The Children's Book by AS Byatt

The Children's Book by AS Byatt is a vast, almost rambling novel about several families and multiple lives. It is the kind of novel where a review must concentrate on the context and setting and leave out any detail, for there is far too much of that to do any of it justice. The detail is so extensive that to include anything in particular would elevate it above its relevance in the overall scenario. In the end it all hangs together beautifully and the contrasting, yet similar lives of its characters serve to illustrate the social mores and concerns of its setting. Multiple characters live through more than twenty years of their lives and descriptions of specific events happen on every page. No review could do justice to any part of this veritable tangle of history and stories. And, more than that, it is the detail of these events and interrelationships that form the very currency of this work. What happens, and to whom is happens is important and should not be revealed.

But the setting and the context are important and, since these are part of a history we all share, then there is no reason not to set them out in some detail. It is the context, both cultural and political, that this shared history inhabits that informs what we understand when we read a novel as complex and profound as this.

We begin in the mid-eighteen-nineties. We are generally among the professional upper middle classes and bi-locate between London and Kent, with much more happening out of the city. But it is the then modern Victoria and Albert Museum where the tale begins with the discovery of a lad called Philip camping out in the already dusty cellars, where the already massive collection of objects that cannot be displayed are in storage. Philip seems to have talent, but then he is a working-class lad from the Potteries, so whatever his abilities he is unlikely to be taken seriously. He has run away from a poor home and the bowels of the museum have become a rough home. Until he is discovered. Luckily, he is embraced by people who would like to help.

Many families inhabit this tale, but crucially it is a woman called Olive who repeatedly takes centre stage. She is a writer and regularly invents stories for her children. Ostensibly, these are the children's stories of the title but, as the book progresses, we realise that the meat of the novel is the real-life stories that the young people in this assemblage of families enact. As ever, reality proves to be far more immediate and unpredictable than imagination, which tends to resort to received worlds that can only exist in an abstract or ideal form or reconstruct the real thing via fantasy. And it is fantasy that is so often used to obscure the raw and often inadmissible truth of real lives.

When Olive writes these stories, her imagined worlds fit the fashions of the time. And in the 1890s there is much of human life that is only ever discussed euphemistically, despite its being lived in the flesh. Consequences are all around but admitting their existence in any explicit way is rarely possible. They exist only in allusion, even when reality pokes its nose into the bubble. This particular late Victorian world is that of a liberal middle class, gently socialist of the Fabian variety, but also imbued with the conservatism of their social class and their upbringing. One really does not want to maltreat the lower classes, but really one does get such little opportunity to demonstrate one's true values. One is conscious, of course, of the obvious difference in standards of dress, with our polite society ever conscious of material, colour, accessory, decoration and ensemble. And, of course, it's never dirty... but one must not judge. One must reform.

But this is also a world where women have become hungry for emancipation. At the start of this shared history that spans over twenty years, there are murmurings of desired independence, imaginings of opportunity, dreams of fulfillment outside the home, the bed and the cradle. The link between the latter two would only be made in the imagination, of course. Except in reality, which only rarely obtrudes into discourse, there are skeletons in cupboards, past excesses that have been denied, encounters that perhaps have been intimated only in the imagination. But these people are not prepared for the emotions they feel, nor the natural drives that overtake them. They succumb, knowing they should not, and then invent fiction and euphemism to explain away the reality that just occasionally arrests them.

A greater reality is about to absorb them all, however. By the end of The Children's Story, there have been suffragettes and suffragists, protest, sabotage, imprisonment and death, all in furtherance of a cause soon to be won. Ironically, it was perhaps World War One, which also grinds to its grim conclusion before the end the novel, that brings so much death to the generation of the children at the start of the book, that guarantees these women will receive their emancipation, if only to fill a labor shortage.

The majority of The Children's Book describes what might be termed a family saga involving multiple families either side of an Anglo-German relationship. The book concerns itself with identity, gender politics and roles, denied sexuality and eventually passionate reality. There are helpings of Fabian socialism, arts and crafts and little touches of class difference. There is always sexual repression married to moments of excess, with its physical consequences, both social and personal. These are characters who really do populate the story, and thus make the story in their own terms. None of these people act out events just so that they can be listed in the book's experience.

But at the same time, these people remain distant. They never really let out their feelings, except when they overstate them. Thus, they are of the era that made them. and we become convinced of their reality, their credibility and their dilemmas.

