Viper Wine
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
'Wickedly funny' The Times
Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. Stampedes follow her arrival in town.
However, as she approaches middle age, the attention turns to scrutiny. Her adoring husband Sir Kenelm Digby - philosopher, alchemist and time-traveller - wishes she would age naturally, but Venetia discovers a potent and addictive elixir of youth, Viper Wine. Set on the eve of the English Civil War, and based on a true story, this brilliant novel asks a very contemporary question: what is the cost of beauty?
'Dazzling' Observer
'Intoxicating' Independent on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in 1630s England, a country heading for civil war, Eyre's confident debut novel expertly combines historical fact with modern-day invention. Sir Kenelm Digby is an alchemist, a man at the crossroads of magic and science; in Eyre's imagination, "sometimes his mind was double hinged, and could go forward as well as back." Eyre's narrative includes anachronistic imaginings of the future: microscopes, Fermat's Theorem, binary code, and even Barbara Streisand. Digby's wife, Venetia, desperate to regain her youthful beauty, imbibes Viper Wine, an illicit concoction whose ingredients include snake venom and the urine of pregnant mares. Although Venetia is gratified by the results, the drink renders her face largely immovable, the 17th-century equivalent of Botox. Parallels with the 21st century abound, as women are "misled, traduced, deluded" into cosmetic procedures and "always forced by their pride to lie and say they pinched not, they painted not" and that "everyone pretended to believe them... laughing as soon as they turned their back." Eyre's novel, darting as it does through centuries, is an engrossing take on a timeless subject.
