You could say it was like pulling teeth to get me to start reading
Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” books, but it wasn’t the wisdom tooth extraction that did it. It was afterwards, as I sank into three days of bed rest, soft foods and codeine, that my resistance finally broke and I reached under the bed to where “Outlander,” the first volume of Gabaldon’s series of historical romances, was stashed. It would be my secret vice. I couldn’t let my girlfriend San know that I’d taken her advice and actually started reading the book, or she might think I was actually enjoying it, or something. She’d start asking what part I’d gotten up to, and want to talk about how great the characters are, and how much better it is than one of those books. I once carried a dogeared copy of Walter Benjamin’s “Illuminations” through every punk squat in Europe and was now reading a historical romance novel.
Only a few weeks before, San was hiding the book from me. I’d stop into her office to see how her dissertation research was coming along, and before the door was properly open, she’d already be deep into a history of the Paris Commune or something, making brisk pencil marks in the margins while “Outlander” fluttered open in the wastebasket. Eventually, it was replaced there by the sequel, “Dragonfly in Amber,” and then “Voyager,” the third book. By then, she’d dropped the pretense that they were guilty-pleasure reading and had turned evangelical. “You know, you should really check these books out,” she said. “One of my mom’s friends started reading them thinking they were genre fiction — but they’re really not. You know how video stores always file ‘Watership Down’ in the children’s section? Gabaldon’s books aren’t about bunnies either. They’re rather good.”
I wanted to believe her, too, except I’d already been scorched badly in that regard. Absent the Gabaldon contretemps, the only time I was ever talked into reading romance fiction was in a college class taught by a noted culture studies professor — a leaping marionette of a man who looked like Steve Buscemi with multiple earrings and a goatee. It’s snobbery, he warned, to say that romance fiction isn’t just as good as capital-L, air-quotes “Literature.” Well, who wants to be a snob? I gave the book a fair shot — and it was like young-adult fiction written by Victorian pornographers; a rickety trellis of plot devices hung with obsolete undergarments and bad adverbs.
Not that I didn’t learn anything from it. While the prof took the common cultural studies line on the book, finding reinscriptions of the transgressive potentialities of the subalternizing tropes of wah-wah (translation: Millions of people bought it, therefore it empowers people), I saw a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade of romance readers towing an enormous Sigmund Freud balloon. Here’s how it went: A young girl has a mystical essence inside her that makes her … fascinating, irresistible. She runs around like a brat (she’s “spirited”), throwing tantrums and charming her way out of trouble, until she draws the attention of a mysterious stranger — who seduces and tames her, and installs her as the lady of the mansion. I wrote a response to the book suggesting that millions and millions of people should maybe get a handle on their Electra complexes — which got me in big trouble — and that was that. There are many widely different genres of romance novel, one gathers. The one I read was a “Regency,” which essentially means a rewrite of “Jane Eyre” on pep pills and Viagra. But I was fairly sure, as I am now, that I wouldn’t like any of the other kinds either.
But then I read “Outlander” straight through — and then its gigantic sequel. And then the two gargantuan books after that one. I read them all — four massive historical romance novels — and found that San had been right all along: Whatever Gabaldon was aiming at in writing these weird, compelling books, it had nothing at all to do with simple genre fiction.
What they really are, though, is tough to say. At the very least, the “Outlander” series represents the smartest historical sci-fi adventure-romance story ever written by a science Ph.D. with a background in scripting “Scrooge McDuck” comics — which, despite her somewhat lacquered appearance in the jacket photos, is what Diana Gabaldon turns out to be. The story appears to be fairly superficial as well: A man and woman are flung into romantic adventures in 18th century Scotland. They gallop across misty moors and gaze at each other from moonlit castle battlements. There’s intrigue, and a period of sexual tension, and then lots of serious rutting. But the first thing you notice about “Outlander,” long before the castles-and-moors part starts to kick in, is that it’s a carefully written book, with three-dimensional characters inhabiting a complex, believable world. The people in “Outlander” seem to have lives. The story seems light-handed and plausible. Events seem to happen for reasons and not simply to push the plot forward. The second thing you notice, just as the book turns into quicksand and pulls you under with a big, wet slurp, is that it does all the standard historical-romance tropes spectacularly backwards and wrong.
