tale of his dastardly conman of a father, Ronnie, a born life ruiner (and occasional beater, but the devastating damage Ronnie does both to marks and to his family is usually non-physical in nature), and his absent mother Olive, who left him and his brother with Ronnie when our author was five and whom when reencountering her as an adult he never quite managed to form a relationship with, not least due to her habit of addressing him as Ronnie. Lé Carré is far too self aware not to realise the connection between spying, being a conman, and being a writer, and thus warns the reader early on, re: veracity of the stories he's about to tell:


““I’m a liar . . .Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists.”

Ronnie and Olive remind me a lot of Charles Dickens' parents, for all that Dickens and Le Carré aren't really much alike as writers; the parallel extends to adult Dickens' senior embarassing his son by writing out cheques in his name till Charles had to publish an advertisement in the papers to say he wasn't countenancing this, while Ronnie uses his son's novelist successs in a similar manner (and even signs the novels), to the novelist sons putting their fathers in more bearable form in novels while in rl living in an uneasy tension between trying to avoid their fathers and being unable to let them go. While carrying a less obvious but as deep-seated grudge against their mothers due to what they see as an utter lack of affection. Le Carré's terse description of Olive as the mother without a scent (he can't remember what she smelled like because she never hugged him) says it all.

But the Ronnie (and Olive) chapter comes, as mentioned, near the end of the book; Le Carré knew of course it was the most emotional and the climax. Earlier, we're treated wrily and drolly to such gems as lunch with Rupert Murdoch (who wanted to know who killed Robert Maxwell) being his over the top tycoon self, Alec Guinness, whom Le Carré befriended due to Smiley, being as gentlemanly and enigmatic as you want him to have been, with the occasional one liner to his fellow actors when they go over the top, Yassir Arafat putting on a show (in more senses than one) while Le Carré is busy roleplaying himself as Charlie, the herone of Litlte Drummer Girl, and so forth. Of particular interest to me and a red thread through the book is Le Carré's life long fascination with all things German. He was stationed in Bonn in the 50s, is fluent in the language (and says these days he can't focus on a book for longer than an hour, except if it's in German), keeps coming back here and provides German locations as guest spots in many of his novels. His descriptions of the many, many old Nazis on all levels of the administration in the 50s and 60s is dead-on, I'm afraid. (Just recently, our justice department published a study on how many former Nazis were there in the post war justice system until the 70s. Over 77 percent, I kid you not. Even allowing for the usual argument (which is: well, non-Nazi German lawyers and judges were hard to come by in the 1950s; not untrue, but there were the emigrés, who found it harder, not easier, than the Nazis to get those kind of jobs if they were willing to return, plus there was no encouragement of the younger, less tainted generation), that's devastatingly high. As for the reformed spy network, you probably had to search for a non-former Nazi with a flashlight. Le Carré's description of Gehlen, who founded it and got the US licence for it is wickedly on point. He also can't resist some sarcasm re: the US and British attitude, which was as he sums up that as a Nazi, you were per definition not a Communist, and so okay in the Cold War era CIA's book. (Ignoring that Gehlen was a fantasist and that having a dark past makes you easily availablef or blackmail,with the end result that according to Le Carré 90 % of the German agents working in Eastern Europe were really working for the Stasi. Which I'm completely ready to believe. Competence isn't something the BND was ever famous for, even after the Nazis died out. In an account of a more recent German episode, he maks me cringe because that one concerns the German citizen tortured at Guantanamo, and I remember the (non-)reaction from our governments all too well.

Like Le Carré's novels, The Pigeon Tunnel features far more men than women, though the occasional memorable woman makes it through, like Yvonne, the original for Tessa in The Constant Gardener. Someone I'd like to have read about more is his younger half sister Charlotte Cornwell, who inspired Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl and who, since she's an actress, he wanted to play the character in the movie version, which didn't happen. (Not a fan of Diane Keaton he.) Unfortunately with the exception of saying this about Charlie, he doesn't talk about her, or his other siblings really, other than saying his brother Tony was basically his only source of affection in his childhood (Ronnie and Olive weren't). Various ladies with the designation "my wife" are spotted at the edges of these stories, but as I said, for the most part, Le Carré manages to remain deepy private in this collection, taking the not unreasonable position that describing all these other people is where his and the readers' interests allign.

All in all: highly readable, and no, you don't have to be into his novels to enjoy it.

Connie Palmen: Du sagst es. (Original title "Jij zegt het", thank you, ratcreature). This is a new novel about the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, written in first person from Hughes' pov, and right there you have a basic problem. Not that it's a fictional take on people who lived and died within many readers' living memory (Hughes as late as 1998); there have been others, and fiction at least doesn't declare itself to be THE TRUTH, but the author's imaginative speculation on same; it's more honest than many a non-fiction in this regard. No, it's that both Plath and Hughes were fantastic writers who wrote about their relationship, and sorry, but that's a very high standard to aim for if you're going for first person.

(First person is tricky in general to believe for me as a reader and to do as a writer. I've done it occasionally, but rarely, and as a reader first person more often breaks the suspension of disbelief for me than not. Especially if the narrator is supposed to be someone whose voice has been preserved in written or audio form.)

Connie Palmen doesn't really manage, but that's not the only problem I have with her book. Another, related: there's a lot of prose paraphrasing of Hughes' Birthday Letters poems, which means something real Ted Hughes expressed in a few concise sentences is expressed by fictional Hughes rambling on for several pages. This isn't helping with the comparisons to the detriment of the novel. Then there's the question as to which type of readers this book is aiming for: can't be people either unfamiliar with the Plath and Hughes saga, or just casually aware of both poets' existence, because the novel rarely bothers with explanations and settings; for example, it starts at their first meeting at the St. Bodolph's Review party in Cambridge but doesn't bother explaining what Hughes was doing there, what Plath was doing there, and expects the readers to know all this already. Otoh, if the book is for readers who know their Lucas Myers (American poet, friend of Hughes) from their Richard Sassoon (on-off boyfriend of Plath's pre Ted), then it feels a bit like the kind of fanfiction that solely describes with a bit more dialogue or inner monologue scenes in broadcast episodes which fans are already familiar with with, you know what I mean? I've read Plath's breathless account of her first meeting with Hughes in her journal, written a day or two after the fact. I've read Hughes' elegic take on it, written decades later in his poem "St. Bodolph's" in "Birthday Letters". Palmen trying to match either writer's command of language by paraphrasing them, and not adding something uniquely hers, just feels - well, second rate, sorry to say.

