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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A royal disappointment.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hardcover)
I've long been fascinated by the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, so I was looking forward to reading this new novel. I can't say I thought much of it, however. The style rather reminds me of those paperback romances you find at airport terminals and supermarket checkout lines, and the history, while accurate in spots, seems mostly taken from Antonia Fraser's silly biography of Mary. In other words, our heroine comes off as a brainless sap who seemingly deserved to be pitched off her throne. Having a protagonist you want to give a good slap to does not make for pleasant reading.My main annoyance with the book, however, was Tannahill's cliched treatment of Mary's third husband, the Earl of Bothwell. Going against all the objective historical evidence, Tannahill gives us the tired old tale of Bothwell as Border ruffian who, after blowing Mary's previous husband up with gunpowder, then takes it into his head to kidnap, rape, and coerce Mary into an unwanted marriage with him. Spare me. I was hoping most reputable authors had gotten past that by now. In truth, Bothwell deserved to be the hero of Tannahill's work, and the fact that he wasn't leaves the book with a certain lack of credibility to me. (I'll admit, I'm prejudiced on that point. I feel about Bothwell rather the way Richard III Society members feel about that monarch.)
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad, but frustrating,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Hardcover)
The book started out fairly well I thought, although being an avid "fan" of Mary Queen of Scots I kept noticing little details here and there where I was thinking "That didn't really happen like that" or "This could really have been expanded on". I found this latter one particularly grating at the end, where Mary is imprisoned and years slide by so quickly one can hardly get a feel for the isolation she must have felt. And her death at the end I thought should have been more emotional...though I did like the one sequence of Elizabeth and the "scream". The one point on which I completely agree with the reader from Canoga Park is Tannahill's treatment of Bothwell. Initially I thought he was going to be characterized positively, but then he became the murderous, uncivilized lout that I also thought historians had done well to disprove now...and the "kidnapping and rape" was in actuality almost certainly done with Mary's collusion. Tannahill also takes Antonia Fraser's tremulous view that Mary had been five weeks pregnant at the time of her miscarriage, and not five months, which was initially reported and far more likely...because this would prove that she did indeed have an adulterous affair with Bothwell. Instead of putting in the entirely probable romance between Mary and Bothwell, Tannahill tacks on details about the relationship between Lethington and Mary Fleming, which I was only mildly interested in at best. I guess this was to substitute for the total lack of love she portrayed in Mary's life, but it didn't work for me and left me feeling really unsatisfied.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An absorbing, but distant, look at Mary, Queen of Scots,
This review is from: Fatal Majesty: A Novel of Mary, Queen of Scots (Paperback)
Reay Tannahill's Fatal Majesty is about Mary, Queen of Scots, and I liked it even better than The Seventh Son. It's written in a similar style, with a very dry, sardonic tone to the narration.Fatal Majesty switches back and forth between the English court and the Scottish court, and has a very wide cast of characters--wide enough, in fact, to be rather confusing for someone who isn't intimately familiar with the main players of the time. Most of the characters act entirely in their own self-interest, like so many spiders spinning their webs, and it is the convergence of these webs that eventually engulfs and destroys Mary. Though Tannahill is sympathetic toward Mary, one gets a sense of distance, especially in the latter half of the novel. Indeed, Tannahill's favorite character seems to be Mary's Secretary of State, Lethington, which gives rise to what I thought was the novel's major flaw: once Lethington makes his final exit, Tannahill becomes far less engaged with her material, making the last fifty pages a bit of chore to get through. Tannahill covers thirty years in those fifty pages, and although there's a lot of intrigue packed in those years and pages, I found myself skimming. Worse, Mary herself appears only occasionally in them. That may have been to drive home the point that she was little more than the pawn of others during that time, but I would have liked to have seen more of Mary nonetheless. Still, this is a 450-plus-page novel, and the pleasure of reading the first 400 pages, packed full of excellent characterizations and dry wit, more than makes up for the relative weakness of the last fifty pages.
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