Customer Reviews

The Book of Eleanor: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

It is noted on the endpapers that it took Pamela Kaufman fifteen years to reasearch and complete "The Book of Eleanor." Judging by the book I read, the manuscript must have spent fourteen and a half of those years in a drawer someplace.

Eleanor of Aquitaine has always been an attractive subject for those interested in medieval history--in a time when women counted only as brood mares, she managed to gain enormous power not only as the wife to two kings and mother to two more, but as duchess of Aquitaine and countess of Poitou in her own right. When her story is presented well (and, like other reviewers, I will also cite Sharon Kay Penman's novels as examples), she is trememdously fascinating. In the hands of Pamela Kaufman, however, she is a shrill, imperious self-centered harpy. If that wasn't bad enough, Kaufman throws in a completely--and admittedly--fictional love affair between Eleanor and her Aquitanian captain and asks the reader to believe that this man fathered three of Eleanor's children, including the future Richard Lionheart. Also, Kaufman's Eleanor is dragged kicking and screaming into her second marriage to Henry of England, while history strongly indicates Eleanor wanted the marriage and probably had a hand in arranging it. Add in other enormous historical liberties and just plain bad writing (Kaufman is inordinately fond of exclamation points and crudity for crudity's sake) and you have what could have been a very original novel become an exercise in tedium. There are many excellent books, both fiction and non-fiction, about Eleanor of Aquitaine. "The Book of Eleanor" is not one of them.

Filled with romantic poetry from the famous "courts of love" of ancient Aquitaine and Poitiers, Pamela Kaufman's Book of Eleanor has incredible shelf appeal.....the reviews are spectacular; Washington Post says it;s "absolutely splendid;" the Sun-Times "superbly written;" and the Kansas City Star goes so far as to have it rivaling Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Wow!.....at least that's what I thought when I got my copy. This one is written for fans of romance, not for historical novel afficionados. Let me explain the strong points of Kaufman's writing, which are probably best said by the review from the Detroit Free Press on the back of the dust jacket, where the publishers have excerpted the phrase "amusing historical novel." That's the most accurate of all the reviews, with the emphasis on amusing and a focus on the romantic speculation that has surrounded the relationship between Eleanor and the troubadour Bernard of Ventadour.

Kaufman fans the flames of ancient speculation and creates a romance novel where Ventadour evolves into not only the legendary songsmith that he may well have been, but also a warrior knight every bit the equal of Richard the Lionhearted (who Kaufman makes not only the student of the troubadour, but also his son!) So it's obvious that Kaufman crafts her novel around the legend that there was a romantic relationship between Eleanor and Ventadour. This is the primary nugget of the entire tale that weaves itself into the first 30 of the 31 chapters. The lovers engage in hidden assignations where half of Eleanor's famous "devil's brood" of infant kings-to-be are conceived along with the political revolutions that will in the end foil Henry II's empire building. Throughout their own marriages, constant warfare, and long separations the love persists (in the tradition of the 20th century romance novel) until at long last Henry is dead, Richard is King, and the lovers are reunited in unexpected bliss for their final years together. The fact that too many primary sources appear candid enough to speak to the chivalric love between the two while at the same time stating that it was unlikely that there was any physical relationship, places this novel well outside the realm of historical novels and solidly into the romance category.

What I found horrifying was the way Kaufman turns all the primary male characters in Eleanor's life into demons, with the exception of Ventadour (of course). I realize this may be a requirement of the romance novel formula, but it is very clear that Henry II did not brazenly rape Eleanor to make her his wife and future Queen. Alison Weir (who is a meticulous researcher) in her book on Eleanor says only "Eleanor sent envoys to Henry, asking him to come at once and marry her; this was not necessarily a proposal, ....for it is possible that the couple had already agreed to marry." And even in this speculation she cites the well respected Gervase of Canterbury, among other primary sources. And I must admit that I have major problems with St. Thomas a Becket being demonized as well. This historical facts are extremely well documented that he was not martyred at the high altar at Canterbury. Anyone who has been there is well aware of the exact spot just inside the Martyrs Door where the Pope and Archbishop of Canterbury dedicated a new altar within the last decade. And anyone with an elementary knowledge of forensics knows that vermin will leave a body after it cools, exactly as the contemporary accounts describe the lice and other creatures exiting the Saint's hair shirt and braises the evening of the murder. But Kaufman's greatest sin is the way she turns Thomas into a spiritual monster with no one to defend him at his hour of need. It is well documented by eye witnesses that Edward Grim attempted to defend Becket and nearly lost his arm as a result.