The Children's Book is perhaps a little difficult to start. It introduces many characters and settings in its early chapters. But we do get to know these people and the process is both gradual and convincing. By the end of the work, beyond the end of World War One, their lives have been transformed, though probably not in any way that their safe attitudes at the start might have imagined. The Children's Book is not a historical novel. It is not a family saga. It is not a love story or a tragedy. It aspires to no genre. Neither, it must be stressed, is it general fiction, whatever that might be. It is a novel that takes its reader into a different time, a different environment and a different set of social values. And a truly great novel, because, by the end, we not only feel we have visited different places, but also we have lived in them.  

The Naples Riviera by Herbert M Vaughan

The Naples Riviera by Herbert M Vaughan is a travel book published in 1908. I read it recently during a trip to Naples, itself. When using old guide books in contemporary trips, it can happen that the traveler finds a must-see site has been demolished in the intervening years, but nowadays a cursory check via a search engine can avoid such embarrassment. But what can be gleaned from reading what are now historical accounts of travel is a sense of perspective that is almost always missing from much tourist literature. Yes, the historical fact is always available, but its interpretation is always a variable, and it is this variability that immediately enriches an experience of travel.

Vaughan describes Naples, Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri, Ischia and the nearby bays as seen at the start of the twentieth century. His account indicates that these descriptions were contemporary, but also that they not being experienced for the first time. This is clearly an experienced traveler. It is interesting to note that he regularly advises that certain areas have become overpopulated with foreigners, or regularly crowded with tourists, or more likely to serve an English Sunday lunch than any local speciality. Gone, perhaps, are the barefoot luggage carriers who are generally women and who apparently queue up near the ferry hoping to earn a living by carrying tourists’ suitcases up the hill on their heads. Gone also, perhaps, are the traditional dances, such as the tarantella, that Vaughan claims the locals strike up spontaneously at any time of day and in almost any place.

A surprising observation comes early in the text, when the author refers to the city of Naples, itself, as having been largely rebuilt, and thus containing predominantly modern buildings. The author immediately reveals his preference for a particular period of the city’s history, a preference that looks down on the baroque modernization of Gothic spaces, perhaps questioning even that the Renaissance should ever have descended into mannerism.

There is mild surprise when the author lists the number of places in the Campania region where malaria is either still endemic or was endemic until just before the account was written. Vaughan then discusses the possible causes of the disease. A modern reader, when confronted with the apparent contradictions of contemporary mores, is perhaps gently surprised. When confronted with the author’s incredulity at the idea of malaria being spread by mosquitoes, one approaches the state of being flabbergasted. But the modern search engine can again come into its own to remind the contemporary traveler that it was less than a decade before the writing of Vaughan’s book that the causational link had been confirmed. One lives and one learns.

Sitting in the narrow and sometimes hectic overcrowding of the matrix of the Spanish quarter near Via Toledo, the contemporary traveler is often confronted with the rasping noise and the odour of unburnt two-stroke as motorbikes speed past on what seemed to be collision courses, both with one another and pedestrians alike. The largely unhelmeted riders remind one of the fact that Naples was a lucrative market for diagonally striped T-shirts when the wearing of seat belts in cars became compulsory. One is also minded to speculate what the experience of Vaughan in the streets might have been without the noise of the internal combustion engine and the smell of unburnt fuel. Vaughan of course reminds us that before two wheels there were four legs and that these modes of transport used to leave different evidence of their passing, which also had effects on the nose.

When Vaughan visits Pompeii and Herculaneum, his descriptions are lyrical and vivid. But again the contemporary traveler realizes that it that the experience of these places in the early twentieth century was significantly much less than it is now, since much of the excavation and archaeological work has been done in the intervening century. Anyone who, like Vaughan, wants to contemplate what life might have been like in these ancient Roman towns with their single room shops and narrow streets need only pause for a while in Naples old town or in the Spanish quarter, where, apart from the motorbikes, life probably looks pretty similar to what might have been transacted along those ancient streets. From a distance the city even looks red and yellow, the same colors the decorated most of the dwellings in the two ruined cities.

