The Boleyn Inheritance

The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory

Introduction

Philippa Gregory (born 9 January 1954) is an English historical novelist who has been publishing since 1987. The best known of her works is The Other Boleyn Girl (2001), which in 2002 won the Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists' Association^] and has been adapted into two separate films.  But there is so much more, as my niece Katharine shared with me in a recent email:

"Proper reply to your other email pending, but I just had to reply to your point about the Philippa Gregory books to ask how you're getting on with The Boleyn Inheritance? I do like Phillippa G, and yet at the same time I find her writing style so very...intense, for want of a better word, that I can't read several of her books one after another, I have to sort of intersperse them among others. That being said I think I've read almost all of them at one point or another (I do like the fact of her telling history from a female POV), and the historically accurate reading order (as opposed to publication order) based on the lives of the characters is...:

Plantagenets

The Lady of the Rivers

The White Queen

The Red Queen

The Kingmaker's Daughter

The White Princess - this encompasses the reigns of both Richard III and Henry VII, so crosses both Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties

Tudors

The Constant Princess

The King's Curse

Three Sisters, Three Queens

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Boleyn Inheritance

The Taming of the Queen

The Queen's Fool

The Virgin's Lover

The Last Tudor

The Other Queen

So what did I think of my first Philippa Gregory read?  First a synopsis:

1539. Henry VIII must take his fourth wife and the dangerous prize is won by Anne of Cleves. A German princess by birth, Anne is to be Henry’s pawn in the Protestant alliance against Rome, but the marriage falters from the start. Henry finds nothing to admire in his new queen, setting himself against his advisors and nobles to pay court to young Katherine Howard.

The new queen begins to sense a trap closing around her. And Jane Boleyn, summoned to the inner circle once more by her uncle the Duke of Norfolk, finds a fractious court haunted by the Boleyn legacy of death and deceit.  Nothing is certain in a kingdom ruled by an increasingly tyrannical king.

"I have just read The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory.  I did this as a favour to a French friend who is reading the Tudor novels because she is fascinated by Henry VIII.  The French seem to be much more knowledgeable about our royal heritage than many Brits I find. And very knowledgeable about their own royals in history.  Anyhow, I quite enjoyed the novel because I learnt something about those six hapless women who fell under the gaze of that lunatic Henry.  I know Gregory uses some literary licence with imagined conversations and minor incidents, all the same when I read some of the passages what was going through my mind was ‘Think Trump’!  An arrogant man who seems to think that the normal rules that should apply, in terms of morality and basic decency, to all human beings and certainly those in positions of power, don’t apply to him.  Henry manipulated the system to suit his obsessive sense of entitlement.  Sound familiar?  So I’m now going to read The Other Boleyn Girl so Brigitte and I can have a mini book group of two reviewing a book which we each read in our native language.  I think that means that by and large I enjoyed the read."

Gregory has her own website:

http://www.philippagregory.com/books

The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

After a reading of The Daughter of Time. I felt I wanted to explore Tey's detective fiction technique in a classic format.

First Edition Cover, 1948

An audio book; I find to my amusement that it is read by Carol Boyd, she of Lynda Snell.

Marion Sharpe and her mother seem an unlikely duo to be found on the wrong side of the law. Quiet and ordinary, they have led a peaceful and unremarkable life at their country home, The Franchise. Unremarkable that is, until the police turn up with a demure young woman on their doorstep. Not only does Betty Kane accuse them of kidnap and abuse, she can back up her claim with a detailed description of the attic room in which she was kept, right down to the crack in its round window.

But there's something about Betty Kane's story that doesn't quite add up. Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is stumped. And it takes Robert Blair, local solicitor turned amateur detective, to solve the mystery that lies at the heart of The Franchise Affair...

