Wednesday, March 28, 2012

“Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia”, by Orlando Figes


544 pages, Metropolitan Books, ISBN-13: 978-0805057836

Although Orlando Figes takes the title Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia from Natasha's dance in War and Peace, he could have just as easily used Chichikov from Dead Souls as his vehicle, as he takes the reader along on a wild ride through Russia's rich cultural history. Figes has organized his book thematically, with each chapter exploring a different, compelling set of Russian ideas that revolve around the East-West duality that is so apparent in the works of great Russian artists, writers and musicians. I noticed, however, that Figes seems to be more at home when exploring the themes found in the great classical compositions, providing wonderful character sketches of composers such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky.

Figes's expansive discussion of cultural influences and trends in Russian history opens with the reign of Peter the Great and runs through the first half of the 20th Century, making only brief forays into the era before 1700 (e.g., the lingering effects of the Mongol invasion) and sketchily scanning the years after Stalin in a final chapter on exiles from the Soviet Union. That's over 250 years of Russian cultural history in 600 pages, and the author's focus allows him to analyze what are surely the most formative years of the Russian Empire. Although Figes occasionally examines the visual arts, architecture, politics and scholarship, he primarily discusses music, performance art and, above all, literature. Even then, there's a lot to absorb yet, remarkably, Natasha's Dance is a refreshing survey that will not only motivate many readers (including yours truly) to run out and buy some of the novels and orchestral works he mentions, but also provides a framework for appreciating all those newly purchased books and CDs.

It's not easy to summarize the themes that, according to Figes, pervade most of Russia's culture (and politics); at the risk of oversimplification, one could say that Natasha's Dance views the last three centuries of Russian History as a clash of dualities: Peter the Great opened Russia to European exchanges and, by the end of his reign, society in St. Petersburg was emulating Parisian trends to the point of caricature: "the aristocracy had become so bilingual that they slipped quite easily and imperceptibly from Russian into French and back again. Letters of a page or so could switch a dozen times, sometimes in the middle of a sentence". During the 19th Century, however, many writers and artists longed to pull Russia back to its roots, and they found their "lost" heritage reflected in the eyes of the peasantry (the war with Napoleon only hastened this retrenchment). Thus, for example, one sees the unintentionally comical specter of Tolstoy trying to be like his serfs: "he idealized the peasants and loved to be with them, but for many years he could not bring himself to break from the conventions of society and become one himself". More seriously, by the beginning of the 20th Century, fine art was influenced less by European expectations and more by folk art and peasant dances (compare, for example, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake with Stravinksy's Firebird). Nevertheless, the aristocracy continued to remain aloof from the "more Russian" customs of the peasantry – for many, the folk traditions never rose above a trendy curiosity – and this dissonance contributed to the tensions that led to the Russian Revolution.

I thought Natasha's Dance was one of the best books I have ever read on Russia; in 500 beautifully written pages or so, Figes manages to say an awful lot, not just about the Russian arts and literature, nor simply about Russia as a place, its history, its customs, its religious traditions, but about that thing we call "culture". Figes shows how the arts were intertwined with politics, religion, folklore and beliefs, to create a "national consciousness". His main argument – that Russian culture was defined by a dialogue between the high culture of the aristocracy and the folk culture of the peasantry – is brilliantly developed and original.

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

“Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914”, by Frederic Morton



385 pages, Charles Scribner's Sons, ISBN-13: 978-0684191430

Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Freud, Jung…everyone knows the names, but who were these people and what did they all have in common? How did Vienna link them all? And then there are the names that are not on the tip of one's tongue: Count Leopold von Berchtold, Gavrilo Princip, Trifko Grabez, Nedeljko Cabrinivic. Who in the world were these people and how did their actions lead the world into The Great War (which should perhaps have been more accurately known as von Berchtold's War?) I can think of few other books, save Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station and Andrei Biely's St. Petersburg that so brilliantly captures the spirit of a place in time as does Frederic Morton in Thunder at Twilight: Vienna, 1913-1914, bringing key figures to life and recreating a vibrant sense of being there, in this case Vienna, on the eve of the Great War. I was captivated from the first word to the last.