Vaughan’s description of Naples Riviera comes across as surprisingly modern. It confirms that whenever and wherever we travel it is the experience that matters, the here and now, and crucially how that changes us, rather than confirms what we expected or anticipated when we decided to go there. And so it is both refreshing and enlightening to share another visitor’s insight from a different time as we explore a new any new experience of travel.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson seems to explore the identity conferred on an individual via family. "Seems to" is important here, because what exactly might constitute family for Gretel, the novel's principal character, is always a negotiable point. For many of us, the concept of family can be clearly defined. Its reality is often identifiable, possibly supportive, even dependable. But for others a family can be a site of struggle, a source of conflict, an indefinable and disquieting lack of trust. In either of these extremes, or indeed anywhere else on the spectrum that links them, a child is his or her own individual, an individual that can react against or absorb into whatever form a family might take. Equally, that individual can adopt the family norms, be they for eventual good or ill. Everything Under examines some of these possibilities from Gretel's point of view, Gretel the daughter of a mother she increasingly seems not to know and has not met for many years.

Gretel seems to live a simple, dedicated and ordered life, with perhaps more than an element of self-imposed isolation. She is a lexicographer, examining the accuracy and scope of dictionary entries. Words thus matter to her. They are her bread and butter. Though she has not seen her mother since she was sixteen, she still has vivid memories of words they shared, words her mother invented to label things otherwise indescribable. As an adult, Gretel finds her world turned upside down by the reappearance of a woman she probably only ever partially knew, but whose own identity has now been transformed by age. Communication is hit and miss, sometimes lucid, sometimes mythical, sometimes disconnected. Gretel, however, decides to relive her past via the family life she can either remember or reconstruct, reliably or otherwise via conversation and reflection with her mother.

And that life was indeed somewhat unconventional. She and her mother lived on a boat that was moored on a river. The waters were, it seems, always murky. Gretel never really knew her father, and one of the areas she tries to uncover via her partial engagement with her mother is nothing less than the truth about her own beginnings. The water on which the family boat floated stayed murky throughout Gretel's childhood, and, it seems, has not cleared since then.

Complicating the scene is the fact that she and her mother used to communicate via code words, sounds they themselves invented to describe the unknowns, the lurking dangers or merely the otherwise unspeakable things that can surface to threaten these lives lived in a microcosm of their own invention. There is apparently much to uncover, and not all of it is accessible. And when this private language, these codes for the unmentionable, invade either a mother's or a daughter's memory, they are used to hide something difficult, to obfuscate, as if to ensure their meaning remains unknown, unacknowledged.

Characters alternate between the present and memories of a limited family life on their moored boat. There are demons to confront and assumptions to deconstruct. The water, if anything, becomes murkier when stirred. And if there is a criticism of this forensic reconstruction of a shared but only partially remembered past, then it lies in its tendency to over-complicate. It is perhaps minor point, but one might have expected Gretel, with her professional desire for accuracy in everything to do with words, not to tolerate such obfuscation.

Mother and daughter's invented vocabulary seems, however, to extend to only a few words. This is hardly the "language" we are told they shared. The words reappear in different contexts to indicate apparently different things. Unpicking how these labels have been applied to their shared experience forms a significant element of plot. But again, though much is made of these few words, they hardly constitute the "invented language" of the book's preamble.

Everything Under thus evolves into a complex, complicated and inevitably confused uncovering of this relationship between mother and daughter. Truths are revealed and unconsciously absorbed detail is newly remembered to add context. Throughout, however, we feel that, in essence, things were probably a little simpler than each character's desire to speculate might allow. In some ways this is the book's strength, since Everything Under is a tangle of memories, a tangle of relationships and possibly an undergrowth of old stems that even the participants have neglected to prune.

Everything Under is a challenging read around what is essentially a simple idea. But, when reality finally knocks on the door and these characters find they must own up to the detail of their family life, there are revelations and surprises which, paradoxically, change nothing. Perhaps many families are like that.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

Reviewing books that one has not enjoyed is a pointless activity. Better just to put them on the shelf and forget them. Perhaps a second exposure, some years hence, might reveal what first impressions missed. Likes and dislikes, in any case, are wholly subjective, usually identifying something internal to the reviewer: only rarely do they relate to anything of substance in the object of the review. The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry thus presents a problem. The book came with the strongest of recommendations alongside published reviews that heaped praise. And the book has many positive qualities. It is set in Victorian England and in several ways, it is highly evocative. There is a formality of style, a definite floridity in his language. These people exude politeness and decorum. They even write letters to one another, letters that are reproduced in full between the chapters that bi-locate between London and the Essex coast.