What I thought:  A neat bit of detective writing with no resort to the artifices available to authors writing today, with all the available modern devices, techniques and such advances in the use of DNA and other evidence that is unwittingly left by perpetrators of crime.  Tey is upmarket Agatha Christie and I look forward to reading more titles in this genre.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Franchise_Affair

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

One of the good things about belonging to a book group is that, if run democratically, you will often find yourself reading books you would not have chosen for one reason of many reasons.  So with Rebecca which had slipped past me at various points in my reading life when I might have stumbled upon it.  For example at the time that we were taking annual holidays in Cornwall I found a copy of Vanishing Cornwall in a local bookshop and found it both informative and engagingly written: readable but writing of a very high calibre.  This was my first literary encounter with du Maurier.  I subsequently read The House on the Strand (written more than thirty years after Rebecca)which is a compelling read:

Wiki:  "Like many of du Maurier's novels, The House on the Strand has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them. It has been called a Gothic tale, influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung, in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time. The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge. "

And then I found another title in second hand, A Cornish Childhood, by A L Rowse and then I moved on.

And now thanks to the Val de Saire book club I have met Rebecca.

Rebecca is a thriller novel by English author Dame Daphne du Maurier. A best-seller, Rebecca sold 2,829,313 copies between its publication in 1938 and 1965, and the book has never gone out of print. The novel is remembered especially^[1] for the character Mrs Danvers, the fictional estate Manderley, and its opening line:

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again."

— The second Mrs de Winter

Literary technique

The famous opening line of the book "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." is an iambic hexameter. The last line of the book "And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea" is also in metrical form; almost but not quite an anapestic tetrameter.

What I thought:

A novel that has never been out of print and sold nearly 3 million copies in the 30 year interval after its publication.  In 2017, it was voted the UK's favourite book of the past 225 years in a poll by bookseller W H Smith!!!

For me it started as a slow-burner of a novel. Mrs Van Hopper and her companion are staying at a hotel in Monte Carlo. Both these characters made me squirm a bit, Mrs Van Hopper’s shameless pushiness and the younger woman’s reticence and self-effacing manner. These are the opening chapters and then with the marriage of the young woman and Max de Winter the narrative takes off. Our ‘heroine’ was led like a lamb to slaughter. Du Maurier cleverly drew the creepily manipulative and poisonous Mrs Danvers well and the new young wife’s fearfulness and blind innocence at times made me want to shake the book at her! It was hard to feel sorry for her you just wanted her to show some mettle. She does finally gain confidence and become more assertive when Mrs Danvers is humbled. It was hard to warm to any of the characters except the man on the beach who refused to give up his secrets even though it was for fear of being locked into an asylum. 

Gradually the novel shifts from a psychological drama about obsession to a thriller: will the killer be unmasked and brought to justice. I thought this plot was cleverly written and at just the right pace. The twists with regard to Rebecca’s visit to the gynecologist and her confrontation with Max in the boat hut were clever. I did guess that Rebecca’s shooting was something which she engineered. 

A great ending to the book, rightly famous in the world of literature.

Two further comments: As the story reaches its climax I found myself wanting Max to ‘get away with it’. This sometimes happens when I read a book and a character is so obviously guilty but the author has contrived to make you engage with the guilty one. I think that is skillful writing because the author has manipulated her reader. Secondly it never occurred to me until I came to write this review that the second Mrs de Winter is never named. I went to the opening chapters to check what it was, assuming I had forgotten it, only to find we are never told. I wonder what prompted du Maurier to use that device? Perhaps it was to emphasize her identity as the second Mrs de Winter rather than a person in her own right and perhaps also to subordinate her to Rebecca whose ‘presence’ is constant and who is mentioned so often in the text."

The Riddle of the Sands

The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

My niece came to visit me a month ago.  Like me, she is a veritable bibliophile and hunts along the shelves of bookshops in Paris where she works and lives, for books that will catch her eye for one reason or another.  She is on a voyage of reading discovery.

