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A Place of Greater Safety

4.05 of 5 stars 4.05 · rating details · 1,466 ratings · 295 reviews

It is 1789, and three young provincials have come to Paris to make their way. Georges-Jacques Danton, an ambitious young lawyer, is energetic, pragmatic, debt-ridden--and hugely but erotically ugly. Maximilien Robespierre, also a lawyer, is slight, diligent, and terrified of violence. His dearest friend, Camille Desmoulins, is a conspirator and pamphleteer of genius. A cha...more

Paperback, 749 pages

Published November 14th 2006 by Picador (first published 1992)

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Nov 23, 2012 Paul rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels

Finally decided to jack this one and I'm light-headed and blinking like a person unaccustomed to the light and the sweet air of liberty. What a bummer when you pick a big long novel and it turns out to be the pain in the arse this one did - not so bad that I could apply the 100 page rule but not so good that I actually wanted to pick the thing up and read the words in it. This is a magnificently detailed weird-ass almost day-by-day recreation of the French Revolution seen through the ever-talkin...more

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Sep 25, 2012 Jane rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Where I got the book: my local library. Spoilers but only if you never knew the French Revolution = wholesale death and that real characters who lived 200+ years ago may be a little on the deceased side by now anyway.

"Louise Robert says she would write a novel...but she fears that as a character in fiction Camille would not be believed. Indeed, I just had to look him up to make sure."

Oh, Camille. What a character. And he's flanked by two more tours de force of the literary re-creation of history...more

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Aug 22, 2012 Sarah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sigh. Good, but not quite Wolf Hall (though you can see the roots of it, stylistically), and there are just so many people in it... I had to put it aside to read the history of the Caucasus, for some clarity and light relief, which tells you something. Back into it now.

EDIT: crawling painfully towards the finish. Every word, phrase, paragraph is inspired, but my god, in the whole, it's a drag.

EDIT: Halleluja.

I really struggled with this (and always develop an irrational antipathy towards books t...more

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Nov 14, 2007 Pei Pei rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary, favorites, british, historical

This book is one of my all-time favorites, and I remain in awe of Mantel for balancing the historical and political elements with telling a darn good story. She deals with an enormous cast of characters (most of which history itself supplied, but she makes them come to life), and her portrayal of Camille and Lucile Desmoulins in particular is utterly captivating--they definitely steal the book. If you don't know much about the French Revolution, you will probably be a bit confused by the plot, b...more

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Jul 19, 2012 Kim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: buddy-reads-with-jemidar, kindle, historical-fiction, all-time-favourites

As Hilary Mantel states in the author’s note, "[t]his is a novel about the French Revolution and almost all of the characters in it are real people". Mantel goes on to write that the novel “is closely tied to historical facts – as far as those facts are agreed – which isn’t really very far”. The narrative focuses on three men who are central to the Revolution: the hard-headed pragmatist, Georges-Jacques Danton; the passionate rabble-rouser, Camille Desmoulins and the fanatic ideologue, Maximilie...more
As Hilary Mantel states in the author’s note, "[t]his is a novel about the French Revolution and almost all of the characters in it are real people". Mantel goes on to write that the novel “is closely tied to historical facts – as far as those facts are agreed – which isn’t really very far”. The narrative focuses on three men who are central to the Revolution: the hard-headed pragmatist, Georges-Jacques Danton; the passionate rabble-rouser, Camille Desmoulins and the fanatic ideologue, Maximilien Robespierre. It follows their lives from their school days to the height of the Reign of Terror.

I came to this extremely long novel not because I had any particular interest in the French Revolution, but because I fell in love with Mantel’s writing in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies and wanted to read more of her work. I was initially disconcerted by the extraordinarily long character list at the front of the novel: some thirteen (Kindle-sized) pages. The one disadvantage of reading a very long book on an e-reader is the inability to easily flick back through the pages, which meant that after that first eye-glazing encounter with the character list, I didn’t consult it again. However, I didn’t need to, as I had no difficulty following the plot and (more or less) keeping track of who's who.

Mantel’s style is idiosyncratic. She moves from past to present tense and from third person to first person narration, with the occasional instance of addressing the reader directly. Some of the narrative consists of dialogue in the form of a script. All of this shouldn’t work, but it does for me. I simply love the way Mantel writes. She has a wonderful way with words. Take her description of the Duke of Orléan’s former mistress, for example:

Felicité is a woman of sweet and iron willfulness, and she writes books. There are few acres in the field of human knowledge that she has not ploughed with her harrowing pedantry.

