#82: Mason and Dixon, by Thomas Pynchon

Charles Mason was an astronomer active in the second half of the 1700s. Jeremiah Dixon was primarily a surveyor, though at the time the two professions, astronomer and surveyor, seemed to overlap quite a bit. You were either out in the field with a sexton or a theodolite at night to measure the altitudes of various stars, or you were out with those same instruments in the daytime to take the elevation of the sun and thereby to establish boundaries between territories. Mason and Dixon worked together over a period of several years after 1760.

Most people probably know that “the Mason Dixon line” is shorthand for the cultural border between the southern and northern US; historically, it was an east-to-west line that was surveyed by Mason and Dixon in the early 1760s to establish the border between Pennsylvania (a colony where slavery was illegal) and Maryland (a colony where slavery was legal).

Most of Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason and Dixon deals with the adventures of the two astronomer/surveyors as they work their way westward from the tidelands of Delaware, past the Susquehanna River and across the Allegheny Mountains, from settled farmland to what was then primeval forest traversed by Indian pathways. But some space is dedicated to the earlier adventures of the two as they observed the Transit of Venus in 1761 from South Africa, and then to a peculiar sojourn by Mason on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic (which is where Napoleon Bonaparte was to live out his final years a couple of decades later). A Transit of Venus is when the planet Venus passes in front of the sun. They are rare, and have always been of interest to astronomers:

Venus transits are historically of great scientific importance as they were used to gain the first realistic estimates of the size of the Solar System. Observations of the 1639 transit provided an estimate of both the size of Venus and the distance between the Sun and the Earth that was more accurate than any other up to that time. Observational data from subsequent predicted transits in 1761 and 1769 further improved the accuracy of this initial estimated distance through the use of the principle of parallax. [Wikipedia]

You can pick up a lot of information about what was going on in the late 18th century from reading Mason and Dixon: about the two principal characters first of all, but also about various scientists, politicians and adventurers of that time, and about America, England, South Africa, and St. Helena as well. For example, if you didn’t know about Admiral of the Fleet Sir Cloudesley Shovell and how he came to grief on the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of England in 1707, you could find out by reading Mason and Dixon. Wikipedia makes a wonderful companion as you read the book—useful for determining where history leaves off and Pynchon’s imagination begins.

Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson all make appearances. But this is not an historical novel in the usual sense. Rather, the period and its people are the raw material from which Pynchon crafts one of his peculiar entertainments. Pynchon, it should be said, does not write realist fiction; but nor does he dispense with reality altogether. Reality, in fact, might be Pynchon’s true subject, and in the course of trying to take its measure he routinely crosses into and out of the territory that we would describe as realistic historical fiction.

Though the book has a reasonably satisfying arc, giving us convincing and engaging summaries of the lives of its two major protagonists—leaving aside the question of whether the personalities Pynchon assigns to them correspond with their actual personalities; given how well he has immersed himself in their diaries and correspondence, it seems likely that he has captured some of the essence of the two men—the great pleasure of reading Pynchon is in endless series of humorous, fantastic episodes he presents. To begin a new chapter of Mason and Dixon is to wonder what sort of surreal amusement the author has in store.

Consider the matter of the missing 11 days. In 1750, England switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. The problem with the Julian calendar was that it failed to align perfectly with the earth’s annual rotation around the sun; by 1750, the progression of the seasons had moved 11 days ahead of what the calendar indicated. This was beginning to interfere with agricultural planning—planting and harvesting were occurring just a bit too late. There was also the fact that other countries were making the switch and it would be inconvenient to have to set your watch forward or back by 11 days depending on what country you happened to be in. In switching to the Gregorian calendar, Parliament decreed that the 11 days must be made up, such that the day after Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was decreed to be Thursday, 14 September 1752.

To the great majority of the population (likely not up to speed on the astronomical niceties of various calendar types) it was obvious that 11 days were being stolen from their lives; moreover, it seemed quite possible that the 11 days might have been stashed away somewhere for the private use of certain persons—September 3 could not just vanish. What if it was your birthday?

What’s more real—the sun and the earth, or the calendar on the wall? The latter is supposed to be a perfect reflection of the former, but on this occasion, at least, it wasn’t. Here’s Pynchon’s riff on the matter, in the faux eighteenth century prose style he maintains throughout Mason and Dixon:

Mason for a while had presum’d it but a matter of confusing dates, which are Names, with Days, which are real Things. Yet for anyone he met born before ’52 and alive after it, the missing Eleven Days arose again and again in Conversation, sooner or later characteriz’d as “brute Absence,” or “a Tear thro’ the fabric of Life,” – and the more he wrestl’d with the Question, the more the advantage shifted toward a Belief, as he would tell Dixon one day, “In a slowly rotating Loop, or if you like, Vortex, of eleven days, tangent to the Linear Path of what we imagine as Ordinary Time, but excluded from it, and repeating itself, – without end.”

Mason goes on to relate that he, himself, has in fact stumbled into this displaced raft of time:

…the fact is that at Midnight of September second, in the unforgiven Year of ‘Fifty-two, I myself did stumble, daz’d and unprepared, into that very Whirlpool in Time, – finding myself in September third, 1752, a date that for all the rest of England did not exist, – Tempus Incognitus.”

Mason describes a world vacant of all other human life, his to roam for “the better part of a Fortnight”; Dixon wants to know: “Were there yet Horses about?” Mason elucidates:

“Animals whose Owners knew them, made the Transition along with them, to the fourteenth. ‘Most all the Dogs, for example. Fewer Cats, but plenty nonetheless. Any that remain’d by the third of September were wild Creatures, or stray’d into the Valley, – perhaps, being ownerless, disconnected as well from Calendars. I found one such Horse, a Horse no one would have known, as well as two Cows unmilk’d and at large.

The details, surreal yet specific, continue to pour forth. It’s a rabbit hole, in the Alice-in-Wonderland sense, and Mason and Dixon is a vast field of such absurd, comical holes.

Consider, for another example, the matter of Jenkin’s Ear Museum, on the island of St. Helena, as described in Chapter 17. There was in fact a Captain Robert Jenkins (not Jenkin, as Pynchon has it) who had his ear cut off when his ship was stopped and boarded by a Spanish privateer in 1731. Jenkins was later posted to St. Helena, but as far as I can tell, he did not bring the ear with him nor was it later displayed in a museum. But in Pynchon’s alternate universe, he did bring it,

…by then encasqu’d in a little Show-case of Crystal and Silver, and pickl’d in Atlantick Brine. … Eventually, at Cards, Mr. Jenkin extended his Credit too far even for Honorable John. There remain’d the last unavoidable Object of Value, which he bet against what prov’d to be a Cross-Ruff, whence it pass’d into the Hands of Nick Mournival, an Enterpriser of the Town.

And so this Nick Mournival, in the Pynchonian universe, opens a museum for purposes of displaying the celebrated ear. Mason encounters the museum in a somewhat remote corner of the St. Helena countryside. He is obliged to make a rather peculiar entrance:

Reluctantly at last he takes to his elbows and knees, to investigate the diminutive Doorway at close hand, —the Door, after a light Push, swinging open without a Squeak. Mason peers in. What Illumination there is reveals a sort of Ramp-way leading downward, with just enough height to crawl.

The proprietor has a rather elaborate presentation ready:

Mason: “Well,” brightly, “where’s the Ear then, —just have a look if I may, and be off?”

Mournival: “Dear no, that’s not how ‘tis done, I must come along to operate the Show.”

The show is elaborate and bizarre and involves something called a “Chronoscope.” Mason, increasingly desperate, is looking to terminate the episode, but “You ought not to leave, Sir, till you’ve spoken into the Ear. She’ll be a much better Judge of when you may go.” Mason is encouraged to whisper his “fondest Wish” into the ear, but reminded “that the Ear only listens to Wishes, —she doesn’t grant ‘em.”

In summarizing this episode I am skipping over pages of weird and wonderful detail—I have to restrain myself from retyping entire pages. The capper is that the ear is just slightly … animate:

All this while, the Ear reposes in its Pickling-Jar of Swedish lead Crystal, as if being withheld from Time’s Appetite for some Destiny obscure to all. Presently, ‘tis noticed by Mason, —he hopes, an effect of the light, —that somehow the Ear has been a-glow, —for a while, too, —withal it seems, as he watches, to come to Attention, to gain muscular Tone, to grow indeed quite firm, and, in its saline Bath, erect. It is listening. Quickly Mason grips himself by the head, attempting to forestall Panick.