When she arrived she handed me two books, the first by Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this blog.  The second, by Childers, turned out to be a real discovery.  I emailed her as follows:


"I'm really into the Riddle of the Sands, love its gung-ho plot and somehow all that sailing technique does not get in the way.  I feel Childers is showing off, I assume he was a keen yachtsman.  Actually I am listening to it partially on Audible, read by Anton Lesser a vintage actor who is perfect in conveying a school boy earnestness for the adventure and he does an ace German accent.!"

Amazon says:  The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service is a 1903 novel by Erskine Childers. The book, which enjoyed immense popularity in the years before World War I, is an early example of the espionage novel and was extremely influential in the genre of spy fiction. It has been made into feature-length films for both cinema and television. While on a sailing trip in the Baltic Sea, two young adventurers-turned-spies uncover a secret German plot to invade England. Written by Childers—who served in the Royal Navy during World War I—as a wake-up call to the British government to attend to its North Sea defenses, The Riddle of the Sands accomplished that task and has been considered a classic of espionage literature ever since.

Wiki has a full entry on this book and I really recommend a reading of the background information given.  If you might be minded to read the book don't read The Plot section though!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riddle_of_the_Sands

A Duo of Police Procedurals

The Whistler by John Grisham

We expect our judges to be honest and wise. Their integrity and impartiality are the bedrock of the entire judicial system. We trust them to ensure fair trials, to protect the rights of all litigants, to punish those who do wrong, and to oversee the orderly and efficient flow of justice.

     But what happens when a judge bends the law or takes a bribe? It’s rare, but it happens.
     Lacy Stoltz is an investigator for the Florida Board on Judicial Conduct. She is a lawyer, not a cop, and it is her job to respond to complaints dealing with judicial misconduct. After nine years with the Board, she knows that most problems are caused by incompetence, not corruption. 
     But a corruption case eventually crosses her desk. A previously disbarred lawyer is back in business with a new identity. He now goes by the name Greg Myers, and he claims to know of a Florida judge who has stolen more money than all other crooked judges combined. And not just crooked judges in Florida. All judges, from all states, and throughout U.S. history.
     What’s the source of the ill-gotten gains? It seems the judge was secretly involved with the construction of a large casino on Native American land. The Coast Mafia financed the casino and is now helping itself to a sizable skim of each month’s cash. The judge is getting a cut and looking the other way. It’s a sweet deal: Everyone is making money.
     But now Greg wants to put a stop to it. His only client is a person who knows the truth and wants to blow the whistle and collect millions under Florida law. Greg files a complaint with the Board on Judicial Conduct, and the case is assigned to Lacy Stoltz, who immediately suspects that this one could be dangerous.
     Dangerous is one thing. Deadly is something else.

My notes:  This is yet another typical procedural thriller.  We know the villain, it is a matter of how to set about catching them.   It introduces a feisty female detective, there is a Native American angle, and corruption on a mega scale set, as it is, in the current Trump era.  A body fairly early on, tells the reader there really is something to chase.  The very convenient paper tissue with the blood sample sets the investigation rolling.  But is rather boring, disappointing, procedural with no suspense or twists. All too real in these days where corruption prevails and if you are one of the powerful elite you get away with it.  I am reading this at the time of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.  Nothing surprises me.  The greed of the judge is huge - emeralds, rubies, all that cash.  Greedy women.  Epilogue, with no twists but the character Myers who disappears early on turns up.  convenience of blood sample on tissue.

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Detective Renée Ballard works 'The Late Show', the notorious graveyard shift at the LAPD.

It's thankless work for a once-promising detective, keeping strange hours in a twilight world of crime.

Some nights are worse than others. And tonight is the worst yet.

Two shocking cases, hours apart: a brutal assault, and a multiple murder with no suspects.

Ballard knows it is always darkest before dawn. But what she doesn't know - yet - is how deep her investigation will take her into the dark heart of her city, the police department and her own past...

A new thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD.

Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she’s been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

But one night she catches two cases she doesn’t want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner’s wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won’t give up her job no matter what the department throws at her.

