"The Burning Chambers" by Kate Mosse

Kate Mosse is a best-selling author so I presume that she knows her audience and tailors her work perfectly to what they want. Her choice of subject - the French wars of religion in which Huguenots fought against Catholics with both sides responsible for terrible massacres - should be rich and fertile ground, full of potential. But Mosse has diluted and dumbed-down her narrative; I suppose she knows that her readers couldn't cope with anything better. Any hint of moral ambiguity has been discarded. 

That it is a historical novel is  shown by the use of old-fashioned terms such as "break your fast" for breakfast (Ch 2) and "pursuivants" for pursuers (Ch 7) but any true sense of period is completely undermined by giving the goodies modern moral sensibilities. For example, wife-beating (Ch 50) is regarded as normal by the baddie and abhored by the goodie. I'm not saying that wife-beating is at all tolerated and I am sure that in the 1500s there were many people who condemned it but it would have added interest and tension to the story if a goodie had condoned it. Our moral values are developed within the context of society and one of the functions of a historical novel should be to examine our present beliefs from the perspective of past societies or we risk making the assumption that then they were wrong, wrong, wrong and today we are right, right, right and in the future if they look back at us they will be amazed at how right we were. I suspect Mosse knows that her readers would be shocked if she allowed a goodie to say something controversial but it made for a very unsatisfactory novel.

The characters are mostly exactly the same underneath as they are on the surface. The only characters I became interested in (and mostly because they offered a slight element of comedy) were Aimeric the boy and Madame Boussay his aunt, the latter being the only character to show any sort of development. The others were names for stereotypes; the  goodies were good and the baddies were bad and no-one had a moral dilemma or changed in character. Even the love affair was love at first sight and enduring through thick and thin. There were repeated missed opportunities to develop the characters and this meant that the narrative tapestry woven was threadbare. They were as wooden as the chess pieces moved around the board and like bishops, knights and castles< Mosse's characters were totally subservient to the dictates of her plot.

In the end it was all about the plot. But even this didn't excite me. It lumbered along like a creaking medieval cart. Okay, a lot happened and there were twists and turns, but there was nothing that was not predictable.

It was, I suppose, a page turner but only because I had lost interest well before the half-way mark and was skim-reading to get to the end as quickly as possible.

Some interesting moments:

• "She stretched the night from her bones" (Ch 2)
• "My mind is overcharged with thinking." (Ch 36)
• "It is sometimes safer to be taken for a fool and overlooked, than be considered wise and have your every word examined." (Ch 63)

I was bored. May 2021; 576 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God