Pynchon is often presented as an artifact of 1960s counterculture—a writer tainted by self-indulgence. Difficult in a way calculated to appeal to a certain kind of nerdy male reader (ahem). So when I reread Pynchon, as I do from time to time, I wonder if I’ll be disillusioned, if I’ll feel the need to repudiate my youthful enthusiasm.

Mason and Dixon, along with V and Gravity’s Rainbow, holds up. I would not care to defend Against the Day from 2006; Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, his most recent books, are fine, though they lack the intensity of the earlier books. Mason and Dixon bears the strongest resemblance, among Pynchon’s books, to his grand opus, Gravity’s Rainbow. I wonder if the author was challenging himself to see if he could write a second book with the density of erudition and wit of the earlier book? The major difference is that Mason and Dixon has a warmth and charm that the earlier book is largely lacking. Gravity’s Rainbow is a fierce book, as horrific as it is funny. During the course of it, its major character, Tyrone Slothrop, essentially disappears: his essence seems to gradually leak away. The book isn’t without emotion, but the love affairs are all doomed and no connection or alliance endures. The presiding science is Behaviorism, as per Pavlov and B.F. Skinner; conditioning, manipulation.

I’m not sure there is a similar presiding science in Mason and Dixon, though the book is permeated with scientific concepts: maybe just the idea of measurement, the notion of imposing a Cartesian framework upon the world. The concept of parallax comes up quite a bit. What’s noticeably different this time around is the attention Pynchon pays to relationships, particularly that between Mason and Dixon. They feel a connection with each other, and they “have each other’s backs,” as we would say today. But, like many career partnerships (not to mention life partnerships), their relationship is defined as much by low-level sparring as it is by harmony:

“Why am I doing this?” Mason inquires aloud of no one in particular. “—Damme, that is an intriguing Question. I mean, I suppose I could say it’s for the Money, or to Advance of Knowledge of, —"

“Eeh, , —regard thaself, thou’re reacting,” says Dixon. “Just what Friend Cresap here said not to do, —thou’re doing it…?”

“Whine not, as the Stoick ever says? You might yourself advert to it profitably, —”

“What Crime am I charg’d with now, ever for Thoo, how convenient?”

“Wait, wait, you’re saying I don’t take blame when I should, that I’m ever pushing it off onto you?”

“Wasn’t I that said it,” Dixon’s Eyebrows headed skyward, nostrils a-flare with some last twinkling of Geniality.

“I take the blame when it’s my fault,” cries Mason, “but it’s never my Fault, —and that’s not my Fault, either! Or to put it another way, —”

“Aye, tell the Pit-Pony too, why don’t tha?”

(It will be observed that certain rhetorical flourishes in this exchange have a distinctly 20th century ring to them. And certain authorial tics, such as ending bits of spoken dialog with an unexpected question mark are also much in evidence? Pynchon’s writing style is decidedly relaxed—it’s not that he’s trying to interfere with your suspension of disbelief, it more that he was never much invested in that suspension in the first place. And yes, there is, as always with Pynchon, a certain self-indulgence at work here.)

Mason is the senior partner, and the more serious of the two, a worrier. He is occasionally visited by the spectre of his dead wife, and he ruminates on episodes from his personal and professional history, worrying where he might have gone wrong. Dixon is a more unbuttoned character, more receptive to the strange notions of the various oddballs the two encounter. Scores of other characters, some historical, some fantastical, most mundane, intersect their course as they do their work. They get winters off: One year Mason goes south to Williamsburg while Dixon goes north to New York. The next year it’s Dixon who goes north, and Mason south. On all such journeys, strange thing happen.

Pynchon seems quite at home in the eighteenth century—the century of Tristram Shandy, Gulliver’s Travels, Johnson’s dictionary, and Diderot’s Encyclopédie. Empiricism was taking hold thanks to Newton and his ilk, yet a certain elusive antic madness also prevailed. You could tame the world during the day, write straight lines onto the uneven ground. But at night, who knew what visitor might decide to drop in?

