135 of 143 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Medieval Bedroom Hijinks, June 26, 2010
2010 has been called The Year of Eleanor and for good reason: there are no less than three new historical fiction novels set for release featuring the historical feminist icon, Eleanor of Aquitaine.
Any novel of Eleanor should serve to illuminate the phenomenal life of a woman who, in a time when women were little but broodmares and chief cooks & bottle washers, took charge of her own destiny. Even though many details of her life have been lost to history, what we do know about Eleanor of Aquitaine is that she was a remarkably strong and capable woman....a feminist icon, if you will. A woman whose extraordinary life needs little to no embellishment.
As a historian, author Alison Weir is in a position to know this more than anyone. And yet, when presented an opportunity to write a historical novel based on Eleanor's life, Weir chose to portray this formidable queen as a sex-crazed floozy. Weir's third and latest work of historical fiction, The Captive Queen, manages to morph Eleanor into Paris Hilton.
This novel is just plain poor writing. The sentence structure and dialog are only slightly more sophisticated as an old-fashioned Dick and Jane reading primer. Events are so simplified that they make a mockery of the reader (even ones with no previous knowledge of historical events). The infamous conflict between Henry II of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett is essentially boiled down to:
"Well, I'll not let him best me again!" he vowed, and climbed in [bed] beside her. "But let us not waste time on Thomas. I came here for another purpose." [Insert yet another sex scene here]
Or how about this exchange when Henry, his son Geoffrey, and Thomas Beckett come across a beggar:
"Who is that man?" Geoffrey asked.
"He is a poor vagrant," Henry explained.
See Spot Run. I couldn't help but cringe.
In any historical novel, the author faces the obstacle of providing necessary background information to the reader without sounding like a dried-up history textbook. Frequently, character dialog is used for this purpose, but Weir's attempt is clumsy and awkward at best:
"Unfortunately, he was married to the sister of that awful Thibaut, Count of Blois, who tried to abduct me, remember?" (Eleanor of Aquitaine to her husband Henry II, of England)
Now how awkward is that? Of course Henry would remember his wife's near abduction, which took place a mere two years before this conversation and was even related to the readers of this novel in a five-page scene less than 50 pages prior to this one. Exactly who did Weir fear would forget?
Examples of this poor writing continue throughout the novel, such as when Eleanor comes upon her young son, William, fraught with fever:
"When did this come on?" she asked, her voice abrupt with terror.
"An hour ago, lady," Alice, William's nurse, replied. There were tears of distress-and fear-in her eyes. "Young ones of that age - he's not yet three - take ill quickly; they're up and down like windmills."
I was left wondering why a nurse would need to remind a mother of her own child's age. It's meant, of course, to inform the reader but is a decidedly clumsy way of going about it.
Inconsistencies abound throughout the book. In one scene we are plausibly treated to Eleanor handing over her newborn eldest son to a wet nurse - a commonplace occurrence for women of her rank during that time. Fast forward a couple of chapters and we find Eleanor offering her breast to this same child more than a year later. Nursing mothers everywhere will raise their eyebrows. (Indeed, I don't understand how Weir, a mother of two herself, managed to insert such a biological impossibility.)
And while Weir's historical inaccuracies might have been forgiven (it is, after all, a work of fiction), she leaves us with a puzzling author's note that extolls the virtues of accurate historical detail. I'm still scratching our head over that one.
All in all, this novel was a mess, which is rather disappointing considering that Weir's previous two historical fiction attempts showed promise. Perhaps her next novel will show a resurgence of her prior talent and we can quietly forget Captive Queen.
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35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining look at the life of Henry and Eleanor, April 20, 2010
Alison Weir has written a very entertaining novel of the turbulent life that Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine spent together, ruling the greatest empire in Christendom.
She paints Eleanor as a remarkable woman, kept captive, as the title suggests, not just by the walls of her imprisonment in later life, but also by the conventions of the time that stated that her husband ruled in all things. Her frustrations at the limitations of the time are clear, and we know from the histories that this is not just a modern take on a medieval woman - when allowed to rule as Duchess of Aquitaine or Regent of England she did so fairly and was well loved and respected.
If I don't give this review 5 stars its becuase Ms Weir weaves into the novels some of the old scandals that were aimed at this high profile woman at the time - runours of infidelity primarily, and whereas they do add a flavour to the fictional Eleanor, I find that to a degree they lessen the picture of her that she is trying to portray. Having said that, the interactions between Henry and Eleanor are magnificent, and the reader truly feels that they are privvy to the machinations of a marriage at its best and at its worst.
This is fine historical fiction, about two of the most interesting people that ever lived. Their children were an interesting lot too, clearly keeping their parents on their toes.
This is a very good read, and reflects the events of the time well. Recommended.
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34 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Meh..., May 29, 2010
I'd really enjoyed Alison Weir's first novel, liked her second, and seriously - a novel about Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the most fascinating figures of the 12th century? How could you go wrong?
Like Weir's previous novel, "The Lady Elizabeth," this one is in third person limited, which arguably is an easier tense to pull off than say, first person POV, but unfortunately it's not done all that well here. Also as in "The Lady Elizabeth," the novel starts off too slowly, with way too many POV shifts, overwriting, and too much telling and not enough showing. Then there's the overblown, tedious and often cringe-tastic descriptions of sexy times between Eleanor and Henry (loads of "long and sensual journeys", "I have never felt like this with a woman before", an "undreamed-of capacity for pleasure" and so forth) ... overshadowed only by the breathless purple prose describing Eleanor's fond recollections (just how fond, we are given FAR too much information about) of her liaisons with some bloke called Marcabru and her soon-to-be father-in-law, Geoffrey of Anjou some years before, which would not be out of place in an erotic romance novel and provided an early WTF? moment. Rumours (for which, if I recall correctly, there is no evidence) about Eleanor's supposed affairs with other men during her marriage with Louis are also resurrected in this book. True, it's fiction, so the author is entitled to explore "what ifs," but in this case, it didn't work in the context of the novel; furthermore, it's more refreshing when an historical novel doesn't fall back on oft-recycled myths.
I found it very hard going for the first third, and almost didn't persist. I'm glad to say that once the heated-romance stuff is mostly out of the way (although there are some equally cheesy, clichéd sex scenes between Henry and Rosamund Clifford, for example, to come), things start to get more interesting once the inevitable conflict between two such powerful, passionate and stubborn people surfaces.
What I particularly liked about "Captive Queen" was the depiction of the relationship between Henry, Eleanor and Thomas Becket, and Weir provides an interesting explanation for the complex friendship between the two men. The depiction of the conflict between Henry and his sons, and the sons with each other, is also quite well done, although again, it falls back on a number of legends and clichés which mostly - as I understand it - have no foundation in fact.
As in her previous novels, Weir provides a reasonably comprehensive author's note disclosing the liberties she has taken, which is always appreciated.
I really expected to like this one, but regret to say I was underwhelmed, especially soon after having read Sharon Kay Penman's terrific version of the same events (
Time and Chance: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle) and
Devil's Brood: A Novel). It's not totally horrible, it just didn't quite work for me and IMHO is far from Weir's best work; nor do I think Weir did her subject and her long and eventful life justice. Overall, two and a half stars, rounded up to three.
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