The scenario involves Cora, a recently widowed Londoner, her companion Martha and a child Francis, who, we are told, has significant problems with behaviour. The loss of a husband is felt deeply, and a sojourn by the sea, the Blackwater estuary in Essex being the place chosen, is prescribed. In this small town there are people who live from the sea, people who do rural things, and a vicar, plus his wife and some surviving children. The place also has a secret, though apparently not so secret, myth of a great sea creature, a sea serpent or winged dragon that appears irregularly to wreak havoc on its victims. And it is evidence of this beast that forms the prelude to the tale, evidence that is quietly forgotten for several chapters.

The Essex Serpent also presents aspects of Victorian life as substance in its story. There is disease, with early death, infant mortality and consumption, their combination making a point about the fragility of life. There is the barbarity, by today's standards, of medical treatment. There is violence on the streets of London and severe punishment for those who transgress the law. There is destitution and homelessness, though perhaps not in the direct experience of these characters, but manifest in their enlightened attitudes towards charity. And, within these horizons, relationships develop, characters ail, people disappear in mysterious circumstances and, throughout, there is the expectant foreboding that the Essex serpent casts over anything that cannot be fully explained. One is never in any doubt, however, that everything will eventually be explained.

So where, given the start of this review, are the problems? Let's start at the beginning. Before we meet any of the characters, we are presented with an episode that suggests the book will be primarily concerned with the monster the locals believe inhabits the waters of their Essex estuary. But, given that the power of the serpent's presence is used throughout the text more to signify a threat and create tension than make actual appearance, then this introduction is misplaced.

Secondly, too often the characters appear only when they are needed to drive a plot. The much-discussed behavior problems of the boy Francis hardly seem to figure in his mother's consciousness until the plot requires his action. Then, having exhibited no particular unpredictability thus far, he conveniently delivers when required.

Thirdly, the letters that these characters write to one another seem to be included as plot devices rather than as intended communication. They do not appear, despite the different signatures, to be written in different styles. They contain little small talk and thus do not seem to be letters at all.

Fourth, it appears that these characters are in fact modern people with modern sensibilities, cast in an era where they can highlight cultural and attitudinal differences that might surprise the reader. But the characters, themselves, hardly reflect the assumptions they would be expected to espouse.   No-one is racist, there is no antisemitism and the poor tend to be judged deservingly. These people remark on things about the society that, if they had contemporary Victorian sympathies, they would hardly notice

Fifth, and possibly I am wrong here, there seem to be some factual errors in the book. On a couple of occasions, these people, who give such obvious import to flowers, trees, vegetation and wildlife, make clear errors about what they have seen. At one point a character muses on something they simply cannot have experienced, though the fault here lies in technology, not nature. I could back up these assertions with the detail, but I have no desire to undermine the experience of potential readers of a book with details that some other reader might not notice or choose to ignore. For me, personally, these obvious errors undermined the solidity of the scenario and rendered the characters less than credible.

So for me, this was a very, very difficult read. I did finish the book. It had some things to offer. Please read it and make up your own mind.

Costa Blanca Arts Update - Spanish Brass and Zélia Rocha

There has not been much opportunity to review arts events of late. I am sure I don’t have to explain why. But over the last few weeks there have been attempts to ease the restrictions of earlier in the year and a number of venues have offered events, albeit with audiences wearing masks and seated according to ongoing rules of social distancing. This restricted the recent annual film festival in L’Alfas del Pi to exclude usual venues such as the wonderfully independent Cinema Roma. The festival did happen however, using the spaces provided by Casa Cultura and outside paved areas.

One venue where social distancing is rarely an issue is the Klein-Schreuder sculpture garden. The current exhibition features works by Zélia Rocha, assemblies of iron and steel, largely reimagined engine components and re-created scrap. The forms represented are largely literal, but the construction is utterly abstract. Part of the joy is pausing before each work to identify what each component used to do during its working life and then reflect on how this contrasts with its current setting. The garden’s opening times are on its website.

And then last night, Altea hosted the second of its series of concerts Música a Boqueta Nit, in the outdoor auditorium at la Plaça de l’Aigua, a venue that again is easily to socially distance. New rules, new ages, need new compound verbs, it seems.

The group Spanish Brass, a brass quintet described by no less than Christian Lindburg as one of the best in the world, presented its program and they played in all for about ninety minutes without an interval. In the open air, even a brass quintet needs to be amplified, but a group such as Spanish Brass are used to the challenge and the sound proved more than acceptable to even the most discriminating ear. Amplified, of course, it lacked the character of reverberation, but outdoors there is none of that anyway.

