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aleffert 's review for:
A Place of Greater Safety
by Hilary Mantel
The French Revolution is bafflingly complicated, with its different periods, each with its own leaders, styles, approaches to murder. Meanwhile, France is at war with half of Europe.
This book is bafflingly complicated, 800 pages, jumping POVs, tenses, styles. It attempts to paint a portrait of three towering figures: Robespierre, Danton, and Camille Desmoulins. At this it succeeds. But it is incoherent as a book. All drawing rooms and bedchambers, more about who is sleeping with whom, than the price of bread or marching in the streets. The what, but much less often, the why. But in those drawing rooms and bedchambers Mantel sometimes sparkles.
And of course it ends with a lesson that chills to this day: once due process is gone, power is the only thing that matters. Once association is guilt, everyone is guilty by induction.
This book is bafflingly complicated, 800 pages, jumping POVs, tenses, styles. It attempts to paint a portrait of three towering figures: Robespierre, Danton, and Camille Desmoulins. At this it succeeds. But it is incoherent as a book. All drawing rooms and bedchambers, more about who is sleeping with whom, than the price of bread or marching in the streets. The what, but much less often, the why. But in those drawing rooms and bedchambers Mantel sometimes sparkles.
And of course it ends with a lesson that chills to this day: once due process is gone, power is the only thing that matters. Once association is guilt, everyone is guilty by induction.