A Place of Greater Safety

Rating:
Summary: Insert Wordsworth quote here.
Review: I have just finished this book, so all of my retrospective observations are still a bit wet behind the ears. That said, I cannot yet berate the novel successfully from any angle. If there is any qualification to make, it is that, really, you need to devote a good week to it: about four to read, and three to get back to a person your friends will recognize.

I came about this book by way of an article Mantel had written in "The London Review", loosely tied to the release of Colin Haydon's edited collection of essays on Robespierre. By the end of the article, I was very much the worst neighbor in my apartment building- I did not stop reading or turn off my light for the next two nights.

After seven years of English and Journalism classes, I can not figure out why Mantel's name did not come up once. There is nothing extraneous here, nothing fantastic to the point of unbelievability. The characters mature and change and determine and repel each other. No one is a saint nor, with one minor exception, do they deserve their sentences. In her Camille Desmoulins -for the majority of the novel, at least- there is a great literary archetype of exuberant, young egotism. At first, we blame him for nothing, then everything. At the last, he looks disturbingly like his reader.

Danton, by the same turn, starts out in much the vein of Stanislawa Przybyszewka's Georges-Jacques, the big lug. He gets away with things that you wonder if you'd forgive Bill Clinton for, which- of course- you would. He is admirable as one true to his own interests if nothing else. Then, in one of the most skilled revelations in the literature I've read, his true, unwavering dedication to the principle behind the whole big mess he has helped create is fully uncovered, and too late. There are plenty of places to cry big, philosophical tears in this book.

There are plenty of places to laugh, too. Those familiar with Mantel's editorials will recognize here her ongoing jabs at feminist representative Nicolas Condorcet, and his jealousy of Robespierre for the female attention he felt should rightfully have been his. She gives her tragedy the sense of ridiculous humor it earns. Even at its most productive, the guillotine traveled around in multiple, chocolate form.

Robespierre, somewhat suprisingly, comes across as an almost secondary character. In the end, though, it is him behind the narrative. His influence is why we forgive Saint-Just and Babette Duplay. While she is the product of her family's almost cult-like reverence for "the god upstairs", Saint-Just's hard line violent rhetoric is a logical echo and heir to Desmoulins and Danton's early encouragements of insurrection. Saint-Just appears late, and this follows the arch of the novel perfectly. Everything here, including Mantel's own use of language, artfully turns about in the last hundred pages and bites the hand that has been feeding it. (To stray from a more familiar analogy.)

That goes for the setting as well. The ci-devant court, the external European armies, the anonymous mass known simply as "the people" are all, like Robespierre, apparent afterthoughts that frame the main characters. If their politics are contrary to the monarchy, they still have no other practical precedent. They denounce foreign armies, but without tangible victory there is no legitamacy to the Republic nor to their places in it. Danton openly detests the "good people", but everyone with an education in the novel is intriguing for a place in the new leadership, and in need of a following.

It is hard to put a cap on an emotional response to the characters, because so little of this feels like a sweeping change to the face of the Western World. It reads an awful lot like a small group of people with good intentions whole-heartedly and somewhat frantically making out a place for themselves wherever they can find it. Even Danton's predictions of his immortality, though we know them from the outside to be true, seem overblown in the context of laundry folding and cafe speeches.

I would put it next to "War and Peace" as a literary accomplishment (as well as a weight.) This is an excellent novel.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and intensely humanistic foray into history
Review: The French Revolution is an obsession of mine, and I've probably read every fictional account of it still in print (and many that are not :)) I can say that beyond a doubt A Place of Greater Safety is the best novel on the subject and, along with Gore Vidal's Burr, probably one of the best historical novels I've read period. The history is accurate (which is an event in and of itself) and the characterization is absolutely brilliant. Mantel gets so close to her characters that she sympathizes with almost every one of them, although Camille will get your heart. The way she can take historical events and imbue them with humor, drama, tragedy, and an intense sympathy with all human striving is absolutely amazing. It's a long read but worth every second of it. I've recommended this book to almost everyone I know, but they often don't get to read it because I can't stay without it for more than a week or two.

Rating:
Summary: Unforgettable
Review: This is one of the rare novels of historical fiction that completely captures the true spirit and essence of its subject. Powerfully moving, "A Place of Greater Safety" expresses the views and ideals of the Revolution, through the lives and words of Camille Desmoulins, Georges Danton, and Maximilien Robespierre. The author is, amazingly, able to depict her characters' emotions with so much depth and truth, that by the end of the novel, you will question all you think you understand of the French Revolution and the people who believed in its cause. This book gives the reader a taste of both the beauty behind the emotions which governed the people of France, and of the tragedy that sent so many to their deaths in the early, volatile days of the Republic. A story of the despair of a people and a merciless strugle for justice, "A Place of Greater Safety" is a masterpiece that will not soon be forgotten.