Then there's the way no one but Plath, and maybe her mother Aurelia, is really fleshed out as a character. His siblings, Olwyn and Gerald, were enormously important to Hughes (see next review), but while that's said in a tell not show way by Palmen's narrator, she doesn't bother with the show not tell, actual scenes (other than Olwyn vs Sylvia arguments) that would show us who they are. Again, I can understand some of the why - both died only this year, which means when this novel was written they were still alive, and one feels more inhibited because of this. But it's still for me a narrative failure.

(Also irritating: Palmen's Hughes repeatedly describing Plath's eyes as "black", when real Hughes described Plath's brown eyes in some of the most memorable passages of Birthday Letters. What is up with that? Maybe a Dutch-German translation error, and the original novel means something like "dark gaze"?)

Lastly: having read a lot of Hughes - poetry, drama, letters, some essays - I don't think he comes across as self-pitying in his published voice. IMO, and that doesn't mean he wasn't, just that his own texts, either due to command of language or editing, don't feel like he was. But Palmen's Hughes feels extremely sorry for himself, as if the author wants to make absolutely sure we do, too, and thus paradoxically prevents it.

Jonathan Bate: Ted Hughes.: Subtitled "The Unauthorized Life", because while the author originally had the cooperation of the Hughes estate and thus access to Hughes' unpublished journals, poem drafts etc., he inevitably (if you know something of the long saga of the Plath biographies and Olwyn Hughes) clashed with them, authorization was withdrawn, and thus the subtitle. This being said, Bate clearly has a lot of respect for the tough as nails Olwyn; when she died in January this year, he wrote her obituary, and if you read it, you'll see what I mean.

As biographies go, this is a good one. Bate takes Hughes seriously as a poet, which doesn't mean he praises all his work, but it means we get a lot of Hughes' development as a writer - this includes some quotes from early drafts, and to me at least, it's fascinating to see how various alternatives of a later classic phrase were considered before the final one happened - , a strong presence of his Yorkshire background and his love of nature, detailed accounts of his threatre work with Peter Brook etc. - instead of just accounts of his love affairs. Which are, of course, present as well. If there's anything to critisize, it's that brief relationships like the one with Emma Tennant get more in terms of quotes from the lady in question than second Mrs. Hughes, Carol, gets about her decades long marriage, but since this is also because Carol Hughes still won't go on the record for journalists or biographers, I see Bate's problem.

Anyway, Carol aside, Bate is great with bringing the supporting cast of his biography to life. Definitely the siblings, Gerald and Olwyn, and other long lasting relationships, part ally, part adversary Al Alvarez, but also people hardly noticed even by all the Plath biographers before, like Shirley, Hughes' pre-Sylvia girlfriend who was with him during that fateful first encounter, or Susan Alliston, whose affair and breakup with Hughes turned into a long term friendship and who died of cancer the same year Assia Wevill committed murder-suicide with their daughter and Hughes' mother died (supporting Bate's argument that 1969 beat out 1963, the year of Plath's death, as Worst Year Ever for Hughes). His narrative voice is generally non-judgmental, literary judgments aside (I'm with him on "Shakespeare and the Great Goddess" as Hughes at his prose worst, btw, and also that the Ovid translations work as something of a poetical rebirth), and he comes across as trying to be fair to everyone in the big dramas of Hughes' life: case in point, the last but one of the stormy Olwyn versus Sylvia encounters, where they both thought the other was rude, Bate points out Olwyn smoked non-stop despite Sylvia asking her not to and yours truly entirely sympathizes with Sylvia until Bate also points out that Sylvia's other complaint, that Olwyn stayed so long on this particular visit, overlooks that Olwyn lived in Paris at this time and hadn't seen Ted in more than a year, so had a lot of catching up to do.

Bate declares right at the start he wants to write a complete life, not just another take on the Plath and Hughes relationship, and points the reader to Diane Middlebrook's "Her Husband" for one of the most recent and thorough, but inevitably, though her suicide happens on page 216 of 556, Sylvia Plath is the strongest non-Hughes presence in the book. There's a good argument to be made that dead Sylvia had a stronger grip on Hughes - both as a poet and as a woman - than any of the other living women he became subsequently entangled with, and certainly more than poor doomed Assia. (Another plausible argument can be made that if Sylvia had lived, so would Assia have; both Assia and Ted Hughes despite their affair were anything but sure they wanted to have a permanent relationship before Sylvia died, they both still had other relationships - Assia with her husband David plus a brief fling with, of all the people, Al Alvarez, Ted with the aforementioned Susan, and if Sylvia had lived, the Ted/Assia affair probably would have burned itself out quickly, and they'd have moved on, whether or not they would have re-committed to their respective spouses. But being known as The Other Woman after Sylvia Plath had killed herself trapped Assia in a competition she could no longer win, and in a relationship she and Hughes thought they HAD to make work now which went on to ensure it didn't.)

Bate shows that the poems addressed to Plath collected in Birthday Letters were indeed written (and redrafted a lot) during decades, not a last outburst before Hughes' death (the decades long process had been mentioned at the time Birthday Letters was published, but was met with scepticism), and again, the early drafts are interesting to me both in terms of how a poem is written and as an endlessly attempted dialogue with a woman who is gone. (Ditto for Hughes' comments on her poetry and prose, be it in private letters or, rarely, in public.) His version of Euripides' Alcestis, the last complete Hughes work to be published within his life time, wasn't something comissioned or otherwise inspired by an outside source, he chose to write about a woman dying and then returning to her husband as he felt himself dying, and since I thought there were repeated Sylvia echoes in ALCESTIS, I was gratified that so does Bate. (He found a Wuthering Heights allusion Hughes has smuggled into Alcestis which I missed, though, and which has no equivalent in the original Greek text. In Hughes' Alcestis, Admetos after Alcestis death imagines his own death:

"I think of cool soil
A mask over my face,
A weight of stillness over my body,
A darkness
In which she lies next to me - her lips
Maybe only an inch from my lips,
Forever."