Eleanor is one of my favorite characters and I consider myself a serious fan of her life. However, there were great men associated with her and they were not all demons all the time. It pains me to see a story constructed at the expense of rejecting a considerable body of historical fact. The legend of Eleanor continues to grow rapidly today. Kaufman's book needs to be considered an interesting aberration, not a part of the legend, for it contains too much that is false.

THE BOOK OF ELEANOR is fairly entertaining as a story of fiction. It actually reminded me of a rather steamy historical romance with little basis in truth. I think that the author took too many liberties with her subject. History has given us quite a bit of information about Queen Eleanor, but the author ignored some important facts and chose to weave a story where Eleanor had a lover who supposedly fathered several of her children. I also had a problem with the way the character of Thomas a Becket was written. The author made him into a nasty and despicable person.

I approached this book with a great deal of enthusiasm because Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of my favorite historical subjects and had a very unique life. As a teenager she was married to King Louis VII of France and later divorced him and married Henry Anjou who became King Henry II of England. She was also the mother of King Richard the Lionhearted and the very unpopular King John who was forced to sign the Magna Carta.

Eleanor's life was so full and interesting that it was completely unnecessary to fabricate stories about her. I know this is a novel, but the author did not do justice to Eleanor or her life.

One of the few things that I liked about this book was the jacket illustration of Queen Eleanor.

Pamela Kaufman's rendition of Queen Eleanor is memorable, thought provoking and made for an incredibly enjoyable read. The novel opens with Eleanor imprisoned in a decrepit old castle by her husband, Henry II. She's left with her maid to freeze to death--her punishment for raising their sons in a rebellion when Henry tries to steal her inheirited lands. But Eleanor is made of tougher stuff than Henry suspects, and she writes her memoir, the form in which this book is written. It's a literary device that doesn't always work, but actually works beautifully in this case.

Eleanor recounts her years in the lush, fertile province of Aquitaine, her homeland in the south of France, which she rules from the age of 15, as well as her troubled marriage at an early age to Louis, the king of France--a neurotic religious fanatic who would be ridiculous except that he poses a constant danger to Eleanor's life. She accompanies him on Crusade (where Kaufman gives us a tantalizing glimpse into the sumptuous courts of the Holy Land) and eventually manages to escape him by forcing the Pope to grant her a divorce. But while she longs to marry her true love, an Aquitanian knight, she is kidnapped and forced instead to marry Henry II, a boorish and brutal younger man. Her constant power struggle with Henry, her love for another man, and her eventual victory over her enemies is one of the most compelling stories in history--and although this is a novel, it is based entirely on fact, and scrupulously researched (more so than Alison Weir's biography, which had a lot of contradictory ideas based on badly interpreted primary sources).

I also recommend Pamela Kaufman's medieval novels, Shield of Three Lions and Banners of Gold, which were published in the 1980s and remain some of the best novels about the middle ages ever written. Kaufman really inhabits this time period and anyone who is interested in women's stories and historical fiction should take note.

Eleanor of Aquitaine is one of the most memorable women of history, and a "modern" woman who lived 800 years ago. This is the first novel that I've read in many years about her, and it expands on the Eleanor that novelists like Sharon Kay Penman have only touched on in their work.

Pamela Kaufman's prose is wonderfully unsentimental--this is the best recreation of Eleanor's voice since she was portrayed by Katharine Hepburn. There's no dreaminess or romance-y fluff here--just the voice of a passionate, intelligent woman who learns how to survive and triumph in a world where the cards are automatically stacked against all women. It also realistically portrays her relationships with the men in her life and the way she constantly struggled for power with both her husbands and then her sons. Instead of a starry-eyed love affair, the author gives us a much more realistic portrayal of Eleanor's relationship with Henry II and a deeply authentic recreation of the world they lived in. This novel--long but worth every page--is a real achievement, and a fitting tribute to this amazing historical figure.

Pamela Kaufman wrote two exceptional medieval novels ("Shield of Three Lions" and its sequel "Banners of Gold"), so this reader opened "The Book of Eleanor" with admittedly high expectations. Too high, unfortunately.

My first gripe is that Eleanor's autobiographical tone was lifted straight from Alix of Wanwaithe, the heroine of Kaufman's earlier novels. And it just didn't fit. Also, the real Eleanor lived an extraordinary life, but she was also a woman of her time and this new fictional Eleanor displays a combination of too much submissive behavior with anachronistic 21st century thinking.

Next, although the author purports to have spent 15 years researching this book, it does not comport with what little is actually known of Eleanor's life. For example, Eleanor's rather uninteresting lover, Richard Rancon, was in reality named Geoffrey de Rancon. The real Rancon was captain of her army during the crusade and got into trouble on that pass, but he disappeared, only to show up decades later in a vicious battle against Richard the Lion Heart - NOT what you'd expect if either fictional character had been drawn with respect for the truth.

