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Summary
Summary
An epic novel of the turbulent English Civil War seen through the lives of those that fought for peace and struggled for love Set against the terrible struggle of the English Civil War, Rebels and Traitors is the story of how this turbulent era effected everyone, from rich to poor, and the hopes and dreams that carried them through years of deprivation, bloodshed and terror. When Gideon Jukes and Juliana Lovell, who are on opposites sides of the struggle, meet during one of the era's most crucial events, their mutual attraction brings the comfort and companionship for which they both have yearned. But the flowering of radical thought collapses; its failure leads to endless plots and strange alliances. And shadows from the past threaten them individually and together in their hard-won peace. Like Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and John Jakes' North and South , Lindsey Davis brings to life a turbulent time through the stories of those who struggled, fought, lived and loved on all sides of a defining and devastating time.
Author Notes
Lindsey Davis lives in London, England.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Davis (Alexandria) takes a break from her popular Roman historical mysteries with this sprawling epic of the English civil war. Alas, after the brief, moving prologue, which vividly depicts the final hours of Charles Stuart before his execution in 1649, the novel never again attains that narrative height. The action shifts to 1634, laying the groundwork for the conflict that culminated in the royal beheading and continues through the downfall of Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in 1657 before a pat ending. Much of the action is seen through the eyes of a resourceful survivor, Gideon Jukes, a printer who ends up becoming a musketeer in one of the London Trained Bands, fighting for the Parliament against the king's men. Efforts to humanize the conflict by providing the bookish Jukes with a love interest don't amount to much. Still, the author does a good job of showing the changing role of print in the political struggles. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
The prologue to this novel of the civil war is written with crisp neutrality, from a viewpoint that is distant but clear. It is as if a photojournalist were to offer a commentary on his own images, straight from a war zone where the casualties are being scraped from the streets, the bombed buildings are still burning, the civilians still trembling. It is Whitehall, 1649, and Charles I is going to his execution. It's a polite business, as executions go. "Charles Stuart of Britain was never chained, starved, imprisoned in a bare cell or tortured. People would argue whether his trial was legal, but he did have a trial." The spectators are sombre, subdued, but the authorities are alert for trouble; there is a heavy military presence. The camera frames two separate images: Gideon Jukes and Juliana Lovell, wife of an embittered royalist. The head removed, the crowd groans; perhaps with disbelief? Gideon leads the guard who escorts the executioner to safety. Juliana heads for home. Their paths have crossed before, long ago, on the day of a court masque. While eight-year-old Juliana, granddaughter of a French costume maker, plays backstage, a mutinous 13-year-old who thinks he would like to be an actor is about to make a bizarre debut. Gideon has defied his grocer parents, practical and modest city people, to dress up as "Third Dotterel". Half-stifled in his bird suit, he ends the day with a jaundiced view of royalty. It's one the author obviously shares, and it's refreshing to read a historical novelist who is not besotted with the lush and romantic, who prefers the plain line of common experience to the emotional extravagances of imagined aristocrats. This is a Roundhead's book, full of "Dutch puddings" and mud and Bible verses. It is populated not just by soldiers, thieves, clergymen and grocers, but by the ink-stained, hard-driven pamphleteers who were the forerunners of modern journalists. Gideon, apprenticed to a printer, has entered the trade most likely to radicalise a young man. He spends most of the book as a serving soldier for the parliamentary forces. With his comrades he camps without shelter in frost and torrential rain, fights on "a handful of maggoty blackberries" or a windfall apple, narrowly survives his wounds; meanwhile, the disappointments of his early marriage leave him emotionally frozen. Juliana, admirably resourceful but young and poor, has married a man fighting for the royalist cause, an adventurer called Orlando Lovell. He abandons her for years at a time to fight her own battle for subsistence and survival; her two small children in tow, she is an itinerant, throwing herself on cold charity, scraping a living in besieged towns and their ruined hinterlands. Lindsey Davies lays her battle map over the bland placenames of modern England - Gloucester, Nantwich, Newbury, Alton; she brings her locations alive with the roar of cannon, the ache of hunger and the smell of fear. The conflict she describes is so brutal, so ruinous, that you wonder why the landscape isn't still smoking; how did these wounds ever heal? Davies is a prolific and popular writer, with a wide following for her thrillers set in the classical world. This is something different, large-scale and very ambitious. The word "epic" is overused, but this book deserves it. Davies never forgets that this is not the "English" civil war, but a conflict fought in Wales, Ireland and Scotland as well. She creates a panorama of society, from the royal court to a dynasty of vagrants called the Tews, "rat-eyed, bone-idle, light-fingered tykes" whose lives are perpetual warfare, even when others are at peace. She weaves ingenious patterns to make her many characters meet, part, meet again, always on the verge of connection. As a narrator, she has opted for omniscience, commenting on the cast's actions and the effects they will have, nudging and warning the reader. She uses a robust idiom, largely modern but with a period flavour, and