This, Bates speculates, is Hughescliff, imagining himself in the moorland graveyard at Heptonstall, and goes to quote the relevant Wuthering Heights passage:

"You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!" I exclaimed, "were you not ashamed to disturb the dead?"
"I disturbed nobody, Nelly," he replied, and "I gave some ease to myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now, and you'll have a better chance of keeping me underground when I get there. Disturbed her? No! She has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen years - incessantly - remorselessly - till yesternight, and yesternight I was tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers."

Wuthering Heights was of great significance to both Plath and Hughes (who grew up almost next door, well next village, in Yorkshire), and there are poems about it and Emily Bronte by both of them, but that parallel had still eluded me before.

After describing Hughes' death and giving a brief overview of the lives (and in one tragic case death) of his surviving family in the subsequent years, Bate returns once more to the tale of Ted and Sylvia, and after 500 pages of trying to keep up a matter-of-fact, occasionally ironic tone, at last throws caution into the wind and goes for the bloody passion, and does it better in half a page than Palmen does in an entire novel:

Sylvia Plath's death was the central fact of Ted Hughes's life. However he tried to get away from it, he could not; however the biographer broadens the picture, it is her image that returns. In the letters of his final months, even after the expiation that came with Birthday Letters, Plath remains the most vivid presence in his mental world. So, for example in a simple sentence of luminous poetic prose in a long letter to his German translators who had sought advice on the meaning of various phrases in such poems as 'The Bee God', Ted explains how the image ' Your page a dark swarm':

"brings together SP bending over the bees (pending over the beehive with its roof off), SP bending over her page (where the letters as she composed writhed and twisted, superimposed on each other, displacing each other), her page, as a seething mass and depth and compound of living ideas - carrying, somewhere in the heart of it, in the heart of the words, of the phrases, of the poetic whole struggling to form itself, the vital nuclei of her poetic operation - her 'self' and her 'Daddy' - and finally, her poem (in process of composition there on her page as she bends over it) as a warm of bees clinging under a blossoming bough."

"The lit blossom", he writes, "is also Sp's face." It is as if Sylvia instead of the thought-fox has entered the room and is bending over Ted as he writes. Her face is radiant. Her ghost has returned in recognition of the knowledge that he loved her until the day he died. Before him stands yesterday.

Still the result from my London expedition at the beginning of August. I didn't watch any of these plays, I just bought them in bookstores.

Pitcairn: play by Richard Bean. Flippantly described, it's an Age of Sails Lord of the Flies, featuring the most prominent mutineers of them all. More precisely: after the famous mutiny on the Bounty, some of the mutineers risked staying in Tahiti, and nine went on with Fletcher Christian, and 20 Polynesians, 14 of whom were women (and only three of these women were on board voluntarily, Christian and the other mutineers had simply kidnapped the rest) and ended up on Pitcairn. If you're read Caroline Alexander's The Bounty, for my money by far the best book both on the mutiny and its aftermath, you knew the Pitcairn story ended rather bloodily, with the question as to who killed whom and why depending on the various changing accounts the one European survivor, John Adams, gave when Pitcairn was finally found by the navy decades later. (For years after that, it never seems to have occurrred to any of the curious and Bounty-romantisizing people to interview any of the surviving Polynesian women, until one, nicknamed Jenny, who took the first chance she got to finally leave Pitcairn told her story, and it was anything but complimentary to the European mutineers.)

Now I've watched the three most famous movies on the Bounty mutiny (Laughton/Gable, Howard/Brando and Hopkins/Gibson as Bligh and Christian respectively, with the last movie the only one reflecting newer research and taking a pro Bligh approach, with the earlier two being all evil Captain versus heroic mutineers), and I've read some novels, but Bean's play is the first depiction focusing exclusively on the mutineers and Polynesians who ended up on Pitcairn, and my Lord of the Flies comparison is no hyperbole. Bean is also the first author who makes the Polynesians, both female and male, into characters, instead of presenting him as pretty, available and mostly silent and catalysts for the mutiny. He's also trying very hard to avoid the "noble savage" stereotype, not least by presenting them in their own context, where the Polynesians have their own social hierarchy (which the Europeans utterly ignore) and prejudices. Even though, they come across far more sympathetically than the Europeans, whose first idea on how to live their new Utopia is to enslave the Polynesian males, and whose falling out over the women never bothers with their choices. Bean's solution to what to make of the various contradictory accounts (Adams at various points said Christian had committed suicide, that he was killed by another Polynesian, or by another mutineer, that he became quickly hated or that he remained beloved till the end (the last story being told after Adams had gotten back into contact with people in England and had found out that the story of the mutiny was now firmly pro Christian, anti Bligh in the public consciousness; "Jenny" said all the Polynesians turned against the mutineers and that the women tried to escape Pitcairn by attempting to build a boat, which failed, something that's confirmed in the surviving writings of mutineer Edward Young who also mentions the women were punished for this) is to come up with a twist that I thought was unique to him until rereading Caroline Alexander's book, which mentioned that the very first dramatization of the discovery of Pitcairn had the very same twist. ( The twist in question, and more. )

The question of what exactly happened to cause the mutiny is never addressed, as it's not the point of the play. It's a story where everyone gets a fresh new start but due to the baggage they bring with them - the Europeans ideas of racial superiority, and the confusion of the fact that the women are sexually liberated with the idea that they don't care whom they have sex with, the Polynesians their own hierarchy which divides them from each other and stops them banding together until it is too late - it ends in a far worse state than the one they ran away from. One third into the play, when the Bounty is burned, both mutineers and Polynesians realise they are now in prison, locked together with each other when half of them wants to kill the other half, worse than a prison sentence in England would have been. As Utopia turns Dystopia stories go, this one is told viciously and efficiently. In a can't-turn-my-eyes-away manner; if it's ever staged where I can see it, I will.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: first of all, let me address something that annoys me in plenty of both negative and positive reviews of this play: said reviews treating JKR as the author. She's not. I repeat: she did not write this play, and never claimed she had. The credit on the cover is pretty clear: a two part stage play written by Jack Thorne based on an original new story by Thorne, J.K. Rowling and John Tiffany. Which makes Thorne the author, with input by JKR as well as John Tiffany as far as the storyline is concerned.