And what a cast of characters! Russian revolutionaries (Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky); aristocrats and courtiers of the Habsburg dynasty (foremost among them the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Crown Prince, Franz Ferdinand); the future catalyst of WWII (that would be Adolf Hitler) and a host of intellectual and artistic giants (Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Oskar Kokoschka, Arnold Schönberg). Impressively, the main narrative thread isn't lost in this colorful swirl of personages; in fact, for a reader with even a modest grounding in European history and culture, these numerous fleeting appearances only add to the vibrancy of the tale.

I was swept up immediately by Morton's heady prose (at times, I confess, I found it to dip rather heavily into the symbolic or engage in the overly rhetorical flourish) but still his writing has undeniable evocative power. Here, for instance, is a passage describing the eccentric habit of a struggling artist living in poverty in a Viennese men's home:

…now the brush would drop from his hand. He would push the palette aside. He would rise to his feet. He began to speak, to shout, to orate. With hissing consonants and hall-filling vowels, he launched into a harangue on morality, racial purity, the German mission and Slav treachery, on Jews, Jesuits, and Freemasons. His forelock would toss, his color-stained hands shred the air, his voice rise to an operatic pitch. Then, just as suddenly as he had started, he would stop. He would gather his things together with an imperious clatter, stalk off to his cubicle. And the others would just stare after him.

That, of course, was a sketch of Adolf Hitler. But what most struck me after reading Morton's A Nervous Splendor (reviewed on March 26th, 2012) is how well Morton had made clear the causes of World War I. Of course, everybody knows that the trigger was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip; like me, however, many have undoubtedly wondered just who was this Franz Ferdinand to have set off such a sequence of cataclysmic events. Morton makes the ill-fated Crown Prince the central character of his book and, in doing so, infuses it with heavy irony, for Franz Ferdinand was, despite all his bluster, a constant advocate of peace, not war. That the Great War was begun ostensibly on his account was the supreme, bloody irony.

Morton adroitly renders a sympathetic but unsentimental portrait of Franz Ferdinand, highlighting his problematic relationship with his uncle, the Emperor, and his devotion to his wife Sophie, whom he had married contrary to all the Habsburg's wishes. If there is a tragedy here beyond the insane march to war, it is this story of a prince and the sacrifices he made for his beloved wife, who was continually slighted by a court intent on keeping her down among the "non-royals" in its merciless pecking order. An amazing and amazingly entertaining book.

Monday, March 26, 2012

“A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889”, by Frederic Morton



340 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316585323

As I was still reading Frederic Morton's A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888/1889, and wondering how best to describe the author's approach to history, the perfect metaphor came to mind: some historical writers (mainly, it seems, those of public school textbooks) adhere religiously to objective, undeniable fact: dates, names, places and the other minutiae that so often make their books better studies in tedium more than of history. Perhaps we can describe their works as "photographic history"; that is, absolutely accurate in every aspect but devoid of imagination and interpretation. Morton, to continue the analogy, writes "artistic history"; or, using an artist's brush rather than a camera to paint his word pictures. In his hands, history is interpreted on a canvas, and the reader sees all of the colors, swirls, and textures of the scene.

But, we may ask, is not the camera more trustworthy than the artist's interpretation of events? It may very well be but, then again, the photographer chooses what objects to photograph, the angle from which each photograph is taken and what highlights and shadows to include. Whenever one reads history, from whatever view the author has taken, he is reading the author's interpretation of that history and would do well to remember that what he is reading has been filtered through another mind first. A Nervous Splendor gives us Morton's view of the culture, society and political manipulations afoot in Europe, particularly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the dying Habsburg dynasty in the year 1888 and the first fateful months of 1889.

