THE WHITE QUEEN
Philippa Gregory
Touchstone
Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9781416563686
Civil wars are always confusing, and the Wars of the Roses, the gnarly period Philippa Gregory has picked for her latest series, is no exception. Actually, that’s the modern name for the conflict; at the time it was called the Cousins’ War, reflecting the fact that kinship relations didn’t fall neatly along party lines. Those who fought with the house of York (white rose) often had blood-ties to their Lancastrian opponents (red rose), giving new meaning to the phrase family feud. Not only that, but England and France weren’t yet distinct national entities. It’s all rather murky, so I was glad of the map and family tree printed up front (more detailed diagrams are available on Gregory’s ravishingly illustrated website, www.philippagregory.com).
I don’t mean to make THE WHITE QUEEN sound like hard historical labor. It’s not; it’s impassioned and absorbing and, despite some repetitious passages that an editor should have caught, beautifully written. You just have to get your bearings. The plot, actually, is fairly simple. Edward IV (York) meets and marries Elizabeth Woodville, a proud, sexy Lancastrian widow (there is a lot of switching of sides in this book). They have several children, but kings and their heirs don’t survive long in these troubled years, and often Elizabeth and her kids are holed up in one sanctuary or another while they wait for the latest battle to be resolved. Along the way, she and her high-born mother, Jacquetta --- descendants of Melusina, the water goddess, and thus gifted with second sight --- dabble in sorcery, casting spells to seduce men and make male babies, and calling down storms and curses on their enemies.
The novel is strongly marked by these two different aspects, the historical and the metaphysical. Its more realistic side retells the Cousins’ War from the vantage point not of the men who go into battle but the women who watch and suffer --- and often scheme behind the scenes. Elizabeth is a proto-feminist who, in response to Edward’s advances, says things like, “I am not a yard of ribbon. I am not a leg of ham. I am not for sale to anyone.” Under the tutelage of her mother, an expert in royal politics, as queen she buys rich marriages and titles for her family, moving people around like chess pieces. (One of the things I love about Gregory’s women is that they are never goody-goodies.)
Elizabeth isn’t heartless, though, and one of the strongest scenes in the book shows her witnessing a battle, close up, for the first time. She is appalled by the “ugly excitement” on the soldiers’ faces and their “wild vicious hunger more like animals than men.” She had glorified war, and now she feels like a fool: “I did not know that [it] was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as sticking a pig in the throat and leaving it to bleed to make the meat tender.” Feminists have often suggested that if women ruled the world, there’d be no such thing as war. Gregory would seem to agree.
However, Elizabeth and Jacquetta --- and, later, Elizabeth’s daughter and namesake --- fight in their own way, with water-based witchcraft instead of swords and axes. I must admit that this side of THE WHITE QUEEN often seemed silly and unnecessary to me, a bit of trickery that is at odds with the women’s actual power and assertiveness.
Gregory has employed supernatural themes in earlier books (notably THE WISE WOMAN, a seriously scary novel), and I suppose that pantheistic deities like Melusina felt more real and immediate to people in the credulous 1400s than they do today. Among other things, these mystical entities were metaphors for weather --- those natural phenomena that humans couldn’t (and still can’t) completely predict or master. And I think in the context of Gregory’s feminism, they also represent women’s secret side, the part unknown to their fathers, husbands, brothers (the legend of Melusina, interspersed with THE WHITE QUEEN’s main narrative, turns on the fact that she’s half fish, half woman).
Besides being a romance and a fantasy and a glimpse into the past, THE WHITE QUEEN addresses a persistent historical mystery: What really happened to Elizabeth Woodville’s two sons (Edward’s heirs, the famous “princes in the tower”)? Did Richard III, Edward’s brother, murder them, as Shakespeare’s play suggests? Historians now know that drama is not fact --- revisionist accounts of Richard’s life maintain that he was neither a hunchback nor a villain --- so the question remains. I won’t give away Gregory’s speculative scenario, but it’s intriguing.
A note to those who are already fans: Gregory has clearly designed this novel to link up with her Tudor series. Again, I don’t want to say too much about the denouement, but I assure you that it will be marvelously satisfying to anyone who’s been following her habit-forming novels about Henry VIII and his descendants. It is as if English history was an enormous jigsaw puzzle, and Gregory is laying down the landscape, piece by piece, so we can see how it all fits together. Pretty addictive.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
© Copyright 1996-2009, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
