![]() ![]() There are echoes of Romeo and Juliet here. Through Henry in the background and foreground, Siegel manages to explore not only forbidden romance between Richard and Philip – not so much forbidden for being a gay romance, but for being a romance between members of major rival royal families – but also the mundane complexities of relationships between fathers and sons.Įarly in the novel, the reader gets the sense that Richard and Philip are as destined to be together as England and France are to go to war. Henry II – the father of Richard and his rival brothers, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and rival of Louis VII of France and his son Philip II – looms large in the story because he loomed large in the lives of these historical personages, just as he loomed large in the history of Europe. These story elements are in their own way faithful to medieval history, particularly the period in which the novel is set. What Solomon’s Crown eschews in historical accuracy it reclaims in the depths of its characters and its exploration of family jealousies, sexual discovery and political imperatives. ![]() And a good one that still manages to express quite a bit about the history it distorts. This isn’t a non-fiction work of medieval history. ![]() As Siegel notes in her disclosure, the book “takes enormous liberties with its setting: adding wars that didn’t happen, removing wars that did, ignoring deaths, changing clothing and geography, and portraying medieval battles with such flagrant disrespect for reality that any military historians who read it will probably throw the book into their fireplaces before they manage finish it.” Well, all the worse for them. What’s left is a lovely, if unconventional, tapestry. Like The Lion in Winter before it, a play and film of which the novel is consciously reminiscent, Solomon’s Crown pulls on historical threads, dyes them new colours and then runs in circles with them. Siegel opens the novel by telling readers the plot points that follow are not all historically accurate. This is the stuff of epic history, and excellent reads.īooks we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks She tells her version of their love story against the backdrop of war, intrigue, betrayal and family drama as England and France struggle to make and remake the continent. The historical record is disputed, but Richard and Philip were, at a time, very close and possibly lovers. She cast Richard I, Duke of Aquitaine, and Philip II, King of France, as her romantic and political protagonists. Natasha Siegel has set Solomon’s Crown in 12th-century Europe. I ought to start by confessing a bias – or a series of strong preferences, if you prefer. And so, let’s celebrate the queer medieval romance Solomon’s Crown as it unites medieval royal rivals as lovers. The terrain of the medieval is so frequently trodden that whenever a book finds new ground, it’s something to celebrate. Chivalric romance, epic poetry, adventure, forbidden attraction, the arcane and historical figures that stretch toward the boundaries of heroic myth lend themselves to great – and not so great – reads. ![]() That’s to say the genre is a crowded one and has been for decades. If you were to stack a copy of every romance novel set in the medieval world on top of one another, the pile would reach as high as the spires of the Cologne Cathedral. ![]()
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