The female lead, Claire Beauchamp, is a 27-year-old Englishwoman, a British army nurse just released from duty after the Second World War. On a trip to Scotland with her researcher-husband, who has inherited a cache of local historical records, she sneaks up on a coven of witches dancing around a set of ancient standing-stones and ends up falling through the stones into the past. Once she gets over the surprise of that, Claire develops a plan: to use her knowledge of history to stop the disastrous Battle of Culloden Field before it occurs — to save Scotland from the English. Gabaldon herself, of course, has a background in research, and the researcher-husband device allows her to let ‘er rip with the historical detail like nobody’s business. But note: The female romantic lead enters the story already happily married — and thus both sexually experienced and unavailable. She has a mission planned out for herself. She’s also, it later develops (much later, but more on that anon), about five years older than the male lead, a fierce, dashing Highland Scot named Jamie Fraser, who’s tall, rugged, handsome — and a rather nice, considerate chap overall who’s a bit timid about his virginity. Wrong! wrong! wrong!
In “The Outlandish Companion,” the newly minted “Silmarillion” of the series, Gabaldon says she began “Outlander” as practice for writing a detective novel, without any intention of ever having it published. She also lists her previous writing experience as including, besides freelance work for Disney’s comics division, scholarly and technical articles, software reviews (for Byte and PC Magazines) and a “gigantic eight-hundred-page coauthored monograph on the dietary habits of the birds of the Colorado River Valley.” She’d never written fiction before, and had no idea what sort of story she wanted to tell — so she decided that 18th century Scotland was a reasonable enough setting, and worked up some vignettes to see what sort of people might turn up and what they might end up doing. When Claire appeared, stomping through the 18th century moors talking like a modern woman, it was clear she must’ve gotten there through some sort of time travel. As for Jamie, he just didn’t come off like a man who’d have notches on his belt. Their personalities developed from there.
Gabaldon’s plotting in the “Outlander” series would end up being somewhat patchy and modular, with episode following on episode and minor characters writing themselves in and out of the books for no compelling reason. But the genius of the series also lies partly in her unconventional method of storytelling: She simply doesn’t pay attention to genre or precedent, and doesn’t seem to care that identifying with Claire puts women in the role of the mysterious stranger, with Jamie — no wimp in any regard — as the romantic “heroine.”
It’s all pretty refreshing, especially since you’d expect that sort of role-reversal to be played as comedy in a popular novel, with Claire getting all the good lines and Jamie bumbling around like a sitcom husband. That’s not the case, and it doesn’t come off as a gimmick at all: Jamie and Claire take turns pulling one another through the story, with each covering for the other’s weaknesses and winning a portion of the battles. Claire is “spirited,” but in a way that suggests there shouldn’t be anything childish about a woman’s spirit — and that there’s nothing especially strange (or self-consciously you-go-girl) about a heroine who rushes off to save the hero’s butt from time to time. While Jamie has some 18th century issues over that, he generally appreciates the courtesy.
Gabaldon has said — directly in various places as well as sneakily, through various characters — that Claire and Jamie turned out the way they did (a combat nurse and a Gaelic hunk with a real, human person inside) not as any kind of statement, but just because Gabaldon herself doesn’t especially like weenie women, and rather appreciates men as people. There’s something almost avant-garde about that. You can find a halfway version of it in the novels of Mary Renault, a mid-century crypto-Sapphist who wrote detailed historical fiction about ancient Greek heroes, and who didn’t seem to like femininity at all, while quite liking Amazons. Flannery O’Connor had something like it, but in a mean way.
But when you look at even the edgiest of contemporary fiction, you get the impression that men and women are supposed to be essentially different inside, and that male and female strength is always supposed to be in conflict — as though each had some sort of mystical energy that negates the other. Female characters are commonly strong despite male opposition or through there not being any real masculinity around to contaminate the air. Male characters are commonly strongest when the literary universe they inhabit is a contrivedly masculine one. But the striking thing about Gabaldon’s books is that while Claire and Jamie were clearly raised very differently, and while they’re always behaving like a typical romantic couple — falling into torrid couplings, and squabbling and smacking each other, and storming off in fits of pique and suchlike — they get along pretty well as friends despite it all. You get the feeling that they’d still be crashing around together if one of them tripped and fell through a stone sex-change circle.