Or the way she describes Camille Desmoulin’s feeling about writing:

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences, he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Although I read this book mostly because I want to read everything Mantel writes, it has also made me very much interested in the French Revolution. Thanks to Mantel, I feel like I understand what happened over those tumultuous years. More than that, I feel like I was there, inside the heads of the players. And even though I knew how it was all going to end, the final few pages still devastated me.

I keep telling myself that I prefer history and biography to novels about real historical figures. But Hilary Mantel converts me to historical fiction. I've spent two weeks totally engaged with the meticulously researched world she has created and I completely believe her version of the French Revolution. If I could give this novel more than five stars, I would. This was another buddy read with my friend Jemidar, who shares my fan girl enthusiasm for Hilary Mantel's writing.
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Nov 09, 2010 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lit-english, historical-fiction-1700-1900, paris

French people are strange! Maybe it's the eating the snails. I mean honestly, okay, here in America we eat strange things too. Pickled Pig's Feet, Pickles that are pickled in Kool-Aid, and Twinkies (what is in a twinkie). But the French sure brought head loss to a whole new level. Honestly, I think it was the snails (apparently, according to the Romans, snails fed on meat are too die for).

Or maybe the wine.

Or maybe it was the fact that the only meat the average French person could have was bug.

O...more

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Sep 06, 2010 Lori (Hellian) rated it 3 of 5 stars

1/2+ mark:

I've always been obsessed with the French Revolution. Love Marge Piercy's book about it. It never fails to amaze me that France has this revolution, and when it is over they crown an Emperor, and then recall the monarchy! Totally bizarre.

I once went for a massage which was excellent but the woman fancied herself a psychic. She claimed that the pain I was feeling in my back hamstring was where I got a mortal injury from the Civil War. I feel no affinity with that. Hey maybe it's becaus...more

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Feb 13, 2009 Catherine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, natania, france

This is a book that's terribly hard to pin down. At the macro level, it's about the French Revolution, from the days before 1789 to the height of the Terror. At the micro level it's about friendship, and the shifting, gendered meaning of the same in a time when everything is being transformed. Somewhere between it's about the meaning of political action; about truth and justice and the possibility (or impossibility) of lodging those within the workings of state.

It's also 746 pages long.

I read th...more

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Jan 31, 2009 Hernan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

To begin with, sorry for my poor english, I´m from Argentina and I´m not used to write in your language. I´ve read Mantel´s book in spanish a couple of times so far and, even though I don´t agree with her scope on certain characters –specially Danton –, I´m forced to agree that it´s one of the best historical novels I ´ve ever read. It´s so well written, sometimes in first person, with monologues where the characters show themselves to the reader, others as if you were sat on a theatre. The port...more

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May 20, 2013 William Ramsay rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am becoming a real Hillary Mantel fan.

This is an earlier book of hers, written in the same style as Woolf Hall, which allows her to cover a huge amount of information and number of characters in a minimum of words. This is the story of the French Revolution or al least the story of the three main characters, Danton, Robespierre, and Camille Desmoulins, three men who were instrumental in bringing on and establishing the revolution but were betrayed by the terror they had created.

I've read a nu...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Warwick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, france, paris, french-revolution

A flawed book, but a very impressive and absorbing one.

Mantel traces the story of the Revolution through the experiences of Danton, Robespierre and Desmouslins, along with an extensive cast of the men and women who knew, loved, or hated them. If I'm honest I'd have to say it could have lost a couple of hundred pages – a tighter edit is definitely in there somewhere, although there's something to be said for a lengthy story that you have to live with for a few days.

Part of me wanted more detail a...more A flawed book, but a very impressive and absorbing one.

Mantel traces the story of the Revolution through the experiences of Danton, Robespierre and Desmouslins, along with an extensive cast of the men and women who knew, loved, or hated them. If I'm honest I'd have to say it could have lost a couple of hundred pages – a tighter edit is definitely in there somewhere, although there's something to be said for a lengthy story that you have to live with for a few days.

