Dangerous liaisons
The Marriage Portrait **** by Maggie O’farrell (Tinder Press, £25) Lucrezia, 13, is the youngest daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. When her older sister Maria dies, she inherits Maria’s betrothal to Alfonso, future Duke of Ferrara. The Marriage Portrait opens in 1561, one year after the wedding. The Duke has brought Lucrezia to an isolated hunting lodge where she realises with chilling certainty that since she has yet to provide an heir, he plans to kill her.
The action flits between Lucrezia’s unhappy childhood and lonely marriage, filling in the blanks between the initially charming Duke and the dangerous man she finds herself tied to.
This is a rich, colourful, brutal world and initially the story unfolds on gated palace grounds. Only briefly, at a country villa, does Lucrezia taste freedom after the stifling control of her parents.
The scenery then becomes increasingly oppressive as Alfonso’s ruthless character reveals itself, moving to his grand castle and finally to the dark lodge.
Between threats of unpredictable disease and casual violence, there is danger lurking everywhere, especially for a teenager realising that her life depends on the mood of the men around her.
Lucrezia and Alfonso were real people and Lucrezia died suddenly less than a year into marriage. Though the official cause of death was TB, rumours almost immediately circulated claiming Alfonso had poisoned her.
Her ultimate fate in this fictionalised version of the tale is up for debate, but Hamnet author O’farrell delivers her heroine some overdue justice by breathing vivid life into her tragic story.
Lija Kresowaty
Act Of Oblivion **** by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22)
The Nazis are often the villains in Robert Harris’s thrillers (Fatherland, Enigma, V2). However, his latest novel, set a decade after the English Civil War, reminds us that the British are perfectly capable of doing evil things to one another if left to their own devices.
We begin in 1660 with the Restoration of King Charles II. The 59 men who signed the death warrant of Charles I in 1649 – the Regicides – are being hunted down to be disembowelled in front of baying crowds.
Two of them have fled to America – Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe. We follow the fugitives on a long trek across New England to find somewhere they can start new lives incognito.
This part of the story is true, but history doesn’t tell us much about the men who travelled from England in pursuit. So Harris has invented a wonderfully sinister character called Richard Nayler, a manhunter with personal reasons for loathing the Regicides.
It’s a long, reflective novel, but there are also plenty of moments of high drama as two decades pass by and Nayler’s quest to capture Whalley and Goffe is repeatedly frustrated. Then, he comes up with a diabolical plan to trick Goffe’s wife into telling the pair’s whereabouts.
It’s a masterclass in storytelling, so enthralling that if you’d disembowelled me while I was reading this book, I doubt I’d have noticed!
Jake Kerridge