Fatal Majesty

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 4, 1999

The life of Mary Queen of Scots, from the age of 18 until her death at the hands of her cousin, Elizabeth I, provides the framework for Scottish author Tannahill's (A Dark and Distant Shore) latest novel. Instead of focusing on the personalities of the martyred queen and her formidable English rival, the author has chosen to document the complicated political machinations that led to Mary's downfall. The religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe at that time, the thorny issue of "divine right" and succession to the throne, and the myriad plots, counterplots and counter-counter plots are ponderously explicated here, undermining the vitality of the central character. The precarious motives and positions of those who critically figured in the schemes to maneuver the destiny of England and Scotland are compelling, but these tensions deflate in Tannahill's dense prose. The reader gets a broad sense of the way 16th-century monarchies operated: how Mary, pronounced queen at the age of six months, was a symbolic pawn in the hands of feuding powermongers, mostly men. The crux of the historical tale is that Elizabeth I becomes Mary's fatal nemesis, but there is a surprisingly dispassionate handling of the emotions and thoughts of these two powerful, vulnerable women and the people who loved and/or manipulated them. With the exception of Mary's secretary of state, Lethington, whose personal life and crucial role as a political adviser are well drawn, most of the characters are not persuasively rendered. Occasional glimpses of Mary's personality shine through: her naivete as a young woman when she first comes to rule Scotland, her thwarted romances and her attempts at self-determination. Elizabeth's defensive calculations are a fascinating counterpoint, but Tannahill withholds what a novelization of this famous drama should promise, and gives us instead a heavy load of densely woven facts that read more like a research text than a novel.