Part of me wanted more detail about ordinary life. A Place of Greater Safety is not about that, and there is rather little in the way of dramatisation of the average Parisian's experience through those dark days at the end of the 18th century. This is very much concerned with the ‘great men’ of the time and how they saw things. It's a very useful window on those men, but at the same time the uninformed reader might be left wondering why this fight was thought so necessary in the first place.

Mantel also assumes a fair amount of knowledge about who her characters are. This allows for some beautiful touches of irony in her narration, but, especially towards the beginning, it can make it difficult to distinguish between even such different characters as Robespierre and Danton. Camille Desmoulins is the one who really comes to life here: witty, artistic, sometimes cruel, he is painted convincingly as an aesthete avant la lettre, and a great foil for the splenetic, populist Danton, and the cautious and frighteningly logical Robespierre.

The writing is deceptively simple; it sketches a few lines of dialogue here, a couple of descriptive touches there, not going in for rich portraits of Revolutionary Paris but rather outlining the salient landmarks and allowing the reader to fill in the details. By the time the last hundred pages roll around, the cumulative effect is crushingly powerful, and there is an almost unbearable sense of how badly things will end. I had to put the book down every 20 pages; I just couldn't live in that world for too long at a time. The impression, of good-intentions-gone-wrong, is beautifully given, and followed through ruthlessly. Sometimes the rigorous historical accuracy seemed more of an artistic constraint than a help; but ultimately I was left moved and appalled by the way this story played out. It's a perfect accompaniment to any non-fictional reading in the period, and a great description by any standards of humanity's ability to turn on itself.(less)

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Oct 06, 2012 Cameling rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

In the late 1700s, the growing unrest in France by the populace leads to some men and women pushing their ideals towards the forming of a republic to great heights and for some, to great falls. This is the beginning of the French Revolution, and amongst the many characters who played a part in the fall of the monarchy, are 3 men, George-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre.

The relationship of these 3 men is fascinating. Danton is an ambitious lawyer, charismatic, lusty a...more

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Sep 15, 2012 Jamie Makin rated it 4 of 5 stars

The task Mentel set herself when she began this work is in itself terrifying. An account of the lives of three main players in the revolution, from French provincial birth to Parisian death.
The resulting novel is, unavoidably, massive and takes in a cast so large that the book requires a list of characters at its start. Its large cast reminded me of Dickens and Tolstoy and like those nineteenth century authors Mantel is one of the many writers who have tackled the French Revolution in literature...more

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Mar 10, 2012 Paddy rated it 5 of 5 stars

rivetting - couldn't put it down. Mantel's writing races and flicks about, just like thoughts do. How does she do that??? The characters came right off the pages to me - Camille Desmoulins - who could ever forget him? Robespierre.... strange. Beyond strange. Mad? Did he actually go mad? I just bought Peter McPhee's book 'Robespierre'. It could be fascinating to read his take on 'The Incorruptible'. Well, if he went mad, it's no wonder, with a label like that! How on earth could you live up to it...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Denis rated it 4 of 5 stars

This massive, dense, and complex book is an extremely impressive achievement. Mantel's novel about the French Revolution is a towering yet intimate epic, which, by following three of the most iconic revolutionaries of the era, paints a fascinating portrait not only of multiple men and women living through extraordinary (and intensely dangerous) times, but also of what a revolution truly is - and of what it inevitably becomes. It is a chilly, cautionary tale. This book is unlike ordinary historic...more This massive, dense, and complex book is an extremely impressive achievement. Mantel's novel about the French Revolution is a towering yet intimate epic, which, by following three of the most iconic revolutionaries of the era, paints a fascinating portrait not only of multiple men and women living through extraordinary (and intensely dangerous) times, but also of what a revolution truly is - and of what it inevitably becomes. It is a chilly, cautionary tale. This book is unlike ordinary historical novels in the sense that Mantel makes it very modern and contemporary - mostly by avoiding any kind of descriptions (either of places, costumes, interiors, palaces, streets, etc), a surprising trick that helps her focusing on the characters and on the events only, and which makes them immediately universal: this story is not a walk through a wax museum, or a beautiful landscape from time past, but a study in violence, friendship, ambitions, power, bloodlust, lust, and horror, that happened in Paris two centuries ago but is also happening today, in other corners of the world. That aspect makes Mantel's novel very powerful. As much as she does respect the real words that her heroes (and anti-heroes) have uttered or written, she's not afraid to write dialogues that sound as if they've been taken from the street, today, rather than from the XVIIIth century - it may be a bit strange, sometimes, but it works remarkably well, and it makes us relate vividly to what those people go through and to who they are. Most of all, Mantel's knowledge of the Revolution is immense, and she does understand not only it's dynamic but also what it means and says about human nature. She narrates the complicated events that unfold from the point of view of those who live them - therefore creating a sense of intimacy and immediacy that is thrilling - the last chapter is, for example, absolutely riveting and filled with raw emotions that literally take you the scaffold. I'm not sure that readers who have no prior knowledge of what happened then, and of who those characters are, will fully understand all that goes on: as a French person, I'm somehow familiar with the story Mantels writes about, and I actually love that she goes behind the myths (the ones I was taught at school) and shows me real human beings, whose their hearts beat savagely, in a way that I've rarely encountered in the realm of historical fiction. This is probably one of the very best novels ever written about a Revolution that remains one of the most important events in the history of the world - and Mantel shows us why it is so.(less)

