Whenever you finish a book, post it here
04-14-2016, 01:59 AM
The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory. You have to travel down the odd street of assholes sometimes.
Let's get the obvious stuff out the way: there's a decent amount of Feminist Author Intentional Lecturing (FAIL, for short) in this thing, lots of (female) (and one homosexual) characters saying "O I IZ SUCH AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN, I HAVE TO SIT AROUND IN MY LACE AND PEARLS AND CRY ABOUT MY FATE IN LIFE DESPITE NOT HAVING TO EARN A LIVING WHILE THE BOYS GO OUT AND KILL EACH OTHER TO KEEP ME IN HOUSE AND HOME."
If you can ignore that, though, it's a pretty fast and easy read. 500-odd pages and I burned through it in maybe 3-4 days or so. And standing astride the feminist bullshit is a good dose of Red Pill. This is basically the story of Anne Boleyn's rise and fall, as told from the perspective of her sister, Mary Boleyn. It therefore features Henry VIII and (off to one side) his break with the Roman Church to form the Anglican Church (or, really, his assumption of control over the Church in England.)
In its way it's a potent (and unintentional) sermon against women gaining power by fucking their way to the top. Henry for all his seeming alpha characteristics (he fucks multiple women, including Mary Boleyn herself, and is, after all, a medieval king) is played endlessly by Anne. She strings him along for years. One can have some professional regard for both the tightness and relentlessness of her game: he didn't get to fuck her once before Henry's divorce had come through, and there were any number of alternative young, nubile ladies-in-waiting available in Henry's court. He basically tosses his first wife (and Queen), Catherine of Aragon, entirely aside for Anne, and for an encore more or less rips up the English Church in order to marry her. Part of it was driven by Henry's need for a male heir -- all bar one of Catherine's children died very young or were stillborn, and the one who survived was a girl, not a boy. England had only recently been put back together after the Wars of the Roses and Henry needed a legitimate son by his wife in order to prevent the succession being thrown into dispute again (he had fathered a number of bastards, but making them king was another matter entirely). Even so, Henry really, really, really wanted to fuck Anne and have a son with her, and eventually, he got to do the first.
But as said, it's an unintentional sermon against taking power, because Anne had to basically push a reigning Queen, royalty in her own right, off the throne and more or less take it by force. It had never been done before. She had to coerce Henry to make her his queen before she'd let him fuck her. Once she did that, though, she had set a precedent, and her position was forever unstable: Henry went on to keep fucking everything that moved (he'd had six wives and a lethal case of syphillis by the end of his life), and it didn't take long before Anne (and her brother, and several of their close friends) was beheaded for trumped-up (maybe) charges of adultery, witchcraft, and incest.
It's worth a read, believe it or not, if only because it delves convincingly into the motives and activities of everyone moving around in that time. It is historical fiction, meaning that it is at least partially a hypothesis, but it's not a bad one. The film with Scarlett Johansen, Natalie Portman and Eric Bana is not a patch on it.
Remissas, discite, vivet.
God save us from people who mean well. -storm