Speaking of, the Tudors need to be officially retired from being main characters in historical fiction. They’re done. They’re played. They’re over. Unless your Henry VIII novel involves zombies or time travel or UFOs, it’s been done to freaking death. A Star Trek different timeline or Turtledovian alternate history in which Henry has that son or Katherine of Aragon leads a rebellion or whatever and the “divorced beheaded died/divorced beheaded lived” cadence is no longer relevant- that has potential, but the basics of “When Harry Met Annie” just needs to be scrapped forever.
What I think’s especially ironic is that so many novels are still churned out about Henry VIII yet there are dozens of kings and queens who are nowhere near as well known whose lives would make great novels. A good one about King Alfred of Wessex/England could be great, or even Edward VIII.
Hear hear! I reached the same conclusion halfway through the first season of The Tudors. “You know,” I thought to myself, “this is not going to end well, let’s save ourselves some heartache and skip this trainwreck”
THANK HEAVEN I’ve found someone else who loathed these!!!
I read the first one, when my roommate got it by accident from a book club (forgot to send in the “no thanks” card soon enough). Blech. Poorly-written drivel, with some awful turns of phrase that I can’t believe were accidental. I distinctly remember “the idea that sex had anything to do with causing pregnancy was inconceivable”. No, I’m not making that up.
And the next one - I borrowed it from a co-worker. Equally hideous, with bad romance novel bits thrown in.
I actually liked Clan of the Cave Bear- it’s not on my favorites, but it was imaginative, unique, and had some good moments. Its sequels though turned into 70,000 BC 90210 with the graphic sex scenes, hunks in leather, and Ayla over in the corner inventing everything from the wheel to the particle accelerator. I actually wondered if the series had been continued by another author as it plummeted completely into the standard ‘turgid manhood’ ‘limpid pools of her eyes’ romance novels.
Follett and Brown and Carr can reasonably be called hacks, but going with somebody that no reasonable person would call a hack, I’ll say that I don’t care for most of Gore Vidal’s historical fiction. I liked Burr and Lincoln, but most of his other works including other works in the American series (1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington DC) and the ancient world (Creation, Julian) just didn’t work for me.
I think the biggest problem I have with Vidal’s writing is characterization. There’s always a cynical snarky wiseass who’s clearly Vidal’s mouthpiece, and I honestly think that Spock has a better understanding of human emotions than Gore does; I’ve never read any book of his in which a relationship- whether twixt lovers, spouses, parent-child, even friends- was compelling. He irrigates to the point of flooding all of his books with his own seemingly bottomless well of bitterness.
Vidal had a very unhappy childhood that he has written about many times: a drunken selfish vain greedy virago of a mother, absent father, senators and businessmen schmoozing each other all around him, marriages for money or social position or trophy wives in his family, etc… Perhaps left him with the notion everybody’s just out for themselves and there really is no such thing as love, just lust and self-interest, which while I’m far from a romantic I just think is simply not true at all.
OTOH, Vidal’s archenemy Capote was similarly abandoned by his parents and pillar-to-post (interestingly, he and Vidal were both the sons of alcoholic mothers named Nina who married for money), yet the relationships portrayed in his books are complex, bittersweet, compelling, and generally ‘alive’. I think that more than Capote’s truth stretching/outright lying is why Vidal hates him so intensely to this day- classic Salieri Syndrome in that Capote did something he can’t in depicting people. Vidal’s a great essayist and great wit, but Capote’s novels and short stories will probably be in print a century from now while Gore is forgotten in his own lifetime, having been a literary Norma Desmond for decades (and his Max is dead).
Vidal’s far from a teetotaller, but Capote of course was a famous train-wreck when it came to drugs and alcohol and eventually died of the collusion of the two. I’ve wondered if part of this was because Capote drank and did drugs to kill the pain and emptiness, while Vidal simply covered it in bitterness.
One of my pet peeves in historical fiction is the first person recounting of the life cliche. It worked in I CLAUDIUS/the God- he was a writer and historian and the work was supposed to have been written over several years, but there are several where the person is on their deathbed or is discovered to have written a memoir where it’s just cheesy.
For characters on their deathbed, it’s amazing how linear and narrative their memories are and how well they remember dialogue from their past. If meant to be an autobiography (like Margaret George’s novels- she’s done Henry VIII, Cleopatra, Ramses) it’s amazing how ‘modern’ they write their life story: unlike most monarchs they’re amazingly self-deprecating and detailed in recounting their past and in recreating dialogue and sexual experiences. It’s almost a sign of a bad novel; 9 out of 10 times, third person works best for historical fiction.
Umberto Eco wrote a novel called Baudolino in which he actually has fun with this. The main character is recounting his life and his Latin is terrible, so it’s first few pages are written (in English translation of Eco’s Italian of Fra Baudolino’s Vulgate Latin) with terrible grammar and [del]scratched through[/del] formal prose before he finally says “to hell with it, let me just write it in my native tongue”, where upon it becomes a lot more fluid.
No Ramses. She did Henry VIII, Cleopatra, Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Magdeline, and Helen of Troy.