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Sep 04, 2011 F.G. Cottam rated it 5 of 5 stars

This novel is too long. It comes in at 872 pages in the paperback edition I read and some sections - like the description of the doomed but tedious Madame Roland - could have been cut without doing any damage to character, narrative or atmosphere.
So why five stars? Simply because A Place of Greater Safety is such a magnificently imagined account of the French Revolutionary Terror that to give it fewer would be churlish and an injustice. The author takes three principle characters - all of them e...more

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Aug 16, 2011 John Bellamy added it

It is fate of great and prolific authors to be judged by their better or best books. Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times suffer by comparison with David Copperfield and Great Expectations, while Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Shirley remain ugly literary stepsisters in the seductive company of Miss Jane Eyre. And such is likely to be the fate of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. True, it’s as great and entertaining a novel as has ever been written about the French Revolution,...more It is fate of great and prolific authors to be judged by their better or best books. Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge and Hard Times suffer by comparison with David Copperfield and Great Expectations, while Charlotte Bronte’s Villette and Shirley remain ugly literary stepsisters in the seductive company of Miss Jane Eyre. And such is likely to be the fate of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety. True, it’s as great and entertaining a novel as has ever been written about the French Revolution, not excepting either Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three or any of the Baroness Orczy’s breathless Scarlet Pimpernel gasconades. And it has everything a superlative historical novel should have: a profound but lightly worn knowledge of its historical period, a dazzling talent for vivid and ingratiating characterization, an enviable skill at contriving witty and revealing dialogue and enough sardonic irony for at least a dozen novels. But Hilary Mantel isn’t just any historical novelist—she’s the authoress of Wolf Hall, the most accomplished performance in that genre of the last decade. Wonderful as A Place is, it is likely to forever dwell in the shade of her later imaginative feat.
That’s a shame, especially when you consider that Mantel’s challenge in A Place—undertaken nearly two decades before Wolf Hall—was an even greater task than her improbable triumph of making the dubious Thomas Cromwell (Thomas Cromwell!—the brutal historical strong-arm heavy in the melodrama of King Henry VIII’s Reformation!) the hero of Wolf Hall. Readers of A Place will soon discover that her daring with Cromwell was as nothing compared to her courage in dealing with the blood-drenched heavies of the French Revolution: Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and a host of others. Forget your Carlyle, dismiss your Dickens and you can even throw your copy of Simon Schama’s Citizens out the window for the nonce, or at least as long as it takes you to read Mantel’s thrilling narrative. The only caveat here—especially directed at enthusiasts of Wolf Hall—is that Place is a volume demanding considerably more patience of the reader. Mantel’s French Revolution is a much wider canvas than her English Reformation, and it lacks a character either as central or sympathetic as her Thomas Cromwell. Her trio of primary characters here are not only presented warts-and-all but with those warts indissolubly fused with their virtues. In summary: a wonderful fictional rollercoaster ride through the French Revolution but a comparatively denser read (750 pp.) for Mantel fans captivated by the more uncluttered narrative line of Wolf Hall. I must confess that it took me nearly seven weeks to get through it and it didn't ignite my enthusiasm until about page 400--but after that it's a terrific and unmitigated pleasure.(less)

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Jul 16, 2011 Gina rated it 2 of 5 stars

To be fair, I just don't think historical fiction (at least the kind where the history trumps the character development and action and such that I like in my books) is my kind of thing.

