Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Book Review: Queen B by Juno Dawson

Returning to the world of HMRC for a Tudor throwback with a witchy, lesbian twist

Anne Boleyn, historically accused of witchcraft—what if she really was a witch? I mean, you're not getting points for the originality of the premise, but I can't say I'm not interested. The eponymous Queen B exists in the background of the existing two HMRC novels as the progenitor of what grows into a national, official coven, and this novella purports to give us the beginnings of it all.

And it does well... kinda?

We are not following Anne for this story. Instead, we begin with the perspective of one of her ladies-in-waiting, her closest companions, her coven, watching as the swordsman takes her head. The narrative then jumps backwards and forwards in time between the year of her death and the time, a few years earlier, when she prepared to ascend the throne, and her brief time on it, all from the perspective of Grace Fairfax, transplanted Yorkshire girl, lesbian and witch. Because we couldn't stray too far from the métier of the original two novels, after all. Grace has the proximity to give us an intimate view into Anne's life and goals, trying to get a witch onto the throne of England to make life better for all her sisters in the process, as well as an emotionally invested view into the aftermath of her death—what this means both for the witches of England and for those who were closest to Anne herself. This ultimately leads to some events that in some ways prefigure the world we come to know in Dawson's novels.

But don't go in expecting a story about the creation of an official bureau of magic. This isn't that. This is, instead, a much messier, more personal story about love and people, and wanting and betrayal. It's about the risks people take, the lies they tell themselves, and the things that matter enough to them that they will make terrible choices to get them. Also, lesbian witches. Plenty of that.

As it happens, that's exactly the sort of story I like, so I was very happy reading this. Grace is a great narrative viewpoint character, occupying a half-in/half-out position with the royal household, thus giving us a way to evaluate the events of the story with a slightly more objective eye while still being invested in them. And by god is she invested. We get a good bit of rage, as well as some more complex emotional moments from her, and if nothing else, the woman doesn't go by halves, which is great fun to read.

But despite not being the protagonist or a viewpoint, it's the characterisation of Anne herself, occupying the edges of the narrative, that is the most striking. Obviously Anne Boleyn is a much covered fiction staple—her position in English history, her relationship with Henry and his break from the Catholic church, her ultimate end, all serve to make her a fascinating, shifting character onto whom a number of takes can be projected to suit the narrative need. Temptress, victim, political machinatrix, religious reformer, pawn—all available angles to take, all options explored in fiction already. But Dawson chooses simply to make her... messy. Which I'm absolutely sure has been done before as well, but it's the first time I'm reading it and I rather like it.

Dawson's Boleyn is compelling, charismatic and political, yes, but she's also someone whose motivations and ambitions are a little opaque, even to her. Possibly (probably?) she is lying to herself. The options are left open to interpretation by the reader, but what we are definitively given is a person, someone who exists as more than one thing to more than one of the people around her, and does not do it flawlessly. Someone whose perfection is only in the eye of the ones who love her more than they see her, for a time. We also see her exclusively through the people around her, and her own legacy-making—half of the story exists once she has already gone away, and some of it through what she has left behind, the words spoken to friends and lovers, letters hidden, gifts bequeathed. For a story not told from Anne's perspective, it does an awful lot of interesting centring of her, her interests, her propagandising and her failings.

Particularly interesting is that it does all of that, all of that focus on Anne, her wants and her machinations, while at the same time almost entirely sidelining Henry as both a character and a narrative force. He exists off to one side, reported on, creating change, but rarely spoken of directly or the focus of discussion. And even for the stories that centre Anne elsewhere, this is incredibly rare—as with all of the wives of Henry VIII, her entire narrative is conveyed to us now through the lens of her relationship with the king.

I have mixed feelings about this, as a choice? On the one hand, I deeply appreciate the narrative detaching the story of a really quite famous and interesting woman from the male framing and focus she receives in almost all tellings. More stories of people who get to exist outside of their status as wives, mothers, siblings and daughters of the powerful men of history, please. But at the same time, the story is deeply interested in a lot of things that were going on because of Henry. Anne's death is extremely central, as is the impending coronation and installation of Jane Seymour as her successor. For the women who are telling this story, Henry is an important motive force in their lives. He is the architect of the seismic changes in the world they live in, and will be again. To ignore his presence in the story renders its telling a little strange. We see the ripples in the pond, but never the stone that made them, and I wonder if the story would be less effective if it did not rest on the assumption of knowledge on the part of the reader—is this story less well told for someone not familiar with this bit of British history?

