49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Forbidden Love in a Country in Turmoil, October 14, 2005
This review is from: Earthly Joys: A Novel (Paperback)
I purchased Earthly Joys upon finishing The Other Boleyn Girl trilogy and realizing that after almost 2,000 nonstop pages of Philippa Gregory I still had not had enough. Earthly Joys moves the reader from the Tudor period into the Stuart era through the eyes of John Tradescant, a royal gardener who tends to his plants as though they were children. Indeed, sometimes better than his children. Devoted to his wife and family, Tradescant none the less finds himself smitten with the dashing and glamorous Lord Buckingham and is soon torn between the simple family homestead, and the opulent gardens of the king.
Written with her trademark amazing characterization and vivid attention to detail, Gregory brings to life the turbulent 17th century society of Charles I and impending revolution. Reading of those long ago political machinations, desperate economy, rising religious conservatism, and consequences of forbidden love makes one realize that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The faces have changed, but the scene is the same today.
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59 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Practice, not principle...", June 22, 2005
This review is from: Earthly Joys: A Novel (Paperback)
Historical fiction is Gregory's métier, especially England in the Tudor/Stuart eras, Earthly Joys covering 1603-1639, post-Elizabethan rule, when James I of takes the throne, bringing his Scottish entourage with him. Changing the face of the once staid and proper Elizabethan court, James closes his eyes to Papist practices and indulges in masks and diversions, wasting the coin of the treasury on vast entertainments, while the common people are burdened with unnecessary taxes, their farmlands enclosed for royal use.
Robert Cecil, long a close advisor to Queen Elizabeth, steps in to advise the new King, his estate a favorite diversion for the royals, with its magnificent gardens and handsome appointments. John Tradescant is chief gardener to the statesman, as well as a close friend. A simple man, John believes deeply in the natural hierarchy of authority, God, King, Lord and servant, although many have begun to question the King's direct link to God. John's gardens reflect his philosophy, an Eden without the taint of disorder: "a delicate marriage of wildness and artifice, an imposition of order upon unruliness, which... looked as if it had been ordered and well-ruled out of simple good nature."
After Cecil's death, John is commissioned to work at other fine estates, creating his intricate gardens from plants he has collected from all over the world. Eventually, John's talent comes to the notice of George Villier, the Duke of Buckingham, a confidant of both King James and his successor and heir, King Charles I. The Duke's behavior is scandalous, his excesses legend and there is gossip that he is lover to both the King and his heir. But when Tradescant meets Villier, he falls under the man's spell, his charm and beauty blinding John to the dangers of such an alliance.
John's wife, Elizabeth, has always been of a strong religious bent, eschewing finery for the more austere garb of the Puritans. As John travels over the years for Cecil and the Duke, gathering cuttings and rarities, his son grows up much like Elizabeth, questioning the King's direct lineage to God and wanting more than to pledge his life to another man as an oath-bound servant. By the end of James's reign, the Duke is second only to the new monarch, Charles I, who, like his father, ignores the troubles of his people, indulging in his own pleasures. But John is helpless to deny the Duke, even to the point of death, desperately in love with the charismatic dandy who is squandering the kingdom at the side of Charles I.
Throughout the novel, nature's diversity is contrasted with the turmoil wrought by selfish kings and their sycophants. Tradescant straddles the middle ground, wed to the beauty he creates, but losing his balance in matters of the heart. He believes the myth, mistaking a god in the dazzling beauty of the Duke, yet constantly disappointed by the reality of his position in life: he is only a gardener, albeit the finest in all of England. Tradescant is as deeply flawed as the era he lives in, a good man caught up in a dark vortex of conflicted emotions, struggling to balance his duties as a husband and father with the yearning to travel the world, to follow the Duke wherever he leads. His faith in God and himself is put to the test and John knows both indescribable joy and the depths of despair.
John serves as a metaphor for the changes sweeping the country, devoted to the old ways, yet tempted by the new, his heart tormented by helpless devotion to the Duke, his marriage flawed but still dear. His life mirrors history, the reign of James I, Charles I, The Gunpowder Plot, the great crash of the tulip market in Holland, the clash of King and Parliament and a growing populist revolution, a well-ordered world thrown into chaos by an irresponsible monarchy blind to the ills of society. Tradescant travels the globe gathering every variety of nature to plant in English soil, a life he could never have imagined, his soul adrift in a rose-filled garden, the sharp thorns of loss hidden beneath the fragrant petals. Luan Gaines/2005.
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