I've had this behemoth of a book on my bookshelf for over a year, a hand-me-down from a friend. After only getting through the first 100 pages of Wolf Hall, I was skeptical but thought I'd give it a shot. At first, I was hopeful. Though there were SO MANY characters (prefaced by a 9 page character key), the story...more

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Apr 23, 2010 Jeff added it

Shelves: fiction, fiction-historical

Hilary Mantel has been garnering much praise lately for her historical novel Wolf Hall. But as an amateur Tudor historian I feel that although the book is beautifully written, she makes Thomas Cromwell too much of a freethinking rationalist and Thomas More simply a medieval crank in ways the evidence will not support. However, I can wholeheartedly recommend her earlier A Place of Greater Safety. I have never read a better and more gripping fictional treatment of the French Revolution, or one so...more

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Feb 27, 2013 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars

I'd like to give this four and a half stars because it's slightly less remarkable than the Cromwell novels, but hey! it's still extraordinary. I'm ashamed to confess how little I knew of the period - I'd never even heard of Camille Desmoulins, one of the three main characters in the novel - but Mantel has fired me with a desire to find out more. There were moments when the information load was a tad too intense, but the novel never failed to grip me. It's hard to believe it's a first book, and I...more

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Aug 09, 2010 Maureenm is currently reading it Recommends it for: Readers who want a BIG READ

Recommended to Maureenm by: Read 'Wolf Hall' last year

I am half way through this book and think I will be putting it on my top 50 list (I have been an avid reader for the past 50 years!). I am enthralled by the characters and even though I know how the story ends, I find it hard to believe that the three central characters are destined so such gruesome deaths. Of course Mantel is such a genius at character that, like Shakespeare, she makes destiney as much a matter of character as of fate.
I read 'Wolf Hall' last year and decided then that I would r...more

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Sep 01, 2010 Todd Smalley rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, read-in-2010

This review is an absolute rave about this book. I actually had to knock a couple of other books down out of 5-star ratings because the gap between APoGS and the other books was too wide to be in the same rating group. I picked it up, not knowing (or caring) much about the French Revolution, after enjoying Mantel's Wolf Hall immensely. I now feel I understand a great deal about the revolution, and had a wonderful time getting there.

The most compelling part of this book is Mantel's means of stor...more This review is an absolute rave about this book. I actually had to knock a couple of other books down out of 5-star ratings because the gap between APoGS and the other books was too wide to be in the same rating group. I picked it up, not knowing (or caring) much about the French Revolution, after enjoying Mantel's Wolf Hall immensely. I now feel I understand a great deal about the revolution, and had a wonderful time getting there.

The most compelling part of this book is Mantel's means of storytelling, which moves things along at a rapid pace. She focuses much less on the What and much more on the Who, the Why and the How. The beheading of the queen is, um, disposed of in but two paragraphs, for example, and many times what might seem to be a major event is left undescribed, saved for the reader to learn in later dialogue and in context of how it affected the characters and the sweep of events. I found this technique surprising at first but later came to relish it as a satisfying puzzle. The three main characters - Danton, Desmoullins, and Robespierre - are richly drawn, and to a purpose: their motivations, strengths, and weaknesses had major impact on the French Revolution, and thus, on world history. I don't think I've ever read a book that so clearly draws the connections between interior lives and world events. To keep things lively, as well as true to life, Mantel includes plenty of what often makes a good novel: ambition, sex, friendship, betrayal, birth and death.

You will note Mantel's unusual writing style, full of things that shouldn't work but do, things that shouldn't be allowed, but are. She switches the narrative voice from third (sometimes omniscient) to several different firsts, and even disarmingly talks directly to the reader at a couple of points. She uses colons in unusual ways, but you get what she means. She brings in tables of information, such as inflation rates for goods like bread, and direct quotations from historical documents. She switches from conventional dialogue to script-like format throughout the book. All of it is clearly the work of a careful writer telling a complex tale.