With the use of a wide range of source materials, including newspapers, periodicals, memoirs and unpublished diaries, Morton presents an intriguing account of a short, yet important, period in Vienna's (and Austria's) history. Morton chooses July 1888 through April 1889 as a watershed period because these years marked the time when "the western dream started to go wrong". Morton paints the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the late 1880s as backward and stagnant, still obsessed with protocol, tradition and keeping up appearances. The Habsburgs still hung on to their monarchy and modern classes (modern up-and-coming industrialists, for example, having little to no access to the court). Morton looks at the elite of society in a number of areas like science (Freud), music (Brahams, Strauss, Buckner), theater (Herzl, Schnitzler); even the rise in prophylactic sales during Carnival is described, as is the pursuit of the Crown Prince's affections by the girls of the fashionable crowd.

Naturally, what I found to be the most interesting in a morbid sorta way are the chapters that focus on the Crown Prince Rudolf, the liberal-minded (and disturbed) heir to the Austrian throne. The progressive Crown Prince was stifled by the traditions of the court, forced to entertain guests he did not like (such as Kaiser Wilhelm II; I mean, did anybody like Kaiser Bill?) and was only able to voice his ideas through unsigned articles in the newspapers. His choice of the Mayerling incident to solve his problems still seems odd for an intelligent, 30 year-old prince, while his choice of taking Mary Vetsera with him seems more for convenience than for some love tragedy as she was willing to go along with his plan whereas his regular mistress laughed it off.

Morton's scholarship and care for detail are obvious throughout, but he goes far beyond most other historians in his ability to involve the reader and make him empathize with the long-dead people in his book. In his hands the events at Mayerling become understandable, though no less tragic. One can only wonder how history might have changed if Rudolf had been a partner with his father, Emperor Franz Joseph, rather than a powerless heir in the wings, and if the bloody 20th Century may not have taken a different course instead.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

“There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters”, by Claire Berlinski


400 pages, Basic Books, ISBN-13: 978-0465002313

Anyone interested in the future of Conservatism (notice the capital 'C'?) ought to read there Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters by Claire Berlinski. Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, is both loved and loathed by people the world over, and both for good reason. Taking power in Britain at a time when the country was an absolute basket case, the grocer's daughter from Grantham realized that extreme measures were needed in order to pull Britain from off the downward path of socialism and liberate the considerable entrepreneurial energies of the British people and restore wealth and prosperity the the sceptred isle. She ultimately succeeded, but not without causing dislocations and fundamental changes that, by contrast, make Ronald Reagan's strides forward to "morning in America" look like a cakewalk. Her imperious personality only made her drastic policies seem all the more drastic. There is an important lesson to be learned here: any really profound change away from socialism and towards capitalism will make permanent enemies, so any politician who seeks to make such changes must either be able to ignore the critics or transcend them. The importance of Margaret Thatcher has only increased over the years. She was one of the main politicians that opposed and fought socialism in all of its forms. After the fall of Communism and more or less general adoption of the main aspects of her policy by most major European parties, it looked like the free-market ideas that she so passionately championed had become completely vindicated once and for all. 

Unfortunately, in recent years we have been witnessing the resurgence of those ideas, and it is important now more than ever to be reminded of what sorry life Brittan had led under such policies. Berlinski interviews both allies and adversaries of Thatcher, including an interesting visit with some former miners whose lives were changed forever in the wake of the failed miners' strike of 1984. Berlinski's sympathies obviously lie with Thatcher, but she gives Thatcher's enemies a fair chance to be heard. I happen to agree with Berlinski's summation that while current geopolitical issues (radical Islamic terrorism, which Thatcher frankly failed to recognize as a big threat) may seem to have little to do with the Cold War milieu in which Thatcher operated, the eternal appeal of the secular religion of socialism (especially when it forms an "unholy alliance" of expediency with Islamic enemies of the West, as detailed by David Horowitz and others) will always make Thatcher's ideas and experiences relevant. This is a thought-provoking book with a very important message.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

“Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War”, by Robert K. Massie



1007 pages, Random House, Inc., ISBN-13: 978-0394528335

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War examines the first arms race of the 20th Century, that of the modern battleship. Robert K. Massie lays out the development of the Dreadnought-class battleship and its implications, beginning with Queen Victoria's ascension to the throne and ending with the declaration of World War I. The focus is on both the absolute monarchies and constitutional governments that undertook to design and produce these ocean-going behemoths and closes with the sequence of declarations of general European war in the summer of 1914. Interestingly, the book tackles its topic from a biographical perspective, with virtually every word focused on giving the reader a clear picture of the personalities involved, from the Queen herself to Kaiser Wilhelm (referred to unfailingly as William in the book), from Cecil Rhodes to Otto von Bismarck. This makes the book somewhat more readable, but leaves the reader with the impression that the arms race (and thus the War) is entirely due to individual personalities. Very little time or attention is given to broader social developments, reducing the citizenry of each nation to little more than observers, often even less given the secrecy behind many of the developments.

Kaiser Wilhelm is especially closely considered, making it clear that, at least in part, his own inferiority complex and vacillation between Anglophilia and Anglophobia led to Germany's near-inexorable march towards war. At times, he desired nothing more than the acceptance and respect of his grandmother and uncle (Victoria and Edward VII); at others, he would repudiate any possible tempering influence they might have had. After Bismarck, one chancellor after another rotated through the government, serving at the Emperor's pleasure, due to Bismarck's authoritarian constitution). Still, the volatile Emperor was occasionally easily manipulated by experienced politicians without realizing it; in most cases, this maintained peace and allowed the danger of war to pass. On the British side, particular attention is also given to Admiral Jacky Fisher, whose reforms in the British Navy at the close of its heyday are still seen in modern navies all over the world. During the great sail-to-steam conversion, it was his focus on gunnery and simulation of wartime situations that kept his Navy at the top of the game. Realizing the importance of speed in naval operations, he continued to push for steam vessels, even when this was still controversial. The development of the modern battleship is due in large part to his driving force, constantly seeking to defend his island nation.

Dreadnought does a fine job of illustrating the developments, both military and political, that led to the declaration of one of the first of the 20th Century's awful world wars, little-discussed though it may be. While Dreadnought spends practically no time on the war itself, gaining familiarity with this era of history leads to a sense of sadness at the loss of the world's innocence nearly one hundred years ago.

Monday, March 19, 2012

“Blenheim: Biography of a Palace”, by Marian Fowler


272 pages, Penguin Books Ltd., ISBN-13: 978-0140106176

Blenheim: Biography of a Palace by Marian Fowler is a small but wonderful book, a popular history (or, I guess I should say, biography) of perhaps the greatest of all English country houses, from its conception and building in the opening decade of the 18th Century to the burial of Winston Churchill in the early 1960s. Using the vast Blenheim papers (now in the British Museum), together with local Oxfordshire documents and archives, Fowler has been able to trace the history not just of its famous inhabitants but, perhaps just as importantly, of the building itself. along with the thousands of servants and workmen who have kept the place functioning over the years.

The book itself is divided into four long core chapters that each taking a specific event at Blenheim (the first is a theatrical performance of a Dryden play put on by his grandchildren for the almost senile first Duke of Marlborough) before moving on from there to a general description of the place and its inhabitants at that time. The four events are each separated by about 60 years and feature the reigning Duke as its guide. Fowler comprehensively details the often scandalous behavior of the spectacular landmark's occupants, as well as its physical features and crippling maintenance costs.

This is, in short, not only an informative, but an entertaining book, one which I have read several times over the years. Throughout it all, Fowler was able to capture the age in which the palace passed through the lives of a series of dukes who were, suffice to say, an interesting collection of persons. The point of the book was never an examination of the Blenheim Papers, nor, indeed, of the Churchill family, except when the book used those members to piggy-back the story of the palace. Just waht history should be: informative, entertaining and enlightening.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

“The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story”, by Janet Gleeson


