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4.08 AVERAGE
4.08 AVERAGE
Love the idea of this but couldnt.get through it. Seems strange that the plot builds to these big moments and yet let's you down and almost skips over them.
Read on audio book- Jonathan keeble who has done great work so that's not the issue hear for me.
Read on audio book- Jonathan keeble who has done great work so that's not the issue hear for me.
I don't doubt the effort that went into this but I found it dense and tedious, and a challenge to stay focused with such a large number of characters. It is however a fascinating window into the time. Missing something in the flow of writing.
Very few books are as special to me as this one has become. Brilliant work from Mantel. A real review will follow soon.
There is the world and there is the shadow-play world; there is the world of freedom and illusion, and there is the real world
A Place of Greater Safety is a story of the French revolution as told through the hypocrites who enabled and then succumbed to it. How true is it? Well, it's unclear. Much like the divide between the salons where the Revolutionaries air their rhetoric and the streets where they have their effect, it's not a clean line. There are quotes from the writings of the three men whose lives form the core of the narrative- but there are idiosyncrasies, empathies, emotions that we could never have known. Much like at the trials that the Revolution becomes known for, it's plausible enough to be true for our purposes.
I'm impressed with how long Mantel keeps the shell around her heroes- the Revolution starts, and aside from the Fall of the Bastille, so much of it is told to our characters rather than shown. The crowning deaths of the King and Queen are obscured, alluded to. Even the death I was most interested in seeing come to pass (Robespierre's) is only described in a single sentence of the afterward. Our only real trips to the guillotine are when the machine finally comes for its architects- by then, even they are tired of the spectacle.
The story, like real life often does, hinges on small, subtle shifts in relationships- in assumptions made about people you are sure you know better than they know themselves. By the time the machine turns their way, it is too late- it has learned too well from its architects. My only wish was that we got to see a little of the end of the Revolution- Napoleon waits in the wings aside from a blink-and-you'll-ask-yourself-if-Bonaparte-is-spelled-that-way mention towards the end. Still, a masterpiece from the writer whose prose reminds me most of Charles Dickens in the denseness of ingenuity and pathos.
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Very well written, very interesting, but also very long.
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A terrifying read - Hilary Mantel captures the unbelievable moment when the world tips off its axis, and the impossible becomes mundane. Reading this in 2024, when populists are once again wielding people's latent anger, mistrust and desire for violent retribution felt almost suffocating at times.
A remarkable achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact it was for a long time an unseen debut novel that only saw the light of day thanks to the author mentioning it in an interview. Possibly overshadowed by the later Wolf Hall trilogy, it’s just as well researched, insightful and measured yet compelling as those books, with searing insight into human nature and historical context. Some do struggle with her style; that must be a real thing as many do refer to this. I can only say I find her books immersive and artful, hard to put down or forget.
Amazingly, Hilary Mantel wrote this massive tome very early in her career -- 25 years ago now. Yet you can already see the mastery and confidence of the person who would write [b:Wolf Hall|6101138|Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell, #1)|Hilary Mantel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1336576165s/6101138.jpg|6278354] and [b:Bring Up the Bodies|13393094|Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)|Hilary Mantel|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1437160769s/13393094.jpg|14512257]. Even then, she could do anything. The narrative is mostly chronological but bounces between sections in the first person, the third, script dialogues, omniscient narrator, internal monologue, newspaper articles, diaries, letters, even slyly addressing the reader directly from time to time.
This is not a narrative about what happened in the French Revolution. It's best if you know the basics of it, but actually it doesn't matter that much if you don't follow all of the course of events or understand the swirling factions. Don't be put off by the 8-page character list either. What matters is the internal lives of the three main characters, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins, and their friends and families. They've known each other since they were teenagers, and they become key figures in the chaos of the revolution. Mantel takes us inside the heads of three very different people the way she did later with Thomas Cromwell. The book may seem long and rambling, with scenes banal and less banal described in great detail, and yet somehow she keeps you fascinated. It took me weeks to read it, but that's because it's massive, not because I was bored.
The story as a whole is an object lesson in what happens when powerful people decide that the end justifies the means, when anyone whose opinion differs from yours is a danger to be eliminated. But Mantel's view from inside their heads also makes us see how these young men were overtaken by events, starting a process of which they lost control, then unable to see how to row back to their noble principles, now drowned in a sea of blood. Camille sees the light in the end, but all it does is assure his death -- the "place of greater safety" that gives Mantel her title.
Yes it's grim, but Mantel's black humour is always lurking.
This is not a narrative about what happened in the French Revolution. It's best if you know the basics of it, but actually it doesn't matter that much if you don't follow all of the course of events or understand the swirling factions. Don't be put off by the 8-page character list either. What matters is the internal lives of the three main characters, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins, and their friends and families. They've known each other since they were teenagers, and they become key figures in the chaos of the revolution. Mantel takes us inside the heads of three very different people the way she did later with Thomas Cromwell. The book may seem long and rambling, with scenes banal and less banal described in great detail, and yet somehow she keeps you fascinated. It took me weeks to read it, but that's because it's massive, not because I was bored.
The story as a whole is an object lesson in what happens when powerful people decide that the end justifies the means, when anyone whose opinion differs from yours is a danger to be eliminated. But Mantel's view from inside their heads also makes us see how these young men were overtaken by events, starting a process of which they lost control, then unable to see how to row back to their noble principles, now drowned in a sea of blood. Camille sees the light in the end, but all it does is assure his death -- the "place of greater safety" that gives Mantel her title.
Yes it's grim, but Mantel's black humour is always lurking.
The executioner. His overheads have gone up shockingly since the Terror began. He has seven men to pay out of his own wages, and soon he will be hiring up to a dozen carts a day. Before, he managed with two assistants and one cart. [...] At first, they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. Do the powers-that-be understand just how much blood comes out of even one decapitated person? The blood ruins everything, rots things away, especially his clothes.[...]
It's heavy work. If you get someone who's tried to do away with himself beforehand, he can be a mess, maybe collapsed through poison or loss of blood, and you can strain your back trying to drag him into position under the blade. Recently Citizen Fouquier insisted they guillotine a corpse, which everyone thought was a lot of unnecessary work.
Mantel maintains a slightly irritating distance from her subjects, and assumes a level of knowledge about the French Revolution that I don't have, but it was still a compelling, beautifully written book.
A Place of Greater Safety is a well written and entraining novel. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, and I can see myself buying it as a gift for a fan of historical fiction. Almost all of the characters are complicated and sympathetic.