And the problem with Tudor novels is that they’re not usually Tudor novels…they’re Henry VIII novels. I have yet to see a novel in which Henry VII is the main character, or for that matter, (except for the Prince and the Pauper) one where Edward VI was, or Queen Mary.
I see that The Alienist has already been well taken care of, but I have to add one other flaw it has…
When I read it in high school, I really enjoyed it and was inspired to do some research on 1890s in NYC. You remember Paul Kelly, the leader of the Five Points Gang with the “handsome chiseled Black Irish features” (or whatever the phrase was)? Make that “handsome chiseled Italian features.” Paul Kelly was not his real name. Nowadays, Carr could have found Paul Kelly’s wiki entry and called it a day, but if I in the pre-internet 1990s could find this info in a reference book from my public library, Caleb Carr, Master Historian, has some explaining to do.
Also, going from that mugshot on the wiki, neither “handsome” nor “chiseled” should have been employed.
It works spectacularly well in the Flashman series, where the titular hero of Empire gleefully sets the historical record straight in his memoirs about how his glorious reputation was entiredly undeserved and exactly what a bastard he really was.
I’m not fond of Phillipa Gregory’s novels either. Her early works are bodice rippers and that very much comes through in her “historical” novels. I gave up on The Other Queen about 1/3 of the way through the book and I’m shocked I lasted that long. It was so repetitive and boring. There were all the standard bodice ripper catch phrases and stereotypes without any of the bodice ripping. I have no clue how historically accurate the book was. I don’t care. It was just bad.
Bernard Cornwell has done Alfred of Wessex in a series called The Saxon Stories. I have a copy of the first one but I haven’t read it yet.
Edward VIII has been covered pretty well in miniseries/TV movies, as have Victoria & Albert. (Jean Plaidy wrote a bunch of novels on Victoria, but the ones I’ve read were pretty dull.)
I like Sharon Kay Penman’s novels on Stephen & Maud and Henry II & Eleanor. She’s working on one about Richard the Lionheart.
I’m reading non-fiction now about Edward II and Isabella and Roger Mortimer, and it seems like there would be a good novel there.
I actually enjoyed Jean Auel’s books. But I did think it was a bit odd that this one man and one woman managed to develop the entire neolithic toolkit by themselves.
They discover how to use flint and pyrite to start a fire. Then they have sex.
They invent the bow and arrow. Then they have sex.
They invent the fire drill. Then they have sex.
A couple more books, and they will invent the internal combustion engine. Then they will have sex.
Sampiro (and the others, but your reviews were very extensive and full of good explanation of why it sucks, and what’s wrong) - Thanks very much! 15 years ago, somebody recommended Pillars of Earth to me, I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, and reading your review, I see I didn’t miss anything.
I willl bookmark this thread for further references - please keep them coming!
As for one of your points, that of people in the past having modern attitudes, that really bugs me (though I can’t remember any specific references right now). However, I found it interesting in the after-script to Eco’s Name of the Rose, he says that the long passages where William of Baskerville talks of a future with horseless carriages and similar, many critics lambasted him for that as cheap and anachronistic, and he said those were really excerpts from medieval manuscripts.
I’m going to offer up Sarum: The Novel of England by Edward Rutherfurd. (Evidently, there’s only been one novel written about England, and this is it!)
freckafree, yeah, that’s right up (or down) there with Pillars for ploddingness, lack of characterization, etc.
There are very few big fat books that live up to the promise inherent in a big fat book. Big fat books should be like a good meat loaf – lots of meat and spice, not so much filler.
Upthread Sampiro voiced his dislike for first person deathbed narratives from people with photographic (and audiophonic) memories. This used to throw me but now I’m okay with it, if the narrator’s telling a good story.
Rutherford writes like James Michener, whose research was absolutely impeccable but whose prose often read like you were reading a textbook. Michener’s one of the few authors for whom I usually thought the film version was much better; the miniseries of Centennial (which at 20+ hours had the time to take on the whole book) and the film of Hawaii and its sequel The Hawaiians (both of which focus on only one segment of the length novel) both did better jobs of fleshing out characters than their source material.
I’ve read a lot of historical crap. My Least Favorite thing about most crappy historical fiction is the presentism, which truly is pervasive. The Other Bolyn Girl for instance (which I read for a book club) was loaded with presentism. Not a single character in that whole hot mess seemed to think like a person in the appropriate period would have thought.
I read a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine that was another really vivid example of this – I can’t remember the author or name [brief break to Google…] – The Book of Eleanor by Pamela Kaufman. Eleanor of Aquitaine was many things but she was certainly not (as in this book) a 21st century woman wearing a wimple.
Somebody up thread mentioned name dropping in crappy historical fiction – I have a similar complaint: if you’re reading a crappy historical book set anywhere around 1912, watch out! Someone’s going down on the Titanic! If all the fictional characters which have been placed on the Titanic had actually been on the Titanic, the thing would have sunk from the sheer weight.
And both Rutherfurd and Michener telegraph every calamity. If things are particularly hunky-dory at the end of chapter, watch out! Impending DOOOOOOOOM!