If you’re the sort of person who hangs on to every morsel of palace drama between Princes Harry and William, if you binge-watched every episode of The Crown twice, if your copy of Burke’s Peerage is dog-eared from overuse, then Jo Harkin’s sophomore novel, The Pretender, should be right up your alley. On the other hand, if you can’t tell a Tudor from a Stuart, if your grasp of British history is limited to 1066, the Magna Carta and James Bond, The Pretender might still be right up your alley. Here’s why.
As we’ve learned from the massive success of Game of Thrones, the public has a virtually unquenchable thirst for watching royal dynasties die nastily. And things aren’t looking good for King Henry VII in 1485, despite his army having slain Richard III; forces are at play both abroad and at home to have his throne usurped by any of a number of pretenders.
The Pretender’s protagonist, introduced to us as John Collan, is one of them. Young John is spirited off from his father’s farm in the company of a mysterious nobleman and a priest, rechristened as Lambert Simons, and told he is the rightful heir to the British throne. What could possibly go wrong? When Lambert inquires whether he will have to take the crown from Henry by violent means, his tutor-priest replies, “Oh no, I’m sure he’ll hand it over full apologetic. . . . Don’t be an ass.”
After his initial schooling in Oxford, Lambert continues on to Burgundy and Ireland, where he is steeped in the intricacies of etiquette and politics in a manner befitting a future monarch. It’s in the latter that he meets—and falls in love with—Joan, the proto-feminist daughter of the Lord Deputy of Ireland. He realizes, to his dismay, that such a match is out of the question, as he could marry her in neither of his two likely futures: king of England or disgraced (and possibly dead) peasant pretender.
But which of these two fates will befall him? What will become of his beloved? And there’s also the slight matter of England, whose fortune hangs in the balance. Harkin skillfully evokes the foreboding and intrigue that surrounds the throne with rough-hewn language and fistfuls of bawdy humor. Her rollicking saga of royalty, loyalty, lechery and treachery is fit for a king . . . or a man who was merely told he would be one.
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