From the reader reviews posted on Amazon.com, a lot of romance purists are suspicious of Gabaldon because of that sort of thing. Even though a new genre, the time-travel romance, has sprung up in the wake of her books, she’s viewed as something of a carpetbagger, a weird historical novelist on romance territory. The rough-and-tumble relationship between Claire and Jamie, the battle scenes, the violence. Who the hell wants that stuff? The historical-fiction community, for its part, disapproves of the time-travel, which keeps catapulting characters back and forth between the 18th and 20th centuries, while the hardcore sci-fi crowd just thinks all the smooching is icky.
As if that weren’t enough, it gets wronger from there. The genre people practically hop around and shake their fists in unison over the fact that “Outlander” rambles along for almost 300 pages before the main characters even get together and start making Main Plot. But what Gabaldon’s book does instead is introduce an entirely fresh sort of popular fiction — a freer, more authorial version of the middlebrow airport novel than the English language has ever seen before. Gabaldon can craft characters and situations like a real author, and can motivate them like a real author, and has a prose style that almost — almost — manages to sustain a sort of adjective-rich lyricism, while hitting the occasional magisterial cadence. Here’s Claire pausing after stitching up a wound, from the upcoming novel, “The Fiery Cross”:
I never prayed consciously when preparing for surgery, but I did look for something — something I could not describe, but always recognized; a certain quietness of soul, the detachment of mind in which I could balance on the knife edge between ruthlessness and compassion, at once engaged in utmost intimacy with the body under my hands and capable of destroying what I touched in the name of healing.
Gabaldon’s critics also hoot in chorus and kick over wastebaskets because, once the third book, “Voyager,” kicks in, 20 years have passed and Claire and Jamie are both in their mid-40s — which everyone knows is too old for the sort of thing they’re always getting up to. Her detractors shatter crockery and spit down mail-shafts over the fact that Claire finds herself in love with two husbands in different centuries, and has to split her loyalties in order to keep the one from avenging himself on the other’s forebears. Many people hate, particularly, that Gabaldon not only gets away with all this weird, wrong stuff, but that her books are flying off the shelves because of it. Ah, well. To Gabaldon’s critics says Robert Burns, “Some books are lies frae end to end.” To Gabaldon:
Misled by fancy’s meteor ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray,
Was light from heaven.
“Bring Up the Bodies,” Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to her Man Booker Prize-winning 2009 novel, “Wolf Hall,” is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do. Mantel makes bold not with form — by now meaningful experimentation in that area seems exhausted — but with the very material that brings most readers to novels in the first place: our imaginative identification with fictional characters and the experiences we feel we’re sharing with them.
As with “Wolf Hall,” the central character in “Bring Up the Bodies” is Thomas Cromwell, master secretary to King Henry VIII of England. The son of a drunken, abusive blacksmith, Cromwell has risen about as high as any commoner could hope to, entirely on the strength of his acumen, industry, cunning and resilience. As an often-quoted passage from “Wolf Hall” declares, “He is at home in courtroom and waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury.”
This is, incidentally, Cromwell’s own assessment, but he’s saved from vanity by the fact that his confidence is not just well-placed but precisely placed; he is the ultimate realist, and he possesses that most potent of assets, an excellent knowledge of himself. In the thousands of fictional retellings of Henry’s reign — most of them focused on his ambitious second wife, Anne Boleyn — Cromwell is typically depicted as a ruthless schemer. He got rid of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, when Henry wanted Anne, and he got rid of Anne, too, when the time came. The first ejection led to the foundation of the Church of England and the second to the execution of six people.
As Mantel tells it — she describes the novel as “a proposal, an offer,” rather than an assertion of historical truth — Cromwell represents the vanguard of a new era, one in which ability trumps noble birth. He can countenance any number of insults from the arrogant aristocrats he works with because he knows that “chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the money lender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and the kings are their waiting boys.”
He would never dream of voicing such thoughts, of course, and part of the marvel of Cromwell the character is his self-control. “I never forget myself,” he tells the ambassador from the Holy Roman Empire at a moment when his temper has been sorely provoked. “What I do, I mean to do.” The style Mantel employs to write about this exemplar of the will is declarative to the point of bullishness; her voice is his. The character’s allure lies in his energy and his resilience, and it’s thrilling to hitch your readerly perspective to a man who can seemingly do anything and furthermore has the nerve to try.
