A Tudor and a tortoise, both in fine voice
I cannot say I jumped for joy when I saw that the fine historian of the British monarchy, Alison Weir, had written a historical novel. What on earth for? She has already shown her inspired historical imagination in her biographies of crowned, and often decapitated, heads. She has brought her subjects to life as well as any nov-elist, revealing their characters and their tangled, usually dire predicaments. She has taken the political metaphysics of royal blood and presented it as tragedy. History has provided her with plots that surpass fiction, plots whose labyrinthine intricacies she has already teased out and laid bare for our appalled contemplation. What could a novelistic approach add to this? Dialogue strewn with "dost thou"s and "prithee"s, and sentences running widdershins in the syntax department?
Well, I am happy to report that all this pother was a waste of time, for "Innocent Traitor: A Novel of Lady Jane Grey" (Ballantine , $24.95) is splendid and an admirable exercise in creative restraint. Jane Grey, in case you've forgotten, was Henry VIII's great-niece, and a direct descend ant of Henry VII, the first Tudor king. As such she had "rich and valuable Tudor blood" in her veins, precisely the asset you would not desire if you wished for a long or peaceful life in 16th-century England.
More particularly, Lady Jane Grey was the daughter of ruthless, abusive, power-hungry monsters who looked at her with disappointment. She was not the boy that they hoped for, though of course she was still excellent marriage fodder. As a consequence, she was subjected to a draconian upbringing designed to make her accomplished and biddable, before being put into play in the political realm. As a veritable amphora of regal blood and pure Protestant faith, she was considered for a time as a possible wife for Henry's successor, his son, Edward; but the boy lay on his death bed before Jane's diligent parents could wangle a way for the desired union. But they and their powerful associates had another card up their sleeve. Edward's death would bring his sister Mary Tudor to the throne. An intransigent Catholic, she would certainly restore England to the embrace of Rome, an abomination in itself that would, furthermore, most certainly introduce a new era of spying, torture, burnings at the stake, and dispossession of Protestants. Under these circumstances -- and in Jane's parents' ambition and in the wholly evil duke of Northumberland's pursuit of dominion -- the girl was groomed as the true heir to the throne. She was hastily married to foul Northumberland's son, and with Edward's death she was declared queen -- by some, and pretty hesitantly too. Such allegiances were provisional and, as it emerged, fleeting.
But that -- and there is more, culminating in the final tragedy -- is history. What of the fictional elements? Weir tells the story in the voices of several characters in plain English, not bodice-ripper argot. And while she provides much domestic and, indeed, wardrobe detail, her orderly historian's mind keeps the story spare and the focus clear. The narrators include Jane, her parents, her nurse, and many others. The Jane Grey of these pages submits to her lot, step by fatal step, but only after much agony of soul. Her confusion and desire to act justly culminate in a fierce struggle of conscience over whether assuming the throne of England is God's will or an usurpation of the rightful claimant. Meanwhile, we also find Mary Tudor contemplating God's will, seeing her accession as the divinely ordained salvation of an England fallen into heresy. As the fate of those cursed by royal blood is Weir's specialty, it is not surprising that she is sympathetic to Mary, a pathetic figure whose life was another tragedy. In giving narrative voice to her subjects Weir brings us into emotional contact with them in a way that an unadorned historical account does not. We feel, rather than merely acknowledge, that these crimes and machinations were the actual doings of real individuals and that the hard life those callous schemers created for Jane in particular was really lived -- and brutally ended.
It seems a little unfeeling to turn from poor, doomed Lady Jane Grey to a tortoise in an 18th-century village in Hampshire, and yet the creature in question is the subject of another nonfiction writer turned novelist. Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Timothy, or, Notes of an Abject Reptile" (Vintage, paperback, $12) is told in the voice of Timothy, a tortoise who, for decades, actually lived in the garden of the Rev. Gilbert White , one of those gentle, inquiring, natural-historian clergymen who once flourished in England. Timothy's voice is abrupt and acerbic -- and with good reason. In the first place he is a she, though not recognized as such by those in whose company she is forced to live. Moreover, she has been condemned to exile and "apprenticed for life in the role of a curio." To her cool eye, human beings are preposterous in both their presumption and their appearance: "Great soft tottering beasts. . . . Crescent of pale shell at the ends of their fingers. Drab furrows of person-scented cloth hang about them. . . . That mass of body and brainpan to heat and cool with their internal fires. No tegument, no pelt to help them."
Timothy's gaze is alien, but she is still very much the 18th-century natural philosopher and acute observer. Her descriptions of nature -- which, one gathers, are some amalgam of White's writing and Klinkenborg's conjuring of a tortoise's style -- are arresting and beautiful. And just as White makes her his study, so she makes him hers, remarking on his speculations and ruminations, his habits and occupations, his "pride of reason" and isolation from the processes of nature. She watches him: "Separate in the curious act of reading. Eyes fixed to the page like the stoat staring down a field-mouse. Attention averted from everything else. Nosing along the trail of words."
"Timothy" is a brilliant tour de force, and I have installed it on the shelf with my other favorite animal stories of all time: Jack London's "The Call of the Wild," Henry Williamson's "Tarka the Otter ," Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," John Collier's "His Monkey Wife," and John Hawkes's "Sweet William."
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
