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veronicafrance 's review for:
A Place of Greater Safety
by Hilary Mantel
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.