#81: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I first read this book when I was a teenager, during a phase when I was ripping through a lot of nineteenth century Russian literature. I enjoyed it then, but probably did not understand it very well. I say that because when I read it this time, I don’t think I understood it very well and I’d hate to think I’ve lost ground in the interim. Now, as then, I read the decades-old David Magarshack (Penguin) translation. Janet Malcolm has convinced me to avoid those fashionable new translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

I can say that it’s a remarkable book, full of extravagant characters and events. It’s also a crowded book, largely devoid of “social distancing”: in essence a series of large gatherings of up to 20 people, all talking excitedly and typically culminating in some dramatic flourish, such as a woman throwing 100,000 rubles onto a fire and suggesting that one of her suitors pull it out before it burns. One character or another laughs on every page, but it’s usually hysterical laughter; there is profuse trembling and there are frequent mentions of writhing lips. If you don’t like your fiction high strung, then Dostoyevsky is probably not for you.

The title character, Prince Leo Nikolayevich Myshkin, is very central to the story—if this were a movie, we’d say that he’s in every nearly every scene. So why is he called an “idiot”? Well, he isn’t an idiot, in fact. He’s actually very perceptive and intelligent. I think the word “idiot,” somewhat like the word “moron,” used to be more a clinical description and less an insult. As science and medicine have abandoned these terms, they have become mere terms of abuse. Obviously, that’s not how Dostoyevsky intended to present his title character.

But back to Myshkin, he’s also an epileptic subject to breakdowns when things become too intense. He has just returned from five years in Switzerland, where, under the care of a Dr. Schneider, he has made great progress and has stabilized to the point where he is ready to lead a normal life in Russia. He’s an orphan who was brought up by a pair of aunts, one of whom abused him. He is unworldly in the extreme: innocent, idealistic, trusting. Just about any description of The Idiot describes him as “Christlike” or “an idealized Christian,” but those characterizations do not help me understand him. He's seems to me like a real person, not an avatar or a concept, and he is far from perfect: he’s naïve, indecisive, and timid. Perhaps because Dostoyevsky is a superb novelist, our impression of Myshkin, as of other characters, changes with every chance we get to observe him. Towards the end of the book, one of the other characters, a decent fellow by the name of Radomsky, delivers this assessment to the prince:

I don’t agree – indeed, I feel positively indignant – when someone – oh, whoever it is – calls you an idiot. You’re much too intelligent to be called that. But you must admit you’re also so strange that the fundamental cause of all that’s happened is due to your, as it were, inherent inexperience …, as well as to your extraordinary simplicity; furthermore, to your phenomenal lack of a sense of proportion …, and finally, to the enormously great mass of intellectual convictions which you, with that extraordinary honesty of yours, have hitherto taken for true, natural, spontaneous, and sincere convictions.

By the way, Myshkin is not the only prince in this book, and this title should not be taken as indicating any kind of connection to the royal family. Nineteenth century Russia was apparently full of princes, and some, like Myshkin, may not have been particularly wealthy or influential. Similarly, there are two generals in The Idiot, but neither is a military man: the term denoted a high-ranking civil servant.

Most of the other major characters in the book have as good a claim to a clinical diagnosis as Myshkin: consumed with self loathing, repressed rage, or sheer perversity, they rarely say what they mean. Conspiracies are alluded to; one character or another comes to the prince to divulge some scheme or other, but then goes off and invents some new intrigue. The reader is in the same position as poor Prince Myshkin, trying to figure out who’s up to what and why.

There is a plot, but it’s too complex for me to summarize and besides seems somehow beside the point. The reader is in danger of being overwhelmed, just like poor innocent Myshkin. If you squint a bit and look at the book from a certain perspective, you could say that The Idiot is the story of a young man trying to decide between two possible women. You could go one step further and say that one of the women is a “bad” girl—that is, a fallen woman—and the other is a “good” girl, the youngest daughter of a prominent and reputable family. The bad girl isn’t so much bad as self-damned. She has been ruined, as they used to say, and no longer believes herself worthy of love or even respect.