Maybe a comparison: The Empire Strikes Back. Script by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett. George Lucas did not write it. Of course he had imput in the storyline, and he approved of the final result. But I can't count the number of criticisms of Lucas as a scriptwriter which sooner or later bring up the fact the ESB script was written by two solid veterans as an explanation why that movie is the favourite of most fans, who point to Leigh Brackett's Bogart-Bacall-Hawks past as having influenced the Han and Leia scenes, etc. By the same measure, it might be more useful to compare HP and the Cursed Child to earlier work by Thorne for the tv series Skins or his plays than it is to compare it to JKR's novels.

All of this being said, here we go: I enjoyed reading this two part play tremendously. I haven't read much Next Generation fanfiction to compare it too, but it should surprise me if previous takes on Scorpius Malfoy resemble this one, who is an adorable geek and very much his own character, not Draco or Sirius revisited. Now the last two HP novels had made me have some pity and sympathy for Draco and the Malfoys in general (with the caveat that joining a genocidal bastard voluntarily not being a good idea should have been kind of obvious), but this play finally made me like Draco, without negating or prettifying his previous history in the slightest. The adult interaction between him, Harry, Hermione and Ginny feels both plausible and satisfying to me. Harry with the best of intentions struggling with fatherhood and this textually explicitly being tied back to his being raised by the Dursleys on the one hand and having Albus Dumbledore for a mentor on the other also makes character sense to me. And while "son of famous man struggles with expectations, developes massive issues" is anything but new as a concept, I thought Albus Potter was a good variation of the theme. I also liked the Albus-Ginny parallels; they have a scene together that brings up Ginny's Tom Riddle experience just rightly.

Being a genre fan, I'm of course familiar with the central plot device - ( which is spoilery )

- with Star Trek, Farscape and Buffy all having done memorable episodes using it. Cursed Child offers ( Spoilers. )

It also fits with the fact that all ensemble characters, past and present, dead and alive, contribute to saving the world: hooray for team work!

Complaints: not really. I mean, Spoilery New Character is more of a plot device than a character, but otoh New Character triggers both the aforementioned Ginny and Albus scene, and has one with Harry which is totally my kind of messed up: ( in spoilery ways. )

I'm really looking forward to seeing this scene acted out on stage in a year or so when tickets become reasonably available.

Kieron Gillan's current comic Darth Vader has been reccommended to me from multiple sides, and since I saw there are two trade collections available already (i.e. something I can actually get my hands on), I went for it. (Also, I really liked Kieron Gillan's sadly cancelled Abigail Brand centric comic back in the day.)

( Vaguely spoilery talk about Star Wars: Darth Vader, Issues 1-12 ensues. )

In conclusion: I'll definitely keep reading.

In another fandom, have a Black Sails fanfic rec:

Pieces of Silver: which is a wonderful missing scene set in late season 2 in which we see Silver interact with Miranda Barlow (and Abigail Ashe) while everyone is en route to Charleston. Great character voices for all three of them.

Very enjoyable, but not quite what I'd hoped for, by which I mean I wanted to love it and didn't, though that might partly been to having had wrong expectations.

What I thought I would get: first of a series of detective novels starring Harper Lee and Truman Capote as children.

What this is: one off novel about Harper Lee's and Truman Capote's childhood friendship. In the course of which they also play detectives (this, btw, was a rl thing, complete with cosplaying Holmes and Watson), but in the way children do, i.e they're looking for a mystery but when they eventually hit on a "mystery", it isn't really one, more of a shaggy dog story their imagination makes into more, though they come up with a few correct conclusions in between. At any rate, it's not the main plot of the novel, which is very reminiscent of, say, Tom Sawyer in the way it's structured, i.e loosely connected anecdotes and a few lingering plot threads.

I should add that it takes enormous guts to tackle the childhood of these two writers, since they've milked it for their own fiction. Which means at least part of your readers will have fictionalized alter egos of two masters of their art in their heads, though this book definitely is written primarily for children as readers. (Who presumably wouldn't have read Capote, even if they should have watched the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.) Neri wisely doesn't try to imitate either of their narrative voices, and sticks to third person, sometimes in Nelle's and sometimes in Tru's perspective, though as an appendix he has fun with some Capote and Harper Lee pastiches in the form of first person narrated short stories his child heroes have supposedly written during the course of the novel. (As he mentions, the real short stories were lost, so he gives his versions, which are fun to read, and good natured stylistic exercises to boot.)

Purely taken as a novel for children, it provides them with a pair of misfit heroes, with Tru the more unusual of the two, because tomboy heroines have been popular since decades, but as far as I recall, defiantly "sissy" boy heroes are not. If I were Neri, I'd have trusted my youthful audience more to get the point, because he repeats at least three times that part of what makes the Nelle and Tru friendship is that neither of them fits into gender roles (i.e she's seen as too much of a boy for a girl, he's seen as too much like a girl for a boy), but that doesn't take away from the charm of the combination. (Especially since neither does Nelle get more "feminine" nor Tru ore "masculine" in the course of the narrative; that's not how they influence each other.) Other than not fitting gender roles, our young heroes are also united by passion for books, a wild imagination and having living but absent mothers (Nelle's has mental health problems, Truman's is Holly Golightly a narcissist who can't stand having a child when she yearns to make it in the big city, and specifically can't stand this particular child - as Capote's biographer Gerald Clarke once wryly noted, at least his mother ensured he'd never have a "am I gay?" Identity crisis as a teenager, because she told him he was way earlier than that.) Their fathers, otoh, couldn't be more different - Nelle's is her later model for Atticus Finch, Tru's is a charming conman who never pulls off a succesful con. (And isn't much around.)

