Astraea
Jane Stevenson Jonathan Cape, 304pp, £15.99
ISBN 0224061402
Shakespeare is the constant presence behind Jane Stevenson's absorbing and intelligent tale of 17th-century passion and politics, set in the chilly capital of Protestant Holland. She rewrites the story of Othello in the love between Pelagius van Overmeer, a dispossessed African prince, and the Winter Queen, the exiled Elizabeth of Bohemia. Elizabeth echoes Prospero, another exiled King, and her court performs A Winter's Tale, also a story of dispossession and eventual redemption. Stevenson's themes are exile, failure, and the long period of waiting and frustration before God's purpose is revealed.
Pelagius's oracular gift brings him to the Queen's notice, but prophecy is not always consoling. In one extraordinary sequence, Pelagius reveals the Queen's dead son, trapped beneath the ice. The book ends in 1642, with the outbreak of civil war in England, and anxiety and despair at the exiled court. Stevenson's readers know that 1688, with the Glorious Revolution and the ambiguous triumph of the Protestant cause, is yet to come, but history does not show her hand to those caught in time. The reader loves knowing more than the characters, but the dangers of giving them an unnatural prescience are not entirely avoided.
Stevenson's descriptive writing owes much to Dutch painting. Here are the still, scrubbed domestic interiors, kitchen objects, ornaments and carpets, plain and decorated, polished and cherished, as well as vivid action scenes, the stag-hunting sequence, the levees, the mechanics of the printing industry and the exotic silks and laces of aristocratic costume.
Elizabeth is proclaimed a beauty, both in Pelagius's eyes and in the poetry of the period which forms the epigraphs to the chapter headings. The cover of the book, however, gives us a merciless piece of Dutch portrait painting; showing a sad, middle-aged woman with the long jaw and straight nose of the Stuarts. Pelagius, on the other hand, is a figure from myth. He is the Black King from the Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch, a picture that is lovingly recreated in the text. This encounter between history and myth lies at the heart of a problem in the pacing of the book.
Pelagius, a stranger to this northern land, is sympathetic and convincing. Stevenson gives him a complex subjectivity and a capacity for introspection largely absent from Shakespeare's noble warrior hero. Even his negotiation of 17th-century racism, astonishingly like the modern variety, is well imagined and portrayed. Blacks were then rare enough in Holland to be regarded as an exotic curiosity, rather than a threat. While we follow Pelagius's point of view, the book is persuasive and gripping. But private affairs give way to public policy; the passionate marriage between the Black King and White Rose must remain secret, hidden, a love acted out on back staircases. A child is born and whisked away. Everyone behaves very carefully in public. Coded notes are exchanged. The reader expects discovery, accusations, subsequent separation and disgrace. Instead, history intervenes and European political events, albeit narrated in fascinating detail throughout the last part of the novel, take centre stage. Civil war breaks out and we all sit freezing in the court of the Winter Queen waiting for the next envoy. It is hard not to feel disappointed. Myth beats history hands down - it is more exciting to enter imaginary worlds than to be told what really happened.
Elizabeth's righteous Protestant convictions seem like worldly excuses to regain power and a handsome income so that she can dress up her daughters and marry them off to suitable princes. I don't dispute the authenticity of Stevenson's portrait, but this modern reader, also a staunch republican, was confirmed in her conviction that the beheaded or dispossessed monarchs of Europe deserved all they got.
Patricia Duncker's latest novel, James Miranda Barry, is published by Serpent's Tail (£10.99)
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