Much Madness is Divinest Sense

I’ve just finished Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus. Renaissance Italy is such fascinating subject matter that I wonder I’ve not read much about it before. I absolutely devour any history programs about the Medici and the Borgias. One of my colleagues teaches a class entitled “Dante and the Medieval World.” Yes, in a high school — isn’t that cool? Anyway, I thought of her often as I read, because Dante is frequently alluded to in this novel.

The novel begins in 1490s Florence, just as Lorenzo de’ Medici dies and the city comes under the control of Savonarola. To Alessandra Cecchi, the main character, it is a frightening time, as the rebirth and flowering of the Renaissance seems perilously close to being snuffed out forever. Alessandra is strong-willed. She has a fine mind and the latent talent of an artist, but she is often discouraged in using both. Alas, she is a free-spirited woman in a harshly patriarchal society.

Alessandra is married off to politically astute and sensitive Cristoforo. The marriage allows Alessandra to have certain freedoms that she craves, but it also stifles her — Cristoforo is homosexual, and he cannot feel passion for Alessandra. Instead, Alessandra is captivated by the young painter employed to create frescoes for her family’s chapel.

The book was well-written, and I definitely felt as if characters were rendered honestly, with special attention given to the times in which they lived. Amazon recommended this book to me because I bought books by Tracy Chevalier and Susan Vreeland, whom they considered similar. If you reduce Dunant’s book to simply being a novel about art, then yes, they are similar. However, while Vreeland and Chevalier write about well-known artists and/or works of art and their backstories, Dunant has created a fictional art world. None of her characters are famous, and we cannot be sure that anything they created is today the admired creation of an unknown artist, but they do live in fascinating times, and I was easily swept into their story.

I don’t have a book-rating system, like 1-5 stars, or even something cutesy like apples, because I’m a teacher. If I had one, I’d give Philippa Gregory’s The Queen’s Fool three stars (or apples). Frankly, the author’s odd choice of writing almost completely in comma splices really put me off. I found it hard to concentrate on the story when this major usage error kept popping out at me over and over. I only wish I was exaggerating.

Aside from that, the story moves along, and I was intrigued by the characters. Frankly, I thought the best part of the story was the portion the protagonist, Hannah Green, spent in Calais. I was much more interested in her story as a Jew in the Renaissance than all the palace intrigues.

I did not understand Hannah’s divided loyalties. She seemed to serve several masters and equally love them all, which didn’t make sense to me. Also, no reasons were really shown why she should love these people, who really hadn’t done all that much to earn it, frankly.

The writer seemed to me to choose very obvious aspects of Judaism to demonstrate her characters’ religion, although perhaps this was on purpose, too. One would not necessarily want to confuse Gentile readers who didn’t know much about Judaism. Gregory also has the excuse that her characters are actively hiding their religion and do not remember all their customs, nor keep them out of fear of being discovered as Jews. Still, I found the depiction of this side of Hannah’s life rather basic.

Another complaint I have about Gregory’s writing is that her dialogue is not period, which is something I noted while reading The Other Boleyn Girl. It is a little off-putting to find so much non-period dialogue in a piece of historical fiction. Particularly annoying was the repetitive use of “D’you” for “Did you.”

After I have said all that, you might wonder why it merited the “three stars.” Like I said, it was readable. I did become interested in the characters. I don’t think I could have finished it, considering all its flaws, if it didn’t have these good qualities. I found it odd and intriguing to see Mary portrayed so sympathetically. However, to paraphrase Will Somers, the Fool, history did not remember Mary’s good qualities, just as they did not remember her father’s. As he is remembered as a lecherous wife-killer, she is remembered for her burning of “heretics,” mostly Protestants, which rightly earned her the appellation Bloody Mary.

Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone discovers his neighbor’s dog impaled on a “garden fork” and decides to do some detective work in order to discover the dog’s murderer. Like his predecessor, Sherlock Holmes, he has, “in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will.” That is because Christopher has a form of autism called Asperger’s Syndrome. People with Asperger’s often display astounding intellectual capability, while suffering from diminished social functioning. Mark Haddon brilliantly and poignantly captures the thinking process of a boy with Asperger’s Syndrome in his debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

I can’t imagine how difficult this novel was to write, as Amazon Canada reviewer Jack Illingworth notes, “This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists.”

I once had a student with Asperger’s, and it was interesting to watch him walk down the hall, tracing his fingertips against the wall, clinging to the wall almost, to keep from touching others. He looked only in front of himself, never to the sides, almost not seeming to see the others. Before I taught him, when he was in middle school, he had been known to bang his head on the desk when he answered incorrectly in one of those quiz bowl competitions. Because they knew I’d be interested, my parents sent me a paper clipping of an article about him in their local paper in Macon. It was hard not to think of him as I read this book, though my student is certainly more socially aware than Christopher, who went to a special needs school and only seemed to exhibit high facility in math and science, whereas my student seemed equally gifted in many areas, including my class.

I found the book difficult to put down. It brought my grand total books I’ve read in one sitting up to five. The others are:

• Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody
• The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
• Home is Where the Heart Is by Billie Letts
• The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

What all these books have in common are strong characters that drive the novel to such an extent that I absolutely must see what happens to them. I discovered after I read the book that it had been a Today Show reading selection, which explains why I kept running into references to the book. I must thank my friend, Roger Darlington, for sending it to me in exchange for The Poisonwood Bible, which I sent to him. It was indeed, as you hoped, Roger, a fair exchange. It was nice to have the British version for a couple of reasons: a) the language differences were intact, which made it easier to see the setting as Britain, b) the cover is much better: