“Elizabeth I: A Novel”, by Margaret George

688 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-0670022533

Remember when you got in trouble in school and your teacher or the principle or whomever told you that they “weren’t angry; just disappointed”? Remember that? No? Oh. Well, anyway, that’s just what I felt while reading Elizabeth I: A Novel by Margaret George. I wasn’t angry; just disappointed, because I had such high hopes from the author of the novels The Autobiography of Henry VIII, With Notes By His Fool, Will Somers (reviewed on March 7th, 2012) and Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (reviewed on April 10th, 2012), two absolutely brilliant works of historical fiction. One of the ways in which Elizabeth I differs from her other works is that it doesn’t give a womb-to-the-tomb account of the title character’s life; rather, George chose to start in 1588 when the Virgin Queen’s reign was half-over (maybe she thought that Elizabeth’s early life and reign had already been well-covered in historic fiction?) The trouble is that while this was by no means an uneventful period (Spanish Armada, anyone?), there wasn’t all that much happening that the middle-aged, female monarch directly took part in – which, when you consider that she’s the narrator of the book, rather drastically puts a kibosh on the story. Thus, we witness scene after scene in which Elizabeth anxiously waits for news about some crisis or other, and then hearing an account of what happened from some other character. Riveting.

George is a great historical novelist, and Elizabeth I is not without its good moments, but it often feels like she’s marking time with a series of episodes that, while interesting to a point, do not advance the story at all (like the invention of the indoor toilet!) rather than fill in historical gaps with invented, but plausible, scenarios that serve to advance the plot. Not to mention the (for George) uncharacteristically sloppy writing, anachronistic language and narrative gaps, such as when, over the course of a few pages, Elizabeth goes from barely knowing who Essex is to being as intimate with him as any she ever was with Robert Dudley. Or the out-of-left-field, what-in-the-HELL moments that burst fully formed from her mind, as when she has Lettice Knowles sleep with William Shakespeare (?!). One would be forgiven in thinking that George became rather overwhelmed by her subject – whom she dubs “the supreme mystery woman” – and was rushed to make her publisher’s deadline before she’d fully digested and figured out her take on Elizabeth, but, really, this lets her off the hook, I think. After one brilliant historical novel after another, this effort is quite beneath George’s abilities and all are justified in their supreme disappointment. Instead of a grand Tudor feast, we have been served a half-baked pudding.