Be warned: this is a long book, it is a dense book, and it has many characters (the character list up front is helpful). I found myself googling place names in France and looking up the characters and events in Wikipedia. Some reviewers see this additional effort as a downside requirement to enjoying the book, but I looked at it the other way: Mantel made the French Revolution and the characters so interesting, I wanted to know more - a lot more - than she could pack into an 800+ page book. That kind of spark of interest is a rare gift, which left me wishing Mantel could explain so many more moments of history in her engaging style. In short it takes some work, even as you're enjoying it. But the rewards are great. Now, when can I go to Paris?(less)

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Mar 27, 2012 Dorothy rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a head-scratcher of a book. I have given it 4 stars because I felt the book see-sawed between 3 and 5. Three stars for being overly long, boggy in the middle (a wide middle) and occasionally anachronistic in the dialog. The dialog. There is a lot of it. Too much quite frequently. I honestly considered quitting the book 60% of the way into it but I chose instead to skim the dialog-rich sections which just didn't seem to add a lot.

I sm very glad I did. The pace picked up and the inexorabl...more

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May 25, 2011 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Harumph. I wrote a review of this book and for some reason Goodreads didn't save it. So here's the jist.

Before I started reading this book, I could have told you about Danton and Robespierre (thanks, Gerard Depardieu and that Polish actor who played Robespierre!), but not much else about the French revolution. I knew that Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined, but not why or how that came about. Hilary Mantel introduced me to a huge number of supporting players--I suppose Camille Desmo...more Harumph. I wrote a review of this book and for some reason Goodreads didn't save it. So here's the jist.

Before I started reading this book, I could have told you about Danton and Robespierre (thanks, Gerard Depardieu and that Polish actor who played Robespierre!), but not much else about the French revolution. I knew that Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined, but not why or how that came about. Hilary Mantel introduced me to a huge number of supporting players--I suppose Camille Desmoulins is pretty major, but he'd never come up for me before--and more background information on the Revolution than I'd ever thought existed. I'm pretty sure that before I read A Place of Greater Safety, I thought the French Revolution consisted mostly of people being guillotined by Robespierre and Saint Just. This novel is a phenomenal achievement on Mantel's part.

On that note, I feel like I was missing something the whole time. Mantel's writing style isn't particularly difficult, so I progressed through the 700-some-odd pages at a clip, but I found myself arriving at a seminal moment in history with no idea how I had gotten there. Was I not reading carefully? Did Mantel actually leave something out? Am I just not up to the intellectual pressure of this book? Or maybe--and this is my suspicion--Mantel planned it that way because that was how it was in history. One moment Camille and Robespierre were close friends and the next moment, the latter was signing the former's death warrant. They were all saying how they opposed the death penalty, and then suddenly everybody was being guillotined. Whole casts of characters were often replaced by other casts of characters with different ideologies. I confess--it was a little too much for me. I think the simplicity of the writing (not SUPER simple, really, but not too dense to read easily) made me think that I was understanding a lot more of the political stuff than I really was. And on top of that, I really didn't like any of the characters. Even Danton, who was my favorite of the three principal players, had his despicable moments.

Honestly, it's a period in history during which nobody ever had a happy ending. I should never read books in which I know that all of the important characters that I've spent 700-plus pages with will be guillotined at the end. And by all of them, I mean ALL OF THEM. I know this is an occupational hazard if you're reading about the French Revolution, but it didn't appeal to me. It's certainly an epic novel, and at times exciting, haunting, chilling, and even a tiny bit romantic--but it's not my particular cup of tea.(less)

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Aug 20, 2010 ·Karen· rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, brits