What I thought:
Call me a reading snob but I would never choose a Michael Connelly, this was the choice of fellow reader in my Splinter Book Group.  I did not want to read the book in truth, and I laboured through yet another police procedural as I saw it.  But there were some interesting slants, our protagonist Renee Ballard is banished to 'The Late Show' - the so-called Graveyard Shift, for making a complaint against a colleague.  And in Ballard we have a principled feminist, charismatic, her passion for surf-bording, her attachment to her dog Lola, staying at her grandmother's.   I can see she might get a champion's following as a for example has Jack Reacher.  The book closes on a subtle cliffhanger , that is a clever device.  I listened to this title on Audible, it was useful adjunct to ironing bed linen and gardening. 

The Daughter of Time

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey  - first published in 1951

My niece Katharine who lives and works in Paris came down to St Vaast for the weekend bearing books.  Amongst these was a copy of The Daughter of Time.  An introduction to Josephine Tey for me.

Synopsis:
Richard III reigned for only two years, and for centuries he was villified as the hunch-backed wicked uncle, murderer of the princes in the Tower. Josephine Tey's novel The Daughter of Time is an investigation into the real facts behind the last Plantagenet king's reign, and an attempt to right what many believe to be the terrible injustice done to him by the Tudor dynasty.

Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, recuperating from a broken leg, becomes fascinated with a contemporary portrait of Richard III that bears no resemblance to the Wicked Uncle of history. Could such a sensitive, noble face actually belong to one of the world's most heinous villains - a venomous hunchback who may have killed his brother's children to make his crown secure? Or could Richard have been the victim, turned into a monster by the the Tudors?

Grant determines to find out once and for all, with the help of the British Museum and an American scholar, what kind of man Richard III really was and who killed the Princes in the Tower.

There is a very good page in Wikipedia on the subject of this novel.  There is a summary of Grant's case for the innocence of Richard III.  Much has probably been written since Tey published in 1951 on the probability of Richard's guilt.  Winston Churchill evidently did not give much credence to Tey's theories as propounded via her protagonist Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard.

This is the portrait around which the novel is written: 

What I wrote to my niece:

Hi Kat

I thought I'd just drop you a quick line to say that I finished the Tey, a little while back, and I thought it was very cleverly constructed and obviously received many plaudits but I struggled with a detective story approach to the Two Princes. I am sure it was quite something when she published it and I wonder what academic studies have been carried out since to try and solve the mystery.  For example in Tey she seems to refute that Richard III had a deformed back but I thought that this was one of the things that helped solve the mystery of the 'skeleton in the Leicester carpark'.  That and the DNA.   I love the detective genre but here in the Tey I knew there would not be a definitive outcome.  However I would like to read a 'proper' Tey thriller (if you see what I mean) so I have ordered the Franchise Affair to await my return to the UK.  

In summary, I struggled with this book.  By and large I like a crime thriller, a whodunit, but this book somehow did not sit easily in that genre for me, despite the accolades the novel has received over the years.  The novel is listed as number one on the CWA's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time list and number four on the MWA's Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list.

  

The Essex Serpent

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Waterstones Book of the Year 2016

Sunday Times number one bestseller

Shortlisted for Costa Book Award

iTunes Book of the Year 2016

Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas prize 2017

Longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize 2017

Longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2017

Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017

Shortlisted for the Independent Bookshop Week Book Award 2017

British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017 (Fiction and Overall)

What Amazon says:

An exquisitely talented young British author makes her American debut with this rapturously acclaimed historical novel, set in late nineteenth-century England, about an intellectually minded young widow, a pious vicar, and a rumored mythical serpent that explores questions about science and religion, skepticism, and faith, independence and love.

When Cora Seaborne’s brilliant, domineering husband dies, she steps into her new life as a widow with as much relief as sadness: her marriage was not a happy one. Wed at nineteen, this woman of exceptional intelligence and curiosity was ill-suited for the role of society wife. Seeking refuge in fresh air and open space in the wake of the funeral, Cora leaves London for a visit to coastal Essex, accompanied by her inquisitive and obsessive eleven-year old son, Francis, and the boy’s nanny, Martha, her fiercely protective friend.

