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A Place Of Greater Safety

Hilary Mantel (Goodreads Author)

3.95 · Rating details · 6,988 ratings · 907 reviews

Capturing the violence, tragedy, history, and drama of the French Revolution, this novel focuses on the families and loves of three men who led the Revolution--Danton, the charismatic leader and orator; Robespierre, the cold rationalist; and Desmoulins, the rabble-rouser.

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Paperback, 872 pages

Published 1993 by Penguin (first published 1992)

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Jun 04, 2008 Paul Bryant rated it it was ok · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Nov 12, 2011 Kim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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

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, 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. ...more

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Aug 06, 2010 ·Karen· rated it it was amazing · 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 "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 Robespierre'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.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n07/hilary-m... ...more

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Jun 20, 2019 Diane S ☔ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: lor-2019

My first successful fictional audio book. The narrator Jonathsn Keeble, is I thought, fantastic. I actually listened and read this, following along with the narration. The book itself, concentrated on three prominent figures of the French Revolution, was witty, informative, if not quite historically accurate, though certain events were. Centering on the lives of three let the reader enter their thoughts, actions and personal lives. Mantel has a way with words, wringing out of them, both the ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Jane rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, unforgettable

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 ...more

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Jul 15, 2015 Teresa rated it it was amazing

Having read her two Cromwell novels, I couldn't help comparing the style Mantel perfected in those to this much earlier work. For example, the depictions of the childhoods of the three main characters reminded me of the same technique she uses to first get us engaged in and sympathetic toward Cromwell in Wolf Hall. In all three novels, once blood is shed, and alliances made and remade--and even though I know what's coming--the tension is ratcheted up to an almost unbearable pitch. A lovely ...more

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Nov 19, 2013 Sue rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, favorite-authors, kindle, france, 18th-century, read-2014

Well, thanks to the ministrations of Hilary Mantel, I now feel that I have the start of an understanding of the French Revolution and some of its key players. While A Place of Greater Safety is an acknowledged historical fiction, it is peopled with historical figures who lived the revolution, wrote its new laws and newspapers, created and were victims of its blood-lust.

Mantel uses multiple styles in her creation: writing in the third and first person; inserting occasional historic quotes; ...more

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Dec 20, 2012 Warwick rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, paris, france, 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 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. ...more

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Nov 27, 2014 Alice Poon rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction

I was reading this epic novel non-stop for the last seven days and, with a sigh of relief, I finally reached the end yesterday. While mulling on how to write this review, an immediate thought that came to mind was that the novel could’ve been tightened and slimmed down by a fifth to a quarter. I’m giving it a rating of 4.2 stars out of 5.

On the whole, it is a rigorously researched work of historical fiction describing in minute details the emotional, sexual and political lives of the three I was reading this epic novel non-stop for the last seven days and, with a sigh of relief, I finally reached the end yesterday. While mulling on how to write this review, an immediate thought that came to mind was that the novel could’ve been tightened and slimmed down by a fifth to a quarter. I’m giving it a rating of 4.2 stars out of 5.

On the whole, it is a rigorously researched work of historical fiction describing in minute details the emotional, sexual and political lives of the three leading actors who played pivotal roles in the French Revolution (Maximilien Robespierre, Camille Desmoulins and Georges-Jacques Danton) and who were surrounded by a myriad cast of secondary characters; and the entangled and mind-boggling relations and interactions, sexual or political or otherwise, between the one and the other.

In terms of crafting a spell-binding historical novel, Ms. Mantel is a talented storyteller who knows how to titillate her readers. I was particularly impressed with the last third of the book, where the irony of bad-outcome-from-good-intentions helps to build up hair-raising tension. Having said that, I still came away with a tinge of disappointment that the author chose to bypass the chance to examine some salient issues from the viewpoint of ordinary French folks (for example, the underlying reasons as to why they thought there was no better alternative than to resort to bloody violence; how the epochal ideological shift affected the average Parisian on the streets and what his/her reactions to that shift were).

