This latest Maggie O’Farrell novel is once again a work of historical fiction, like Hamnet, and even more riveting. Now the reader finds themselves in the mid-1500s, Renaissance Italy. Our protagonist is Lucrezia, fifth child of Cosimo D’Medici of Florence. It is not always easy to remember or believe how young our protagonist is, barely 15 when married to Duke Alfonso of Ferrera. For a girl so young, she is remarkably poised, self-assured, daring and matured. It is very possible people in that era did mature more quickly, and highborn young ladies in particular were trained from birth in close detail on how to comport themselves. Certainly Lucrezia’s composure is beyond what one might expect of a young teen of today!
Overlooked by her family who favour her elder brothers and sisters, Lucrezia is thrust into prominence when the sister who was promised in marriage to Duke Alfonso dies suddenly before the wedding. She is betrothed to Alfonso in Maria’s place, although she is barely more than a child at that time. The wedding takes place when she is just fifteen, and before a year is up, the bride is dead. This is told to us at the very start of the novel, so it is no spoiler. But the reader wonders why this would be told to us right at the start, colouring the entire read of course. Perhaps it is to heighten the tension, to make the reader aware that story we are following will be a short one timewise, to draw attention to Lucrezia’s precarity and how limited the time granted to her would be. Perhaps it is to turn the novel into a sort of suspense story, making the reader wonder how her end will come. The author’s note indicates that even apart from the fact of Alfonso and Lucrezia’s marriage, many events from this novel are drawn from historical events, such as the grim conclusion of Alfonso’s sister’s forbidden romance, and some of the other details such as the keeping of an exotic animal menagerie by Lucrezia’s father.
The structure of the novel is clever, moving back and forth in time from 1561, that all important year after Lucrezia is married, to her childhood in Florence. Within that time frame is another back-and-forthing, between the temporal present of Lucrezia being moved to the Fortezza where her death is planned, to the year of being Alfonso’s Duchessa, where after the wedding ceremony and leaving her Florence home, she is taken first to an idyllic hunting lodge, then to her new husband’s castello in Ferrera. The movements in time are of course narrative devices through which information is imparted to the reader in careful releases, so as to build the narrative and framing, as well as the growing tension. We follow Lucrezia and join in her bewilderment then growing distrust as she encounters the riddle that is her husband, at once so thoughtful, loving and charming, and also so ruthless and scheming and brutal:
…’he is like Janus, with two faces, two personalities. And he can switch between them,’ he snaps his fingers in the air, ‘like that’
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Lucrezia of course has to take great pains to conceal her high-spirited, true self from him in order to survive, to pretend to be a compliant young bride, but even so, Alfonso is not fooled: As Lucrezia expresses it,
I don’t know how he does it but he can gaze on someone and see whatever it is they most want to keep hidden. He can peel away the layers people use to clothes their secrets…
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When we hear Alfonso say,
It is hard to define. There is something at the core of her, a type of defiance. There are times when I look at her and I can feel it – it’s like an animal that lives behind her eyes. […] I do not know how I missed it. It makes me fear that there will always be a part of her that will not submit or be ruled
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then the reader understand it is time to give up hoping against hope that Lucrezia has only imagined her handsome husband wishes her harm; that her days are indeed numbered, and that her impending doom is not just the fantasy of a neurotic young woman full of fears and fancies, but the very real menace of approaching death.
Surprisingly, even her powerful family and name cannot protect Lucrezia; she is but a pawn, which she fully comprehends and indeed has been carefully brought up to be. Apparently in this violent time, it was not that uncommon for highborn wives to be summarily murdered by their husbands to get them out of the way when it was politic to do so; in the afterword, we learn from the author that Lucrezia’s elder sister was strangled at 34 years of age by her husband, and her cousin also died a sudden mysterious death, “suffocated accidentally while in bed”, but actually strangled with a dog leash by her own husband; and like Duke Alonso, the husbands were never called to account. The highborn brides seem extremely dispensable!
Alfonso commissions a painting of his new bride, which he calls a Marriage Portrait, by a student of Michelangelo. Interestingly, it is not a single painter, but a whole team of apprentice painters who do a portrait –
Between five or ten at once one time, depending on how many commissions we have
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with one doing the landscape in the background, one specialising on the cloth textures of the dresses, one doing the face and hands, etc. This of course is quite different to the modern day notion we have of the master artist who does an entire portrait as a signature style on his own. The only jarring note in this novel is when O’Farrell writes of Alfonso referring to the painting as that of his ’first duchess’, which he then amends to ‘beautiful duchess’, right in front of Lucrezia and everyone else in the room. It is just a little unlikely a suave killer like Alfonso would make such a slip; and if it was intentional, it makes no sense for him to give any indication he is planning to murder his wife. But apart from this one niggle, this novel was a compelling read, one of those where the hours simply fly by as the reader cannot put it down until it is finished.
Hamnet was lovely, looking forward to this one too. But what a story!