Dark story is vividly entertaining
A Net for Small Fishes Lucy Jago Flatiron Books
The corrupt, licentious court of England's James I makes a fittingly baroque backdrop for A Net for Small Fishes, Lucy Jago's novel (based on an actual 17th-century scandal) about a complicated female friendship fuelled by ambition and anger.
When narrator Anne Turner first lays eyes on Frances Howard in January 1609, she sees a weeping 18-year-old covered with welts after being whipped by her husband. These are of no concern to her mother, who has summoned Anne to dress Frances for a court appearance and coldly advises her daughter to “submit to your marriage,” arranged to serve the political interests of the powerful Howard family.
Her 17-year-old husband beats her because he has been unable to consummate their union, Frankie confides. “I am very unhappy,” she whispers, slipping her hand into Anne's. “In that moment, I recognized Frances Howard to be the dream I had long held,” Anne tells us. “With Frankie, I could have the life I had always wanted.”
Anne schemes for her family to surmount Jacobean society's rigid gradations of rank and status. Her husband George's medical practice at court requires the couple to spend money they don't have to keep up appearances. Payments for the herbal medicines Anne concocts and the outfits she designs for court ladies help, but they are always in debt — not unlike Frankie's family, except the Howards' spending is on a vastly greater scale and the nobility are rarely forced to pay their bills. Anne is more fortunate than Frankie in one sense. George, impotent for some time, gracefully shares Anne with a lover, a courtier who fathered the three youngest of her six children. Their marriage remains loving and supportive. Anne hopes Frankie's patronage will smooth the path toward a knighthood for George and upward mobility for her children.
Jago weaves an intricate web of social, sexual and political manoeuvres that entangles her characters. Even Frankie's abusive husband is depicted with a measure of empathy as the traumatized son of a man executed for treason.