The 1930s US South setting means the novel has to deal with race as well. There are two poc characters with lines and personality, a boy a bit older than our heroes, and the cook at Truman's aunts' house where he lives. The boy is the occasion for an early scene where Tru and Nelle face the local bullies; note that Nelle is incensed by the unfairness of the situation because she knows the black boy can't fight back (it's unthinkable), and that's why she intervenes, which I think as a way to signal both institutional racism and that Nelle, with the best of intentions and bravery, isn't free from some assumptions herself, it works. As for the cook, Neri tries his best to avoid the "Mammy" cliché, but of course she is an older black woman being roped into helping two white kids in an endeavor (and knowing she'll be held responsible if it goes wrong), and we're in the kids' pov, so while there's enough narrative information to make it clear she has her own life going on and doesn't live for young Truman, we still don't see her outside of how he relates to her. The Ku Klux Klan shows up twice in the novel, the second time in what I automatically assumed was an invented occasion in order to pay homage to To Kill a Mockingbird, because Nelle's father gets to face them down, but no, upon checking, the second occasion actually happened: when eight years old Truman was called to New York to live with his mother for a while, he threw himself a big Halloween farewell party (of course he did), and the Klan, objecting to the presence of the earlier mentioned poc characters among the guests, showed up. (KKK, Monroeville edition, deciding to crash eight years old farewell party is the type of thing that would be called hopelessly over the top if invented, so I should have known it really happened before googling.)

Sidenote: Because I read Go Set a Watchman last year (and of course To Kill a Mockingbird ages ago), I couldn't help but notice that the depiction of racism in Monroeville is markedly different in the prequel/rough draft compared to the other two. In Tru and Nelle, it's there, it's unfair, but most townspeople are benevolent, and the KKK are bumbling bullies and fools whom the good people naturally oppose. There's nothing like the creeping horror when in GSAW, in the adult Jean Louise's pov, she realises that it's everywhere and far from limited to unpleasant brutes.

Back on reviewing track, technical details: Neri gives the child Nelle a Southern accent to be phonetically transcribed, but not the child Truman (though Nelle's has disappeared by the end of the novel from her dialogue) - no idea how accurate that is. Some of the other characters talk in it, too, which is always a bit tricky for me as a foreigner to read. I couldn't help but notice that when they play out their Sherlock Holmes scenarios, Nelle is Watson while Truman is not Holmes but Sherlock, and here I cried foul and clear influence of not one but two more recent tv incarnations. :) (She would have called him Holmes!) This being said, it only made me wish more for the child detective series I had imagined this to be the start of, because I could have read tons more about these two fighting crime.

In conclusion: I liked but didn't love, and now hope for fanfiction providing more and going deeper. This is such a delightful friendship through the decades before the two lost each other in the wake of In Cold Blood and Truman's alcoholism-fueled assholery and self destruction. And in addition to the fighting crime tales, I want the superheroes AU. Because clearly Nelle would have made a great superheroine (complete with shock realisation about mentor) and her withdrawal from the public eye was so she could superhero undetected. Truman provided the intelligence in their investigations by befriending every supervillain ever and making them spill the beans.

The third volume of Simon Callow’s monumental Orson Welles biography, which carries our hero from 1947, when he left the US behind and became a permanent globetrotter, to 1965, when he made Chimes at Midnight, which Callow with some justification, both artistic and biographical, sees as his opus magnum and all things coming full circle. (And of course it was the last movie (minus the mockumentaries like F for Fake) he actually got to finish, while living on another twenty years desperately trying to finish over projects.) The article which alerted me to the publication of One Man Band assumes Callow will present volume IV , covering the last twenty years, but I could understand it if Callow leaves it here; artistically, it’s just so tempting, not to mention that the theatre and film projects description are a great part of the appeal of the biographies, and without these, with “just” the life to describe, part of the motivation must be lost.

(Mind you: if The Other Side of the Wind, aka the nearly finished Welles movie with copies slumbering in archives of money men for decades and then fought over by heirs, actually finally gets released in the next few years, as has been announced there should be a LOT of new material to analyze.)

( Meanwhile, here are the impression of Welles: The European Years )

Recently, I finished rereading the six historical novels by the sadly dead Judith Merkle Riley. I first read them back when they were published, in the late 80s and early 90s, and enjoyed them a lot, though not all in the same degree. Going back, I find at least half of them hold up well, and all have lots to offer. Mind you, there's the drawback, especially if you read them all in a row, that Judith Merkle Riley has a few character types and plot points she keeps repeating and reusing. Sometimes it grates. Sometimes she doesn't get (imo, as always) the balance right. But she also has wit, on display in all six, and manages to narrate with a sense of irony but without condescending to whichever period she describes. Also: all of the novels are female-centric and manage to avoid the "one special girl" trap, i.e. women other than our heroine are valued by the narrative and get to be competent, with their own emotional lives.