But if Cromwell is a man of action, he’s also, at age 50, prone to reflection and haunted by the dead. “Bring Up the Bodies” opens with falconry in the picture-book English countryside during the king’s summer “progress” (a sort of nationwide tour) of 1535. Cromwell’s falcons are named after his two daughters, who, with his beloved wife, died in London’s intermittent epidemics. He hasn’t forgotten them, but it’s significant that he’s memorialized them as birds of prey. Above all, Cromwell nurses a grudge against all who participated in the downfall of his mentor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Yet, he is not without warmth. A conscientious and covertly tender householder, he presides over the lives of assorted dependents from various social classes. His carefully concealed soft spot for distressed gentlewomen and exiled court figures like Catherine and her daughter, Mary Tudor, leads him to make small but largely unappreciated efforts on their behalf.
We are shown that Cromwell is ruthless — there’s passing mention of hangings in Ireland, among other things — but we also know that he is loyal. This is his saving virtue. His allegiance is to England and to Henry, who, like the late Cardinal, has recognized his worth and raised him up. Some of the more notorious highlights of Cromwell’s career — the dissolution and sacking of monasteries and other Church property and the execution of Thomas More, depicted in “Wolf Hall” — are cast in this light: England’s riches should belong to the state, not to Rome, and be utilized for the benefit of her king and people. Like a modern Labor Party politician, Cromwell tries to pass poor laws and work programs in the face of mighty resistance from Parliament and the aristocracy.
Throughout the first two parts of “Bring Up the Bodies,” this is the Cromwell we accompany. He is the king’s most valued councilor and is effectively running the country. His enemies are preening, scornful and often foolish noblemen, out to promote clannish interests or reconciliation with Rome. Anne Boleyn, his former ally, has turned on him, and turned off the king. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist,” Cromwell thinks. “He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does,” yet she has overestimated her own security. They are two of a kind, perhaps, but unlike him, she has let her success go to her head and will, in consequence, lose both.
Discouraged by Anne’s inability to give him a son and harried by the vixenish ways that once enthralled him, Henry falls for Jane Seymour, “a plain young woman with a silvery pallor, a habit of silence and a trick of looking at men as if they represent an unpleasant surprise.” It becomes Cromwell’s job not only to clear the way for Jane to become Henry’s third wife, but to make the king feel that he is justified in discarding a second spouse. Cromwell pursues this goal in the conviction that sooner or later Anne would have come after him and his friends.
That’s the setup, but as the interrogation and trials of Anne and her alleged lovers commence, Mantel carries the reader into harrowing territory. Cromwell tricks a foppishly romantic musician into boasting of having slept with the queen (Mantel does not endorse the view that the man was tortured into this admission) and conducts a series of interviews with the four doomed noblemen accused of being her lovers and of plotting against the king. The four also happen to be Cromwell’s political enemies and, furthermore, key participants in a satirical court entertainment that depicted Cardinal Wolsey being dragged to hell by devils. “He needs guilty men,” Cromwell tells himself. “So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
Political horror is not a new literary mode — you can find it in the New Testament as well as in such 20th-century works as George Orwell’s “1984.” However, the protagonist in those stories is invariably the victim. “Bring Up the Bodies” devotes 270 pages to developing its hero, investing the reader in the superiority of his personality and cause, and then ushers him into the interrogator’s chair. Cromwell is contriving to send these people to the scaffold for crimes they quite possibly did not commit, however “guilty” they may be of others. Because he is our man ever bit as much as he is Henry’s man, we are, in some obscure way native to the laws of fiction, implicated. These are not easy chapters to read, although they are magnificently realized.
As assured as her implacable protagonist, Mantel walks the edge of a very sharp knife in the last part of “Bring Up the Bodies.” I don’t believe she cuts her feet on it, but sometimes it felt as if she were cutting mine. It’s impossible to repudiate Cromwell, but embracing him has become infinitely complicated. Of all the many fictional depictions of the moral quandaries involved in the exercise of great power, this may be one of the most disturbing. It comes much closer than any I’ve ever encountered to letting you know how it must feel to manage the fate of a nation: how intoxicating and how very, very perilous.
Yes, “Game of Thrones” has dragons and ice zombies and giant clairvoyant wolves, but for every viewer (or reader) who climbed onto George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy bandwagon for the magical stuff, I suspect there are two of us who are in it for the palace intrigue. Velvet sleeves concealing jewel-encrusted daggers, scheming eunuchs with networks of spies, parvenue commoners outwitting the supercilious aristos and totally, utterly ruthless power plays — what’s not to love?
