Book One -- Earthly Joys by Philippa Gregory

Earthly Joys
Philippa Gregory
Historical Fiction
500 + pages

Good God, this woman is a best-selling author who got one of her books made into a feature film? Okay so The Other Boleyn Girl was hardly a box office smash, but still, if the book was half as bad as this one, who the hell thought it would make a good movie?

Earthly Joys is the story of a gardener named John Transcendent who creates fabulous formal gardens for some of the most important people of the early Jacobean period. He starts out working for Robert Cecil, adviser/spymaster to Elizabeth I and James I, and eventually works for George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham and "favorite" of James I, and then, ends his life working for Charles I.

This should be right up my alley; I find the period fascinating and, of course, James I was one of several gay/bi (if I may apply a modern term that wasn't used at the time) monarchs of England. Also, John Transcendent is a totally great period name; it's one of the reasons I decided to read this book instead of one of her Boleyn books.

Sadly, Gregory is all about telling instead of showing. In the first five pages or so, we learn that John is not only Cecil's gardener, but also his confident. Not because she shows us, but because she just says so. And it just goes on like that for another 500+ pages as John wanders in and out of history and travels around Europe buying rare plants. He also marries Elizabeth, a truly boring Puritan, who pretty much exists as a character to be boring, which, when you think about it, is great for Gregory, who didn't have to work very hard to give the woman any real depth.

John eventually falls passionately in love with Buckingham, apparently just because Buckingham is gorgeous and has style. Frankly, I think the historical Buckingham, while indeed stylish and handsome after the fashion of the day, was an incompetent ass and Gregory's portrayal of him does nothing to change my mind. I can't see what John sees in him and she does nothing to really explain it. I'll give her credit for actually going there and writing the buttsecks instead of just having John pine for Buckingham, but that wasn't enough to save the book for me.

Although I knew it was crap pretty much from about page three, I stuck it out, because I'm like that; even with mediocre fiction, I tend to want to know what happens. In addition to the whole "telling not showing" thing, John's a pretty passive character and frankly, in the end, his death didn't have any real impact on me. God knows I have no interest in the sequel, Virgin Earth, which is about John's son, who, thanks to losing his Puritan religion when his wife dies, is a slightly more interesting character than Elizabeth. Still, I don't really care about what happens to him in Virginia.

I don't always like to judge an author by just one book, particularly one written ten years ago, but she's been writing for over twenty years so that's not really an excuse. So yeah, this one? It's a skipper and I won't be reading any more Gregory.