Second Thoughts

Tags

Blood and Beauty, Magnificent Century, netflix, Suleiman the Magnificent, The Day the Universe Changed, The Pillars of the Earth

I spoke too soon about the CGI effects in Magnificent Century.

For the Siege of Belgrade, the pitched battle was depicted by showing (effectively) still shots of the major characters accompanied by waves of blood splashing across the screen. It was not tasteful, nor pleasant.

I do give the show some credit, though. They tried to balance portrayal on screen of both the goings-on within the royal palace and with Suleiman and his court in the field. This requires somehow portraying a massive army on the march and huge battles, all on a TV-series budget. They did try.

The other effect that smacked me across the head is one that I’ve seen before in 80s shows (or maybe it was 90s. The Sharpe series is one that springs to mind). Magnificent Century‘s use of electric guitar to score a period drama is also not a good production choice. To me, it made the show seem at least 20 years older than it is.

I’m also surprised at how thoroughly the soap-opera plot has grabbed me. The episodes tend to have cliff-hanger endings, particularly when it comes to the conflicts between the various female main characters. I find myself craving to find out how the latest cat fight is going to turn out. It is embarrassing to admit it, but it is true.

I’m also continuing on with The Pillars of The Earth, and this is a story that seems to snowball in intensity as a rolls along. Where I had started with reading a handful of pages at a go, I now find myself staying up to all hours to advance from chapter to chapter. I also notice the author pulling in more and more of the significant events of the time period, directly linking them to his narrative. Maybe a bit obviously, the White Ship plays an active role in the story.

In another part of the story, our hero finds himself working that the Toledo School of Translators, whose existence I only recently became aware by having watched The Day the Universe Changed. The flood of Greek scholarship that flowed from the completion of the Reconquista and the subsequent Western access to Muslim libraries is a tremendous event in the development of Western Civilization. It is also one that I really was unaware of until I saw it in the TV series. As The Pillars of the Earth wanders around Europe a bit, the story begins to feel every bigger and bigger.

Likewise I soldier on with Blood and Beauty. It may be a mistake to read this particular book intermittently. Each time I come back to it after reading something else, the disorientation of present-tense narrative returns in full force. As always, I get used to it after a while, but at first I feel less human for having read this style of prose.

As I get further into this book, I realize that details of Blood and Beauty and the details in Borgia come pretty close to each other. I don’t think one used the other as a source. Rather, I suspect that they both have relied on the same, or at least similar, contemporary histories. Even in some cases where the story is different, you can see how one has made a slightly different interpretation of the knowns and unknowns than the other. Who killed Juan Borgia? In Blood and Beauty, we know it is not Cesare because the narrative of the book has access to his inner thoughts. We also know it is not Lucrezia, because her motive (the killing of commoner and confidant Pedro) doesn’t occur until after the killing of Juan. In the book, however, it is clearly shown how history will fault Cesare once other bodies pile up. Once you start killing one of your own relatives, it stands to reason that you’d be willing to kill another.

One surprise in Blood and Beauty is the prominent featuring of syphilis to the story. It is particularly potent here, at least to me, because unlike the characters in the book we are aware of both its transmissible and its potentially fatal consequences. In the book, a surprising number of major characters struggle with the disease. On TV, they were merely made gay.

Are You Trying to be Mean?

Tags

Blood and Beauty, Borgia, Italian Wars, Marilyn Manson, Sarah Dunant

What is seen cannot be unseen.

A few chapters into Blood and Beauty: A Novel About the Borgias and I started to wonder why I got this novel in the first place. My main issue was how it is all written in the present tense. It is rare that I read a novel written in this style, although I gather it isn’t exactly uncommon. It seems a particularly-jarring way to write historical fiction although, again, that seems to be something that is gaining ground in recent years. I find it immensely distracting. That sense diminishes the more I acclimatize myself to the book, but it never really goes away. Whenever a character reflects on a past event (written in past tense) and then returns to the present, the shock of the present tense writing once again disorients me.

Wondering, I took a look at the Amazon reader-reviews, to see if I was going to continue to find the work difficult to read as I read more. The content of one of those reviews grabbed me. The reviewer, essentially, says that the author seems to have really wanted to write a non-fiction work but, given her reputation as a novelist, was unable to stray to far from her home ground. At the time, I hadn’t made it far enough into the book to know if that assessment is accurate. I’m still not sure, although now that I’ve read the suggestion I’m not sure that I can fairly evaluate the claim. To the extent that I try to think about it, I can only consider the terms set out by that one review.

Another reason I have difficulty following the book is that I’m trying to read it and watch Borgia at the same time. I mix plot points between the two, not only because I’m trying to follow both at the same time, but because they both seems to have used very similar, if not the same, source material. The other night I watched and then read as Cesare returned to Rome. Problem is, the two events are years apart (even in Borgia‘s compressed narrative). I was in for a shock when Juan Borgia made an appearance in the book, several episodes beyond when he was murdered in the show. Working with multiple versions of the same story is probably not the smartest way to go about this.

Which brings up another question. We are dealing with a historical subject, whatever fictional embellishments are added, the central narrative is fixed. This book was published in the midst of a minor Borgia saturation. Beyond that, we have centuries of exposition on the Borgia story. When I read this, it is within the context of already (and recently) having watched the very same scenes in The Borgias and Borgia. While some will come to Blood and Beauty fresh, I would think most would have arrived here via television, novel, film, or perhaps opera. Inevitably, this would shape how one ingests this novel, making it difficult to judge it on its own merits.

Author Sarah Dunant’s “thing” is history from a woman’s perspective. Her previous works focus on female main characters. I’ve read in reviews that this should be the focus of Borgia, although I don’t get that focus through reading the book. Dunant has also said that her goal in writing the novel was to separate the fact from the politically-induced rumor – also a noble pursuit. I suppose it is up to the reader to weigh how well her research fares against the other versions of history that are out there. It also goes some way in explaining the release of a Borgia-based novel right in the midst of a Borgia wave. Perhaps she is providing some counterpoint to what she didn’t like seeing on the TV.

With Borgia removed from streaming, I’ll have to satisfy my lust for things-Borgia with this book and its sequels. That is, as long as I am able to soldier on through this present-tense prose.