I was
reading this epic novel non-stop for the last seven days and, with a sigh of
relief, I finally reached the end yesterday. While mulling on how to write this
review, an immediate thought that came to mind was that the novel could’ve been
tightened and slimmed down by a fifth to a quarter. I’m giving it a rating of 4.2
stars out of 5.
On
the whole, it is a rigorously researched work of historical fiction describing
in minute details the emotional, sexual and political lives of the three
leading actors who played pivotal roles in the French Revolution (Maximilien Robespierre,
Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton) and who were surrounded by a
myriad cast of secondary characters; and the entangled and mind-boggling
relations and interactions, sexual or political or otherwise, between the one
and the other.
In
terms of crafting a spell-binding historical novel, Ms. Mantel is a talented
storyteller who knows how to titillate her readers. I was particularly
impressed with the last third of the book, where the irony of
bad-outcome-from-good-intentions helps to build up hair-raising tension. Having
said that, I still came away with a tinge of disappointment that the author
chose to bypass the chance to examine some salient issues from the viewpoint of
ordinary French folks (for example, the underlying reasons as to why they
thought there was no better alternative than to resort to bloody violence; how
the epochal ideological shift affected the average Parisian on the streets and
what his/her reactions to that shift were).
Set
in one of the bloodiest and most tumultuous periods in French history, the
novel no doubt gives a kaleidoscopic view of important historic events and personages.
But the fictional elements of the novel tend to dwell interminably on Danton’s sexual
and material voracity, Desmoulins’ bisexual perverseness and Robespierre’s frenzied
self-abnegation. Couldn’t they have been simply hot-headed, starry-eyed young idealists
who started out thinking it was their ineluctable duty to reform a rotten
system in their beloved country, but ended up being sucked into the vortex of
power addiction, which ultimately destroyed lives unnecessarily, including
their own? If Robespierre’s ascetic traits were still credible, the salacity
attributed to Danton and Desmoulins just seems to me to be a bit forced.
All
in all, this made for good complementary reading alongside Thomas Carlyle’s
non-fiction title The French Revolution:
A History, which I commenced reading before starting on Mantel’s novel. With
these two books, I’m learning a lot about this cataclysmic phase in French
history.
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