Here are the novels in question, their plusses and downsides in the opinion of your humble reviewer:

The Margaret of Ashbury trilogy:

1. A Vision of Light: introducing our heroine, Margaret, who dictates her memoirs to a monk and lives in the time of Edward III., but is totally not Margery Kempe, honest. Mostly not, I suspect, because Judith Merkle Riley wanted Margaret to enjoy sex more and be a bit more down to earth. But Margaret does have visions and chats with the Almighty, in between going through a vivid medieval life, including an encounter with the plague, becoming a midwife, marrying twice (spoiler: in this volume), and having the ability to befriend tremendously interesting people. Margaret is a delightful heroine, and like I said, not the novel's sole carefully drawn woman. You get a sense of how clichés are avoided/twisted around early on when he drunken father remarries, a not-attractive-anymore widow with two sons of her own who at first glance doesn't seem to care for Margaret. But no, we're not going the Cinderella/Evil Stepmother route; instead, Margaret due to an incident starts to see her stepmother as a human being and bonds with her (not to mention that Mother Anne teaches her the highly useful skill of brewing excellent beer). Later, when Margaret's mentor, the midwife Hilde, shows up, you think: mentor figure! Midwife in novel set in the late middle ages! She'll die! But no. Hilde is still happily alive and living with her trickster type companion at the end of the trilogy. And so forth.

If A Vision of Light has a downside, it's that the ending, the last 50 pages or so, are basically a set up for the next volume rather than a conclusion to this one. If there had been no more novels, I would gone "Hang on! Am I to believe this abrupt shift in their relationship will make either of them happy? But - but..." Knowing what will come, I'm fine with the twist.

2.) In Pursuit of the Green Lion: perhaps my favourite of the trilogy. Margaret and SPOILER have to deal with the fallout of that set up, and Judith Merkle Riley executes one trope I enjoy if well done - ( Spoilery trope named )

- in a convincing way. Also there's lots of sarcasm at the expense of the nobility, and two bickering ghosts. (In future books, Merkle Riley sometimes lets the supernatural elements go overboard, but here it's just in the right doses, plus one of the ghosts is someone Margaret loved and lost in the past, and the book makes the point that loving someone in the present doesn't mean all that came before wasn't as important, or, conversely, that having loved someone truly means you can no longer love anyone else. In short, it's the anti One True Love No One Else Counts trope I still wish was more common. Yay! This is also the first book set in France for a considerable part when Margaret & friends are undercover as pilgrims, giving us a wry and amused look at the Avignon era of the Church. Oh, and it features the first bunch of Merkle Rileys satanists; there's a Gilles de Rais type around...who has it in for Margaret's love interest because said love interest satirized the count's poems. Which is a very Merkle Riley twist.

3.) The Water Devil: a bit of a let down compared to the first two. Not that it's a bad book per se; by itself, it's a perfectly entertaining adventure novel, Margaret & friends are still a captivating lot. But the villainess is a paper thin cliché, and the story itself doesn't really add anything new to Margaret's development, as opposed to the first two. Ah well.

Standalone novels:

The Serpent Garden: set during the early reign of Henry VIII., and highly unusual already because it has nothing to do with his marriages. The most prominent Tudor in it is his sister Mary, since her brief marriage to the French king and subsequent one with Charles Brandon form part of the plot, but Mary is only a supporting character. Our heroine here is Susanna, soon widow of a morally no good painter and an accomplished painter of miniature portraits herself, who first becomes a part of Wolsey's entourage and then a part of Mary's. This novel has both a third act and a supernatural problem; for two thirds of it, Susanna is a fine plucky heroine using her talent in world that keeps underestimating her, plus the book offers a take on Wolsey during the height of his power. (No Cromwell in sight, though Cavendish shows up as a flatterer and Anne Boleyn as a teenage girl in France.) But Susanna's no good husband who dies at the beginning has been involved in supernatural treasure-hunting, and during the last third, the book gets dominated by an angel versus demon struggle with Susanna only playing a small part, and it's just not what I signed up for.

The Oracle Glass: My favourite of the standalones! Set in Paris during the Reign of Louis XIV, with the famous "Affair of the Poisons" playing a central role. Our heroine is Genevieve, clever, a book worm, but also handicapped, which is why her mother hates her. Genevieve gets thrown out after her father's death and gets picked up in the streets by Catherine La Voisin, the most (in)famous "witch" of Paris, soothsayer, abortionist, master poisoner, con woman and head of a whole network of women who have at least one of said skills as well. Genevieve gets a new identity as the 150 years old Madame de Morville and becomes a successful soothsayer, which works out well for her for a while, but if you know at least a bit of French history, you know La Voisin has a date with destiny. She, btw, is perhaps Merkle Riley's most successsful female villain/ambiguous character (sometimes one, sometimes the other), practical, ruthless, and basically a female Don Corleone, seeing herself as simply a very successful business woman with marketable skills. (Which she is, and has the business folders to prove it.) Genevieve's attitude towards her is a mixture of respect, (justified) distrust and some awe.

Meanwhile, Genevieve's blood family is dastardly rotten, except for her grandmother (whom she models her Madame de Morville persona after) and her sister, Marie-Angelique, who is another great cliché refuter, because she's the pretty blonde one to Genevieve's intellectual brunette, but she is also Genevieve's one good family member and consistently loving towards her, instead of being a mean girl (tm). Then there's Genevieve's maid Sylvie (who gets paid a lot to spy on her by various parties and cheerfully admits to it every time to Genevieve while keeping the cash), and the other ladies of La Voisin's network. This novel is just bursting with women who are interesting and have interesting relationships with each other. And I'm okay with the romance, too. Highly reccommended.

The Master of All Desires: alas. This one has the dullest heroine of the lost, Sibille, despite her being a writer (a poet). She gets completely overshadowed by two other ladies, Catherine de Medici and Diane de Poitiers, since this novel is set in France, 1556. The title refers to the novel's McGuffin, a mummified head who can fulfill wishes but specializes in fulfilling them in a way that ruins everything for the wishing person. Catherine and Diane both want it, Sibille by accident has it, and Nostradamus tries to deal with the head in a way that avoids bringing on the apocalypse. This is a novel with a good premise, but it can't quite decide who the main character is - Catherine, Nostradamus or Sibille -, and Sibille, alas, is the most colourless of Judith Merkle Riley's OCs. Also Nostradamus having issues with poetry in general gets repetitive. Worth reading for the way Merkle Riley twists events at the end of Henri II.'s reign and after to be the result of ill-considered wishes by Diane and Catherine (let's just say wishing crowns for all your children is a baaaaad idea if you don't clarify three of them aren't supposed to get the same one), and for a take on Catherine de Medici which is traditional but also avoids the monster cliché (this Catherine has the potential but doesn't go there yet). Also if you enjoy twists on the "evil wish fulfiller: how to outthink them?" trope. But as a novell, it belongs with the "Serpent Garden" to those I think could have used a complete redrafting and/or different focus.

