Having not merely read but absolutely DEVOURED
The Other Boleyn Girl, I was eager to read more from Ms. Gregory, and I decided to go in chronological order by history, rather than publication order. Thus, this book came next.
I suppose it's fair to say that I liked "The Other Boleyn Girl" so much that in all honesty, anything coming after it would have little chance of living up to my massive expectations. I wanted another book that both informed and transported me, another invigorating read that made me forget the world around me and sucked me into a world I had scarcely ever imagined. But unfortunately, that simply never happened with this second foray into Ms. Gregory's meticulously researched world. Throughout this book, I was never able to lose sight of the fact that I was reading about people Ms. Gregory never actually knew personally. I never had that feeling reading "The Other Boleyn Girl". In that book, she always made me feel as if I was reading about real, living, breathing people -- not just historical figures being recreated on a page.
In Gregory's defense, there is not a lot known about the private lives of the three women she tries so hard to bring to life here. (She explains as much in author's note at the end of the book, in a move a more cynical reader might call covering her rear end.) So she had little to draw on, and perhaps she should not be faulted if her characters come off as a little flat, simply because she was unwilling to substitute juicier details for scant facts. However, it must be said that she compounds the problem by splitting her narrative into three parts. Instead of giving us a full, rich portrait of one woman, she chooses to give us a pale sketch of three.
The first woman is Anne of Cleves, King Henry VIII's fourth wife, and the first one who managed to outlive him. She comes from Lutheran Germany as part of an arranged marriage and a package deal -- her hand in holy matrimony for her brother, the Duke of Cleves' word that he'll align with Henry against his Papist enemies. Unfortunately for Anne, she has two strikes against her before her marriage can even begin. For one thing, as soon as Henry meets her, he decides that he doesn't like her. Ms. Gregory's imagining of what went wrong during this first meeting to engender such instant spite from the King is ingenious, and I'd bet dollars to donuts that what she imagined is pretty close to what actually happened. Second, the great nations of France, Spain and England at that time were like schoolgirls on a playground in the way they constantly changed allegiances and teamed up against one another. In the month or so it took Anne to get from Germany to England, many of Henry's advisors had already convinced him that he no longer needed the partnership with Cleves. Her marriage to Henry lasted barely six months, so a book solely about her would have been a slim volume indeed. She starts off as a fairly interesting character, but after she loses Queenship Anne's narrative becomes dull, and most of her passages are obviously just breaks from the actual story that's happening with the second Queen Katherine, at court.
Katherine Howard is one of the weaker elements of the book. She's a paper-thin creation, characterized only by youth, beauty and simplicity of mind. Unsurprisingly, this gets very repetitive very quickly. She is guided by her uncle, the same sinister Duke of Norfolk who stood as a shadowy, controlling figure in "The Other Boleyn Girl". Unfortunately, his appearances in this book lack the same threat and menace that he had before, and even he stands diminished in this new tome. Also diminished is the character of King Henry VIII himself. In "The Other Boleyn Girl", I understood him more as a person, and could clearly see his motivations through the eyes and actions of the characters around him. In this book, the people around him simply settle for constantly referring to him as "mad" or "a monster", and little explanation is given for how exactly he got that way, except for old age and the wound in his leg.
The most diminished of all, however, is Jane Boleyn. When she chose to make Jane a protagonist and tried to humanize her, Ms. Gregory took a humongous risk, and I do not believe that it paid off. When she's not busy trying to lead yet another queen to the scaffold, she endlessly moans about her lost husband -- a man SHE helped condemn to death in the first place. Reading her endless whining and moping about how much she loved George and Anne Boleyn highlights one of the books most dismaying flaws: its repetitiveness. The characters repeat the same things over and over again, sometimes within the same paragraph! As the book goes on (and on) it becomes more and more painfully obvious that it's been deliberately fluffed up with filler, since there was so little content to be had here. I wish Ms. Gregory and her editors had simply settled for having a shorter book. After all, there's no rule that says your book will be taken less seriously if it's less than 400 pages, is there? Let's hope not -- the repetion was so bad that in some places, I honestly started to think that maybe Phillippa Gregory didn't write this entire book.
On the whole, I wasn't SO disappointed with this book that I'll stop reading Ms. Gregory's books, but I have to admit that I've lowered her pedastal a few feet. And I'll keep reading the other books in this series in hopes that at least one other will match the brilliance of "The Other Boleyn Girl".
