Gortner handles this span of nearly sixty years with aplomb. The scope of the novel is broad, covering Catherine's life from the age of ten to the moment of her death in 1589.
Far from the malicious "Madame Serpent" of Huguenot proproganda, Catherine becomes France's savior, preserving the tattered country from foreign domination by uniting her Catholic daughter to her Huguenot nephew and preventing the powerful, ultra-Catholic Guise clan from usurping royal powers. Threatened by enemies on all sides and watching the hopes of her house dwindle as one Valois prince after another dies, Catherine struggles to hold the imploding kingdom together through compromise, tolerance, and the dogged pursuit of a vision of religious unity. Though devoted to her children as much as a queen might be, Gortner's Catherine is willing to sacrifice their individual happiness, as well as her own, for the good of her beloved France.
In contrast to this heartless monster, Gortner creates a Catherine who, though far from cuddly, nurtures a compassion born of her foreignness and her unrequited passion for a husband who spurns her. Demonized as a ruthless regent with an unquenchable thirst for power, the historical Catherine has been accused of murdering opponents with impunity, ordering massacres of defenseless Huguenots, and sacrificing her own children in order to maintain her dominion. Narrated in the first person by Catherine herself, the novel attempts to humanize an historical figure long vilified by partisan accounts of her role in the bloody Wars of Religion that rent France asunder during the latter decades of the century.
0 kommentar(er)
