Cashmere Book

Cashelmara is Susan Howatch's retelling of the lives of Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III of England. She sets her tale primarily at Cashelmara, an estate in Ireland, beginning in 1859, with Edward's second marriage to his first wife's cousin, Marguerite. The characters are wonderfully real and complicated, grabbing your attention and holding it to the end, and the story progresses so smoothly that it is like watching a movie.

Howatch uses a device that has become common, but isn't always my favorite, a passing of the story from one point of view to another. She does it magnificently. We begin with Edward's view, pass to Marguerite's (Margaret), then to Patrick (Edward II) the son of Edward from his first marriage. Patrick marries Marguerite's niece, Sarah (Isabella), and the next voice is hers. I was swept entirely into her story and found the events there fascinating. The fifth voice belongs to Maxwell Drummond (Roger Mortimer), and I wondered why this historical figure has been exploited so little because he is never clearly hero or villain but a blend of the two. No need for invention with such a character springing right off the pages of history. And, the last voice belongs to Ned (Edward III), son of Patrick and Sarah, who is left with the chaos created by his father's debauchery and his mother's defection and has to decide how to bring some dignity and morality back to life at Cashelmara.

I am always delighted with a good historical novel. Good ones, well-researched and accurate are difficult to produce and a joy to read. Susan Howatch goes one step further in resettling her characters in another time and place, and yet still being true to what history tells us about them and their relationships to one another. I know of no other writer who does this as well as she does. She always makes me want to know more about the real people behind her fictional ones and I find myself reading histories and researching online for tidbits of information. It is nice when a writer can awaken that kind of curiosity.

There is one more book by Howatch about the Plantagenets that I will try to get to before the end of the year. Hope it is as well-crafted and as much fun as this one was.