336 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0446524995

Who ever thought a book about porcelain could be so engrossing? But Janet Gleeson has written an exciting (yes, exciting!) and fascinating tale in The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story. It is a combination of science and adventure with some industrial espionage thrown in and biographical aspects, too. You get a real feel for the personalities who are portrayed in this book: the profligate prince (Elector Augustus the Strong) who is desperate for a way to finance his out-of-control spending, so he pins his hopes on alchemy; the teenage alchemist (Johannn Bottger) who draws attention to himself with a magic trick that fools people into thinking he has found a way to create gold (and thereby gets himself locked away by Augustus until he can duplicate the feat. But Bottger was no charlatan: he really thought he could do it). The tension builds as Augustus invests lots of money in Bottger's enterprise but starts to get impatient when he doesn't see any results; poor Bottger even manages to escape for a short while because he is afraid of being executed for his failure. Eventually, he saves himself by coming up with a commercially viable formula for porcelain – but it wasn't easy, as this often exciting and always absorbing story of the European development of the formula for making fine porcelain (and the growth of the Meissen works that led the way) makes clear. 

The "Arcanum" usually refers to the age-old quest for a recipe for turning base metals into gold. but Gleeson uses it appropriately here not only because porcelain became known as "white gold" in 18th Century Europe, but also because Bottger had originally set out to make gold. Having rashly claimed – and "demonstrated" – that he could do so, Bottger was imprisoned in 1701 by the greedy Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony (long story, that). Augustus, whose appetite for women and riches was legendary, held Bottger captive for decades; while his gold-making experiments failed repeatedly, he was given the task of discovering the ancient Chinese secret of making porcelain. Bottger eventually did make fine white porcelain from gray clay, prompting his "ironic testimony" above his laboratory door: "God…has made a potter from a gold-maker". Never granted his freedom, Bottger was made head of the king's porcelain factory at Meissen. Gleeson traces the history and development of porcelain artistry from there by following the careers of the mean-spirited Johann Gregor Herold, an artist whose inventive colors and patterns set the standard, and the sculptor Johann Joachim Kaendler, whose fine work in 1730s Dresden would bring about a bitter rivalry with Herold. The sublime results of their competitive work can still be viewed in the museums of Dresden and Meissen. Gleeson does a marvelous job of relating court intrigue, decadence, and chicanery, but her descriptions of 2,200-piece dinner services and the lavish banquets on tables decorated by porcelain finery, including an 8' high model of the Piazza Navona with running rosewater, steal the show.

The Arcanum is a story of greed, incredible artistry and innovation and all set against the political ambitions of a warlike and ever-changing European landscape. Gleeson's true skill is in the way she draws out the detail to people the landscape with lifelike and realistic detail without cluttering us with dull information or specious descriptions. She is immensely readable, bringing the story and the people alive.

Monday, March 12, 2012

“Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom”, by Roger Pearson


384 pages, Bloomsbury Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1582346304

Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom is a biography of François-Marie Arouet, (1694-1778) who took the pen name "Voltaire" for reasons still unclear (author Roger Pearson lists some guesses but doesn't choose one). In most ways he was the 18th Century itself, distilled into a frame so thin that it appeared as though a good stiff breeze could blow him away. But not only did he live to the age of 84, he also wrestled one of the most powerful institutions in history – the Catholic Church in France – virtually to a standstill. One of the most prolific writers of all time, he is said to have churned out a million words during his life: plays, essays, letters, poetry, satire. He never wrote a novel (novels were considered trashy entertainment in his day and he never cared to write one), isn't read much anymore – not even in France – and is remembered today not so much as a philosopher in his own right, but as a brilliant, witty popularizer of other people's ideas. But his razor-sharp French prose style was the envy of the young Rousseau, who ultimately went on to have an even greater and more profound impact on the world.

What inflamed Voltaire's passion the most was his need to write, and nothing did the trick more quickly than intolerance and injustice. Imprisoned more than once himself, Voltaire repeatedly put himself in jeopardy defending in print the victims of injustice and religious bigotry (a particular plague of his age) and launching one spirited attack after another on their tormentors, those in political and ecclesiastical power, which in 18th Century France were pretty much two sides of the same coin. Each chapter has a title and a descriptive summary, in the style of an 18th Century novel. In lively and witty prose, Pearson takes the reader from Voltaire's inauspicious beginnings (he was an illegitimate child who was expected to die) to his first clashes with the authorities (he spent close to a year in the Bastille when still only 23), his liaisons with one woman after another, the business dealings that made him wealthy, his sojourn in England (where he found the relatively tolerant atmosphere refreshing enough to publish a series of "English Letters"), his rocky relationship with Frederick the Great, and the whole cavalcade of one of history's most colorful and brilliant lives, leading right up to his retaking by storm, in the last days of his life, the very Paris from which he had been so often banned.

