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