Princes and parliaments

I have had a copy of Dan Jones’ The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England sitting on ye olde TBR shelf for… probably ten years now? Anyway, I was chatting with one of the bartenders at East Reg who said he was reading it and was having a great time, so I bumped it up the priority list and started reading it last week. It’s about 500 pages long, so I wasn’t able to crank my way through it before I got un-sick enough that I had to start getting out of bed and doing things besides read, but it was very fun and fast-paced, so I did spend a few evenings last week staying up a little too late reading it.

I did not know a whole lot about the Plantagenets before going into this. I had heard the name, but my knowledge of pre-Tudor rulers of England is very spotty, and I had no sense of what order any of it went into. I knew there were way too many Henrys and I didn’t know anything about any of them except the seventh and eighth. I knew Richard the Lionheart was the king when the Robin Hood stories take place and that he was off on crusade sometimes. I knew Eleanor of Aquitaine was kind of a big deal but I couldn’t have told you how she was related to anybody.

As a result, this was a very good book for me! The blurbs on it frame it as basically a “primer” on the Plantagenet dynasty, and that was exactly what I needed. It walks us through the 300 or so years of history from the reign of Henry II through the deposition of Richard II and into the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses with the ascension of Henry IV. I have another book on the Wars of the Roses that I am now interested in reading quite soon, although it is not the one by this author, who seems to have written quite a number of popular medieval histories and also hosted a TV show I’m now watching on Netflix called The Secrets of Great British Castles, which is exactly what it sounds like and perfect edutainment content for me.

The main narrative throughline in this book in terms of trying to tie it all together into an argument for historical importance is the relationship between Plantagenet monarchs and the rest of the English political community. We all learned at least a little bit about the Magna Carta at school but other than that, US kids don’t get all that much in the way of lessons about UK civics; hell, in a lot of places we barely learn about US civics. Here, Jones walks us through the changing relationships between the Plantagenet kings and their barons, knights, and occasionally the commons, and the increasingly sophisticated system of charters, parliaments, courts, and other administrative apparatus that governed England as it chugged slowly and unknowingly toward the modern era. Disputes over the taxes to finance the endless wars with France, Scotland, Wales, the Holy Land, and occasionally Ireland and Spain bring together military and financial history in a way that’s fun and easy to follow even if you are the sort of person who usually likes the military history more than the financial history (I do like financial history but I can recognize that it’s sometimes dry. This is not dry).

There are probably more scholarly books on the Plantagenets you can read if you want to be really serious about it–Jones provides a pretty intriguing “further reading” list at the back. But if you are just like “I can name all six of Henry VIII’s wives and what happened to them, but I couldn’t tell you if Prince John from Robin Hood and King John from Shakespeare’s King John are the same person or not if you put a gun to my head,” then this is certainly the book for you (they are indeed the same person). A few years ago I read Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and when Merricat’s list of things she liked included “Richard Plantagenet” I was vaguely embarrassed that I wasn’t sure who that was other than that it probably wasn’t Richard III because nobody liked him. I am now no longer embarrassed because even though there are two Richard Plantagenets I now know enough about them to be pretty confident that it’s the first one because nobody liked Richard II, either. I am also very pleased to be confident that if I ever have to watch another adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV I will be able to at least sort of tell some of the Henrys in it apart.

The writer's retreat from Hell

Recently two of my dear friends got married, and gave away books as wedding favors at their wedding. They had quite a lot of copies so Sam and I ended up with five books collectively instead of the traditional one apiece. One of these books was Rachel Hawkins’ The Villa, a dual-timeline novel about two childhood best friends, now both writers in their thirties, who take a girls’ trip to a villa in Italy where a very famous murder happened in the 1970s among a bunch of drugged-up rock star types. The crew in the ‘70s timeline are based off of the Romantic poets from the infamous summer in Lake Geneva, where Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, John Polidori wrote The Vampyre, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley were insufferable to everybody (or at least that’s what I’ve heard), and Claire Clairmont was also there. Except, in this version, the Percy character, up-and-coming musician Pierce Sheldon, gets brutally murdered, and in addition to Mari Godwin writing a genre-defining horror novel, the Claire Clairmont character also creates an artistic masterwork, in this case a sad folk album.

Apparently some of the book is also inspired by the Manson murders, but I don’t know anything about them, whereas I know a fair amount about the Romantic poets and the infamous Year Without a Summer ghost story writing contest. This book drew from it really well–changed things enough to keep me guessing and make it feel like I wasn’t just reading a reskin of the events I know already, but full of fun little Easter eggs for Romantic poetry dorks, like Percy Shelley’s inability to realize that babies aren’t interchangeable.

This book does a good job of having both a thoughtful feminist perspective and female characters who are kind of awful. Everybody in the ‘70s crew is awful and also they’re all babies; the fraught relationship between Mari and her stepsister Lara, particularly the way they keep letting all these charismatic, creative, captivating, but ultimately shitty men get between them, is sad but very believable for teenagers. In the modern-day timeline, the fraught relationship between Em–a writer of cozy mysteries who stayed in her hometown and got married, then got sick, and is now going through a phenomenally ugly divorce–and Chess–who fucked off outta town as soon as she could and has now become an Instagram-perfect self-help writer–has to do mostly with things besides men but boy howdy does Em’s shitty ex-husband manage to insert himself into it.

There are a lot of good layers and reveals on top of reveals, which I won’t talk about here because I cannot be bothered to remember how spoiler tags work, but the result is certainly very compelling–when the novel started really picking up steam I found it difficult to put down. The aesthetic tension between the bright, sunny, live-laugh-love-ass vibes of the villa in the summer (and of Chess’ career) and the increasingly dark and fucked-up things we learn as the story unfolds is drawn in beautifully atmospheric, cinematic terms; Em clearly has a not just an eye for that sort of thing but a somewhat cynical hyper-awareness of it.

Overall, this was a really fun little thriller that weaves in a number of things that are Relevant To My Interests to create a deliciously claustrophobic story about creativity, jealousy, fucked-up interpersonal dynamics in many flavors, and the strengths and limitations to the curative powers of fucking off to Italy. Also, it really made me want to fuck off to Italy for a writer’s retreat.