In one scene, the “good” girl, Aglaya Yepanchin, daughter of General Yepanchin, asks Myshkin to meet her at a park bench early one morning. Is romance in the offing between the prince and this general’s daughter? She begins by telling him how much she admires him:

‘Now listen,’ she began again. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you all this—I’ve been waiting ever since you wrote me that letter and even before that. Half of it I told you yesterday: I think you’re the most honest and truthful man I know—more honest and truthful than anyone, and if people say about you that your mind—I mean that you sometimes suffer from mental illness, it’s unfair. I’m quite sure about it and I’ve been arguing about it, for although you really are ill mentally (you will not, of course, be angry with me for saying this, for I don’t mean it at all derogatively), yet the most essential part of your mind is much better than in any of them. Indeed, it’s something they never dreamed of. For there are two sorts of minds—one that is essential and on that isn’t. Isn’t that so? It is, isn’t it?’

It would seem that the young woman is well disposed to the prince. Perhaps they have a future together? But as the conversation continues, her intentions become less clear. First she asks him to help her “run away from home.” When he declares this plan “absurd,” she says that she will instead marry one of her other suitors (the son of the other general). She goes on to say: “I’m sure you came here because you thought I was in love with you and that I had made an assignation with you.” The prince replies “I really was afraid of that yesterday.” Aglaya is enraged by this response.

The conversation continues for several pages. Aglaya reveals that she has received letters from the “bad” woman, Natasya Fillippovna, urging her to marry the prince. The prince is just trying to sort through all the protestations, denunciations, hints, and revelations that Aglaya hurls at him. At this point I might take a page from Aglaya and propose that there are two kinds of readers of The Idiot: those who take the things these characters say more or less at face value, like the prince, and become less and less certain of exactly what is going on as the novel progresses, and those who intuit the emotional truth behind all the drama and have at least a sense of where motives ends and sheer perversity takes up. Because in Dostoyevsky novels there is always the impulse, in certain characters, to self-destruction. Prince Myshkin swims against this tide of perversity, and I, a naïve reader of the first type, am rooting for him to come out right and find his equilibrium, and maybe even true love. This objective seems within reach as the novel winds down. I recalled that Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky’s previous novel, has a happy ending, though many critics found that ending unconvincing.

I imagine that the second type of reader will be less shocked by the ending of The Idiot than I was. I hope the critics were happy.

#80: The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan

I paid more attention to the main title of this book, and to the cover art, which shows the intricate geometric design of the Dome of Imam mosque in Iran, than I did to the subtitle (which is displayed in smaller type on the cover). But in fact, this is a new history of the world, and my mental picture of camels and sparkling fountains and mysterious palaces long buried in the sand were dealt with summarily in the first 50 pages. What Peter Frankopan has given us is a four-thousand-year overview of old-world history from an economic perspective. That is, he explains everything in terms of trade, commodities, and politics. You can go pretty far with that key, and I cannot fault his analysis: the book is a complete success on its own terms and was a pleasure to read. There is none of the sloppiness or overgeneralizing you tend to expect in a “new history of the world.”

Along the way, I was surprised to learn how consistently Persia/Iran (the latter name only having been adopted in 1935) has been at the center of world affairs. I enjoyed reading about the conquests of Alexander the Great, and about the Islamic golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Baghdad was founded and became the richest city in the world. Frankopan notes that as empires rise they begin to draw in resources from everywhere; throughout most of world history, one of the key resources to be acquired was human—that is, slaves. During Baghdad’s heyday, a great many slaves were imported from the eastern parts of Europe, delivered by the people we know as Vikings. In fact, the words ‘slav’ and ‘slave’ are related.

After the discovery of the Americas and the reorientation of trade routes and the tapping of the great mineral wealth of the Incas, the power center of the world shifted to Europe, which then in its turn began to exploit human beings as property, not primarily in Europe itself but in the colonies and possessions its nations began to acquire.

