Tag: England

Day Fifteen: Britten and Brülightly

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Cover for Britten and BrulightlyAnd now for something completely different!

Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry is a noir graphic novel. I haven’t read many graphic novels, but this one seems to be outstanding. Most of them look like superhero comic books to me.

Britten is a depressed detective whose partner is a tea bag (I can’t believe I just got the pun of his name! I am so dense sometimes!) who makes humorous comments from inside the pocket of Britten’s (of course) trench coat. Britten takes a case from Charlotte Maughton, who doesn’t believe her fiancé, Berni Kudos, committed suicide. She is convinced he was actually murdered. Britten begins investigating Kudos’s job at Maughton Publishing, because Charlotte thinks Kudos’s death might be connected to a blackmailing scheme aimed at her father. During the investigation, he begins to uncover family secrets.

Although I became confused by the plethora of characters, I was impressed by the drawings, which are detailed and gorgeous. I am no expert on art, but I think they are stunning. To match with the noir theme, they look like watercolors in shades of gray with muted, subtle touches of color.

Reading this book made me more interested in exploring graphic novels, but so far I haven’t seen anything that looked as interesting. Two other highly lauded graphic novels, Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, and Maus, by Art Spiegelman, have compelling themes but much more primitive drawings (in the case of Maus, I couldn’t tell one character of a certain type from another), and I was attracted to Berry’s book mostly by the beautiful art and witty dialogue. Unfortunately, Berry doesn’t seem to have published anything else yet.

Day Ten: Before I Go to Sleep

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Cover for Before I Go to SleepBest Book of Week 2!

Before I Go to Sleep by S. J. Watson is a stunningly creepy novel that successfully creates a sense of growing dread. It is not really a traditional mystery, more like a slow-starting but absorbing thriller.

Every morning Christine awakens not knowing who the man in her bed is and thinking she should be younger, sometimes twenty years younger, sometimes a lot younger than that. Every morning her husband Ben has to explain who he is, show her pictures of their life together, and explain that years before she had a traumatic brain injury that causes her to forget everything when she goes to sleep at night.

A neurologist calls her each day to explain he has been treating her without her husband’s knowledge and reminds her to take out her journal and read it. As she reads and keeps her journal every day, she begins to remember a few things by herself, and she finds her husband is telling lies. She remembers having a baby, but he says they never had children. She has specific memories of a good friend who he claims moved away to Australia, but she finds out she didn’t. Her husband always has good explanations for these lies, but more and more things begin to disturb Christine.

Should she trust her husband or not? Is she falling back into the paranoia that has been a symptom of her illness? And how exactly was she injured in the first place?

Day Nine: Mary Boleyn

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Cover for Mary BoleynIn the introduction to Mary Boleyn, biographer Alison Weir talks about the many misconceptions we have about Anne Boleyn’s less famous sister, which were not only derived from such popular fictions as The Tudors (wildly inaccurate, but I still loved it!) and The Other Boleyn Girl (ditto), but also from biographers and historians over the centuries. Weir calls her book both a biography and a historiography, because she tackles many published statements about Mary’s life and attempts to show the extent of their truth or even likelihood.

Because most of Mary’s life was spent in the background of her glittering, ambitious family, not many actual records or letters that mention her exist, and only a couple of her own letters survive. Even the exact date of her birth is unknown, so that there has been been debate about whether Mary is the older or younger of the two sisters. (Weir makes a good case for older.)

Weir examines Mary’s life from as early as it is known and explores such subjects as whether she had an affair with the King of France (yes, probably a short one), whether she came from that with a ruined reputation, as has been alleged (no, but her family may have sent her away from court), whether she had an affair with Henry VIII (yes, but possibly reluctantly), whether she was then labeled a “famous whore” as has also been alleged (no, hardly anyone knew about it), whether she was married off to an unworthy but complaisant husband as a result (no, she married before the affair to William Carey, a wealthy and influential courtier who was one of Henry VIII’s trusted friends), and so on.

The picture Weir paints is of a woman who has repeatedly been smeared over the centuries. She certainly did not seem to be ambitious, like the rest of her family, because she got very little from her royal lovers. She was almost certainly also not well regarded by her family, probably because she had taken these lovers without gaining an advantage. After her first husband died, she eventually remarried for love, William Stafford, a relatively poor man much lower in status who was 12 years her junior. After she was cut off from her family and court as a result, she described the time of her widowhood as “bondage” and stated in a letter to Thomas Cromwell that no one in the world cared for her except Stafford.

Mary seems to have been slighted by her family for much of her adult life and was finally exiled from them because of her second marriage. This separation may be the only reason she survived her sister and brother.

Weir makes a strong case for Mary’s first child, Katherine Carey, being the unacknowledged daughter of Henry VIII. An appendix relates what happened to Mary’s descendants. Weir remarks that Henry VIII’s line is believed to have died out with Elizabeth I, but assuming she is correct about Katherine’s birth, she provides a fascinating list of some of the famous British people who can trace their lineage back to Mary’s daugher—and so to Henry—including Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Lord Nelson, Vita Sackville-West, Ralph Vaughn Williams, Princess Diana, Camilla Parker-Bowles, and Queen Elizabeth II herself.