Book No. 15 of 2021
I really enjoyed this book, which I saw one review describe as “an Elizabethan-era spy thriller.” The first half or so of the book is a little slow going, as the characters and plot are being set up, but once everything is in place the story tumbles forward and is deeply compelling all the way to its aching end.
One of the best, quietly hilarious recurring gags is the way England and Scotland are described from the perspective of the main protagonist, a Muslim physician from the Ottoman Empire: while Anglocentric narratives paint Elizabeth’s empire as redolent with glory, our narrator is deeply unimpressed with the primitive, dark, dirty, plague-ridden tableau he sees. It’s a delightful subversion of the framing I’m used to. It’s also hilarious how the difference between Catholic and Protestant theology, seemingly an unbridgeable gap thus justifying violent conflict, is bafflingly petty and hard to comprehend to our fish-out-of-water narrator. More painful is how he gets caught up in these intrigues, never fully understanding what is going on with these people who have no interest in understanding him.
Without being the main focus, there is an element of the immigrant narrative here thanks to the framing of the story; additionally, it’s fascinating how thrilling the spycraft aspects of the story are given the extremely analog and slow-moving nature of 1500s intelligence gathering.
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I was strongly reminded of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, another book where a well-known chapter of empire-building is told from the perspective of a long-suffering POC.
The Tudor court intrigue, power-jockeying, and strategizing reminded me of Wolf Hall the TV series (have not yet read the book).