Tidelands by Philippa Gregory

Tidelands by Philippa Gregory

England 1648. A dangerous time for a woman to be different . . . Midsummer’s Eve, 1648, and England is in the grip of civil war between renegade King and rebellious Parliament. The struggle reaches every corner of the kingdom, even to the remote Tidelands – the marshy landscape of the south coast.  

Alinor, a descendant of wise women, crushed by poverty and superstition, waits in the graveyard under the full moon for a ghost who will declare her free from her abusive husband. Instead she meets James, a young man on the run, and shows him the secret ways across the treacherous marsh, not knowing that she is leading disaster into the heart of her life. 

Suspected of possessing dark secrets in superstitious times, Alinor’s ambition and determination mark her out from her neighbours. This is the time of witch-mania, and Alinor, a woman without a husband, skilled with herbs, suddenly enriched, arouses envy in her rivals and fear among the villagers, who are ready to take lethal action into their own hands.

I have previously avoided Philippa Gregory's novels, fictional biographies (her own description) of illustrious historical women as I prefer a biography to be of the factual variety.

However, this novel is different. Gregory has made much of the fact that she has chosen as her protagonist a fictional woman, and one living in poverty, blighted by her socio-economic circumstances. Alinor, or Goodwife Reekie, as the locals call her, is the village wise woman, eking out a living since her rascal fisherman of a husband disappeared over a year ago leaving her and her two children without sufficient means to exist. Fortunately for Alinor distraction is soon on hand in the form of recusant priest and Royalist hottie, Father James Summer, and from here on (page 3 or something) it's downhill all the way. I felt cheated as Tidelands quickly entered the realm of run-of-the-mill romantic potboiler. It didn't even have the excuse of being particularly interesting. At one point I managed to accidentally turn two pages at once, and didn't notice for another page and a half, so little was happening.

A chance encounter in a midnight graveyard leads to Alinor offerering comely young James overnight sanctuary in her husband's fishing hut until he can safely make his rendezvous at the squire's manor house the following day. Alinor can see from the cut of his fine cambric shirt and chiselled good looks that James is of noble birth, although that's not a motivating factor at all in her decision to help him, thank you very much. After blurting out that he never expected to find a woman like her in a place like this (or indeed any woman at all, one would suppose, given his priestly vows), Father James takes up residency with the squire, secures Alinor's young son a position and education at the big house and gives her enough money to buy herself a fishing boat in order to earn a respectable living. Things are starting to look up for our downtrodden heroine, but then the message from this book does seem to be that golden tresses and a pretty face are a big help to a young woman determined to forge her way out of poverty.

Perhaps Gregory should have spent less time on her much-heralded historical research and more time on creating compelling, vivid characters. Because, whisper it, Tidelands is actually a bit boring, the paciest part of the book being the blurb on the book jacket (quoted above). I didn't really care what happened to Alinor. The plot seemed interminable. I had to force myself to read on. As well as being the least convincing recusant priest this side of the Reformation, James didn't much cut the mustard as a lover either. Young proto-feminist Alys, Alinor's teenage daughter, started out promisingly, railing against her destiny to be trapped by the unforgiving circle of poverty in a grim life of hard work and low expectations to such an extent that she sounded more like a 21st century student than a barely educating peasant. Then she suddenly changed her tune when prosperous farmer's son, Richard, noticed her golden tresses and pretty face and, yawn, yes, you get the idea.

The plot is unsubtle stuff, and given away in its entirety on the book jacket just in case you don't have the patience to suffer in excess of 400 plus pages: the villagers, growing suspicious of Alinor's wisdom, good fortune and swelling belly - Father James having serious issues with priestly celibacy -accuse her of witchcraft. Who'd have thought it? 

Read something else instead of Tidelands.

For all its carefully crafted historical setting Tidelands lacked that vital sense of total immersion in another time and place. And it was increasingly difficult to take its characters' dilemmas seriously when read alongside (as I was doing) Raynor Winn's compelling real-life portrait of 21st-century poverty in The Salt Path (reviewed here). The contrived dullness of Tidelands was very forgettable in comparison. Dullness is unforgivable in any novel, let alone one this long. If you're after the full history experience then do yourself a favour: go and read Alix Nathan's startlingly-original The Warlow Experiment or Joseph O'Connor's transfixing Shadowplay.

Click here to read more about Tidelands on Philippa Gregory's website.
Click here to listen to an interview given by Philippa on creating women characters in historical fiction.
Click here to read an interview about Tidelands in the July/August edition of Booktime Magazine.