As the decades running up to the French Revolution (which Voltaire helped start but didn't live to see) roll by, Pearson traces every parry-and-thrust of the life of a writer in an age and a society in which writers were closely watched and frequently harassed by the government, their works censored and sometimes burned, their personal freedom never completely secure. Observing his darting around Europe, hopping over a border here, leaping into a midnight carriage there, in order to stay ahead of those who would imprison him again, one wonders how Voltaire ever got anything written. But write he did, compulsively, exhaustively and on an array of subjects that would fill a dictionary (one of his best-known works is, in fact, a Philosophical Dictionary). By the time of his death, while the war against intolerance and bigotry was far from won – most likely it never will be, entirely – the ideals of the French Enlightenment had already borne fruit on this side of the pond, the American Revolution being in full swing in 1778, and it was possible for writers in France and elsewhere in Europe to express their ideas with much less fear of the authorities than ever would have been possible in Voltaire's youth.

Friday, March 9, 2012

“Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles-Joseph de Ligne”, by Philip Mansel



384 pages, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Ltd., ISBN-13: 978-1842127315

The subject of Prince of Europe: The Life of Charles-Joseph de Ligne by Philip Mansel was the seventh Prince de Ligne, born in 1735 and christened in Brussels. A nobleman of the southern Netherlands, a grandee of Spain, a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, by the past marriages of his family he was related to many foreign dynasties; he was, therefore, both geographically and historically, a true European figure. At the age of 16 he was taken by his father to Vienna where he was presented to the Emperor and the Empress. From then, until his death at the age of 79, he traveled incessantly and had many residences in different countries so that he could proudly say, "I have six or seven fatherlands". He was a soldier, a diplomat and an adviser to scores of important people. A prolific writer, he was also the author of different forms of literature, but he was above all a remarkable historian of his age. He knew most of the great and the good of Europe and he himself became a celebrity thanks to his good looks, his charm and his gift of conversation. He was famous, too, for his success with women, whether they were kitchen maids or aristocratic married ladies.

As his narrative proceeds, at appropriate moments Mansel discusses the characteristics of Ligne and the period in which he lived. He tells us that this was an age that deified sexual pleasure; the Prater Park outside of Vienna was a place where couples were constantly disappearing into thickets; in the women's salons in Brussels the conversation was very lubricious; and Paris, one need not say, was even wilder. Ligne wrote a short story in which the hero explains that after "attacking" many women, the pleasure of the sexual act passed, but the honor of it remained. We are told that, like his imaginary hero, Ligne believed in the "honor" (?) of sexual conquest and, in an extraordinary letter to his daughter, he proudly describes how he had a love affair with a village girl when he was about 58 years old. But while he bedded servants and prostitutes and had sexual affairs with a cosmopolitan collection of aristocratic ladies, there are some doubts about all the affairs that he described in his letters (after all, he had a reputation to maintain). One of his close friends said that he did not believe in half of the love affairs. As he grew older he knew that his conquests could not continue (once, when he was inscribing a mistress' initials on the wall of one of his houses - a strange occupation) - we are told that he wrote in one of his manuscripts, "I always think it is the last one; oh! This time it certainly is!") Eventually, his passions became more platonic; the Princess Dolgoruky, whom he called in a letter to her "a mythical goddess", was angry if his hand so much as brushed hers.

But Mansel suggests that "behind his glittering façade" there was a dissatisfied and disappointed man. There was not only the death of his son, killed when fighting for the Austrians against the French in 1794 and which, as he wrote to his friend Casanova, had given him more pain than had all the pleasures of his life - "and I have had a prodigious number of them" - given him pleasure. He found his wife unbearable (she was the Princess Francisca-Xaviera of Liechtenstein, whom he had married when he was 20 and she was 14); he had not found an ideal mistress; he never achieved military glory; he had, for the last 25 years of his life, to content himself with the role of a spectator; at the age of 75 he was still tormented with ambition.

