Sometimes when you’re an intern at a publishing house you
get questions that you really don’t know how to answer. These are questions like: “How are you
finding your time here?”, “Would it be okay if I asked you to do...” and “Isn’t
this cover that I designed fabulous?” which all have very nice and easy answers. You say: “It’s great, I’m having an amazing
time”, “Of course, nothing would please me more” and “It’s beautiful!” and to
be honest most of the time you are being truthful because every person that I
have worked with so far in this industry has been incredibly friendly and
talented. On occasion, however, the
tricky questions come up., the most difficult of which is: “What do you think
of this book?” Now this is more than a question of sucking up to the powers
that be. You can’t of course be wholly negative, but a sycophantic response
praising the book to the rafters is not always appropriate either. You’re
trying to show off judgement, taste and maybe a bit of a discerning sense of
where the market is. This means that the
normal response is to praise the book but offer reservations.
Where am I going with all of this? Well near the end of my first placement with
Luath I was given Donald Smith’s The
Ballad of the Five Marys to proof-read.
This is a historical-fiction novel set during the life of Mary I of
Scotland (the inner historian in me hates calling her Mary Queen of Scots for
boring reasons that I will not get into here).
I read through much of the book in one day and was asked how I was
finding it. I, truthfully (often a
mistake in work and in love), said that I was really enjoying it and thought it
could be, if marketed right, a big seller.
Apparently this was the correct answer (phew!) as the book was quite popular in the office. However, on describing the novel to some of my friends I have found that people have been quite sceptical about it. Therefore the purpose of this review really is going to be me attempting
to persuade you that this book is, in fact, a really rather excellent historical
novel set in a period saturated with a lot of very average works.
The main reason for why I like this book is the style. Unlike other genres of fiction, I find that
historical fiction tends to be a little stuck in its ways. Most books tend to
be written in a fairly standard first-person style, focussing on one or two
characters’ journey or in a narrative third-person style. This book is nothing
like that at all. It is set throughout
most of the life of Mary Stewart, first crowned regnant-Queen of Scots from the
time of her birth to her incarceration by Elizabeth I of England. The story is told through a number of POV
accounts, set through a combination of diary/diary-like accounts, personal correspondence
and other similar methods. The idea
essentially is to get a widow on the minds of each individual. The ‘Five Marys’ (four companions of Mary I
along with the queen herself) have their own shared diary, form around half of
this, the rest being various people from like Darnley and Bothwell. The author has a strong didactic purpose
(something that I will come back to later) and this means that he attempts to
get as many different perspectives in as possible, but this does not distract
from the story-telling – in fact I believe it enhances it greatly. As a historian with an interest in the period
I am perhaps not the best person to talk about with regard to how the
characters come across, but in my view they are differentiated well without
becoming generic and all bring their own distinctive flavours to the
story. Equally, one would expect a story
that covers such a significant amount of time to rather flounder as time
passes, but quite the contrary, I find it picks up pace as the story
progresses.
This story’s main weakness, however, lies in its didactic
purpose. The author professes himself to
be a big fan of Mary Stewart and intends for the novel to redress the balance
of some professional historiography that, in Donald Smith’s view, unfairly
maligns her. For me this is a rather troubling stance to
take. It is true that modern
historiography has often shown Mary to be a rather naive queen, whose poor
choices in husband led Scotland to a very bloody period of civil strife that
dogged not only her reign but also the minority of her son James. Furthermore, there is a very valid argument
that perhaps this line of enquiry can be overplayed; Mary ruled at a very
difficult time thanks to the emerging power of England and the turmoil of the
Reformation. Having said all of that,
however, for a fictional account to be attempting to pass itself off as some
sort of amateur history strikes me as being a little troubling. It strikes me as being a bit like films such
as BRaveheart that have very little grounding in actual history, but pass
themselves off as fact. Now this book
has far more accuracy than Mel Gibson’s mauling of history, but it must always
be remembered that this is fiction.
Leave history to the pros! The
worst example of this is the final page which lists a group of ‘Discussion
Questions’ which seems to suggest that Smith intends for this book to be taught
to children in school as History. I
really hope that is not the case as it would mark a remarkable dilution of the
subject for a fiction book to be passed off as fact!
Despite this reservation, I would strongly recommend this
book to fans of historical-fiction, if nothing else than because stylistically
it is so different from anything I have read before in adult fiction. Ignore the pretentions of historical
scholarship and you will find a very pleasing read!
7/10
