THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507270600
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARIAN COURTNEY
LENGTH: Medium: 55 lines
POISON
KATHRYN HARRISON
Random House. 319 pp. $23.
KATHRYN HARRISON'S vivid historical novel, Poison, chronicling the lives of Francisca, a poor Spanish girl, and Marie Louise, the niece of France's Sun King, Louis XIV, quickly transports the reader to another century.
Though the characters seem to have little in common other than birth on the same day in 1667, their lives unfold in parallel fashion. They both grapple with hopeless situations requiring courage and imagination; they both contend with a tyrannical religion, a superstitious society and restrictions on women. And ultimately, both are betrayed.
Removed from a privileged, carefree life in France and sent to Spain, 18-year-old Marie Louise becomes the reluctant bride of King Carlos II. The country desperately needs Carlos and the new queen to produce a male heir; under Carlos' inept rule, Spain is quickly crumbling into financial and political ruin. But conception proves impossible because the king is impotent. No one dares to suggest that Carlos might be responsible for the couple's childlessness, so the queen suffers the blame of barrenness. She resorts to subterfuge to save herself from death or imprisonment.
Francisca's family raises silkworms, but she sees possibilities beyond her poverty. She envisions a future in which she will be rich enough to wear silk herself. Like the silkworms that turn mulberry leaves into the raw material for fine fabric, she transforms her grim reality through her imagination. She audaciously flouts societal precepts and the tenets of the church, and her disregard leads to a pregnancy out of wedlock. While Marie Louise is persecuted for not having a child, Francisca is condemned for doing so.
Spanish Inquisition officials, wanting to round up sacrificial ``sinners'' to quell the church's craving for power amid suffering, throw Francisca into prison. Her father cannot buy his daughter's freedom. But the imagination that helped Francisca through childhood gives her the means to tolerate suffering and torture.
Although the two women face disparate situations, Harrison skillfully splices their stories together into a whole. She smoothly makes transitions between the past and the present, the realistic and the fantastic. Combining historical characters and details with creative ones, Harrison, whose previous novels, Thicker Than Water and Exposure, were spare in comparison, tells an intriguing tale that is rich with the magic and imagery of dreams.
- MEMO: Marian Courtney is a writer who lives in Charlottesville. by CNB