Martin has always maintained that he’s been influenced at least as much by history and historical fiction as by the traditional epic fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien. Aficionados know that his novels (collectively called “A Song of Ice and Fire”) are loosely based on the Wars of the Roses, a vicious series of battles of succession that took place in 15th-century England. Martin has also listed Maurice Druon and Thomas B. Costain as models, two mid-20th-century historical novelists who wrote about medieval France, and you can see echoes of that material in his fictional universe, as well.
It would probably surprise several generations of British schoolchildren to learn that the dynastic politics of the late 1400s could be transformed into anything coherent, let alone entertaining. (“It’s worse than the Wars of the Roses!” Lucy Pevensie cries in dismay when someone tries to explain a particularly complicated bit of Narnian history in “Prince Caspian.” She speaks for many.) This, however, hasn’t kept many novelists and historians from trying.
It’s not that there aren’t fabulous characters and nefarious doings in the Wars of the Roses — Secret marriages! Mad monarchs! Vanishing princes! This is a story that concludes with one of the players being drowned in a barrel of wine, after all. But keeping the Wars’ family trees, convoluted legalistic arguments and perpetually shifting allegiances straight is enough to give anyone a headache. It certainly doesn’t help that all the male principles seem to have the same three names (Henry, Richard or Edward) or that they are forever gaining or losing and then gaining again the titles that serve to distinguish them from one another.
For fans who wish to investigate further into the real-life inspirations for Martin’s characters, one of the most lucid popular histories of the conflict is Alison Weir’s “The Wars of the Roses” (originally published as “Lancaster and York”). Some of Martin’s references to the Wars are easy to pick up. For example, the two dueling clans in “Game of Thrones,” the Lannisters and the Starks, have names that resemble those of the two sides in the Wars of the Roses. Like the Yorks, the Starks are northerners, while the Lannisters, like the Lancasters, are famously rich.
Both English families were branches of the House of Plantagenet who vied for the throne after the deposition of the last Plantagenet king, Richard II, in 1399 and before the establishment of the Tudor dynasty in 1485. There’s no one-to-one correspondence between the characters in “Game of Thrones” and actual historical figures, but Martin was clearly inspired by Edward IV in creating, say, Robert Baratheon, the great, strapping warrior who became a stout, ailing king. There’s a dash of Edward, too, in Rob Stark, a brilliant commander who makes an impetuous, disadvantageous marriage.
Cersei Lannister, Robert’s ambitious, conniving widow, is thought by many to have been inspired by the hot-headed Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, the king Edward IV helped depose. Henry’s bouts of insanity left him frequently unable to rule, and Margaret, a leading Lancastrian, fought ferociously against those she saw as threatening her family’s hold on the crown. Historians view her as a prime driver in the Wars of the Roses, just as Cersei is substantively responsible for the War of the Five Kings in “A Clash of Kings.” Cersei also resembles Isabella of France, an earlier medieval English queen, who conspired with her adulterous lover to dethrone, and possibly to murder, her (bisexual) husband, Edward II, in the 1300s.
Cersei is a crude, incompetent politician, however, which cannot be said of Isabella. Although unpopular in England, where she was nicknamed “the She-wolf of France,” Isabella has acquired some sympathizers over the years, including the indefatigable Alison Weir, who wrote a contrarian biography of her in 2006, “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Weir has also written novels about various women in the Tudor era, no doubt aspiring to the success of Philippa Gregory, whose romantic historical novels routinely land on the New York Times Bestseller List.
For her own part, Gregory has already published three books in a series set during the Wars of the Roses, “The Cousins’ War” (an apt title, given the intricate blood relationships among the many combatants). The most recent of these, “The Lady of the Rivers,” may even be infused with enough magical elements to appeal to some “Game of Thrones” readers: In it, the character of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, possesses psychic abilities (the real duchess was tried for witchcraft by her political enemies) and is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by her first husband. For those who prefer a more grounded view, Gregory collaborated with two historians, David Baldwin and Michael Jones, on a nonfiction book, “The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother,” published last year.
You may have noticed that most of these books are about women, despite the fact that, with very few exceptions, the women of the Middle Ages had little power. Much of today’s popular historical fiction about the rulers of the Middle Ages is read by women who are primarily interested in the lives and problems of women. Since the historical record contains next to no information on this topic, fiction has stepped in to fill the breach.