So, in this masterly biography, Mansel does not idolize his subject, and he does not hesitate to quote those who called Ligne "a chatterbox" or "a scatterbrain" and who were important in condemning him to inactivity. But the one compliment he is anxious to pay Ligne was that he was a European. He united in his sympathies Christians, Jews and Muslims; he was proud of being from Flanders but was at home in the six countries of Europe where he lived; and his flexibility of mind permitted him to accept the changes. Therefore, claims Mansel in his conclusion, "Ligne is a man for our time" (a reference only to his thinking and acting as a European). One can agree with this.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

“The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers”, by Margaret George




932 pages, St. Martin's Press, ISBN-13: 978-0312061456

The first ten or twelve times (yes, it's that good) I read The Autobiography of Henry VIII, I was blown away by the romantic grandeur of 15th Century England and Europe. Enter the world of castles, monasteries, diplomats, priests, peasants and manuscripts (books written by hand on parchment). Margaret George skillfully whisks the reader away from the modern world to the King's Court, where the ornate intricacies of ballroom and bedroom are as lethal as battlefields dominated by cannon and horsemen. The reader is invited to the private counsel of the King who presides over it all, to discover not only what he says in public, but what he really thinks of his wives, his nobles and courtiers, his rivals in France and beyond. It is a brilliant work of historical fiction, one to be savored many times.

HOWEVER, keep in mind that, as a work of history (as opposed to historical fiction), the books fails badly. Judging by Henry's actual statements and actions, George's interpretation of his life are highly unlikely. There are several events of his life and of his character that go unnoticed or unresolved in the novel. Remember the actual Henry VIII was decried in England for centuries after his death as a bloodthirsty tyrant, but the reasons for his legendary cruelty go unmentioned in George's novel. For that matter, Henry's cruelty itself goes largely unmentioned as he is recast, from the vicious tyrant of history, to a love-starved prince of fiction. Simply put, the real contemporaries of Henry VIII would not recognize the king portrayed in this book. Did Henry simply deceive himself, so that he did not know what a shark tank his court had become? Was he an incurable romantic, as the Autobiography suggests? No. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the book does not portray the greatest Tudor king as he was.

But this is to be expected, seeing as this book is written from the perspective of Henry VIII - and it makes him more human, more sympathetic and yet more chilling, all at once. He appears to be a smart man, a strong leader, a charismatic sovereign and a wise king - but he had a strange childhood of neglect and disfavor by his selfish parents, suddenly interrupted when his brother died and he became heir and was thrust into a world where there were no limits, no brakes upon his conscience or his power, especially when he ascended the throne. This odd combination led to a man who, despite his strengths, was in his personal life like a big, dangerous child - when he got tired of wives or friends, he killed them. Yet the final results of his rule, including the introduction of new ways of viewing religion in England, a breaking up of the old, stale social systems, and the brilliant Queen Elizabeth, were all positive. This book, fascinatingly written from the perspective of Henry VIII with notes from his very wise fool, Will Summers, explores these contradictions in a clever and attention-catching way. The notes by Will add a fresh perspective and balance to the book; also, the book touches the personality of his wives and shows them as real, flawed humans, the good Queen Katherine, who nevertheless allowed her extreme piety to blind her to her husband's needs, the scheming, shrill Anne Boleyn, the quiet and beloved Jane, the ugly but kind and humorous Anne of Cleves, the frivolous Katherine Howard and finally, the wise Katherine Parr.

Usually when a book is this long, I have a nagging feeling that an editing hand would have made it better, but not this book; it is gripping, spectacular and superb, fro first to last.I stayed up several nights to read it, and I could barely put it down. All of these characters, as well as the mood of the times, of the diverse English people, the war ridden Europe and the superstitions and religious fervor of the age all come alive in this brilliant book.