The program was varied and, for this outdoor summer evening, largely light, but expertly delivered. It included part of an orchestral suite by Johan Sebastian Bach, Oblivion and Libertango by Astor Piazzolla, and a medley of songs made famous by Edith Piaf. The last work was apt, since on the way to the concert, it seemed that about half of the cars in Altea had arrived from France.

Introductions to the music hereabouts are almost always delivered in a mixture of languages, and last night Spanish Brass chose three, English, Castellano and Valenciano, so though the French missed out on the words, they made up lost ground in the music.

Personally, the high point of the evening was the concerto for wind quintet by Salvador Brotons. The composer is a teacher of brass instruments in Barcelona’s conservatory and this piece was commissioned from him by Spanish Brass for the 2014 Alzira festival. It may not be common knowledge outside Spain that this eastern part of the country is known for the extent and quality of its bands. These are not the brass bands that used to be so prevalent in the north of England before the community and culture that spawned them was excised. These have the character of a symphonic band, with a mix of brass and woodwinds, mouthpieces and reeds that often march through towns accompanied by a set of timpani on wheels. The overall standard of musicality in these groups, at least one in every town, no matter what size, is so high that they can and often do play rich and varied material.

As a result, there exists a corpus of composers for band throughout Catalunya and Valencia who attempt far more than pop cliché. And so to the Brass Quintet Concerto of Salvador Brotons. The first movement is rhythmically challenging, with its complex and broken, but always punchy lines, a second movement that reminds of Miles Davis and Gil Evans, and the finale that impresses via its neoclassicism and Hindemith-like astringency.

It is refreshing to hear real music performed again. It’s ability to surprise via the new and genuinely original is unique, and the rootedness of this new experience in everything that has gone before has to be heard to be understood, or appreciated, in that essential order.

The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk

Simplicity is a very complex concept. ‘Keep it simple’ is good advice, but not if its result is a dumbing down of content or a dilution of ideas towards the patronizingly inane. Simplicity, when it indicates an elegant and succinct portrayal of otherwise complex material, is what writers often seek, but rarely achieve. For some truly great artists the quality is achieved apparently without effort. This is the quality and the power of illusion.

An impressive example of this complexity of the apparently simple can be found in The Red Haired Woman by Orhan Pamuk. So much fiction takes the form of a biography that examples need not be listed. These life stories take many forms, from chronological sequence to end-of-life recollection, from jumbled memories to self-analysis. Very few would follow the highly original form of Orhan Pamuk’s novel and, crucially, the reader of this book will not be aware of its experimental originality until the end, perhaps even some time after finishing the book.

The Red Haired Woman is in the three distinct parts. The novel’s principal character is called Cem, though the narrative is well developed before we are aware of any name. In the first part, Cem is still at school. His impoverished family cannot raise the cash to enable the lad to attend a crammer to assist his studies, so he takes a holiday job labouring for a well digger. We are aware, though never explicitly, that there are complexities in these familial relationships. We are in Istanbul, where we habitually find Orhan Pamuk, but thirty years ago when the city had not sprawled to its current extent and perhaps where certain things were not discussed openly.

Mahmut, master of his trade, is the well digger. He and his two helpers begin to work on sloping ground in Őngőren which, at the time, is a sleepy little place beyond the city limits, where everyone knows everyone else's business and where modernization is just on the horizon. The well diggers go about their task during the day and retire to a bar in town most evenings. There is a theatre group in the town, and one of its members is a thirty-something woman with red hair. Cem becomes obsessed with her beauty and, as often is the case in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction, the sensation becomes all-consuming for this young and impressionable man. Stubbornly, the well excavation does not yield its goal and Cem extends his stay in Őngőren. Perhaps predictably, encounters with the red-haired woman do much to educate the young man. Eventually the labourer leaves the project in strange circumstances before it is finished to return home to Istanbul, leaving behind in Őngőren things that will continue to haunt him.

In part two of The Red Head Woman, we meet Cem again, but now he is an adult, university trained - so the crammer the labouring paid for did at least some good - and on the way to becoming a rich property developer, a significant but perhaps not major force in Istanbul’s modernisation. He is aware of much that he left behind in Őngőren, since the summer of well digging has left many indelible memories. These are brought into sharp focus when a contract to redevelop parts of the area comes across his desk and Cem decides to pursue the project. He thus needs to re-visit to the area and re-tread the only partially recognizable paths he trod during that personally influential summer some three decades previously. Some of the characters he knew those years ago are still around. Some of the issues that motivated dissent are still in focus.