Another, more manly, popular contemporary historical novelist, Bernard Cornwell, has set a series of novels, “The Grail Quest,” during a slightly earlier period. His hero, an archer named Thomas of Hookton who gets caught up in the Hundred Years’ War, is an entirely fictional commoner in search of that fabled relic. What Cornwell’s novels lack in historically based, Machiavellian aristocrats they make up for in action-packed, blood-soaked battle scenes.
For the ultimate in medieval scuttlebutt, however, you can’t do better than Barbara Tuchman’s prizewinning 1978 history, “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century.” This account of the Hundred Years’ War centers around the life of a French nobleman who married an Englishwoman, but it’s more expansive than any novel, taking in such fascinating details as the bizarre fashion for long-toed shoes in court (so long, they had to be tied up with strings and were inveighed against by puritanical clergymen) to the legendarily brutal rampages of British mercenary John Hawkwood through Italy. If you really want to know how the peasants fared while their rulers skirmished, the peculiar challenges of sewage-management in a stone castle, what the real agenda was behind the Crusades, or just how dastardly the highborn and royal can behave when it suits them, then look no further.
Despite the heavenly perfection of the free market, Hollywood, mysteriously, refuses to provide family-friendly entertainment that is, shall we say, correct, politically. While it may seem like the entertainment industry is devoted to profit above all else, and is therefore engaged in giving the people what they want, the truth is those show business freaks are shoving their liberal values down America’s throat, as evidenced by “Glee” and Lady Gaga’s appearance on “American Idol.”
Thankfully the Tea Party has decided to produce its own entertainment, just like it produced its own history. If the grand liberal conspiracy theory of Hollywood is correct, underserved Real Americans will flock to Tea Party entertainment options in droves, forcing every film and television studio to produce appropriately conservative fare or go out of business entirely.
The first big offering from “Colony Bay Productions,” the Tea Party-affiliated studio, is a TV show called “Courage, New Hampshire.” It has not yet been picked up by any network, so the studio just released it on DVD and is selling it on its website.
“Courage, New Hampshire,” disappointingly, is not the story of a grizzled Manchester homicide detective named “Danny Courage.” It is, instead, a soapy period costume drama about the fictional town of Courage in the days before the American Revolution. The first episode, “The Travail of Sarah Pine,” is the story of a colonial “grizzly momma” named Sarah Pine. Pine is a slow-witted, slightly deranged young woman who is convinced that a caddish British soldier who knocked her up a year ago will return to marry her. When the soldier, Sgt. Bob Weedle, returns to Courage for some other reason, a year later, he is arrested by the town’s principled, honorable justice of the peace, Silas Rhodes, played by some guy. (Not sure why they couldn’t get Jon Voight — he would’ve been perfect.) (Oh, wait, this guy is the co-founder of Colony Bay Productions.)
As proof of the producers’ commitment to historical accuracy, the British are all evil and speak with British accents, while the colonists are mostly good and speak with (wildly varying) American accents. (Well, one of them sort of has an Irish accent.)
So, Weedle is apparently under arrest for “fornication,” though, oddly for colonial days, no one seems to have punished Pine for bearing a bastard child.
Then there is a great scene where Weedle chops the same piece of wood over and over again, seemingly without successfully splitting it, while having an odd conversation with Sarah Pine.
Pine: “You know what the Word says about men in your station.”
Weedle: “I confess, I do not know.”
Pine: “Protectors of the innocent, bearing the sword against evil. Rewarding those who do good, who love God.”
Pine: “I’m a KINGSMAN, Sarah! I eat the king’s bread, I do the king’s bidding. I always have, and I always will!”
Pine, to her baby: “That’s why God made your poppa so strong, little lamb. To put his arms around us.”
So, she’s not all there, as you can see.
Someone named “Simian Trout” (I think?) shows up to act as Weedle’s lawyer, and he is great. Trout is played by longtime minor character actor Basil Hoffman, who is acting all over this show. Trout was sent by the governor, who does not want to upset the king, on account of how many soldiers there are in Boston, but Rhodes insists on trying Weedle, because of justice. (“One law for England, and another for us? Is that what it is, Simian? Not while I’m justice!”)
