It's a book about nuns
4 stars
I think this was on my to read list because I saw Adam Roberts recommending it on twitter. I have read and enjoyed quite a few Adam Roberts books, so I thought I'd give it a go. It must have been on my to-read list for a while, because it's been ages since I was on twitter. The book tells the story of a convent somewhere in England in the 14th century. (I'm second guessing myself now about when the story takes place, but the exact timeframe matters very little).
The book this reminded me of, and bear with me because it will seem a weird comparison at first, is Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. Historical fiction, written in a kind of detached, almost dreamlike tone. In Mantel's book that style of writing is counterbalanced by the epic and emotionally charged events of revolutionary France described. In …
I think this was on my to read list because I saw Adam Roberts recommending it on twitter. I have read and enjoyed quite a few Adam Roberts books, so I thought I'd give it a go. It must have been on my to-read list for a while, because it's been ages since I was on twitter. The book tells the story of a convent somewhere in England in the 14th century. (I'm second guessing myself now about when the story takes place, but the exact timeframe matters very little).
The book this reminded me of, and bear with me because it will seem a weird comparison at first, is Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety. Historical fiction, written in a kind of detached, almost dreamlike tone. In Mantel's book that style of writing is counterbalanced by the epic and emotionally charged events of revolutionary France described. In this book, it's mostly about some nuns and their squabbles. It was like reading something where all the emotional intensity had been smoothed out, sanded down. I also found some of it hard to follow because keeping all the characters straight was a struggle. They're all nuns. There's no real main character, nuns come and go over the course of the fifty or so years of the main narrative, and the detached writing style means that there's nothing very distinctive about most of the characters.
Having said all that, this was an interesting read: a historical novel set at a time, and in an environment that I haven't seen portrayed all that often in the genre.
