...despite their very public lives, each of these characters has an inner story, too, and Dunant does a terrific job of showing us what makes them tick — both directly and through the eyes of Machiavelli, then an apparatchik for the city of Florence, sent to witness Cesare’s march across Italy. All in all, they’re a magnetic bunch, these Borgias ... Beyond the attraction of the characters and the history, Dunant has a great immersive style. Her hallmark is the penetrating detail ... In the end, what’s a historical novelist’s obligation to the dead? Accuracy? Empathy? Justice? Or is it only to make them live again? Dunant pays these debts with a passion that makes me want to go straight out and read all her other books.
A risk of historical fiction is that the people become museum pieces, defined by their clothes, furniture and funny words. Dunant’s characters copulate, defecate and menstruate with visceral physicality; they catch colds and suffer constipation, sweat from fever, shiver from cold, and scratch at pox-scabs ... The story proceeds through a succession of tremendous set pieces, including a sea storm, a plague, the delivery of a child and various skirmishes ... Dunant, though, has made completely her own the story of Italy’s most infamous ruling family. Retaining the knack for plotting and pacing from the crime novels that began her career, she depicts history in a way that we can see, hear and smell...Identifying historical blurrings and myths about the period, Dunant’s Italian novels are an enthralling education.
As the novel opens, Machiavelli travels as an envoy from Florence to Rome. Dunant deftly humanizes the man behind the classic text ... We are not quite in Hilary Mantel territory here, where descriptions of a royal court shine with subtlety and intellectual ferment. With Dunant plot is primary, and the story must keep chugging onward ... Italy's patchwork quilt of kingdoms and duchies in the period were enough to challenge any cartographer, and occasionally frustrated this reader. I could have used a map.
It’s material that, in the hands of a gifted storyteller like Dunant, will captivate readers ... she occasionally leans on the sort of ready-made language that merely carries this sort of story along...But more often than not, Dunant surprises us with fresh and inventive imagery ... This capacious if highly conventional historical novel glides on to its own dissolution as the lives of Rodrigo and Cesare unravel, the strings binding their empire loosen, their minds fray, their bodies weaken. Only Lucrezia seems to flourish, although we learn about this somewhat after-the-fact in the epilogue, narrated by Machiavelli in later life. There may be more history in this novel than fiction, which lessens the emotional impact of an otherwise satisfying tale, impressive in its sweep and mastery of detail. I only wish that Dunant had managed to bring all her characters to life as ably as she has Lucrezia, who is perhaps the one indelible figure inhabiting this story.
Although the author occasionally gets caught up in some of the distracting internecine workings of factions against the pope (their opponents were many), Dunant is at her best focusing on the three Borgias, especially the conflicts between Cesare and his father as both gain in power and stature, and most particularly on the life of Lucrezia, forced into different marriages for political benefit, nearly dying from a debilitating flu, and finally coming to terms with the enigmatic Alfonso, son of the duke of Ferrara and her third husband, with whom she ensures the future of a powerful dynasty.
With a vibrant cast of characters both iconic, including the vastly influential Niccolò Machiavelli, and rarely highlighted, Dunant’s captivating Renaissance Italian saga will thrill her fans and bring more into the fold.
Although the material is rich, this isn’t the writer’s best work. There are anachronisms—or, at the very least, moments that lift the reader right out of 16th-century Italy ... These might seem like small matters, but they make it hard to believe in the world Dunant has built. There are other issues endemic to historical fiction, like slightly overripe language and dialogue laden with information that everyone participating in the conversation would surely possess already. However, one of Dunant’s great strengths as a writer is in illuminating the lives of women who were able to amass and wield power despite having no authority ... Flawed but not without interest—sort of like the Borgias themselves.