Most of the rest of the episode is a gripping courtroom drama.
Once the defense attorney begins cross-examining Pine, there is a montage implying a lengthy, exhausting questioning. But then the montage ends and Rhodes says: “Mr. Trout, for the last time, you will ask a question of the witness or not, but you have tried this court’s patience long enough.”
Then he cruelly cross-examines her by accusing her of lying to her aunt and fornicating with a guy, and everyone gets so mad, even though this is basically the exact tale she told before, when the prosecutor questioned her. (As you can see in the clip above, Rhodes is not happy with this line of questioning.)
Trout calls some drunk person, for comic relief. Is he the best part of the movie? You be the judge!
But Pine’s attorney has a surprise witness! Some redcoat from Weedle’s regiment! The redcoat confirms that Weedle not only impregnated Pine, but he also — unlikely as it may seem — said he totally loved her and wanted to marry her.
Why did he decide to give this testimony? “Because I know what it is … to be called a bastard.” Shocking twist!
(Also I thought his regiment was days away in Boston or something, because Weedle kept claiming that they would show up and burn the whole town down and shoot everyone if the didn’t let him go? Unfortunately, this never happened. No one fires a single musket.)
But then they declare Weedle innocent, because there was no such thing as DNA testing back then. But Weedle shocks everyone by abandoning the king’s army and deciding to raise his child with Sarah Pine. He moves out west, to steal land from the Indians.
Then the Boston Massacre happens (off-screen, in Boston). And Rhodes and his redcoat friend decide not to send the militia after Weedle and his wife until after breakfast. The end. A tour de force! All I could think at the end was, that was amazing, but why was none of it about taxes?
I can’t wait for the next episode! What’s in the hatch? Liberty? Is Liberty in the hatch?
“If you thought the portrayal of John Adams as a chubby, bald, Italian indie actor was proof that the liberals who run Hollywood hate our Founders, you’ll love the guy who wrote and stars in ‘Courage, New Hampshire.’” — Me.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
More Alex Pareene.
Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp’s many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though biographies of varying degrees of seriousness have also been written of most of these men, their lives might best be suited to fiction; only it can adequately convey the animating tincture of myth that has made them momentous.
This, at least, is the thought that comes to me upon finishing Mary Doria Russell’s “Doc.” This extraordinary novel, whose central figure is John Henry “Doc” Holliday, is both a work of reclamation of the man from his legend as a coldblooded killer and an inspired evocation of a mythic quintessence. That fundamental aspect of Doc’s life is announced from the start: “The Fates pursued him from the day he first drew breath, howling for his delayed demise.”
Though set chiefly in 1878 in Dodge City, the story begins with John Henry Holliday’s early life as a man beset by misfortune. The son of a Georgia planter, he was born with a cleft palate, later repaired by innovative surgery. His mother, a woman “educated in excess of a lady’s requirements,” devoted herself to the arduous task of teaching him to speak clearly. She also taught him to play the piano and supplemented his formal education, sharing with him her love of the classics. She died of tuberculosis when he was 15, leaving him in life-long mourning. She quite possibly left Holliday with her disease as well — the tuberculosis that eventually killed him two decades later.
Holliday trained as a dentist in Philadelphia, returned to Georgia to set up a practice, but soon the dread malady began to show itself. He traveled west to ply his trade in an atmosphere supposed to be more salubrious than Georgia’s miasmic swelter. Texas was first, then Dodge City. Here, in this “small, bright hellhole in the immense, inhuman darkness that was west Kansas,” we have the heart of the book and the entrance of a familiar set of characters. Among them are Bat Masterson, flashy dresser, some-time lawman, and future newspaperman who greatly embellished the old West’s already lurid history; James Earp, saloon-keeper and husband of a former prostitute, now running a brothel; Morgan Earp, lawman and the sunniest of the brothers; Wyatt Earp, lawman, straight arrow, and taciturn lover of horses; and Mary Katharine Harony, well-born Hungarian, educated in the classics, and now an enterprising, if bibulous, prostitute known as “Big Nose Kate.”
Kate and Doc are brought together by sexual attraction and a sense of camaraderie arising out of the mutual exchange of pithy quotations from the classics. Kate, who is, not to mince words, a termagant, has no patience for Doc’s desire to relieve the suffering of others by the practice of dentistry: He can, she scolds him, make vastly more money by gambling. And this he increasingly turns to as his constant, wracking cough — and the whiskey he takes to subdue it — makes delicate work progressively more difficult.
