I love Alexandre Dumas.
He is the one author I am really willing to forgive abusing historical
facts As such, I’ve been putting off
reading La Reine Margot for the
longest time. I devoured the entire Musketeers trilogy in about a week (even
going through the long slog of the first two parts of The Vicomte of Bragelonne) and I read the Count of Monte Cristo in at
a similar lightning pace. Maybe I left
too long before coming back to Dumas, or maybe it’s linked the bigger picture
of falling a bit out of love with reading recently, but I wasn’t impressed with
La Reine Margot in the way I hoped to
be.
I think what struck me as the biggest problem is that the
book is more about political machinations than it is action. Dumas is superb at action. That’s why I love The Three Musketeers so much.
It’s about four young men doing stupid and dangerous things, but it’s so
concerned with the doing. There are
great moments of action in La Reine
Margot but the real problem of the book is that it’s so concerned with slow
political back-biting that it just doesn’t have the same charm as Dumas’s other
works. On top of this, it makes the book
a real commitment. The characters shift
their motivations and alliances like most people change clothes and, when you’re
kind of in the mood to drift in and out of reading, it makes it really hard to
tell what’s going on.
The story itself is concerned with a period of history I
know nothing about; the reign of Charles IX and Catherine de Midici’s attempts
on the French throne. As far as I can
tell, and taking into account that this is a highly fictionalised account of
history; the de Medicis were bad. It
call kicks off with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, for which
Catherine de Medici was pretty much solely responsible and then the narrative
steers into the shadowy world of those trying to politically outmanoeuvre a de
Medici (a practically impossible feat) and overthrow her sons (far easier as
they had a tendency to die). The main
point of the fighting is the age old Catholics vs Protestants conflict. The crown in France does not do much to help
matters.
It’s real shame that I couldn’t get into this book. The titular character, Marguerite, is
great. As Catherine de Medici’s daughter
she is married off to Henry of Navarre to form a political alliance. Although the pair do not love one another,
and both have numerous affairs, they work together to make their situation bearable. Marguerite has all of Catherine’s good
qualities: the wit and charm and intelligence that the men of the family seem
to have missed out on, without her bad ones.
And I want her to just be in it more.
She’s relegated to so little because she is just a woman.
Again, I am not sure why I didn’t get on with this
book. I usually love this kind of thing;
political scheming and machinations that make the House of Commons and our
democratic system look like a Communist utopia.
Catherine de Medici was, historically, a pretty shitty person and that
should translate into a better character than it does. I like the idea of her ruling with an iron
fist from behind her sons’ successive thrones, holding the power with such subtlety
that even they are left asking, “Am I King?
Am I master?”
My next read is Legend
by David Gemmell.
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