"For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined."
Thus Hilary Mantel in an illuminating article on Robespierre in the London Review of Books. Her use of the p-word is a measure of the kind of disdain she feels emanating from the academic historians, who seem to think there are only two kinds of history, the 'sceptical and rational' or the 'imaginative and erratic'. But Mantel has defini...more "For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined."
Thus Hilary Mantel in an illuminating article on Robespierre in the London Review of Books. Her use of the p-word is a measure of the kind of disdain she feels emanating from the academic historians, who seem to think there are only two kinds of history, the 'sceptical and rational' or the 'imaginative and erratic'. But Mantel has definitely and emphatically created a third category: the flawlessly well-researched, vivid, modern re-telling and re-interpretation.
At the end of the book Danton's thoughts return to his mother sitting by a window making lace. 'He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern and not the threads.' A perfect image of how a text can be viewed both ways, as the woven threads around spaces or holes surrounded by threads. Another playful reference by Ms Mantel to her craft - and this novel has several such winks and nudges - essentially looking at the holes and gaps in history and filling them with her imagination. So what are the holes and gaps? This is not a distortion of facts, a filling in of detail that is missing in the historical accounts: this is fiction, and fiction is licensed to do what academics may not. Fiction can give us the emotions: hope, euphoria, frustration, apprehension, fear, jealousy, envy, pettiness, resentment, friendship, loyalty, love, hate, betrayal. At the same time Mantel never tries to deceive the reader, she points up her modern idiom, openly admits that Danton never wrote anything down, but slyly asks if perhaps we can hear his voice nevertheless and then provides us with that voice, makes use of documents and original sources, and then juxtaposes them with conversations between two characters that of course can only be imagined.
The re-interpretation is her scrupulous avoidance of a well-ploughed furrow, that of portraying Danton as the bull-like masculine sensualist and Robespierre as the ascetic 'feminine' incorruptible, in opposition to each other virtually from the start. She pays service to these images, the myths that grew up around them so swiftly will no doubt have some grain of truth in them, but she will not take on any prejudices without her own careful examination. This is a magnificent achievement, gripping and engrossing, and a strident demonstration of how historical fiction can compliment the academic.
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Apr 13, 2013 Alison Dellit rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, historical-fiction

It's not the length and density of this book alone which can make it a gruelling read, but that it is in the end a tragedy. For 800 pages you feel the revolution slipping slowly through our characters fingers, something they aspire towards and yet never seem to grasp. For the last three weeks or so, the book has provided a melancholic backdrop to my daily life maybe suited to a less stressful time.

As a tale of the Dantons and the Desmoulins, it is an astonishing feat. Camille and Lucille, George...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Matt Brady rated it 4 of 5 stars

Ideas are born from the minds of men and women, shaped by their own talents, personalities, flaws, prejudices and biases. When looking at important historical events, it's easy to forget that, forget the people who had these ideas. Or rather, it's easy to forget that they are simply people, regular people, who have dislikes and weaknesses, people who make mistakes. That is what is at the heart of A Place of Greater Safety. The people behind the French Revolution, or some of them at least, and th...more Ideas are born from the minds of men and women, shaped by their own talents, personalities, flaws, prejudices and biases. When looking at important historical events, it's easy to forget that, forget the people who had these ideas. Or rather, it's easy to forget that they are simply people, regular people, who have dislikes and weaknesses, people who make mistakes. That is what is at the heart of A Place of Greater Safety. The people behind the French Revolution, or some of them at least, and the ways their diverse personalities drove events. But ideas can outgrow the people that have them, and take on a life of their own, overwhelming the individual and sometimes devouring them. A man might start a boulder rolling down the hill, only to them find himself fleeing before it, trying to avoid being crushed.

It's a dark book. Spoiler alert! I don't know if that should be obvious, given that it is a novel of the French Revolution, but there it is. Do not expect a happy ending. The life expectancy of a Revolutionary figure was not very high, and Revolution is a bloody business. Mantel captures the rage, fear and panic very well, never forgetting the faces behind the statistics, the killers and the killed, while also letting the events speak for themselves, without any real authorial judgement.

In her later works of historical fiction, Mantel shows a great talent for contextualising and explaining the relevant historical details. One does not need to be an expert in Tudor history to understand and follow the events of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. This is a skill Mantel had not quite developed in A Place of Greater Safety. I don't know much about the French revolution beyond the bare bones, and at times I found the plot hard to follow. There is an avalanche of characters, places, factions, battles, and there were a few times when I didn't quite understand the feud between this character and that faction, the personal or political disputes that always fuels the tensions and disputes. It was never quite overwhelming, but I did feel a little lost at times.

Overall though, it's gripping stuff. If, like me, you came to Mantel through Wolf Hall, you won't be disapoitned by this.(less)

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Dec 28, 2011 Ginny added it

I should have read this on my kindle which would have enabled me to easily look back to see what each one of the characters had previously done, who they were and how they were related to the other characters. I know that I would have gotten more out of it. This book, like Wolf Hall has a huge cast of characters.
But, nevertheless, I loved this book and Mantel's writing.. I had known next to nothing about the French revolution before reading it.

