The Sixth Wife Harper Perennial

REVIEWED BY:

SCORE:

Author: Suzannah Dunn
Publisher: Harper Perennial

REVIEW:

Katherine Parr (Kate), the widow of Henry VIII and dowager queen of England, marries again in almost unseemly haste to Sir Thomas Seymour. It’s a love-match, something thrice-married Kate hasn’t experienced before, and even though she’s in her mid-thirties – an advanced age for a childless Tudor woman – she soon falls pregnant.

Catherine (Cathy), Duchess of Suffolk and Kate’s best friend, watches the marriage flourish –and fall apart. Cathy mistrusts and dislikes Thomas, but sets Kate high on a pedestal. She believes Thomas unworthy of her friend, and thus puts into motion a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Soon Cathy and Thomas embark on an affair, even though they both claim to love Kate – and when Kate begins to suspect something is amiss, Cathy points the finger of blame on Kate’s stepdaughter, the young Princess Elizabeth.

When treason is but a step away, Cathy’s and Thomas’s actions both singly and together bring them closer to disaster, while Kate is innocently oblivious of the tragedy about to strike down her happiness…

This is very much a book about women – about being a woman of principle, strong, well-educated and independent – and yet still being vulnerable and open to fault. The main theme is summed up thus:

Kate told me that [Senor Vives, her tutor] advised them never to marry for love. For a man, it was of no consequence, he said: a man could marry for love. But not a girl. Because it would render her vulnerable. Of all the pieces of advice from him, Kate chose to ignore this one.

The style of the narrative was not one I warmed to. Conversational, with many stops and starts, it piled on detail in one sentence and glossed over it the next. It does make the prose more intimate, as if Cathy is sitting with you telling the story, but for the first half of the book I found it a little unwieldy and it took a while for me to get into the story.

Mature and at times engaging, The Sixth Wife is full of pointed observations of human nature and its contrariness (e.g., Cathy doesn’t love Thomas but doesn’t hesitate to start the affair, even though she can’t find a reason for her actions). The author has a very good eye for detail and emotion, her almost psychological insights drawn out subtly in narrative observations, such as in my favourite paragraph:

It was spider season when I returned to Sudeley, webs everywhere in the garden, spanning paths and veiling windows, each bearing a single dark fruit. Eerily blind to us, those spiders, squatting there, clutching their lace. I walked with care, head bowed, flinching.

In composition, The Sixth Wife is almost flawless: if it were a literary essay I’d give it an A+, but as a novel it seemed to fall short. For all its sharp investigation of human relationships, for me it lacked humanity. Others may disagree, but since it never warmed my interest above tepid, regretfully I can only give it 4 Flutes. Philippa Gregory does it so much better.