A Place of Greater Safety

Product Information

She moves from past to present tense and from third person to first person narration, with the occasional instance of addressing the reader directly. She also gets away with switching tenses and generally leaving the reader to work out what's happening by herself. An ambitious, gripping epic and a tour de force of historical fiction, A Place of Greater Safety tells the story of three young men who find themselves in Paris in 1789, at the dawn of the French Revolution.

She alternates between past and present tense, and between first and third person, sometimes within the same passage or section. In Mantel’s version of events, he is bisexual, but I do not know whether this is true of the real Desmoulins or not.However, not everything about even a significant historical event like the French Revolution can be known. For me, the book has left me with a thirst for more knowledge about those times and many thanks that I did not live then. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. We have casual talk of murders and loss of life, the immorality of the situation of a country besieged from all sides and almost bankrupt, generals being replaced at breathtaking pace and a lack of clear predefined plans.

In 1767--when Armand was able to walk, and Anne-Clothilde was the baby of the household--Jean-Nicolas said to his wife:"Camille ought to go away to school, you know. It was not that he was unwilling to assume responsibilities; he was simply overwhelmed by the perplexities of life,paralyzed by the certainty that there was nothing constructive to be done in any given situation. Lucile is in love with him from the beginning, even though she knows the nature of his relationship with her mother. A lovely passage at the end set my heart racing, in much the same way as my favorite metaphor in Wolf Hall and the final page of Bring Up the Bodies did.En wij op onze beurt bestrijden de gevestigde orde alleen maar omdat we er niet in slagen zijn smerige ladder op te klimmen. Spoilers but only if you never knew the French Revolution = wholesale death and that real characters who lived 200+ years ago may be a little on the deceased side by now anyway.

There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry. And he would snap at them that his own province was good enough for him, and ought to be good enough for them too. In her father's house, where the brewer ranted all day and bawled his workers out, great joints of meat were put upon the table. The city stinks of wealth and corruption; beggers sit in roadside filth, the executioner carries out public tortures, there are beatings and robberies in broad daylight. The windows were closed against the early summer, against the buzzing fragrance from gardens and fields.It would be almost impossible to read a novel as long as A Place of Greater Safety and not get some idea of the setting. Robespierre joins the powerful Committee of Public Safety, and it is the members of this committee that become the real leaders of France. The explanation came at the christening, from the grinning uncles and cradle-witch aunts: aren't you a little Godard then, isn't he a little Godard to his fingertips? The town smells of summer; not very pleasant, that is, but the same as last year, the same as the years to follow.

Character wise, I warmed to Max – I started off disliking him and finding him very cold but towards the end I liked his integrity, although his allegiance to Camille did annoy me. The ladies of the family believe in annual production, and Madeleine's late start hardly deters her. And Camille in the end just breaks, but Robespierre his thoughts and motivations are never really seen directly.

Its alumni were celebrated if diverse; Voltaire, now in honored exile, had studied there, and Monsieur the Marquis de Sade, now holed up in one of his chateaux while his wife worked for the commutation of a sentence passed on him recently for poisoning and buggery. Danton in forcefulness resembles Cromwell who Mantel later would take on (an already a few times mentions in this work). The pages fanned over--the fox and the cat, the tortoise and the hare, wise crow with his glinting eye, the honey bear under the tree. She makes these famous figures of the French Revolution into real, believable people, with flaws and complexities, and they come to life, all through the 749 pages of the novel. He had the knack of getting himself into the company of the older, well-connected pupils, of making himself in some way fashionable.