I loved this as an adolescent, but as I feared, it didn't hold up on this reading. Sometimes that doesn't matter to me (
Scarlet Pimpernel), but it did in this case.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
and I don't trust Tey to present the information in an unbiased manner.
|
Bringing this back around to the book a bit, I'll say that my antennae went up and stayed up when Carradine mentioned the Boston Massacre as an example where popular history has got it wrong. No big deal, he said, and only four "casualties."
Well, it was a big deal. Think Kent State, but with more deaths and by occupying soldiers. Armed troops firing on an unarmed crowd without orders. Eleven people were hit, which I make out as eleven casualties, five died in the immediate aftermath and a sixth, who was crippled, died as a result some years later.
So yeah, I thought Tey couldn't be trusted if she felt she had to misrepresent American history to make her point - or if she couldn't be bothered to get it right. Either is damning.
I thought the book's exposition was pretty clunky, essentially lose/lose. Major info dumps linked together by unrealistic conversation. The info dumps are fine if it's history; that's what history is, but not very artful as fiction. I found it telling in a way that Tey quoted large swaths of
Rose of Raby, as if such highly fictionalized history, complete with conversations and thoughts, qualified as one of those primary sources. Essentially she borrowed what served her case, no matter the provenance. All sorts of unsupported allegations were strung together with such phrases as, "he might have," "he must have," "he may have" and "he would have."
Grant's attitude toward historians (except those he agreed with), ah, Rose of Raby! have been sufficiently skewered, so I'll end with a quote from him on the nature of criminality as reason why Richard wasn't criminal. "The criminal mind is essentially a silly one." Well, Q.E.D.! I bet the criminal masterminds in London would have laughed themselves silly over that one.