Frankopan shows us how events in one part of the world could have surprising effects in another part. For example, would the Taj Mahal have been built if it weren’t for Spanish conquests in the Americas? Frankopan thinks not:

Shah Jahan’s lavish expression of sorrow at his wife’s death finds a neat parallel with that articulated on the other side of the globe not long before. The Mayan Empire had also been flourishing before the arrival of the Europeans. “Then there was no sickness; they had then no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no consumption. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came,” was how one author writing not long afterwards put it. Gold and silver taken from the Americas found its way to Asia; it was this redistribution of wealth that enabled the Taj Mahal to be built. Not without irony, one of the glories of India was the result of the suffering of “Indians” on the other side of the world.

Histories of the world can often lose momentum as they begin dealing with more modern times. That is not the case here: Frankopan has fascinating things to say about how central the lands east of the Mediterranean were to world conflict. In the case of World War I, Great Britain was determined at all costs to hold onto its empire, particularly India. To this end, worried that Russia might sweep up Afghanistan and Persia as it continued to expand into south central Asia, England bought off the Tsar’s government by forging an alliance and supporting Russia’s claims to warm water access to the world’s seas from the Black Sea through the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. Germany aligned itself with Turkey, which had different notions about who should control this channel. Add in the value of the recently discovered oilfields in what was then still Persia, and the stage was set for the peculiar chain of events, the belligerent raising and re-reraising of stakes, that ended with slaughter and stalemate. Having won the war, England and France divided up the Middle East between them, with England take the southern part (Iraq and Iran) and France taking the northern part (Syria and Lebanon). The greed and duplicity of the Brits in their dealing with Iran, and their sheer contempt for the people in this part of the world, were extreme and shocking. They owned the oilfields and refused to share more than a pittance with the people who lived above them. Their final intervention was the removal of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossedegh, in 1953, this time with a big assist from the USA, which has since taken over the role of leading player in the “great game” of manipulating countries and governments for profit and strategic advantage. The fact that such efforts have so often failed in recent decades is relatively less distressing in light of the long perspective that Frankopan provides.

This is far from the only “new history of the world” that I’ve read in recent years. Some, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’ve enjoyed immensely. Others, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind, less so. Silk Roads is an impeccable work that was a pleasure to read and very successful in describing the world from a particular perspective. You can’t deny that commerce and economics have played a dominant role in shaping world history.

But I think I’m going to avoid reading any additional “new histories of the world” for a while. Reviewing humanity’s progress at a rate 1000 years every 50 pages is a bit like flying over a country at 35,000 feet. It’s not that the information available at this scale isn’t interesting, it’s that it doesn’t really fire my imagination. I’d much prefer to be put down at a particular time and place: Francis Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America is my favorite example of this kind of history. For days at a time I could almost imagine being a part of the French colony in Quebec, with trading and missionary expeditions going deep into the North American continent, and the ferocious Iroquois Confederation just to the south in what is now New York State.

French is still spoken in one part of North America, but by any standard the French failed as imperialists. Certainly there were economic reasons for this, and Parkman probably did not fail to address this aspect of their history. But that’s not what stayed with me.

#79: A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel

This is a novel about the French Revolution—or rather, about what life might have been like for some of the people at the forefront of that revolution. The main characters, all well-known to history, are George-Jacques Danton, a politician; Camille Desmoulins, a pamphleteer and provocateur; and Maximilien Robespierre—let us call him a legislator. All three were also lawyers.

Hilary Mantel does an amazing job of grafting what her imagination conjures up—made-up particulars, conversations, and other details—onto what is known about the actual people and events she depicts. That is, she invents only beyond the limit of what can be gleaned from the historical record. In her Author’s Note at the beginning of the book she writes: "Almost all of the characters in [the book] are real people, and it is closely tied to historical facts—as far as those facts are agreed, which isn’t really very far."

The French Revolution was initially propelled by noble ideas. It gave us the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which, as per Wikipedia, was “[to be] valid at all times and in every place, pertaining to human nature itself. It became the basis for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law.” The aristocracy, which had oppressed and abused the great majority of the population for centuries, was almost obliterated. The Catholic Church, which had also preyed upon the population, was largely toppled from its pedestal, with priests becoming civil servants and Notre Dame cathedral rechristened (or rather, renamed) the Temple of Reason. There was talk of abolishing private property and of abolishing slavery in the French colonies. Civilization was to be rebooted: the calendar was reordered to start with year one, and the names of the months were changed: instead of January, February, and March, the newly minted citizens could now put up calendars that showed them Nivôse (snowy month), Pluviôse (rainy month), and Ventôse (windy month). Most of these changes were rolled back under Napoleon and the various nineteenth century “Empires” that followed, but something of the revolution has persisted in the DNA of the nation. For one thing, the French retain a strong anti-clerical bent, which goes some way toward explaining (if not justifying) their objection to burkas and other religious garb. For another, the French remain a very fractious people, very quick to defy their own government, as the frequent strikes and the recent “Yellow Vest” movement attest.