In subject matter. It might also be in marketing, I don't know, I read three of these novels because sonetka's reviews had made me curious, but what they have in common, other than the era they're set in, is the first person narration and the fact they are about and narrated by teenage girls.

Detour rambling: mind you, authors who are definitely billed as Weighty Bestseller Writers employ first person narrators as well, independent from whether their main character is male or female. Mika Waltari did it all those decades ago, Philippa Gregory can't stop doing it right now. Mostly, and there are always exceptions, I prefer third person in my historical narrative. This is because few authors can pull off a first person voice which strikes me as plausibly that of a character from era X. Also if you've read more than one novel from a first person addicted author, the voices in question usually resemble each other too much, independent from which time the characters hail from. (Which is, btw, why I think Waltari pulled it off in The Egyptian, but then his narrators from Neronian Rome or the Finnish middle ages also sound very much like aged Sinuhe, and my suspension of disbelief is broken. Otoh Jo Graham gets away with it regularly, not least because her first person narrators actually are meant to be the same character, born into different eras. Someone who for my taste created a plausible first person narrator in the Tudor era is C.J. Sansom in the Shardlake series, but maybe if I would read a novel of his set in another era and it would also be first person, I would feel differently.

Anyway: Katherine Longshore, who wrote the trilogy (of sorts) I'm about to review, isn't a writer in the Sansom class who manages to give you a strong sense of era through the various levels of Tudor society, or of the ideological clashes. Her novels all take place in the claustrophic court world, and her narrators don't hold values or positions which completely clash with a present day reader. Romance and self realisation are the two main red threads. But I enjoyed reading all three books, though in varying degrees. They're vividly written - süffig, we'd say in German, for which there is no adequate English translation, but the word associates a good drink -, and even within the overcrowded (by novels) Tudor era, they manage to feel individual, not derivative of the dozens of predecessors. They manage to bring the characters they feature to life. While they're losely connected, you can read each on its own. They also don't take place in chronological order. On the contrary, the first one is the last one in terms of Tudor chronology. Which finally brings me to the actual books.

1.) Gilt: Our first person narrator is Katherine "Kitty" Tilney, who grows up with Catherine "Cat" Howard (given the overabundance of Katherines, a historical novelist always has to come up with short versions and nicknames; these are Longshore's) and ends up witnessing her execution. This is the book I liked least of the three, for one particular reason: structure-wise, it reminded me too much of The Other Boleyn Girl - goodnatured, kind female narrator is endlessly exploited by ruthless ambitious other female main character, who rises and then falls mostly due to own deeds. Our heroine, as opposed to our villainess able to see the shallowness and destructiveness of ambition and court life, at the end finally is free of same and can have a self determined existence.

This is definitely one of the most negative takes on Katherine Howard I've come across. (Most fictional takes on Henry VIII.'s fifth queen have her as a good natured, if somewhat stupid teenager, with the exception of Ford Maddox Ford who made her into a Catholic saint.) She's basically a High School mean girl: manipulative, shallow, cruel, demanding loyalty without ever giving it. Even when she does something historically seen as generous (pleading for the incarcarated Thomas Wyatt, who is at the point of her wedding enjoying another stint in the Tower), she does so for self aggrandizement. Now the mean girl characterisation is just as possible as the goodnatured one in terms of the historical foundation (i.e. we don't know; certainly the mutual blaming each other once Katherine Howard, her servants, and her former and current lover were arrested could be due to understandable panic in the face of a gruesome death, or it could say something about their characters - who are we to tell?), but the problem is that the Kitty and Cat relationship is the central one in the novel. Everyone keeps telling Kitty that Cat is just using her, but it takes her eons to catch on. And we're still supposed to buy into a deep bond between them after Cat's fall, which makes Kitty be there for her in the night before her death, when all the previous novel has shown Cat in such a relentlessly negative light. This just doesn't work for me. More ambiguity in Cat and some truly positive actions which make it understandable why Kitty still loves her, and I'd been sold.

Why do I still think the novel is worth reading instead of skipping over? Because it (and the subsequent novels) have the most fleshed out, interesting Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, of any Tudor era novel so far. We're definitely talking post Julia Fox Jane characterisation, without Jane suddenly becoming a saint (impossible anyway in a novel dealing with the Katherine Howard era). Seen through Kitty Tilney's eyes, Jane is basically a Tudor noir character, an enigmatic woman with a past who is a riddle Kitty can't quite solve. She clearly had strong feelings for the dead Anne, and Kitty at one point speculates that Jane in her relationship with Cat and the other young girls is trying to recapture her youth, but then again, after the fall, Jane at one point says to Kitty "What makes you think this (death) isn't exactly what I deserve?" In the end, Jane comes across as better than Cat who immediately tries to use her as a scapegoat once all is discovered, and Kitty's sympathies are with her. The hints about Jane's and Anne's relationship are enough to make one very curious about the next novel, which is:

2.) Tarnish: this one has a young Anne Boleyn, just returned from France and new at the English Court, as the narrator. And because it's Anne Boleyn in her late teenage years, the arc of the other two, with our heroines realising the destructiveness of ambition and court life, is unthinkable. Also, the romance outcome is the exact reverse from what it would be in your avarage YA novel. Anne in this novel has two main love interests, King Henry, whom she has a long term so far unrequited crush on, and Thomas Wyatt, whom she developes the verbal-sparring-of-equals relationship with, which in a novel dealing with not rl characters would lead to Anne leaving her crush on the King behind and embracing true love in the form of Wyatt. Not here, of course, though she gets out of the crush stage with Henry and does realize she's in love with Wyatt, but Anne, with an YA unusual form of ambition, concludes that with two married suitors and one of them the King hinting that he's willing to do the hitherto unthinkable and separate from his Queen, she's going to go with the more powerful option.

(The novel's Henry VIII., btw, is a neat exercise in reader foreshadowing, leaving aside that Longshore already presented us with the bloated, more quickly lethal version in the previous novel, as well as the assumption your avarage reader has avarage historical knowledge. You can see why Anne, especially given she's grown up in a society glorifying him, has her original crush, while at the same time the way he's paralleled with his sister Mary, who in her casual cruelty is the closest thing the novel has to a villain, foreshadows what will happen.)

(Another unusual thing for romance-heavy novels: Anne's relationship with Henry Percy, which in this version isn't youthful True Love but both of them wanting to escape an unwanted marriage and seeing each other as the solution to this - and in Anne's case seeing Henry Percy as a social climbing -, rushing into a relationship and then realising there's no there there. Which comes with awkward first time sex. Usually romantic heroines either have blissful sex with their true love, or unwanted painful sex with an arranged husband. Awkward wanted sex with not-really-true-love makes for a refreshing change.)

The novel also has a strong emphasis on the relationships between the Boleyn siblings, and here you can see the author improving in terms of the previous novel. Anne, who hasn't seen her sister and brother for years, makes some basic assumptions about them which turn out to be mistaken (or only scratching the surface), but she doesn't come across as blind the way Kitty does in the previous novel re: Cat, not least because neither Mary nor George are presented as villains. (Though this is one of the darker Georges; one of the things Anne at the start is puzzled and hurt is why their early childhood closeness before she went to France can't be recaptured and George behaves in a jerkish way to her. There is an explanation - and no, it's not incest -, and misunderstandings are cleared up, but George still is one of the edgier versions around, though miles from the Tudors rapist or Mantel's spineless fool.)

And, as mentioned: Jane (Parker) as she is then. Longshore uses Fox' research re: Jane Parker being present and involved in the early court life of Anne Boleyn to great effect; her version is a nail-biting, intense girl who forms a loners' friendship with pre-popularity Anne, but with more than one reason (and Anne is blind to the obvious other one at first), and there's also a basis for both Jane's capacity for passionate attachment and her fear of being at odds with power. She's plausible as a younger version of the woman from Gilt and goes some ways to explain the enigma without explaining it all.

Anne going from newcomer and somewhat ridiculed outsider at court to trendsetting new favourite comes with the usual finding-yourself-arc of a young heroine but also with historical irony, due to the reader's awareness what her triumph at the end will result in. It also comes with strengthened relationships to her siblings and to Jane, though, and a wistful road-not-taken one with Wyatt, and all in all, it makes Tarnish my favourite of the three novels.

Brazen: features an older Anne a few years later, just after Elizabeth's birth, as a supporting character, but our first person narrator is another teenage girl: Anne's first cousin Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, who gets married to Henry VIII.'s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. Another Henry, as viewers and readers of Blood Ties know. Here, he's Fitz. They're not, however, allowed to consume their marriage just yet, supposedly because Henry VIII. thought teenage sex was responsible for his brother Arthur's early demise. I kid you not. This is so preposterous that I looked it up, and yes, Henry VIII. actually gave that as a reason. Mind you, the novel allows characters to point a far more likely reason for the royal non-consummation order: this way, the marriage could easily be dissolved, should Henry VIII. want or need to marry his illegitimate son to someone else. If he had legitimized him - not impossible, given he had made both his daughters illegitimate -, then, for example, it would have been very likely that he'd sought a royal bride for Fitz.

Anyway, being forbidden to have sex of course makes for the obvious arranged-couple-falling-in-love-and-yearning-for-each-other plot. But Mary also has other things going on her life; as ever, Longshore is good with the friendships (Mary with Madge Shelton and Margaret Douglass; together, they create the Devonshire Manuscript) and the family relationships, which with the Howards are even more dysfunctional than they are with their Boleyn relations. (Mary's parents have a marriage to spectacularly bad - historical fact, btw, we have the Duchess' of Norfolk's letters to prove it - that it arguably outdoes Henry VIII.'s marriages in that department, minus the part where he killed two wives.) Mary's brother and Fitz' best friend, Hal (Earl of Surrey, poet, destined to be executed a few years after this novel) is another important supporting character.

Early on, Mary has a romantic view on the Henry VIII. and Anne marriage but gets rapidly disillusioned. One of the novels twists is that while remamining an Anne supporter, Mary inadvertendly contributes to her fall when she thinks Cromwell is interrogating her about her friend Margaret Douglass' secret marriage (Margaret being the King's niece, this one was illegal and did indeed earn Margaret a stint in the Tower later) and tries to distract him with in itself harmless talk which Cromwell later uses fatally against Anne. Btw, this Cromwell is certainly of the villanous kind, though the uncontested prize for main male villain (other than Henry VIII.) in this novel goes to Mary's father, the Duke of Norfolk. (I've yet to read a positive characterisation of him in any novel, no matter whom the author prefers. Which isn't surprising. He scorned books and new ideas, abandoned the nieces he first pimped at the first sight of trouble and abused his wife.) (Mind you, somewhere I'm sure there is a Misunderstood Woobie!version of Norfolk. There is of everyone else...) Who ends the novel frustrated when a grown up, sadder and wiser Mary who after Fitz has become a vampire has died young refuses to be his instrument and continues her own life at her own conditions. (Which as a Duke's widow she can now afford.) But he swears he'll find another Howard girl to bring to the King, and thus the circle to the first novel is closed. It is also for Jane, who in this novel makes only a few appearances but at the end as opposed to Mary returns to court because she can't imagine another existence but serving a queen, and thus dooms herself. The relative lack of Jane after her two strong and intriguing appearances in earlier novels is a let down only if you've read the other two, but it makes sense given Mary would have had only limited contact with her.

All in all: not must reads, but if you feel like consuming three novels about women in the Tudor age which offer interesting non-romantic relationships along with the romances, these would be a good choice.