By Fire, By Water, by Mitchell Kaplan
Posted: Sun August 1st, 2010, 8:46 pm
By Fire, By Water
I wanted to like this book. I wanted lots of others to read and like this book. My reason is quite selfish: Granada history is one of my specialties, and almost nobody writes about it. So I welcomed a book with the setting partly in pre-conquest Granada.
I didn't like this book. Actually, it hung around on the shelves for months, because even with my pre-interest, the novel couldn't 'grab' me. So in order to finish the thing, I took it on a packtrip, with nothing else to read. So I finished it--but under any other circumstances, I wouldn't have.
The writer says he 'massaged' the history to fit his plot. (Massaged = wildly slanted / facts misstated and/or inverted.) Now lots of writers do that, and I can tolerate that if the plot reason is good enough.
But it wasn't. In fact, I was very hard pressed to figure out what the plot WAS. This seemed more of a picaresque novel -- One Darn Thing After Another-- except that it didn't stick with one character. There was so much head-hopping, both within scenes and between scenes, that I felt absolutely no emotional attachment whatsoever to the characters he wanted me to like.
And as for the characters he DIDN'T want you to like-- well, heavy-handed would be one way to put it. I don't know why he spent so much time in the heads of Tomas Torquemada and Queen Isabella and his other 'bad guys' (no argument about Torquemada, but he never mentioned that the Inquisitor-general was a converso himself, that would have added too many shades of meaning and ruined the nice black-and-white presentation) except so that you would know that their motivations were really, really bad, and they couldn't think straight about their religion. In any case, I finally resorted to scanning through most of these scenes. They were neither factual nor entertaining and so what was the point?
He did give a little nod of the head to a few of the clerics who fought the Inquisition, Hernando Talavera among them. But he so mangled the recent history of Granada that I almost choked. He mentioned the brother and the son, but somehow left out the actual ruler! He had Ferdinand plotting against the ruler the King actually plotted FOR. And as for the idea that the female protagonist could have continued her business during a ten-year-long civil war followed by a one-year siege -- .
You never stayed with any character long enough to care about him/her. And as for the politics of Spain and Castile -- it's a good thing Kaplan left most of them out, because he screwed up the bits he put in. Ferdinand never could have usurped the throne of Castile from Isabella, and he knew it going into the deal. He couldn't even rule for his daughter (although Isabella's will named him as regent for Joanna) until her husband was out of the way.
This is the point Kaplan didn't get, which most books don't get: Ferdinand and Isabella WANTED the Jews to stay, as converts. They set up the edict of expulsion so that most would find it very hard to leave Spain, and would therefore be forced to convert. Besides the religious motive (which was probably sincere on Isabella's part but merely useful on Ferdinand's), these conversos provided the backbone of the new monarchs' power structure, because they owed their loyalty and their safety to the crown, not the powerful nobles or the peasant class. The more people in that situation, the better for Isa and Ferd.
The Inquisition was a way to control them once they converted. A constant threat that could be held over their heads to make these subjects do what the sovereigns wanted. It didn't really heat up into the 'pure-blood' horror that it became until Philip II. Kaplan has a number of sources listed in the back that lay out the history of the institution, so he has no excuse for not knowing that.
Plus he made Rodrigo Borgia, in his brief mention, a nice guy. This is the later pope Alexander IV, father of Cesare of the same surname, who made a point of murdering his daughter's husbands.
Spoiler warning: there wasn't an ending. it just sort of fizzled down. Which made me quite mad. If I'm going to wade through all that unpleasantness, it would be nice to have some reason for having done so.
Well, this review will have to suffice.
I wanted to like this book. I wanted lots of others to read and like this book. My reason is quite selfish: Granada history is one of my specialties, and almost nobody writes about it. So I welcomed a book with the setting partly in pre-conquest Granada.
I didn't like this book. Actually, it hung around on the shelves for months, because even with my pre-interest, the novel couldn't 'grab' me. So in order to finish the thing, I took it on a packtrip, with nothing else to read. So I finished it--but under any other circumstances, I wouldn't have.
The writer says he 'massaged' the history to fit his plot. (Massaged = wildly slanted / facts misstated and/or inverted.) Now lots of writers do that, and I can tolerate that if the plot reason is good enough.
But it wasn't. In fact, I was very hard pressed to figure out what the plot WAS. This seemed more of a picaresque novel -- One Darn Thing After Another-- except that it didn't stick with one character. There was so much head-hopping, both within scenes and between scenes, that I felt absolutely no emotional attachment whatsoever to the characters he wanted me to like.
And as for the characters he DIDN'T want you to like-- well, heavy-handed would be one way to put it. I don't know why he spent so much time in the heads of Tomas Torquemada and Queen Isabella and his other 'bad guys' (no argument about Torquemada, but he never mentioned that the Inquisitor-general was a converso himself, that would have added too many shades of meaning and ruined the nice black-and-white presentation) except so that you would know that their motivations were really, really bad, and they couldn't think straight about their religion. In any case, I finally resorted to scanning through most of these scenes. They were neither factual nor entertaining and so what was the point?
He did give a little nod of the head to a few of the clerics who fought the Inquisition, Hernando Talavera among them. But he so mangled the recent history of Granada that I almost choked. He mentioned the brother and the son, but somehow left out the actual ruler! He had Ferdinand plotting against the ruler the King actually plotted FOR. And as for the idea that the female protagonist could have continued her business during a ten-year-long civil war followed by a one-year siege -- .
You never stayed with any character long enough to care about him/her. And as for the politics of Spain and Castile -- it's a good thing Kaplan left most of them out, because he screwed up the bits he put in. Ferdinand never could have usurped the throne of Castile from Isabella, and he knew it going into the deal. He couldn't even rule for his daughter (although Isabella's will named him as regent for Joanna) until her husband was out of the way.
This is the point Kaplan didn't get, which most books don't get: Ferdinand and Isabella WANTED the Jews to stay, as converts. They set up the edict of expulsion so that most would find it very hard to leave Spain, and would therefore be forced to convert. Besides the religious motive (which was probably sincere on Isabella's part but merely useful on Ferdinand's), these conversos provided the backbone of the new monarchs' power structure, because they owed their loyalty and their safety to the crown, not the powerful nobles or the peasant class. The more people in that situation, the better for Isa and Ferd.
The Inquisition was a way to control them once they converted. A constant threat that could be held over their heads to make these subjects do what the sovereigns wanted. It didn't really heat up into the 'pure-blood' horror that it became until Philip II. Kaplan has a number of sources listed in the back that lay out the history of the institution, so he has no excuse for not knowing that.
Plus he made Rodrigo Borgia, in his brief mention, a nice guy. This is the later pope Alexander IV, father of Cesare of the same surname, who made a point of murdering his daughter's husbands.
Spoiler warning: there wasn't an ending. it just sort of fizzled down. Which made me quite mad. If I'm going to wade through all that unpleasantness, it would be nice to have some reason for having done so.
Well, this review will have to suffice.