The French rightly celebrate the forward-thinking aspirations of their revolution, and have adopted its unofficial theme song as their national anthem. But as the bloody lyrics of that song remind us, the revolution was characterized as much by ferocity as by noble aspirations. Mantel is not shy about presenting the details:

The Princesse de Lamballe was murdered at La Force prison. Possibly she was raped. When the mob had torn out most of her internal organs and stuck them on pikes, they cut off her head and carried it to a hairdresser. At knife point they forced the nauseated man to curl and dress the Princesse’s pretty fair hair. Then they marched in procession to the Temple, where the Capet family [that is, the now-deposed royal family] were locked up. They put the head on a pike and hoisted it up to sway outside the high windows. “Come and say hallo to your friend,” they exhorted the woman inside.

Heads on pikes were an everyday sight—when the king and queen we led from Versailles to the Louvre (to make it easy for the populace to keep an eye on them and prevent them from making a break for the border, which they did anyway), the heads of various royal retainers were raised on spikes at the head of the procession. The crowds cheered.

As another writer succinctly put it: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The guillotine was an apt symbol of the age: devised as a sanitary and progressive tool that did its job efficiently and without unnecessary cruelty, it became a symbol of horror as soon as it was set up in the Place de la Revolution. Something about separating people from their heads just insists on unsettling the average citizen’s mind, despite the inventor’s best intentions. By the time the revolution wound down in the mid-1790s, as many as 40,000 heads had dropped into the executioner’s basket.

A Place of Greater Safety is a very dense book: Mantel gives us pretty complete biographies of her three major characters, starting with their early lives in the provinces, through their youthful days in the capital, the heady times as the revolution gets under way, the increasingly stressful and conflicted times as responsibilities and alliances pile up and as factions emerge among the revolutionaries, and finally the pull of events and personal conflicts that lead the majority of them to the guillotine. It’s like watching people in a boat as they drift from a still pond through a lazy stream to a raging river and finally over the edge of a Niagara.

Mantel presents her protagonists are good people who are eventually undone by the press of circumstances and by certain quirks of character—flaws. Georges Danton was a natural leader and orator who took easily to power and came to depend on the adulation of the masses. Danton made a strong impression with his scarred face and his massive build. He wasn’t always scrupulous in his dealings, but Mantel never suggests that he put personal gain ahead of his intention to help give France a functioning democracy. In the movie Danton he is played by Gerard Depardieu—it’s hard to imagine a more perfect bit of casting.

Camille Desmoulins was a kind of scapegrace, a mercurial character with a talent for provocation. His pamphlets and speeches taunted his foes and amused his allies. Some allies learned that they had become foes when they read Desmoulins’ latest broadsheet. Desmoulins was high strung and impetuous and fell into affairs with both men and women without seeming to try.

Then there’s Maximilien Robespierre. History has not been kind to him, but Mantel shows us how this scrupulous, high-minded idealist eventually succumbed to the machinations of trusted associates, ultimately signing the death warrants of Danton and Desmoulins. Volumes have been written about Robespierre, but he remains an enigma. In an essay for the London Review of Books, Mantel has written:

To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by 'alleged to have said'. You will contradict yourself, because he contradicts himself. If you want to know why he excites such extremes of adoration and loathing, you have to study not just the biographies but the life stories of the people who wrote them. His 19th-century biographer Ernest Hamel worshipped him, the socialist historians Mathiez and Lefebvre championed him, George Sand called him 'the greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all known history'. Lord Acton described him as 'the most hateful character in the forefront of human history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men'. In 1941 the historian Marc Bloch tried to call time: 'Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, we've had enough. We say, for pity's sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was really like.'