Russell brilliantly conveys Doc’s psychological predicament as a genteel, educated Southerner who has been foiled by an unlucky disease and thrust into the life of a hard-drinking gambler. Doc reflects ruefully that the courtesy he shows everyone, regardless of race or condition, is no doubt mistaken as stemming “from an admirable democratic conviction that they were every bit as good as he was. In reality he thought himself no better than they: a significant distinction. It was not a surfeit of brotherly love that informed John Henry Holliday’s egalitarianism. It was an acute awareness of the depths of disgrace into which he had fallen.”
Much of the story is an imaginative, perceptive re-creation of the personalities of real characters drawn from the whiskey- and blood-soaked annals of the Western frontier. A number of fictional persons are also at large, among them a mixed-race youth, Johnnie Sanders, who is murdered — maybe for money or maybe by destiny: “The sad truth was,” broods a melancholy, resigned Wyatt Earp, “that a half-Indian colored kid like Johnnie was asking to get killed by standing there in his own skin, minding his own business.” The mystery of this death adds more poignancy than suspense to the book, for oddly and quite wonderfully, the real dramatic tension arises elsewhere: out of the state of Doc’s lungs, the repair of Wyatt’s front teeth, a few hands of poker, and the chances and mischances that drive the actors toward the notorious event that propelled them into history and legend.
That, of course, is the gunfight at the OK Corral of 1881, in which the three Earp brothers and Holliday took part. Nonetheless, it stays over the horizon, a conjunction toward which the actors are stumbling, small incident by incident, seemingly by chance. It is, as one might say, no accident that Doc and Kate, the two spouters of Latin axioms on the nature of fortune, are fingered as central to that celebrated shootout, a neat dovetailing of classical fatalism and Western myth. “If he hadn’t talked Kate into going back to Doc,” ruminates James Earp, some three years hence, shortly after the deadly confrontation, “that damn street fight in Tombstone never would have happened. Wyatt only got mixed up with Ike Clanton after Kate got mad at Doc one night and then got drunk enough to tell Sheriff Behan that Doc was in on the stagecoach robbery that touched the whole thing off. Her story was horseshit of the highest order, and as soon as she sobered up, she took it back.”
In an “author’s note,” Russell says readers will wonder, “How much of that was real?” Her answer is “not all of it but a lot more than you might think.” To which I will add that what is “real” includes, paradoxically, what she so deftly transmits: the luminescent aura of a tragic myth.
The History Channel: not just for documentaries about Hitler anymore. In an effort to appeal to those millions of Americans who would rather watch contestants eat dung in a jungle with Jeff Probst egging them on than watch another documentary about something that happened before they were born, the channel has brought in reality show producer Mark Burnett to create a 12-hour scripted drama about the Bible. Previously, Burnett’s biggest shows to date have been “Survivor,” “The Apprentice” and “The Voice”… all of which sound like Sunday school stories themselves when you stop to think about it.
But just in case putting Bible stories on the History Channel makes you feel a little icky, don’t worry. The series will be entirely free of historical context, according the network’s president.
The Bible has its own layers of interpretation, of course, but Ms. Dubuc said the series would not try to impose any kind of historical context to events like the Flood. “It is just the magnitude of the book itself,” she said. “We’re not stepping back to examine anything that could be called a controversy. We are just telling the stories that are in it.”
Ms. Dubuc said researchers are already at work and theologians will be consulted.
Where else should a non-historical show go than on the History Channel? And good luck finding that non-controversial story from the Bible. I think it’s somewhere between the part where God (if he/she/it exists) says “Let there be light,” and when Jesus Christ rises from the dead (still up for debate).
Of course, the ultimate irony of Burnett’s Bible series is that it is the first scripted History program since “The Kennedys” was canceled, with the channel claiming that “the mini-series did not live up to its standards of accuracy.”
Lena Headey in "Game of Thrones" 
Pre-Tea Party tea people 
Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Earp’s many brothers are known to most of us as they have been shaped successively by sensationalist journalism, dime novels, movies, and TV series. Though biographies of varying degrees of seriousness have also been written of most of these men, their lives might best be suited to fiction; only it can adequately convey the animating tincture of myth that has made them momentous.
And in the beginning, there was Richard Hatch. 