Part three of the book is written after Cem's involvement with Őngőren has concluded. It is in this section that we hear a different perspective on Cem’s life and to reveal its detail in a review would devalue the impact of the book. Suffice it to say that from this different perspective, Cem's actions and memories take on a wholly different character. We knew all along that there was potential for consequences, but Cem never thought to find out what might have happened. But reality catches up, and resentment grows when it is ignored. All experience is particular, and we must all be aware that individual perspectives are nothing more than that, individual. It is the consequences that are shared.

But Orhan Pamuk’s The Red Haired Woman is much more than an individual fictional life. The well diggers, visiting the bar in Őngőren, chat about many things. Repeatedly, two stories are examined from different viewpoints. Oedipus, a man condemned to murder his father and marry his mother, is one. A perspective the well diggers explore is that Oedipus is not aware of the curse that directs his life, and that even when he consciously tries to avoid it shackles, the power of fate further condemns him to its confines. The second story, from the Shahmaneh, features Sohrab and Rostam. Almost counterbalancing Oedipus, this story has a father kill his son. And it is these themes, predetermination, fate, the paternal, maternal and filial, and then eventually powerlessness that form an intellectual backbone in the work. Cem the property developer is set to modernize the place that did so much to influence his personality, his outlook on life and his future. But the place will reassert itself in his life in a different, wholly unpredicted way that Cem, himself, created, but can neither influence nor control. The patricide and the filicide of the stories that obsessed Cem in his youth eventually fight it out in this brilliant book.

The Red Haired Woman, this short, accessible and apparently simple novel thus develops intellectual and philosophical dimensions, blended with its constant undercurrent of political identity and economic change. Only at the end does the reader become fully aware of the complexity of its themes, and how expertly Orhan Pamuk blends these apparently disparate ideas into a biographical whole called Cem, the principal character through which we experience an entire view of the world. And yet the reading of this book, start to finish, is always simple. The style is transparent and the reality is almost tangible. It is both personal and general, mundane and ontological, reassuringly simple and yet emotionally tangled and challenging. It is a perfect example of how simplicity is it the heart of the complex. Or was that the other way around?

Elizabeth – The Forgotten Years by John Guy

Myths are best served exploded, otherwise they can over-inflate and thus hide the substance of any dish. And if that dish be the national consciousness or identity of a nation, then such over-egging must be avoided, lest it become the over-elaborated norm.

In recent times the Tudors have become entertainment currency, and not only in British media. From television series to historical novels to feature films, we have seen a plethora of offerings, mainly stories of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, it has to be said. These often degenerate into costume dramas or whodunits of political intrigue, where accuracy is smoothed out of the history to create the kind of simplistic cliché of plot that mass markets are deemed to demand. “Based on a true story”, that overworked and internally contradictory byline, is now so overworked that it would be better omitted. “Fabricated around historical names” would be better. And though there is nothing wrong with fiction, since it often allows interpretations that challenge received wisdom, there are real difficulties when that fiction is transferred into myth whose acceptance becomes so widespread that it may not be challenged. It could be argued that connotations associated with terms such as Good Queen Bess, Golden Age or even simply Elizabethan are in danger of relying more on fiction than fact. Or perhaps these are nostalgic labels for contemporary ideal states that are thought to be lacking in our own times.

And so what an absolute delight it is to come upon a book such as Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years by John Guy. This is a book that really is based on true stories, since this academic historian of Clare College, Cambridge references and describes any sources that the reader may need to back up any point. Timescales are not stretched, statement is supported by facts and mystery is only allowed to obscure fact when evidence does not exist.

The forgotten years of John Guy’s title refer to the latter part of Elizabeth's reign. The earlier years, before the Armada in 1588 are those that form the backdrop for most of the fictions, with their multiple plots, proposals, match-makings and conspiracies. These later years were characterized by war, economic difficulties and political intrigue. They were perhaps dominated by considerations of succession, since Elizabeth, of course, had no heir. It is worth noting here, however, that John Guy, by virtue of a discursive style that deals with issues rather than a mixture of events arranged chronologically, does offer as context much background material relating to the years before 1588. This picture that is purportedly a selective encounter with the later years of Elizabeth's reign thus contains much rounded and detailed description of her entire reign.

