A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel
by Hilary Mantel
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Book Summary Information
Author: Hilary MantelEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-11-14
ISBN: 0312426399
Number of pages: 768
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel
Book Review: THIS IS A NOVEL ABOUT THE MAKING OF A MONSTER.....
Summary: 5 Stars
This novel is about the making of a monster. Of course, it's about more than that. The book is too rich and full and alive to limit itself to the evolution of one character to the exclusion of the rich world outside but the central thread of this exceptional book is the slow drift of one man's idealism toward the acceptance of tyranny. (At one point, in a heated argument, Danton says to Robespierre, "It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.") There are literally hundreds of characters in this book, but at the heart of it lie the three conspirators, sometime friends and sometimes allies Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. All three giants. Without Danton, the French Revolution would have died as it began. Desmoulins was its greatest pamphleteer. Robespierre ruled over the Committee of Public Safety, which ordered and stage managed the murder of all enemies the Committee imagined.
Danton -gross body, scarred face, nonetheless attractive to women, a charismatic speaker--he was a friend of Desmoulins. Sometime antagonist, sometime collaborator, his relationship with Robespierre was more complex. Desmoulins -erratic, sexually ambivalent- had a genius for making the right friends: his friendship with Robespierre protected him until near the end, when Robespierre, with much hand wringing, abandoned him to public justice and the guillotine. At the beginning, physical violence so disturbs Robespierre that it makes him physically ill. He's ascetic, pinched -Danton makes fun of him as a little monk--he forsakes all private life and pleasure the better to serve the republic. But the republic is a mother who eats her children. By the end, Robespierre coldbloodedly betrays Danton and abandons Desmoulins, signs their arrest warrants and consigning them to the tender mercies of the courts. In the interest of the state, emotions like compassion and friendship must be sacrificed. Justice and truth are unimportant in the face of public security. Soon it's chop, chop, bye bye, no more Danton, no more Desmoulins.
It is impossible to say too much positive about this book. It is that good. It is truly exceptional, filled with lightning characterizations of a succession of fascinating characters. Here's Desmoulins:
Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and abuse; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catch in the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.
And Danton on Robespierre: "He feels something, in his heart, and then he sits down and works out the logic of it, in his head. Then he says the head part came first; and we believe him."
Camille's wife, Lucille: "Her emotions now seemed to lie just beneath the surface, scratching at her delicate skin to be hatched."
Mirabeau, Lafayette, Philippe Egalite, Louis and Marie Antoinette, Marat and Hebert, Saint-Just, Madame and Monsieur Roland, Fabre d'Eglantine --they all come alive in these pages.
Early in the novel, the Marquis de Lafayette, feeling hopeless out of date in the tumult of real social revolution, shakes his head and wonders: "Where do they come from, these people? They're virgins. They've never been to war.... They've never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they're such enthusiasts for murder."
By the end of this novel, there are no more virgins.
Summary of A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel
It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A charming gadfly, erratic and untrustworthy, bisexual and beautiful, Camille is obsessed by one woman and engaged to marry another, her daughter. In the swells of revolution, they each taste the addictive delights of power, and the price that must be paid for it.
As 19th-century novelists Alexandre Dumas and Charles Dickens both discovered, the French Revolution makes for great drama. This lesson has not been lost on Hilary Mantel, whose A Place of Greater Safety brings a 20th-century sensibility to the stirring events of 1789. Mantel's approach is nothing if not ambitious: her three main characters, Georges-Jacques Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins, happen to have been major players in the early days of the revolution--men whose mix of ambition, idealism, and ego helped unleash the Terror and brought them eventually to their own tragic ends. As Mantel points out in her forward, none of these men was famous before the revolution; thus not a great deal is known about their early lives. What would constrain the biographer, however, is an open invitation to the fiction writer to let the imagination run wild; thus Mantel freely extrapolates from what is known of her protagonists' personalities and relationships with each other to construct their pasts.
This is a huge, complex novel, but the author has done her homework. Though Danton, Robespierre, and Desmoulins are at the center of her story, they are by no means the only major characters who populate the novel. Mantel uses historical figures as well as fictional ones to provide different points of view on the story. As she moves from one to the next, her narrative voice changes back and forth from first to third person as she sometimes grants us access to her characters' deepest thoughts and feelings, and other times keeps us guessing. A Place of Greater Safety is a happy marriage of literary and historical fiction, and a bona fide page-turner, as well. --Margaret Prior
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