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berenikeasteria 's review for:
The White Queen
by Philippa Gregory
Before I even began reading the novel, I noticed one or two problems. Though small, they're worth noting. Gregory includes a royal family tree at the front of the book, to demonstrate the Houses of York and Lancaster, but according to this tree Edmund Tudor was married to King Henry VI at some point. I've got to say I burst out laughing at this. I understand that it's a genuine mistake, but seriously? Didn't Philippa Gregory or an editor or someone catch this before the book went to press? Putting a family tree in the beginning of a book is kind of an important deal to get right - you put it in so that your readers could understand the character relationships in your book, so you want to make sure that the tree is accurate!
Getting into the book, at first it didn't seem that bad. The writing style felt somewhat different initially, and I reasonably enjoyed the imagined scenes of how Edward and Elizabeth came together. It was a bit fairytale romance, but I could look past that, and the stuff with the reeling in of the ring I could dismiss as superstitious custom. However, Philippa Gregory is quickly up to her old tricks again. Jacquetta's comeback to Edward's mother? Please. Talk about simplistic dialogue. What was up until that point a continuous coherent plot begins to jump about as necessity dictates; from September 1464 we jump to May 1465, then to Summer 1468 which is a chapter only lasting a little more than three pages, then suddenly from that we've jumped way ahead to Summer 1469. At one point we even jump ahead FIVE YEARS from 1478 to 1483! All the romance suddenly feels sucked out from Elizabeth and Edward's relationship and all they do is have the same old discussion about Edward having to ride off and leave her to put down another rebellion... My issue here is not the history (because Edward did have several rebellions to contend with), but Gregory skipping ahead in this manner, providing us only with a few short pages before skipping ahead again. I understand perfectly that there are fewer sources on what these people were doing than there were on the Tudors, but shouldn't a good writer be plausibly filling in the gaps and developing their characters rather than rushing ahead to get to the next big event? This writing feels hasty and rushed, and no wonder it feels like all Edward talks about is riding off to the next rebellion: Gregory is just covering the same ground over and over and cutting out huge chunks of what is happening in between.
Gregory sure does like her repetition too - we are endlessly told of how Elizabeth and her mother Jacquetta are, according to legend, descended from the mythical water goddess or spirit Melusina, and Elizabeth brings up that annoying dark locket more times than I've had hot dinners. As an example of the kind of interminable repetition; "These are gowns as good as I wore when I was queen. 'Good God, Elizabeth,' I say. 'Where do you get your gowns from? This is as fine as anything I had when I was Queen of England.' " The sheer anachronisms of the words Gregory puts into the mouths of her characters is hilarious. At one point Jacquetta calls George "an utter numpty". I had to stop reading in order to roar with laughter at that point. The word "numpty" didn't even enter the dictionary until 2001 and began life as a slang word in the 20th century. I even read at one point a character say "Oh my God!" I'm pretty sure that in the 15th century, what with the character who says it being a staunch Catholic and all, this would be considered blasphemy.
It's not just an anachronistic word here or there either. Sometimes the actual quality of the English that Gregory writes is below average. Take this example: "Perhaps to save all the family who named themselves Rivers in order to honour the water-goddess who was the founder of their family". This is horribly clunky and inelegant English. A more correct writing of that sentence would be; "Perhaps to save all the family who named themselves Rivers in order to honour the water-goddess who was their founder". An editor should have picked up on this kind of poor phrasing, and for that matter you would hope that the author themselves would write with enough quality and skill not to produce ugly, clunky sentences like that. Another really annoying linguistic feature in this book is that whenever Elizabeth refers to her sons by her first marriage, she calls them "my boy, Richard Grey" and "my son, Thomas Grey". Granted, Elizabeth had two sons named Richard, so I can understand why one might need to distinguish between them in writing, but why does she need to call Thomas by his full name? Elizabeth only had one son named Thomas. It's obvious that Philippa Gregory uses this clumsy phrasing of their full names because she thinks her readers are stupid and won't understand what's going on or who she's talking about, even if the situation and names have been explained several times at the start of the book. It's denigrating. There are other grammatical errors throughout the text, and at one point Elizabeth Woodville talks to her own daughter and refers to "your uncle, Thomas" - you'd think what with all the repetition of "my son, Thomas Grey" Gregory could get it straight that Thomas would be the half-brother of Princess Elizabeth, not her uncle.
