Time and Chance by Sharon Kay Penman

This is the place in Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered by four knights who believed or claimed to believe that they were acting on the orders of Henry II. Becket’s martyrdom is the climactic event to which much of Time and Chance, sequel to When Christ and His Saints Slept, leads up. Sharon Kay Penman is known for her fidelity to the historical record, and while this has won her an appreciative international audience, it is an approach that brings its own difficulties. The murder of Becket was a turning point in English history, one of the most dramatic events of the Middle Ages. The trail of events which caused it amount to an ongoing squabble between Church and Crown, frequently petty, episodic, rambling and full of arcane legal and theological detail. It’s very hard to make compelling fiction out of this kind of material and so it’s understandable that Time and Chance doesn’t always succeed.

A tale of two queens: When Christ and His Saints Slept, by Sharon Kay Penman

Photo by John Cunliffe for Abigails Ateliers. All rights reserved.

When I was a little girl I had a chart showing the Kings and Queens of England on my bedroom wall. I was especially interested in the Queens of England – that is, the ones who had ruled in their own right, not the consorts. But there weren’t too many of those. Prior to Mary I (if you don’t count Lady Jane Grey), there was only one – Matilda.

So I was disappointed to learn that Matilda had never really reigned. On his death her father, Henry I, who had lost his only legitimate son in the wreck of the White Ship, left the crown to her. But her cousin Stephen seized the throne, beginning a civil war of nearly twenty years (1135-1154), a period of misrule, bloodshed and suffering when, as the Peterborough Chronicle put it, ‘Christ and all his saints slept.’

Teaser Tuesday: Medieval and Tudor Teasers

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I’m still reading When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman, about the struggle between the Empress Maude and her cousin King Stephen over the English throne:

The great hall was crammed with people: Arundel’s harried servants and disquieted garrison, Maude’s men, fearful villagers, who’d fled their homes for the greater security of the castle. The latter milled about in confusion, some clutching meagre belongings, others trying to comfort wailing children and hush barking dogs, all watching their liege lady and her husband, mutely entreating Adeliza and Will to deliver them from this evil come so suddenly into their midst.

Last week I also dipped into The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn, looking for quotes for my post on dialogue in historical fiction. The novel has two narrators, Anne Boleyn and Lucy Cornwallis, Henry VIII’s confectioner. First, two sentences from Anne:

Privacy at court is scarce; and, of course, the bigger you are, the less you have. There was all the, ‘Dance with me, Anne’; and only so many ruby earrings that I could explain away and sugar stallions that I could get the boys to eat.

And here’s Lucy:

This is exactly what I need: to stir long and hard over a flame, east to west for luck, turning spiced breadcrumbs and a pool of claret into a glossy dough…Every time the door gusts open – bang, bang, bang, all day; people careless with a loose latch – I glimpse rain seething among the cobbles.

Teaser Tuesday: When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My book this week is When Christ and His Saints Slept by Sharon Kay Penman.  And it’s likely to be my book next week and the week after as well…this one is a chunkster!  So here’s a chunky teaser:

The night was clear, the sky adrift in stars.  The moon was on the wane, casting a wavering, silvery gleam upon the cresting waves.  The ship rode low in the water, and Berold was unnerved to realize the freeboard was only three feet or so above the surface of the bay.  He was already feeling queasy, and whispered a quick plea to St Elmo, who was said to pity those poor souls stricken with seasickness.  He’d heard that, depending on the wind and the tides, a crossing from Barfleur to Southampton might take a day.  Twelve hours lay ahead then, the longest twelve hours of his life.

Library Loot Leads To Joining Chunkster Challenge

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Eva at A Striped Armchair and Marg at Reading Adventures that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

Today I had a look at the classics shelf of the local library to see if anything appealed to me for Our Mutual Read or the 18th and 19th Century Women Writers’ Challenge.  Here’s what I found:

This one appealed to me because I liked the first paragraph:

Every town-bred person who travels in a rich country region, knows what it is to see a neat white house planted in a pretty situation, – in a shrubbery, or commanding a sunny common, or nestling between two hills, – and to say to himself, as the carriage sweeps past its gate, ‘I should like to live there,’ – ‘I could be very happy in that pretty place.’  Transient visions pass before his mind’s-eye of dewy summer mornings, when the shadows are long on the grass, and of bright autumn afternoons, when it would be luxury to saunter in the neighbouring lanes; and of frosty winter days, when the sun shines in over the laurustinus at the window, while the fire burns with a different light from that which it gives in the dull parlours of a city.

The copy I checked out has this same cover and it appears to have suffered some rough treatment!  The back cover was half torn off and has been stuck back together and some of the pages in the front are not far from coming out.  I just hope I can finish it before it falls to bits!

Then I had a look for something by Trollope, preferably something relatively short.  I have enjoyed his chunksters in the past, notably Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now, but I don’t feel like I can cope with one in the near future.  The first Trollope I ever read was a short one, Kept In the Dark, and it was a good introduction to his work.  The longer books can be a bit repetitive.  Anyway, the shortest one on the shelf was this one:

Which, if you can read the title, is Dr Wortle’s School.  It didn’t sound promising, but the jacket copy promises a ‘dreadful secret’ and a ‘scandalized community’ so I took it home.

And unexpectedly, the brand new copy I had ordered of When Christ and His Saints Slept, first in the Eleanor of Aquitaine trilogy by Sharon Kay Penman, had come in!

Talk about a chunkster.  This one is 909 pages long.  That’s more than twice the 450 page starting point a book needs to qualify for the Chunkster Challenge.  And it’s not large print either.  Oh no.

So – and this was always going to happen – this doubles as my official sign-up post for the Chunkster Challenge 2010, which runs from 1 February 2010 to 31 January 2011.  I’m signing up for…level 3, Mor-book-ly Obese, which requires 6 books of 450 pages or more or 3 books of 750 pages or more.  Can I do it?  Well, I read at least 12 books with more than 450 pages last year and at least two of them had more than 750 pages.  So probably, yeah.  Length never puts me off, a book is a book to me.

Deerbrook would count as one of the other two – it’s 600 pages.  As for the third one, maybe this will be the year I finish Dombey and Son.  Or Little Dorrit.  Or Pendennis.  Really, Victorian novels have this challenge written all over them.  Books finished this month don’t count, but there’s no way even Moppet can finish any of these before the 31st.

Back to When Christ and His Saints Slept.  Here’s an excerpt from the jacket copy:

Twelfth-century England, a land of treachery, high passions and shifting allegiances, is plunged into chaos as the Empress Maude and her cousin Stephen become locked in a bitter struggle for the throne lasting twenty years.

Juicy or what?  But I can’t get to this one straight away so what I have to do is restrain myself from dipping in it in advance and spoiling myself.

I might have to put a rubber band on it.