It’s Tudor Time!

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell, the primary subject of Hilary Mantel’s books. Damien Lewis is Henry VIII.

If you have any interest whatsoever in Tudor history and/or historical fiction about the Tudors then you already know that Wolf Hall, the television adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s two Booker Prize-winning novels, has finally reached the U.S. It’s on the PBS show Masterpiece and even if you don’t have cable you can still watch it, online at PBS.org or via the PBS app on your television-watching device.

I will be curious to talk to friends who are watching the show but have not read the books. Mantel’s books are masterful in their immersion into the worlds of their subjects but you really do need to immerse yourself. And there are some potentially confusing jumps around in time.

Mantel’s gotten a lot of press recently, but the best I’ve seen (OK, heard) is her interview with Kurt Anderson on Studio 360, the arts radio show out of WNYC. On the bottom of the page linked there is an extended version of the interview and it was worth it for me. I love hearing her talk about her relationship with these characters, and how she approaches historical fiction (or fictional history, as Anderson proposed she call her work). Especially fun is their discussion of Thomas More, hero of “A Man For All Seasons” but not exactly the best figurehead for religious liberty or freedom of expression, as Mantel points out. There’s also a nice, if short, interview with Damien Lewis, who plays Henry VIII, on the PBS site.

If any of this is making you crave some reading about Tudor times, specifically the reign of Henry VIII, I have some fiction recommendations. If you haven’t done so, and you like the TV series, you should read Mantel’s books, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. The mini-series encompasses the events from both books, up to the execution of Anne Boleyn. Oh, sorry! Should I have included a spoiler alert?

I am a big fan of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels — and hey, there’s a new one out after a long gap! They are mysteries but they stand on their own as satisfying novels and portraits of the period, from the point of view of a lawyer who once worked for Cromwell and keeps getting roped into the increasingly scary orbit around Henry’s court. Apparently the TV adaptation never happened but there’s a radio serial from BBC 4  . . . that is not available online. Rats.

The appearances of Mary Boleyn, Anne’s older sister and Henry’s former mistress, in Wolf Hall made me want to re-read Philippa Gregory’s best known book, The Other Boleyn Girl. Sometimes I like Gregory’s books and sometimes I don’t but I think this is one of the better ones. So is The Constant Princess, which tells the well-known tale from Katharine of Aragon’s point of view.

A couple others from writers who are less well-known: Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle is the story of Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth and last wife and stepmother to Elizabeth. And Portrait of An Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett is about Hans Holbein’s introduction to the Tudor court, under the sponsorship of the family of Sir Thomas More.

There are tons more and lots on the nonfiction side, too, but these are the stories that have stuck with me.

Starring Alicia Zuckerman and Judy Blume: Miami Book Fair and more

 I’m not going to the Miami Book Fair this year, which makes me sad — especially since I’m going to miss my friend and editor/producer Alicia Zuckerman’s event with Judy Blume Saturday afternoon, about the Sally J. Freedman Reality Tour, a project Alicia worked really hard on. While Judy is best known for books like Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, Forever and the Fudge series, Sally J. Freedman is her most autobiographical book. It’s set in Miami Beach in the late ’40s, the same time Judy lived there as a kid. It’s been close to 40 years since I read it and I can still remember details like the fear/dread/excitement of Sally’s conviction that one of their neighbors was actually Adolf Hitler in disguise — and the pain of being stung by a man ‘o war jellyfish.

Even if you can’t make it to the event, check out the story online at WLRN’s website — along with the slide show and the accompanying tour of Judy’s Miami Beach. It’s good stuff, and more than just nostalgia especially if you know and love Miami Beach.

I also wanted to post a couple of recent book reviews I wrote for The Miami Herald. The first was the final book in Philippa Gregory’s Cousins War series, The King’s Curse.* More recently, I wrote about The Forgers by Bradford Morrow, a fine crime novel especially for those who like books about books and fans of 19th century gothic dread. And may I once again sing the praises of my alma mater, The Miami Herald, and editor Connie Ogle for continuing to publish book reviews and news about books and even pay local freelancers to write them? Many a larger newspaper has given up the effort entirely and just runs wire. Like the Book Fair and the great bookstore Books & Books, Connie and her team are irrefutable evidence that South Florida is a far more literary place than you’d guess.

* I liked this book a lot and the series as a whole has helped lead me to more of an interest in the Wars of the Roses, the run-up to the Tudor era. My favorites were probably The White Queen, about Elizabeth Woodville who married Edward IV, and The Lady of the Rivers, about Woodville’s mother Jocasta. Others, especially The Red Queen, about Margaret Beaufort, and The Kingmaker’s Daughter, about Anne Neville, I found more of a slog — probably because the women who were telling the story seemed so unhappy and powerless. Well, Beaufort wasn’t exactly powerless — she did successfully maneuver to get her son, Henry Tudor, on the throne. But she was just a drag to live inside of for a couple hundred pages. I wound up watching the Starz mini-series based on the books, The White Queen, and got into it eventually. I’d recommend it for anyone who’s jonesing for the next season of Game of Thrones, especially since George R.R. Martin has repeatedly said that his Song of Ice & Fire books are rooted in the Wars of the Roses.

What I read last month: September

Because I cannot fully control my inner gold-star-seeking preening child, and because this is a book blog, I’m going to start posting a monthly roundup, with capsule reviews, of what I’ve been reading. And because I have a lot more reading time on my hands now, and can’t really resist bragging about it.

In September I read:

The Fever by Megan Abbot – The highest praise I can offer for this book is that it isn’t really my thing … and I still couldn’t put it down. High school girls mysteriously get sick, around the same time they are discovering their sexuality and getting vaccinated for HPV. While high school remains, for me, a mostly dreaded land where I have no wish to return even in fiction, I was fascinated by this book. And I didn’t see the end coming, which is always a plus.