Written in first person perspective from Elizabeth Woodville's point of view, and in the present tense, it becomes apparent about a third of the way into the book that Gregory has actually painted herself into a corner by doing this. Whenever events in the rebellions occur outside of Elizabeth's knowledge, she has no real way of writing it. This is the danger of writing first person instead of third person for a story which you know is going to have more scope than one person's experiences. One way she gets round this is through messengers, which felt acceptable and certainly the most plausible method, but she is forced to use that device so often that it quickly becomes repetitive. Another way she does it is by pandering to this mythologising of Elizabeth and Jacquetta, and having them dream it as part of their powers of witchcraft. The third and most annoying way is that she sometimes resorts to switching out to third person just to write battle scenes that Elizabeth was absent from. This switching over into third person, when the majority of the book is in first person, is immensely jarring, and reading those scenes it quickly becomes apparent how Gregory is awkwardly trying to find a way out of her fix.
I also didn't like the inclusion of genuine magical powers on the part of Jacquetta and Elizabeth Woodville in the novel. Instead of bringing to life the flesh and blood, flawed and subtle personalities of real people from history, it just turns them into glossed over fairytale figures. It's sensationalism - just like her inclusion of completely disproven slander about Anne Boleyn in "The Other Boleyn Girl" - there was no reason for its inclusion, it was just an attempt to make the story more salacious. Making Elizabeth and Jacquetta genuine witches in this novel does the real women no favours whatsoever, it merely panders to the kind of scandals that they had to suffer being gossiped about them. A few final words must be said about the novel's ending. It ends rather abruptly, however the princes in the Tower incident forms the climax of the tale. Clearly the curse is meant to be ironic, but the irony is thick and heavy, almost as if Gregory were nudging me repeatedly and winking at me and saying "Do you get it? Do you get it yet? Do you see what I've done there? Because we all know how THAT turns out, don't we?" Unfortunately what Philippa Gregory thinks is subtle foreshadowing in her novels is about as subtle as a ten foot neon sign. Also what she does is not really foreshadowing - it's hindsight. For once I'd like to see a character in a Philippa Gregory novel make a prediction or curse that does not happen later in history.
Overall, the book feels rushed and hasty with big chunks missing from the story, further marred by lack of thorough research (Nonsuch Palace, word and phrase anachronisms, the accusation of Edward's illegitimacy) and where research is done it is often altered even when it doesn't make sense in the plot to do so. The romance between Edward and Elizabeth starts off as fairytale sap and then quickly sputters out into a string of repetitive goodbyes. The text is blighted by poor English, grammatical errors, and internal mistakes such as Thomas Grey suddenly being called Princess Elizabeth's uncle instead of her half-brother and the family tree showing Edmund Tudor married to Henry VI. The interpretation of Jacquetta and Elizabeth and their family as witches does the real women no favours, painting them as fairy story characters and not real people, and turns the plot into a silly series of deus ex machinae whenever Elizabeth is in a tight spot, thus eliminating most of the sense of risk, danger and tension from the story. It's clear that Philippa Gregory has no understanding of either the times she is writing about or the real people who lived through them. She makes a bad choice by writing the book in present tense from the first person perspective of Elizabeth Woodville, and she struggles to get around this restriction when she has to convey events that were outside Elizabeth's experience. Ultimately "The White Queen" is far too narrow and personal in scope to convey the complexities and subtleties of historical events, reduced down to a popularity contest of personal relationships, with the wider picture woefully forgotten. Sharon Penman's The Sunne in Splendour is still the gold standard for the retelling of the reigns of Edward IV and Richard III, and "The White Queen" falls well short. Anyone wanting to read about this period in history should avoid this book, as there are so many better options out there.