Mantel doesn't dwell on historical details and does...more

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Dec 31, 2012 Lil rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Absolutely amazing. I'm sad that I'm limited to only five stars - I'd gladly double that if I could!

I have to admit, I was a little intimidated to start this book - I know next to nothing about these times and after reading a few reviews, I was certain I'd have trouble following the characters. This wasn't the case at all. Just like Hilary Mantel put me squarely in Tudor England with Wolf Hall, now I feel like I've been transported to revolutionary Paris and am feeling a little disoriented back...more

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Nov 10, 2011 Erin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

This book took me an absurdly long time to read, but man, was it worth it. Hilary Mantel's brain is some sort of freakish treasure - every time I read her, I am simultaneously elated by the beautiful things she creates and depressed that I will never be able to write the way she does. She breaks so many rules (constantly changing POV not just between characters, but from first person to an anonymous third, to her own voice, to a script format, back to traditional dialogue, &c.), but it all w...more This book took me an absurdly long time to read, but man, was it worth it. Hilary Mantel's brain is some sort of freakish treasure - every time I read her, I am simultaneously elated by the beautiful things she creates and depressed that I will never be able to write the way she does. She breaks so many rules (constantly changing POV not just between characters, but from first person to an anonymous third, to her own voice, to a script format, back to traditional dialogue, &c.), but it all works.

This book is billed as being about Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins, but let's be real - this is Camille Desmoulins' book. And that makes sense. Camille's easy to love because his opinions seemed to run pretty parallel to our own: he was present for and instrumental in all the heady early excitement, inciting the rioting that led to the storming of the Bastille, for instance, but when things got out of hand, he was quick to condemn the Reign of Terror (and he and his beautiful young wife seem to have really loved each other, so don't discount the power of a love story). It's no surprise, really, that he was a favorite of the Victorians, who saw him as a noble martyr for goodness or something. I don't care about that Camille.

And thank god Mantel didn't fall for all of that. Camille's her most sympathetic character, yes, but he's also a little shit. She doesn't ignore the fact that he's the Lanterne Attorney, that he delighted in violence - you get the feeling that the Vieux Cordelier came about partly out of genuine moral distress, and partly out of petulance, as if institutionalized terror repelled him because he preferred the good old chaotic kind, the kind that had made him the revolutionary darling of the people only a few years earlier. He's a dramatic, reactionary little jerk, and his ideals are very dear to him - until those ideals are turned against a friend, aristocratic or otherwise. He's a mess, and he's rather wonderful.

Not to imply that the book is 100% perfect. I read somewhere that Mantel claimed she began writing this book as a Dantonist and came out of it a Robespierrist, but I don't see that reflected in the text. Robespierre himself is amazing (a little bit of personal bias may be coming through here, but I think you'd agree - he's as exacting as you might expect, but entirely human in a way you don't always get to see), but all of her Robespierrist characters are oddly-portrayed. If she's such a Robespierrist, why the uniformly negative depiction of the Duplay family, even when Robespierre himself is narrating(even poor Éléonore, whose portraits do not support the constant barrage of comments about her plainness)? Why Robespierre's personal distaste for Saint-Just, a man who would remain his closest ally until they died on the same day? Even the structure of the plot is Dantonist - Robespierrists don't generally imply that the fall of the factions was the de facto end of the Revolution, because what does that say about Robespierre's own abilities? A book about Camille Desmoulins is going to be inherently Dantonist, but there were still some choices I didn't really understand.

As for Danton himself? He's tough to love, but fun to read. A bit of a brute, hugely egotistical (granted, with good reason) and generally self-interested. Like the rest of the book, he's very well-drawn, but he never inspired much in the way of feelings.

Oh, I don't know. Mantel is a genius, and her books are art. She balances the personal and political so well - I don't want to imagine it in less-skilled hands. The reader would race through the political discussions to get to the next scene with Camille and Lucile (or, well, Camille and Danton or Robespierre or anyone; her Camille is definitely a flirt). But Mantel's mind-blowing, and I was never bored for an instant. My grasp of the French Revolution isn't as strong as my grasp of Tudor history, so I was a little worried that I wouldn't love this as much as I loved Wolf Hall, but I think I may love it even more. I am awed.(less)

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About Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mary Mantel, née Thompson was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article a...more

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“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.” — 17 people liked it

“[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...” — 8 people liked it

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