A Place of Greater Safety

if you want to read a 750pg historical fiction novel about the french revolution, this is probably the one you should read, but i dunno. spolier, they all die in the end.

A Place of Greater Safety.

A really good title but.....

The roots of the French Revolution began with the recognition that France, and its monarchy, were on the verge of bankruptcy. Let's also think of a couple of its more noted incidents, such as the storming of the Bastille through to the beheading of Maria Antoinette; there are so many more to consider in this stunningly fascinating subject. Wiki give a timeline that is long and deep and a rabbit hole for the curious type.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_French_Revolution

That fascination is obvious, mankind's inhumanity to his fellow men and women (off with his/her head), the political shenanigans that the revolution entailed, the wars that it started, the intriguing characters it turned up, the rise of Napoleon, in fact the entire changing of Europe and the world; what more could one want? One can read so many titles on this most interesting of historical events. How can a huge historical novel by one of the world's most celebrated authors go wrong?

Late in Part 4 of this brick of a book is a chapter called Burning the Bodies and is about the storming of the Tuileries Palace, a major event in the revolution. I came out of these 31 pages wondering how bland it was. This dreary chapter hardly covered it; instead we got drab dialogue by the many nondescript characters that made up this cast of too many, dialogue that was so utterly dull as to have had me taken aback. What followed the incident at the Tuileries Palace is the infamous Reign of Terror. With that momentous event coming, this had to improve.

Unfortunately for this reader, it hardly did. A laborious and ponderous experience that was hardly aided by a cumbersome telling of the story, the choppy change of styles in presentation, the rare but annoying change to first-person narrative, very long descriptive prose and then far too long dialogue made this a difficult and disjointed read.

The three main protagonists of this historical fiction are Georges-Jaques Danton, Camille Desmoulinns and Maxililien Robespirre. All were utter giants of the Reign of Terror during the revolution, and all came to lose their heads. Unfortunately, they tended to be just bland and boring amid a cast of bland and boring people talking bland and boring and at times meaningless dialogue that a good editor would have culled in this far too long a book.

A book of greater disappointment.

Twijfel nog of deze nou beter/leuker is dan de Wolf Hall boeken. Net zo dik, met ook heel veel personages waarvan alles door elkaar loopt...