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Maria's Reviews > Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine
Captive Queen: A Novel of Eleanor of Aquitaine
by
by
I read Innocent Traitor a few years ago and enjoyed it, and I’ve been told that Eleanor of Aquitaine was a fascinating historical figure, so I think I approached Captive Queen with reasonable expectations. Unfortunately, reading the first 30 pages of this book was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done. Not to toot my own horn, but I think it was an act of astonishing goodwill that I even gave it another shot, let alone finished the book.
This book reads like it was written out of order. The first 30 pages were so arduous because there was no context for anything. We open in a dark, cold castle and Eleanor is nervous that her secret will be discovered! What could her secret be! This was genuinely suspenseful, but then there’s a lot of exposition and scene-setting before it gets back to the nature of her secret, and by then I had already moved on from the secret. I didn’t care what it was by the time we got to it (and once we learned what it was - that Eleanor had slept with one of the men visiting them in court - I cared even less). When I tried to go back to the beginning to enumerate my complaints, I wasn’t able to re-find the things I disliked the most in those first 30 pages because they made more sense as I had read further in the book. Unpopular opinion, maybe, but I think you shouldn’t have to slog through a quarter of a book just for the beginning to seem less bad in hindsight. The beginning should make you want to keep reading the book, not make you wonder if life is too short for books like this.
The narration reveals more by outright telling us than it does by demonstrating anything within the story. For instance, when Louis and Eleanor are discussing having their marriage annulled and Eleanor says she had been thinking of their daughters constantly, you’d think this wouldn’t be the first you hear of them, right? Maybe she might have considered them sometime after her first roll in the hay with Henry, when she’s had some time to ruminate on what she’s already part of and what she would leave behind by joining him? Nope! There’s also plenty of “as you know”-ing as a means of exposition for events and not just character traits, meaningless descriptions, and redundant or unnecessary dialog tags. This book has it all!
To my mind, the most interesting relationships in the book are the platonic ones between Eleanor and Bernard, despite how useless that subplot was, and between Henry and Thomas (I know, boo hiss, fight me). I didn’t find Henry and Eleanor’s relationship interesting because I just can’t suspend my disbelief that sexual compatibility and land are the foundations of an interesting relationship. I also found the sex scenes really tedious! Not bad, not shocking, just boring. I thought it was boring that all of Henry and Eleanor’s conversations apparently took place in bed, with what I presume are meant to be tantalizing erotic interludes sprinkled in. If Henry can find a reasonably private place in a literal castle to dally with a handmaiden, he can find a reasonably private place to have a conversation with his wife.
More than anything, Weir doesn’t seem to be confident in her ability to write emotionally compelling material. This is problematic in historical fiction: if events aren’t necessarily going to be a surprise, they need something extra to make them more impactful and transformative - to justify why the book was written, really. Deaths are a great way to pack some emotional punch, but those might be where the writing suffered the most noticeably. Geoffrey’s death just felt narratively transactional; Young Henry’s death might have moved me, a little, if I was a different kind of person. I don’t even remember anything about Other Geoffrey’s death, and Henry frankly had it coming for decades. Eleanor’s death was a mercy to me, as a reader, because that meant the book was finally over.
I could go on. I have a LOT of complaints about this book, but this review is already around 700 words, and unlike Alison Weir, I know when to stop.
This book reads like it was written out of order. The first 30 pages were so arduous because there was no context for anything. We open in a dark, cold castle and Eleanor is nervous that her secret will be discovered! What could her secret be! This was genuinely suspenseful, but then there’s a lot of exposition and scene-setting before it gets back to the nature of her secret, and by then I had already moved on from the secret. I didn’t care what it was by the time we got to it (and once we learned what it was - that Eleanor had slept with one of the men visiting them in court - I cared even less). When I tried to go back to the beginning to enumerate my complaints, I wasn’t able to re-find the things I disliked the most in those first 30 pages because they made more sense as I had read further in the book. Unpopular opinion, maybe, but I think you shouldn’t have to slog through a quarter of a book just for the beginning to seem less bad in hindsight. The beginning should make you want to keep reading the book, not make you wonder if life is too short for books like this.
The narration reveals more by outright telling us than it does by demonstrating anything within the story. For instance, when Louis and Eleanor are discussing having their marriage annulled and Eleanor says she had been thinking of their daughters constantly, you’d think this wouldn’t be the first you hear of them, right? Maybe she might have considered them sometime after her first roll in the hay with Henry, when she’s had some time to ruminate on what she’s already part of and what she would leave behind by joining him? Nope! There’s also plenty of “as you know”-ing as a means of exposition for events and not just character traits, meaningless descriptions, and redundant or unnecessary dialog tags. This book has it all!
To my mind, the most interesting relationships in the book are the platonic ones between Eleanor and Bernard, despite how useless that subplot was, and between Henry and Thomas (I know, boo hiss, fight me). I didn’t find Henry and Eleanor’s relationship interesting because I just can’t suspend my disbelief that sexual compatibility and land are the foundations of an interesting relationship. I also found the sex scenes really tedious! Not bad, not shocking, just boring. I thought it was boring that all of Henry and Eleanor’s conversations apparently took place in bed, with what I presume are meant to be tantalizing erotic interludes sprinkled in. If Henry can find a reasonably private place in a literal castle to dally with a handmaiden, he can find a reasonably private place to have a conversation with his wife.
More than anything, Weir doesn’t seem to be confident in her ability to write emotionally compelling material. This is problematic in historical fiction: if events aren’t necessarily going to be a surprise, they need something extra to make them more impactful and transformative - to justify why the book was written, really. Deaths are a great way to pack some emotional punch, but those might be where the writing suffered the most noticeably. Geoffrey’s death just felt narratively transactional; Young Henry’s death might have moved me, a little, if I was a different kind of person. I don’t even remember anything about Other Geoffrey’s death, and Henry frankly had it coming for decades. Eleanor’s death was a mercy to me, as a reader, because that meant the book was finally over.
I could go on. I have a LOT of complaints about this book, but this review is already around 700 words, and unlike Alison Weir, I know when to stop.
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