The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Queen, seductress, girlboss manquée
In this fitful debut novel, Mary, Queen of Scots and her retinue refuse to sit meekly in their dungeon
272pp, Hutchinson Heinemann, T £14.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £16.99, ebook £8.99
Lochleven Castle is today a ruin, visited by tourists, but in the 16th century, for 11 months, it was the prison of Mary, Queen of Scots. Flora Carr’s debut novel The Tower reimagines those months, during which an awful lot happened to Mary: she miscarried twins, she was forced to abdicate her throne by rebellious nobles in favour of her infant son James VI, and she staged two audacious attempts to escape the castle, the second of which was successful.
We meet 24-year-old Mary on her journey to Lochleven, fresh from her humiliation at the Battle of Carberry Hill. She has been stripped of her entourage, but allowed two chambermaids: Marie, a French woman with on-the-nose “French” characteristics (namely “hot passions”), and Jane, a more enigmatic Scot who will, in years to come, tie white cloth around her mistress’s eyes to prepare her for her beheading. Soon, a fourth woman joins the group: Mary Seton, who has been the Queen’s sidekick since infancy.
Much of the novel is given over to tracing the shifting relations between these attendants, but Carr often takes us outside their cramped living-quarters too. Mary’s host, and captor, is Margaret Erskine, a faded beauty who was once the mistress of Mary’s father, James V. Wily and resilient, Erskine loathes Mary as she loathed Mary’s late mother, Mary of Guise. As the months go by, the dramatic events that led to the queen’s imprisonment also come into focus: the deaths of her first two husbands, and her unpopular marriage to her third, Lord Bothwell, portrayed as a brute and (though historians are in reality unsure) a rapist.
Carr’s Mary is a complex woman who wields her sexual power to advance her interests. While talking to men who might be useful to her, she trails her fingers over her skin, leaving them bewitched. She’s also maternal: she yearns for James, the baby she’ll never see grow up; and after her miscarriage, she decides that the twins were boys and imagines who they could have become.
On the other hand, The Tower feels exhaustingly “2024”. The first thing we see Mary do is hitch up her skirts and urinate on some grass. Later, she does the same over a fireplace. Carr seems to think that presenting her “wees and all” is interesting and bold. Erskine, meanwhile, is portrayed as a victim
of the menopause: she has hot flushes and dry skin, and frets she’s becoming invisible. (“I am still here,” she tells herself bravely.)
Jane the chambermaid is an embodiment of mousy girl-power: raped at a young age by her father’s friend, she later breaks the man’s nose. And Seton is depicted as a
“native of Virgo” and a lesbian who has an affair with a lowlier woman. It’s admirable that Carr wants to strip these historic figures of any dowdiness, but her attempts to force them into 21st-century moulds can be cringe-inducing.
Carr’s prose is occasionally overladen with the kind of similes that go down well at creative-writing workshops. On a single page, we’re told Mary looks “like a waterbird peering beneath a wave”, “like a roosting bird”, and “like a butcher smearing away the day’s blood”. Some similes are so weird that they pitch you out of the story. A lute player holds his instrument “like a man bouncing his third or fourth child”. Not his second, then, or fifth.
Still, there’s much to enjoy in The Tower. While there are a great number of characters to get to grips with, Carr ensures that each stands as a distinctive individual. She also captures the dankness of the castle, its dismal and repetitive days, and her grasp of the history is clear but lightly worn. One image that will stay with me is of Mary, riding a boat to cross the loch on her first attempt to escape. Her face is hidden; she is close to being free. Then the boatman notices her hands. They are the colour of fresh snow – “the hands of a water nymph, the hands of a queen”.
Everything feels very 2024. One courtier is ‘a native of Virgo’ and has a lesbian affair