plenty of quotations from contemporary sources. If the deployment of these largely depends on characters reading aloud to each other, that is a reasonable device, since when printed sources were scarcer that is exactly what people did. Her research has been assiduous and detailed, her commitment to the subject is impressive, and the background detail is often eye-opening. Why, then, is the reader ultimately both disappointed and exhausted? In the earlier pages, however complex the political events, Davies calmly returns the focus, every few pages, to the particular human drama of Gideon, Juliana, their friends and neighbours. There's a pleasure in absorbing the book's wealth of detail; if you don't know your Short Parliament from your Rump Parliament, Levellers from Ranters, Edgehill from Naseby, you'll end the novel far better informed. But by the middle of the story, an unpruned growth of names and dates starts to overwhelm the shape of the narrative. The prose begins to plod, and the strain shows in the dialogue. People do not really say "The broken remnants of our army spent a despondent, sleepless night at Ashby-de-la-Zouche". The balance between public and private life has been lost. Each page, the reader feels, should come with a map, so we can keep track of the battles. And though the characters' lives become more complicated, they themselves do not. When Gideon's sister-in-law joins the Diggers' commune at St George's Hill, and his brother attaches himself to ever more extreme religious sects, we cannot follow their moral evolution. Their God is "the searcher of all hearts", but we have never touched the wellspring of their beliefs. It seems that they are making arbitrary choices so that the author can illustrate her points. The denouement is harsh, in keeping with an unsentimental tale, and is worth staying for. Many readers, by then, will have fallen out of the ranks. Long before the climax, Davies has given up dramatising public events and settled for listing them. The book feels inordinately long because it doesn't gain depth as it progresses. Perhaps it is just as well that there is no sentence in it that you would want to read twice. Hilary Mantel's latest novel is Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate). To order Rebels and Traitors for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-davies.1 In the earlier pages, however complex the political events, [Davies] calmly returns the focus, every few pages, to the particular human drama of [Gideon Jukes], [Juliana Lovell], their friends and neighbours. There's a pleasure in absorbing the book's wealth of detail; if you don't know your Short Parliament from your Rump Parliament, Levellers from Ranters, Edgehill from Naseby, you'll end the novel far better informed. But by the middle of the story, an unpruned growth of names and dates starts to overwhelm the shape of the narrative. The prose begins to plod, and the strain shows in the dialogue. People do not really say "The broken remnants of our army spent a despondent, sleepless night at Ashby-de-la-Zouche". The balance between public and private life has been lost. Each page, the reader feels, should come with a map, so we can keep track of the battles. And though the characters' lives become more complicated, they themselves do not. When Gideon's sister-in-law joins the Diggers' commune at St George's Hill, and his brother attaches himself to ever more extreme religious sects, we cannot follow their moral evolution. Their God is "the searcher of all hearts", but we have never touched the wellspring of their beliefs. It seems that they are making arbitrary choices so that the author can illustrate her points. - Hilary Mantel.
Booklist Review
Davis' hefty, ambitious epic of the English Civil War and Commonwealth of the mid-seventeenth century, more serious-minded than her Falco mysteries of ancient Rome, depicts this tumultuous era from the earliest rumblings against Charles I's divine-right monarchy through plottings against Cromwell's Protectorate two decades later. The perspective switches among three people whose paths occasionally cross: Juliana Lovell, a Royalist wife and mother struggling with poverty, thanks to her husband's absences; Gideon Jukes, a London printer's apprentice who joins Parliament's New Model Army; and a teenage vagabond girl. The most exciting scenes dramatize events from their lives, such as the devastation wrought by the cavalier army's brutal advance into Birmingham. The immense amount of background detail sometimes integrates well with the fictional characters' stories, though generally it's piled on thickly. Devotees of the period will appreciate its authentic depiction and the breadth of coverage; everyone else will learn much about politics, military actions, social movements, religious sects, and the daily life of ordinary people as alliances shift, groups splinter off, and the meaning of treason changes.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Seventeenth-century monarch Charles I attempts to rule England without parliamentary guidance, a misstep that will lead to the bloodthirsty conflict known as the English Civil War. In this sprawling historical saga, the author of the popular Marcus Didius Falco mysteries (Alexandria) examines the lives of ordinary men and women whose world is turned upside down by the ensuing chaos. Gideon Jukes, the son of a prosperous London grocer, is sent to apprentice in a nearby print shop. The printer's seditious leanings greatly influence the young man, who will eventually find himself a captain in the parliamentarian forces. On the opposing side, Juliana Lovell, the wife of Royalist colonel Orlando Lovell, fights to keep her children fed and clothed during her husband's long absences. VERDICT Although Davis has created an assortment of interesting characters, the laundry list of battles, uprisings, and parliamentary intrigues makes for some dry reading. Fans of her Roman historicals will be disappointed. Strictly for those who enjoy their historical fiction with a liberal dose of political minutiae.-Makiia Lucier, Moscow, ID (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
