I picked up
Ruled
Britannia this weekend as it seems to have made its way on to many of
the short lists of
year’s best SF. It is
Harry Turtledove’s
latest, and unsurprisingly a novel of
“alternative history”.
We find ourselves transported to Shakespeare’s England, 1597, but one in which
the Spanish Armada has landed 10 years ago, bringing England forcibly back into
the Catholic fold. The English Inquisition is upon the land, and the twin
charges of treason and heresy has everyone stepping softly, and planning revolution. I’m about three
quarters of the way through the book, but I have few thoughts on it.
Turtledove is working with an idea which has potential. It is a pretty conceit; an idea whose boards have been
trod before,
but with enough new to make it interesting.
Unfortunately the final
results owe more to the gimmickry of
Shakespeare
in Love (the curtain rises
with Will working on Love’s Labours Won), then the powerful imagination
evidenced in Turtledove’s
Guns
of the South, or the lyric poetry of his
subject, the Bard, from whom he borrows liberally. And therein lies one of the chief problems. Ruled is populated with characters who speak unceasingly in verse.
To Prance upon the Stage
When your cast of characters numbers many Elizabethan (Isabellan?) players and
playwrights a certain amount of blank verse is expected. The scenes of the
players twitting each other in broad, raunchy iambic pentameter ring true, and
Turtledove’s early passages of Shakespeare and Marlowe fencing, each in his own words, sing.
(and remind you who was the gifted story teller and who the master of letters)
But quickly the device grows old, tiresome, and distracting. Where is
Shakespeare’s genius (a central dogma of Ruled) if you find his
best lines, unprompted, in the mouths of others?
Players never merely act, but must be
always strutting and fretting, and many pages groan under the weight of
overwrought, leaden dialog, whose sole existence is to frame a clever
borrowing or turn of phrase. This heavy handed paean feels more like an exercise
carried too far then true craft. Contrast it against
Pamela Dean whose
appropriations draw
yarn from the whole sweep of English literature to add depth and subtlety to
her weave.
Perchance to dream?
Turtledove also fails in the “truth is stranger then fiction” department. His
subjugated England, and its supposed alternative history hews closer to the
conventional history of the time then many scholars propose as having actually existed. Bloom and Michell have proposed a dozen alternatives all more strange. And more intriguing because they might be true. A writer who seeks to tell a
story of intrigue, plots, deception, and Shakespeare, but whom relegates Kit Marlowe to the role of pompous jackass, and Bacon to a bit part has thrown away much good material. So much you question the author’s wit, or, deadlier still for a career historical fabulist like Turtledove, his grasp on history.
After all, everyone knows Kit was a secret agent and assassin for the Crown (the
original Bond) who staged his own death in that tavern (with Ingram Frizer help) and later
published his own works under Shakespeare’s imprint. Or at least one could make
a reasoned argument to that effect. Next to such, Ruled’s
offerings seem inspid.
Other complaints
Ruled’s women are largely weak,
receptacles of desire, and sketchily drawn.
Cellis’ cunning woman is intriguing, but suffers from an embarrassment of
anachronisms.
Dogberry could well be my least favorite of Shakespeare’s
repertoire, and if Michael Keaton once played him
marginally well, the pale shade Turtledove has cast in Keaton’s stead to
animate Constable Strawberry proves unable to rise to the task, making the
Ruled’s later pages, in which the constable plays a significant
role, a chore.
Turtledove seems confused on the on the chronology of Shakespeare’s
plays, or he
has rearranged their order arbitrarily without justifying or bothering to
notify us of this. An example, the clown Will Kemp’s silence is purchased with
the promise of “Falstaff and a King”. Was not King Harry in Falstaff’s inaugural
play sufficient? (and if commissioning the revival of that rogue in dreadful
comedy of manners Merry Wives is not sufficient reason to dispose
Queen Elizabeth, I can think of none better)
A Trifle, But Still Fun
Misunderstand me not, I am enjoying the book. William Cecil (
de Vere’s guardian) commissioning
Shakespeare to write a play of
Boudica to incite the rabble is clever and
original, and much of the language is an old friend, and I’m glad to see it,
even if it comes in ruder garb then usual. I have some doubts of the efficacy
of Cecil’s scheme (though Coriolanus last summer showed me what a
Roman play could be!) but I’ve not finished the book yet,the pages turn
quickly, and I wish to know how it ends.
A host of furious fancies
Lastly, Tom O’ Bedlam
(a song who has an fey grip upon my fancy) makes an
unexpected, and welcome appearance at one point. Turtledove interprets
“knight[s] of ghosts
and shadows” as being knights of the cross-trade, and the Cecils, fallen
nobility moving though the criminal underworld; spinning webs, pulling strings,
and occasionally cutting a thread short are just such knights. This interpretation
pleases to me to no end.
update:
My thoughts on finishing the book, its weak ending, and surprising prologue copied from Recent Books: Lion’s Blood, More Britannia, Storm of Swords
Ruled Britannia
Ruled
Britannia
ended predictably I’m afraid. I hoped until the very end for
some surprise of substance, but it was not forthcoming.
The 3 page historical
end note on the other hand was fascinating. In it Turtledove talks about what would
have been required for Spain to have invaded England at that time, and where the
verse for the fictional Boudicca came from.
In his estimation (as the premier writer of alternatively historical wars) if the
Armada had gotten lucky enough to land the Spanish infantry would have trounced their English counterparts. No word on how they would have fared against the Scotts.
Yet as the premier writer of alternatively historical wars, I was puzzled by Boudicca, the play Turtledove pens for the Bard, as it is awfully good. In fact Turtledove borrowed much of it
from the play
Bonduca, written by Shakespeare contemporary John
Fletcher, and from Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine. This is both clever and cynical, for
the effect would have be utterly ruined if the reader had recognized the words.
(as was the case with his more obvious borrowing from Titus to account for the
bulk of his fictional King Phillip)
I wonder as the body of human literature grows with the
passing years if each literary age will be boiled down to a single known
author, the rest forgotten?
0