Lost by S.J. Bolton – Since the Key West Literary Seminar focused on crime fiction, last January (see Megan Abbot, above), I have been slowly expanding my reading of contemporary crime which had before then been mostly limited to P.D. James and Kate Atkinson. S.J. Bolton is harder-edged than either of those and not as good a writer. But I’m enjoying her Lacey Flint series … and I’ll keep going if only to find out if she’s EVER going to finally jump Mark Joesbury’s bones like they’ve both been wanting for several books now.

The King’s Curse by Philippa Gregory – I reviewed this one for the Miami Herald. It’s the final entry in Gregory’s Cousins’ War series about the Wars of the Roses, and brings us up to Henry VIII. This time our narrator is Margaret Pole, a York cousin who has a front row seat for Henry’s increasingly desperate search for an heir, growing tyranny and the turmoil England experiences as it breaks away from Rome. I haven’t loved every entry in this series (I liked The White Queen and the Lady of the Rivers, the others not so much) but this is one of the good ones.

Guilty pleasures: On reading Philippa Gregory

So yeah, I read Philippa Gregory’s latest, The Lady of the Rivers, over the weekend. It’s the third in her Cousins’ War series, after The White Queen and The Red Queen. All concern women who were involved in the Wars of the Roses — the battle over the English crown that was ultimately resolved with Henry VII’s establishment of the Tudor dynasty — and his wife, Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth of York’s mother, Elizabeth Woodville, is the White Queen of the first book. Henry VII’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, is the Red Queen of the second book (even though she was never queen). The new book is about Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, Jacquetta.

People who sound knowledgable on sites like LibraryThing sometimes knock Gregory for historical accuracy. I understand their frustration; if you notice details about certain things, inaccurate portrayals can ruin an otherwise well-done production. I have a hard time with any TV or movie  portrayal of newspaper journalism, or horse riding, for that reason. But even though I’m a history buff (in the sense of someone who likes popular histories and will watch almost any costume drama), I’m not an inaccuracy cop when it comes to historical fiction. If someone in pre-New World Contact Europe were eating a potato or a tomato I might not even notice. And I take popular works of fiction like Gregory’s as just that: fiction. I don’t assume that she’s got some kind of time capsule that gives her access to the definitive version of what happened. I assume that she’s done some research into her characters and their situations and come up with her own portrayals of the events and how her characters viewed them. If I wanted rock solid factually based referenced and sourced account of the events I’d read … nonfiction. Something like She-Wolves by Helen Castor, or the nonfiction works of Antonia Fraser or Alison Weir, whose new book on Mary Boleyn — you know, the Other Boleyn Girl? — is high on my TBR list at the moment.

In the meantime, I enjoyed this particular piece of brain candy. It’s not a work of history; I’m not going to claim from now on that the York-Lancaster-Tudor settlement was in fact based on the magical properties Jacquetta of Luxembourg inherited from the mermaid Melusina and passed on to her daughter and granddaughter. But I do have a better understanding of the various players in the Wars of the Roses, and their relationships to each other.

Queening it up

I’ve had an Eleanor of Acquitaine thing for a long time. It hasn’t been as virulent as my Elizabeth I thing, probably because there are a lot fewer novels, movies and TV shows made about the Plantagenets than the Tudors. The 12th century was a long time ago and we have a lot less to go on about how they lived, what they wore, said, ate, etc. Still, there’s some good stuff — the book that got me started was A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by the great E.L. Konigsburg. She’s better known for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the story of two kids who run away and spend a week or two at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (how DID that woman get away with those crazy hard-to-remember titles???). But her book on Eleanor is superb, especially for a kid who’s into history and appreciates a strong woman character.

And what a woman! Eleanor was a significant landholder in her own right — her holdings dwarfed the smaller lands that then made up the kingdom of France — and she was queen of France AND England, annulling her marriage to Louis of France in order to run off with the future Henry II of England, 12 years her junior. It was an alliance of power and property, to be sure, but appears to have been a love match, too, at least in the beginning. By the end, Eleanor joined her sons in rebellion against their father and when that rebellion failed, was imprisoned by him. After he died, her son Richard the Lionheart let her out and she kept the country together while he went off on crusade, got himself held captive then was killed. Very dramatic all around.

catching up

I really have been reading a lot, or at least I was until we got cable and the Tour de France took over my waking, non-working hours. But I can see the end and the stack is piling up. I read Dominion by Calvin Baker, who will be appearing at the Key West Literary Seminar in January. It was a little outside my normal reading, which is the best kind (it’s the reason I joined a book group years ago although that fell by the wayside when I was pursuing my master’s). I read Women and Ghosts by Alison Lurie, a slim book of short stories that I think I might have read before, unless that was an effect of its eerieness. It reminded me how much I like her, and how much I need to read The Last Resort even though I have a strange fear of reading about places I know and love. (Haven’t been able to make myself read Tracy Kidder’s Hometown yet, either, about Northampton, Mass., where I was born.) I read Sacrifice by Eric Shanower, the second volume in his Age of Bronze series of graphic novels about the Trojan War — it was as good as the first, though it does suffer from that effect of many of the guys looking the same; you can distinguish them by their headbands, though. Over the Fourth of July weekend, perhaps influenced by the reintroduction of cable television into my brain, I found myself craving brain candy so I read The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory (author of The Other Boleyn Girl and numerous other works of Tudor Trash). I gulped that down in a day and a half so maybe I’m not over my Tudor thing entirely; plus it was fun to hear from/about a couple of the lesser-known Henry VIII queens (Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard, or Nos 4 and 5 if you’re counting). And just today I finished Dreaming Up America by Russell Banks, which I’ll be reviewing for Solares Hill shortly. Whew.