John Guy states several assumptions that must guide our understanding of the period. In the sixteenth century, he says, status did not trump gender. Elizabeth was a woman, and that meant that many of the males at court had little or no respect for her apart from their recognition of her birthright. And, because her mother was Anne Boleyn, whom her father married after his denied divorce, even that was questioned by many, especially those of the old faith, who would also have wanted to do more than merely undermine this Protestant queen. The author, incidentally, is not implying that gender issues are or were different in other centuries. As a professional historian, he is simply defining the scope of relevance that is to be ascribed to his comment. Secondly, because Elizabeth was a single woman, the issue of succession had to dominate her reign. In the earlier years this meant various scrambles to find her a husband in the hope that a male heir might materialize. But later on, in the period that John Guy's book covers, Elizabeth was too old to bear children anyway. Discussion on succession, therefore, shifted from matchmaking into more strategic and political territory.

In Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years, the queen is portrayed as a fundamentally medieval monarch. She saw herself as descended from God, the assured kin of all others who shared this enthroned proximity to the Almighty. Hence, she could not bring herself to sign the death warrant for Mary Queen of Scots, believing that a decision to kill a royal by anyone would legitimize the practice, and who then might be next to get it in the neck? And since this by definition was a direct attack on God, it also carried damnation as a consequence. Hence Elizabeth's duplicity in letting it be known she wanted Mary disposed of whilst at the same time denying any responsibility for the act, thus requiring the person who enacted her wishes to be hauled up for treason. These medieval royals were above reason, it seems, as well as above the law. And messengers, it seems, have always been fair game.

This unwillingness to sign a death warrant was not a weakness that affected Elizabeth very often. It seems that the mere whiff of a plot or conspiracy quickly resulted in all smells being masked by the odor of fresh ink forming her signature on an invitation to the Tower. John Guy’s book regularly takes us to the gallows with these condemned people - usually men, of course - and offers detail of their fate. A particularly memorable sentence, specifically suggested by the queen, had one condemned man hanged for just one swing of the rope, so he could then be cut down and, still alive and still conscious, witness his own guts and beating heart being placed on the ground beside him. In an age that still believed in the resurrection of the mortal body, these treasonous felons had to be dismembered and their parts separated to ensure they would never have their souls saved. It may have been God’s will, but it certainly was that of His reigning representative on earth.

This Good Queen Bess, incidentally, was in the habit of handing down similar fates quite regularly. She also refused to pay salaries to soldiers and sailors who fought for her, dressed herself in finery while her war wounded received no assistance or pension and were forced to sleep rough. She turned two blind eyes to disease and epidemic that ravaged her forces and population. Elizabeth the patriotic hero also and perhaps duplicitously sued for peace with Spain, offering Philip II near surrender terms if she and he could agree to carve up the economic interests between them.

She handed out monopolies to her courtiers and lobbyists in exchange for a cut of the earnings. A real strength of John Guy’s book is the insistence on translating Elizabethan era values into present day terms. The resulting multiplication by a thousand brings into sharp focus the extent to which national finances were carved up by elites. While parsimonious when others were due to receive, Elizabeth for herself demanded only the finest and most expensive treatment. It was, after all, her Right.

Elizabeth also countenanced an English economy that raised theft on the high seas to a strategic goal. And her courtiers treated the expeditions as capitalist enterprises, with ministers and the like taking shares in the ventures in exchange for a share of the swag. And much of this would be stolen before it was declared or as it was being landed by handlers or mere thieves who clearly learned their morals and behavior from the so-called betters. The market was free, apparently, but those who operated it were always at risk of incarceration.

Thus, Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years will be a complete eye-opener for anyone who has absorbed popular culture’s portrayal of this age. John Guy’s book identifies the very human traits displayed by this Godly queen and posits them absurdly alongside the attitude of her contemporaries that she was a mere worthless woman.

There are not many figures in John Guy’s wonderful book who come out unscathed, either in reputation or body. Neither does he set out to destroy anyone’s reputation. As an historian, he presents evidence, assesses it and then offers an informed and balanced opinion. This, however, is healthy, for in the current climate populism is too often allowed to merge its own version of history into its message. It does so to achieve some control of a contemporary agenda via the creation of myth, and Tudor melodramas are not exceptions to this rule. Elizabeth - The Forgotten Years demands we remember our real past accurately in all its folly, and in so doing explode many dangerous myths.