Also, the portrayal of Eleanor's first husband, King Louis of France, was too extreme. He probably was neurotic, but in the book he's too psychotically mysogynistic, bumbling and ridiculous to be believable. And Thomas Becket, who really was a complex and interesting man, stutters constantly!

Henry was the only character that actually felt genuine, though his relationship with Eleanor was too antagonistic to reflect well on either character, especially hers.

I know, I know. "Fictional history" requires flexibility on the part of the reader, but honestly, this book contorts reality too far to have any grace.

I'd recommend Amy Grant's biographical study "Eleanor of Acqutaine and the Four Kings". Sharon Kay Penman's new novel "Time and Chance" also presents an intense fictional Eleanor, but she is a far more beguiling one than Kaufman's.

The basic premise of the book is that after being raped by King Louis on her wedding day and finding out ten days later that she had become pregnant, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who in this book is a whiny professional victim, turns to the handsome Bernard of Ventadour. She and Ventadour remain together through thick and thin; the singer eventually fathers at least one of her children, Richard the Lionhearted.

There are so many problems with this book that I don't know if I can list them in the space given. Historically, it's a mess. Far from a rapist, Louis was so afraid of the wages of sin that he could barely force himself to have sex with his own wife! Eleanor said about him, "I thought I was marrying a man, but I married a monk." The idea that he attacked Eleanor is absurd. The troubadour with whom Eleanor was supposed to be having an affair paid courtly attention to her - as did many men; it was the style at the time to pay court to an unavailable woman while having mistresses of one's own. Even the minor characters are badly drawn; most of the men save Bernard and Richard the Lionhearted are made to be pure evil, and Richard is shown to have loved women exclusively, something at odds with most historical accounts of the man.

The main problem, however, is that the writer is too afraid of her characters' actions and the consequences to actually face up to what happens to them. When Eleanor is raped by Louis, for instance, Eleanor passes out just before the rape and wakes up just afterwards, sparing the character (and the writer) the nasty business in between. Yet her actions after the rape are those of a woman who *experienced* a great horror, not one that passed out before a great horror was committed on her. It just doesn't ring true.

I'm also still trying to figure out how Eleanor knew she was pregnant ten days after she was raped. That's beyond the ability of even the best modern hospital pregnancy tests, let alone a 13th century woman.

I really, really do not recommend this book, unless you need to have something to laugh over.

Shield of Three Lions was my favorite historical novel ever, still is. I adored Banners of Gold. I waited impatiently while Ms. Kaufman spent fifteen years researching Aquitaine and the Angevin Empire, and if the truth be told, I'd have been happier with Alix Goes To Hollywood than I was with The Book of Eleanor.

Big Problem Number One: I just don't buy the character. Eleanor--the fictional Eleanor of the novel as well as the historical one--is meant to be a strong protofeminist, yet she essentially follows her life around throughout the book, turning this way and that based on the whim of whatever male happens to be dominant in the chapter: Louis the Fat, Suger, Louis Junior, Bernard, Thierry, Henry, and even "Richard" of Rancon; you can't have it both ways. I was utterly unable to suspend my disbelief long enough to accept the fundamental premise that Eleanor was not a willing bride to Henry, whatever the outcome. Maybe I've read too much history and can't get past the general concensus that Eleanor was actually involved in arranging her second marriage before she had quite escaped the first.

Big Problem Number Two: Call me a snob, but consistency is lacking between this Eleanor and the Eleanor in Banners of Gold. Nor am I too sure that this Richard could possibly grow up to be that one.

Granted, this is historical fiction, fiction being the operative, and Ms. Kaufman is as clever as usual in the embroidery of her imagination and the legends upon What Little We Really Know. It's just that it all falls down when the eponymous hero isn't especially believeable.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fun read all the same (hence the three stars) and I finished it in two days, but it just wasn't remotely what I was hoping for. Maybe the next book will pick off where we were left hanging with Alix.

The only reason I finished this book is that I make it a policy to plow on through to the end of any title, just to give the author the benefit of the doubt. This book however was not worth the effort: for all the excitement of Eleanor's life this book was actually boring, the characters pretty one-dimensional and the dialogue unbelievable. Yawn. A much better title for Historical Fiction (in my opinion) is The Royal Physician's Visit by Enquist.

As someone who has read many biographies and historical fiction novels that deal with medieval and renaissance women of power, I was very disappointed in this book - so much so that I threw it out after finishing it. There are other, much better treatments of the dynamic and powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine. In fact, almost any book would be better than this one, which succeeds neither as entertainment, nor as an accurate representation of the period or the person. Don't waste your time or money on this book.