Then again, for all that those dramatic ripples shape the story, they are not the substance of it, and perhaps it truly does not matter—maybe the knowledge of things works against me, distracting me from what is on the page and back to the conventional narrative? Who knows.

In any case, this is a story that lives in the empty spaces, the rooms of women in a court of men, the relationships between women in a world whose documentary evidence largely ignores them, and aside from any concerns about narrative framing, that is wonderful. The moments that focus on the relationship —romantic, in case that wasn't already abundantly obvious from the blurb— between Grace and Anne are few, but nonetheless moving. Dawson has a knack of capturing moments, little frames of view that work as vignettes, as if we're seeing fond or closely guarded memories, sectioned off from the world around them. In those moments, we can clearly see the foundations of Anne and Grace's affections, as well as the faultlines, and they give us a great deal more insight into both characters as much through implication as by actually showing.

What is likewise wonderful is how clearly Dawson acknowledges the limits of the perspective she's chosen. Grace, our narrator, is a noblewoman and member of the court, in the inner circle of the queen, but also someone whose beginning was... if not humble, then rather more middle class than many of her now-peers. She has enough of an eye for social disparity that, when faced with people of much poorer origins and lives through the course of the story, she gives us someone whose sympathy and understanding seems plausible. She's not one of them, but she's those few steps closer, able to exist in the space between, and mediate. And this has allowed Dawson, though briefly, to do some very necessary acknowledgment that, while the problems the witches the story follows are serious and significant, impacting them all deeply and emotionally, at the same time they are living charmed, gilded existences, and their oppression as women and witches exists on a spectrum that continues well past them. This is a story about a Tudor royal court with commoners in it fully willing to speak up for themselves, to name the hypocrisy of the wealthy, noble women and look it straight in the eye.

But it is a novella, so the space for such things is brief. Good, well managed, pleasingly blunt, but brief.

Likewise, Dawson does not go into great depth, but there are glimmers of a very well handled approach to religious belief and witch-hunting in a story that could very easily have leaned into an easy good guy/bad guy approach. We see witch-hunting and the religious fervour underlying it used both cynically and entirely in earnest, by different groups of people with different aims, and understand that for every person using it as an excuse to squash such female power as could survive in the world of 16th-century England, there is another who truly believes that his actions follow the will and mandate of god himself.

Warlocks, too, get an interesting complexity. We have met them in the series' novels previously—typically less powerful than their female counterparts, sometimes resentful of this difference, but fundamentally under the same umbrella of magical ability, if separate in hierarchy. Here we see them before that union, men existing in an explicitly and intensely patriarchal system, using their social superiority in opposition to the witches' magical one. And then again this is unbalanced by class hierarchy—a noble woman witch and a common man warlock exist in extremely interesting dynamics of shifting power in different contexts, and it's a space Dawson is very happy to play in. This is possibly my major criticism of the story; I wanted to see more of this. The narrative is at its best when it plays with the messy social and power systems it has created, but we simply do not spend the time with them to truly explore what they mean to the people living under them. It makes sense: the novella is a novella because the linear story, the set of actions it follows are fairly simple and brief. Extending it would risk wallowing and soggy pacing. But there is so much in what Dawson has created that is fascinating and unusual that I nonetheless wish there had been more story to tell, just to give us the time to spend here.

But it's not, alas, the book we are given. What we do get —an emotionally engaging, historically interesting little snippet into the history of the world of the HMRC books— is still extremely enjoyable. It's a book that's easy to consume in a single sitting, a narrator it's easy to sympathise with, understand and root for, even as she makes decisions the reader may not agree with, and a little insight into how the world of HMRC came to be. If we imagine them as an alternative history, this is in many ways simply a story of the branching-off point, the slight difference that leads to the dramatically different present.

And that's neat. Is it a great deal more than neat? Of that I'm less sure. But if you go in with your expectations set, knowing it's a window into a short period of time, an implication of what's to come after, rather than a thorough explanation, it is very easy to have a great time with it and see some interesting storytelling choices while doing so.


The Math

Highlights: Genuinely interesting choices in depicting Anne Boleyn; brief glimmers of some cool intersectionality; fun backstory and worldbuilding to the existing books

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Reference: Dawson, Juno. Queen B [HarperVia, 2024].

POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social