After a long, long tour of duty frogbeastegg returns from the front; weary, battered, exhausted. There is a stain rather like blood down one side of her kimono, and a few of her hairpins are bent. The geisha wig itself is doing a very good impression of a defensive hedgehog; it will need to be severely combed back into respectable orderliness.
On reaching her table frogbeastegg knows at once something is wrong. She stands still, only her eyes moving, shrewdly assessing that tiny, tiny little difference. Finally she exclaims, “Gah!” and frantically starts checking over the teetering stacks of books. Each tome she pulls off the stack, examines briskly and puts to one side. One book she cradles to her chest, wailing most piteously, “The cover’s scuffed!!” She carefully lays this book in a separate pile to the others and keeps on searching, with a new urgency.
Quarter of an hour later she has finished sifting through the masses of books. The scuffed book has been joined by two others. Frogbeastegg has dumped her wig, and is sat at her table, cup of steaming tea in one hand, the other absently caressing the trio of books. A curious patron makes the mistake of asking her what is wrong; surely something dreadful must have happened. “Oh it has,” frogbeastegg assures him, “something terrible.” She points at the small, barely visible creases and dents in the covers of the three books, and says rather testily, “Just look at that! Some vandal has dropped my books, and damaged them! Just look at that! Ruined! Scarred! Destroyed!” The patron nervously begins to back away, hands held up, a anxious toothy grin fixed in place. Once he reaches what he judges to be a good distance he turns and runs for it. Frogbeastegg doesn’t notice for a few moments, too absorbed in her precious, damaged books.
The Fatal Crown, by Ellen Jones
This book is about the civil war between Stephan and Maude (also know as Matilda). Maude, the sole legitimate surviving child of king Henry I of England, was the designated successor. However on Henry’s death Stephan usurped the crown. This started a war which would last around 19 years, and would transform England from a prosperous, peaceful kingdom into a bankrupt ruin.
This brings me very neatly to the first of my issues with this book – the historical accuracy is dire, though the author claims she is writing a plausible version of history. Near the start of the book Maude is married to the Holy Roman Emperor two years later than in reality, and from there matters get no better. The book is based around an entirely improbable romance between Maude and Stephan, and the author twists the facts and events to fit this. Jones has Stephan usurping the throne in revenge for Maude rejecting his absurd offer to run away with him. She even goes so far as to make Stephan the father of Maude’s eldest son, the future king Henry II. He is born too early, and all the traits and resemblances which contemporaries found the same as his father (Geoffrey, count of Anjou, thank you very much!) are either quietly dropped or twisted to fit Stephan. For example the famous Angevin temper is stripped from Geoffrey’s character and transformed into the Norman temper, i.e. a trait from Stephan and Maude, not Geoffrey. Geoffrey himself becomes a placid, limp, pansyfied wuss; not exactly what his contemporaries had to say of him, even if he did make a famous fuss about a minor wound to his foot. Jones is using real people and real events, but not respecting them, instead using them as little more than pre-made events and characters for an unrelated story. In a historical novel that is, in my eyes, a very big crime. Jones also adds in some rather unbelievable ‘adventure’ type events, such as Maude being drugged and carried off to Normandy because she refused to marry Geoffrey of Anjou. The refusal and subsequent change of mind is historically sound, the kidnapping is not, and more than a little absurd to boot.