While admiring the sites, Cora learns of an intriguing rumor that has arisen further up the estuary, of a fearsome creature said to roam the marshes claiming human lives. After nearly 300 years, the mythical Essex Serpent is said to have returned, taking the life of a young man on New Year’s Eve. A keen amateur naturalist with no patience for religion or superstition, Cora is immediately enthralled, and certain that what the local people think is a magical sea beast may be a previously undiscovered species. Eager to investigate, she is introduced to local vicar William Ransome. Will, too, is suspicious of the rumors. But unlike Cora, this man of faith is convinced the rumors are caused by moral panic, a flight from true belief.

These seeming opposites who agree on nothing soon find themselves inexorably drawn together and torn apart—an intense relationship that will change both of their lives in ways entirely unexpected.

Hailed by Sarah Waters as "a work of great intelligence and charm, by a hugely talented author," The Essex Serpent is "irresistible . . . you can feel the influences of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and Hilary Mantel channeled by Perry in some sort of Victorian séance. This is the best new novel I’ve read in years" (Daily Telegraph).

What I thought:
This is my kind of book, before I even comment on the text it is for me a Pandora's Box of mysterious and murky things, of marvels of nature: mosses, fungi, serpents, parasites, tapeworms, fossils, toadstones, amber, blue seaglass and my personal favourites blue wing feathers of Jay and, of course, Leviathan and then a lexicon of brooding terminology:  decay, putrescence, blackness, miasma, mud, tuberculosis and then there are the things that go wrong, the sheep that is stuck on the saltings, the child that is lost, the young man who is stabbed, Luke's loss of manual dexterity even the jam which does not set. There is much that is strange. I try to find some sense of joy in the pages of Perry's book but even the intimate scenes between the characters are recounted in a gladless style.  What is to like then?  Firstly there is such texture in the narrative, in all those objects both natural and artefactual which are referred to time and again.  Visually appealing, curious and also tactile.  And the settings, the east end of London and the flat coastal landscape of Essex where the land grades into the sea over extensive saltmarshes.  I know saltings well and enjoy walking by them, they have an idiosyncratic fauna and flora and are 'dangerous' to encroach on. Made all the more treacherous by the tides - my familiars as they reveal and then hide their natural curiosities in an endless cycle of highs and lows.

And as for the writing even before I read Sarah Perry's Wikipedia profile I knew that I was in the presence of a writer who is very comfortable in Gothic style and a probably a Victorian born out of her time. She says as much on her own profile page, by inclination and upbringing. She has a PhD in creative writing from Royal Holloway University where her supervisor was Sir Andrew Motion. Her doctoral thesis was on the Gothic in the writing of Iris Murdoch. There are several relationships between the characters in the book and they are all uneasy, that between Will and Cora, drawn together by mutual attraction yet differing profoundly in their spiritual beliefs and always the figure of Stella between a symbol of potential guilt. And Cora herself, a contrary and manipulative woman I found her to be, what did others think?. I could write an essay on her alone...... And finally the book is themed by the serpent who threads its way through the book, the ancient legend, the carving on the end of a pew, the optical illusions of some of the characters, the beached corpse, a medical symbol and always the serpent of original sin, temptation. So this was very much a book for me, and thank you for choosing it.

Postscript - all the way through I found myself wondering just what the serpent would prove to be.  When it transpired to be a 20 foot fish with a single fin running along its dorsum I looked up conger eel and moray eel but even the maximum size for the latter would not work for the giant of Perry's imagining.  In the end I found an answer, the oarfish:

This is what I believe the rotting sea serpent to be:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=oarfish&client=safari&hl=en-gb&prmd=ivn&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjntbGpkNfZAhUmCcAKHcvbBxoQ_AUIECgB&biw=1024&bih=672