The Other Boleyn Girl is Mary, younger sister of the famously ill-fated Anne. When we meet Mary, she is about 14, already married to nobleman William Carey via arranged marriage, welcoming her sister back to the English court after studying in France and catching the eye of King Henry VIII, who has grown frustrated with his aging and seemingly barren wife, Katherine of Aragon.
Mary's parents and Uncle Howard, ceaselessly driven by the motivation to increase their family's fortunes at any cost, basically force her into bed with the king, in hopes that she will conceive a male heir that he will recognize. Why they thought this is beyond me, as the king had already produced a bastard son from another affair and didn't give him any claims to the throne, but I digress. Mary plays along and has two children - a daughter she bizarrely names Catherine after the woman whose husband she's sleeping with, and a son named Henry. This happy news doesn't quite produce the expected results, since Mary and Henry are both technically married and Henry's eye has now traveled to the beautiful and seductive Anne.
Anne is far more worldly, smart and manipulative than Mary, and with the help of their brother George (and of Mary herself), Anne gets Henry to annul his marriage to Katherine and marry her instead. Along the way, she also steals and "adopts" Mary's son as insurance in case she also has problems producing a male heir.
Which she does. After giving birth to Princess Elizabeth, Anne gets a case of the miscarriages. Meanwhile, William Carey dies and new widow Mary dreams of spending all her days at the family estate with Catherine and Henry. Things get dicey for her when she falls in love with, secretly marries and gets impregnated by William Stafford, a commoner. Anne shuns her from the court, but not before separating her from her two older children, and Mary spends a few months in simple bliss on William's farm.
Things never stay simple and when Anne gets pregnant again, she calls Mary back to court. While this book is historical fiction, and there are definitely large portions that are simply not true, I don't think I'm ruining the ending for anyone when I say that Anne's pregnancy ends in miscarriage again, this time with a deformed fetus that apparently came not from Henry, but from her brother George (ewwww). Frustrated by her lack of male heir production and her strong and angry personality, and drawn to the sweet Jane Seymour, Henry turns on Anne with messy results.
I did not like this book.
Part of it is my fault. Not knowing anything about Mary Boleyn, I was curious and began researching her life shortly after starting the book. Which led me to this list of discrepancies between the book and real life. But I don't actually think that's the reason I didn't like the book. After all, I still like Braveheart even after I learned that pretty much the entire storyline is not true. I get people have to indulge in certain ways to make things entertaining and that's why they call it historical fiction.
No, I think the reason I so disliked this book was lack of complexity of any of the characters. Mary was loyal and good, even while she seduced a married king. Anne was selfish and cruel and manipulative. Uncle Howard was selfish and evil. Henry was immature and petulant. William Stafford was good and strong and honorable. The only real complex character was George, whose loyalty to his family (especially Anne) had him doing things that he knew were wrong and whose own love problems (he was gay and had fallen in love with Francis Weston, one of the other courtiers) tore at him.
Still, Mary's loyalty to Anne and even George was infuriating to me. There were no scenes or hints at some sort of warm past or closeness in their childhood; Anne treated her like garbage from Page 1 and Mary still did whatever she said. Part of it was out of loyalty to her own children - despite the fact that she had never received an ounce of parental love or devotion, Mary constantly wanted to be with her children and Anne often exploited that to get Mary to do what she wanted or to punish her - but she still did things and protected Anne when she didn't have to. WHY? Anne did nothing to deserve it.
I read this book because I had heard good things and because I do have a really bizarre interest in the Henry VIII era of English history. Ask me about any other time period and I have no idea, but I can list Henry's six wives and their ultimate ends, as well as the fates of his children. Learning more about Anne Boleyn and her family appealed to me, and I feel let down.
No comments:
Post a Comment