The other aspect of historical accuracy, the setting and detail, is perhaps a little better. At the end of the book Jones lists some of the sources she used to research; there are not many of them, and many of them are over fifty years old, one over a hundred years old, and not a single one was more recent than 1974. This book was published in 1991. As you might imagine this leads to plenty of errors, including many ideas, beliefs and theories which have now been proven to be wrong. If you have even a smidgen of knowledge of this time period the book varies from at best tolerable to at worst laughable. The errors go from tiny little things such as saying most noble women could not read or write (actually, literacy was higher amongst noblewomen than noblemen) to the rather large and consequentially ridiculous. I found myself chuckling when the eighteen year old Empress Maude came running into the Holy Roman Emperor’s throne room while he had guests, bouncing with glee because she had judged her second caught case. Sadly I was not laughing because it was a funny scene, but because that simply would not happen. If Maude had been five it may have been believable. She is supposed to be an empress, one who has been trained rigorously for a decade, dignified, intelligent, lived much of her life in a culture that was known at the time to be rather restrained, and (by the standards of the time) she is well into adulthood. The real Maude was so reserved and ‘German’ in manner her English subjects considered her foreign. In another notable gaff Maude is seen wandering about markets, accompanied by just one other person, shopping personally and haggling with merchants. Er, if she were a minor noble this would be alright, but the heir to the English throne? She also manages to speak to Stephan unchaperoned rather too often for it to be believable, and they seem to have little difficulty in sneaking away for the occasional tryst without anyone being any the wiser. The attitudes of the characters conform to the outdated views now cast aside by historians. The largest example of this is that the main opposition to Maude’s inheritance of the crown is because she is female, and they do not want a queen. This was a very Victorian view; it is generally accepted now that the problem was not with Maude being a woman, but with her being married to a hated Angevin, and with her being very domineering, undiplomatic and generally difficult to get along with. She alienated her supporters rather frequently.
In the midst of all this griping about accuracy I do have to say that Jones has managed to get some things right, and on those occasions where she avoids mistakes she does create a believable atmosphere.
While I am on the subject of the unbelievable, how about the rather silly fact both of Maude’s husbands are essentially impotent until she suddenly needs Geoffrey to erm, perform, so she can claim he is the father of her child, at which point he experiences no difficulties at all? It’s believable in the case of the aged emperor, but not in the case of the fifteen year old, famously rampant Geoffrey who is rather :cough: busy with other women throughout the book. Maude was famously beautiful, and in the book that has only been emphasised. Course, by the time Geoffrey finally gets to erm, show what he is made of, the Maude/Stephan romance is virtually over, and so he demonstrates a permanent recovery. Somehow I got the impression he would not have recovered if history didn’t require him to father two other sons with Maude. Oh why not? Let’s also toss in the fact Stephan’s wife loves him to bits, is completely devoted to him, and does all kinds of things on his behalf, but for reasons unexplained has nothing but distaste for the idea of sex with him. Stephan has had numerous affairs, but all conveniently lacking that special something, and not really mentioned at all once the adult Stephan sets eyes upon Maude. It feels rather like the author set things up so Maude and Stephan could play ‘true love’, despite circumstances forced on the story by history. This would be rather typical of the way reality has been twisted to serve the improbable love story.
As far as technique Jones is actually quite good, and this is perhaps the real pity. She has talent, and it has been wasted here. If she had either severed the already strained link with real history, or if she had done her research better and dropped the love story Jones could have produced a much better book. Her writing is generally crisp and clear, she describes characters and places well, her grammar and so on is very good, and generally she is very readable.
I felt as though the last half of the book was rushed, or the author was told she had to work within a strict page limit and thus did not have the space to tell the story she wanted. The author took around half of the 549 pages to get to the start of the civil war. This is not a bad thing; it gave the reader chance to watch Maude grow up, to get familiar with the characters and situation. I enjoyed the first half of the book far more than the second. Once the civil war starts events rush by, entire years passed over without a mention. Even the famous, decisive battle of Lincoln where Stephan was captured passes swiftly. The characters age suddenly, the political and military situation is poorly described, and everything just generally feels rushed and boring. Given another two hundred or so pages Jones could have completed the story in the same detail as she started. Perhaps she just lost interest in telling the story once the Stephan/Maude romance essentially ended.
If you want a decent fictional account of the civil war then go for Sharon Penman’s ‘When Christ and his Saints Slept’. That book is far truer to history, Penman has done her research well, and consequentially the book is far more believable. It also does not rush past the war itself.
I’m so glad this was a library book, and not one I brought! A bit of an example of how not to do historical fiction using real events and characters. The main lesson here is this:
DO YOUR RESEARCH AND DO IT PROPERLY!!
For those wondering, yes I really am that obsessive over my books. I keep all my books pristine, in brand new condition, no matter how many times I read them. Any damage, even a tiny bent corner on page 496, will set me mourning.