No one can tell us what Robespierre—or Danton, or Desmoulins, for that matter—was really like. The extraordinary thing that Mantel does is situate them all among their families and their scores of associates. This does up the ante for the reader: there are enough people in this book that the cast of characters at the beginning—a list that is six pages long—becomes a frequent necessity. We learn as much about the personal lives of the story’s main characters—their parents, lovers, wives, children, and friends—as we do about their public careers. Much of the detail, of course, comes from Mantel’s imagination, yet I was surprised to find out how much history knows about, to cite one example, Camille Desmoulin’s wife, Lucile. We first meet her at 15, as she interrupts her mother in an embrace with Camille. He then proposes to Lucile in a letter, partly as a tactic to prevent her from disclosing what she has seen, and partly just because the idea appealed to him, I suppose. Mantel has a good feel for Lucile's adolescent mind:

Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself “my childhood is over”) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in [her family’s] household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.

Lucile decides to accept Camille’s proposal, and their marriage, strangely enough, is a success. They become a much-talked-about couple: both are good looking, talented, and well-connected. Camille has a promiscuous past but seems to put that behind him after he marries. Lucile has no such past, but has a few ardent admirers, including Danton: he makes half-serious passes at her which she deflects gracefully. Unfortunately for Camille and Lucile, they live in a time when personal attacks, slander, and innuendo are very potent. (Camille, in fact, is not always scrupulous himself in employing these weapons.) The pamphlet press in France in the 1780s and 90s played much the same role as social media does in our time.

Friends and enemies alike believe that the Desmoulins are depraved libertines—just as the nation had believed (or, in some cases, pretended to believe) that Marie Antoinette did all sorts of depraved things—incest, beastiality, nothing was off limits. Such rumors could not only sully a person’s reputation: they could be entered as evidence at your trial.

Besides Lucile, we also get to know Danton’s two wives (sequential, not simultaneous), as well as the strange family that provides shelter to Citizen Robespierre. And then there are all the associates of the principal characters, such as Fabre d’ Églantine, an actor and playwright who tutors Danton in the art of public speaking. Toward the end we meet some of the extremists (Antoine Saint-Just most prominently) who turned the Committee for Public Safety into little more than a means of liquidating political opposition. These men come to understand that Robepierre’s integrity as the central figure on this committee is the only thing preventing them from doing away with Danton, Desmoulins, and other holdovers from the glorious early days of ‘89 who now want to apply the brakes to a revolution that, in the words of one politician living safely beyond the border, “like Saturn, devours its children.”

Mantel even gives us brief glimpses of the royal family, of the Marquis de Sade, and of Charles-Henri Sanson, the fourth in a six-generation family of executioners and a man who knew the stress of overwork.

It’s hard to know how Mantel makes this whole world seem so real, how she is able to individualize and develop so many characters and so much action. I have a theory, which is that for each significant character in the story she has combined what she has been able to learn from the historical record with a friend, acquaintance, or public person from her own 20th century world, superimposing the one upon the other. But I guess that’s just to say that the characters seem too real to be made-up, which is in turn just another way of saying that she’s a remarkably good writer.

Of course, I am not much of an authority on the French Revolution, and I’m sure an actual expert could point to events that Mantel has made up that are nowhere in the historical record, as well as to biases and omissions that serve her story at the cost of scrupulous fidelity to that record. There is an episode near the end of the book where one of the women in the household where Robespierre is staying claims that Danton has raped her. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that the accusation is false, but this is what pushes Robespierre to finally accede to Danton’s death, though the presumed rape is not made public nor is it used against Danton at his trial. There are other such “behind closed doors” episodes in the book—an earlier one establishes the dishonesty of the young woman making the accusation against Danton.

If you really wanted to get as close as possible to knowing what life during the French Revolution was like, you could read A Place of Greater Safety in tandem with a conventional history—Simon Shama’s Citizens, for example. I’ve been reading accounts of the various persons and events that led to the deaths of Danton and Desmoulins (on Wikipedia, of course) and I’m shocked to discover that these accounts differ from Mantel’s here and there—mostly in ways that make the characters seem less noble and tragic. But facts be damned—Mantel’s reality is the one that I’ll remember.