80 Books No.47: The Queen of Subtleties by Suzannah Dunn

I'm a sucker for Tudor fiction despite never having found anything as good as Philippa Gregory's and Hilary Mantel's offerings. There's something so very enticing about the sexy glamorous world of Henry VIII's court, where things happen which put our modern Royals to shame. It's a world which has rich pickings for a good novelist who can stomach the extreme amount of research necessary to achieve success.

The Queen of Subtleties tries to find a fresh angle on a subject which has been frankly hammered to death. Here, in quite a rare move, Dunn chooses Anne Boleyn as one of her narrators, whilst the other half of the story is told by an entirely unlikely character: the king's confectioner. Quite how Dunn came up with this idea is anybody's guess, as it's a strange one, and quite tenuous: it is entirely unrecorded whether the king's confectioner had ever met Mark Smeaton let alone seemingly fallen for him, so it falls down on the research almost before it starts.

Anne Boleyn is one of my favourite historical characters. Sort of like a more ruthless Kate Middleton, what she achieved in her relatively short life is almost always overshadowed by her scandalous death. History likes to trample on women so let's just take a moment here: she enticed one of the most powerful men in the world despite being of relatively low birth; she supposedly held out from giving him what he wanted for seven years, despite there being clear evidence to show he usually had women as when he wanted them; because of her, at least in part, he divorced the daughter of the power couple of the world at that time and created the Church of England. He broke with ROME for goodness sakes, when he could have made a more judicious match with a French princess which would have gone down much better with the Pope at the time. The changes brought about in these ten years have had ramifications down the centuries, and at the heart of is this reportedly quite average looking woman.

So in theory, Dunn's choice of narrator should make for a good read. It's readable enough, and Boleyn's narrative is infinitely superior to that of the confectioner which is largely boring and pointless because it is almost certainly entirely fabricated. What this book was, though, was unoriginal as it shed no fresh light upon this well-known story and didn't encourage any sympathy towards the main characters. It was also poorly constructed in terms of sentences which had commas all over the place, like a child who has only just learned that they exist.

If you want to read about the Tudor court, don't waste your time on this; go for Gregory or Mantel and you'll get a far more interesting read.