Set in one of the bloodiest and most tumultuous periods in French history, the novel no doubt gives a kaleidoscopic view of important historic events and personages. But the fictional elements of the novel tend to dwell interminably on Danton’s sexual and material voracity, Desmoulins’ bisexual perverseness and Robespierre’s frenzied self-abnegation. Couldn’t they have been simply hot-headed, starry-eyed young idealists who started out thinking it was their ineluctable duty to reform a rotten system in their beloved country, but ended up being sucked into the vortex of power addiction, which ultimately destroyed lives unnecessarily, including their own? If Robespierre’s ascetic traits were still credible, the salacity attributed to Danton and Desmoulins just seems to me to be a bit forced.

All in all, this made for good complementary reading alongside Thomas Carlyle’s non-fiction title The French Revolution: A History, which I commenced reading before starting on Mantel’s novel. With these two books, I’m learning a lot about this cataclysmic phase in French history. ...more

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Dec 31, 2019 Jennifer added it · review of another edition

There’s no way I would’ve finished this if Mantel weren’t one of my favorite authors. And even then, there was a whole lot of sunk cost fallacy getting me to the end. It’s fascinating to see the germination for her later (greater) novels by examining what does and doesn’t work in this one. For me, there was too much historical detail and unconventional structure, with too little novelistic glue to help the reader appreciate and enjoy these other elements. The Thomas Cromwell novels lead you down ...more

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Aug 31, 2015 Bettie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: BBC Radio Listeners

Shelves: historical-fiction, play-dramatisation, published-1992, france, radio-4, revolution, autumn-2015

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b068sjpb

Description: Hilary Mantel's gripping account of the cataclysmic events of the French Revolution seen through the eyes of three of its most important figures, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Maximilien Robespierre.

French Revolution Timeline

Liberty

Equality

Fraternity

Excellent dramatisation, Melissa Murray.
Thanks you R4.

Camille: Carl Prekopp
Danton: Mark Stobbart
Robespierre: Sam Troughton
Narrator Lizzy Watts
Narrator Paul Ritter
Lucile Chloe Pirrie
...more

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Jul 27, 2011 Fionnuala added it · review of another edition

If you want to begin to understand how revolution happens, how individuals get to manipulate the mob, how rioters can be triggered to bring down a government or a monarch, this well researched and beautifully written fictionalised account of the French revolution is a good place to start.

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Nov 23, 2012 Lyn Elliott rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, france

Mantel took on a huge challenge with this, her first book, set aside for twenty years before its eventual publication.
The questions she asks are: at what moment in the political revolution in France is there no going back and, for her three main characters (Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre), ‘Is there a moment when life changes decisively, where there is absolutely no return to the person you were before, or the conditions as they were.' This leads to a further question: 'how an individual Mantel took on a huge challenge with this, her first book, set aside for twenty years before its eventual publication.
The questions she asks are: at what moment in the political revolution in France is there no going back and, for her three main characters (Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre), ‘Is there a moment when life changes decisively, where there is absolutely no return to the person you were before, or the conditions as they were.' This leads to a further question: 'how an individual can, by the force of their will, make themselves over into something or someone other'.

Mantel believes that for Desmoulins there was a moment of transformation, when suddenly he becomes famous as a revolutionary actor. For Danton and Robespierre there is less a defining moment than a series of events that, rapidly or gradually, take them to situations they had not envisaged. Frequently they are pushed to respond to actions taken by others and eventually they lose control. The book ends with the show trials and execution of Desmoulins and Danton. Robespierre and Saint-Just, the principal driver of their downfall, followed them to the guillotine a few months later. The only safe place for the politically active under the rule of the Committee of Public Safety, was the grave - the place of greater safety of the title.

The revolution's course was chaotic, especially in the years that concern Mantel. At first I found rapid scene changes and incomplete glimpses of political manoeuvrings difficult to keep track of. It was much easier to keep on reading once I accepted that this reflected the swirling chaos of the revolution itself and i stopped trying to keep all the details in my head as I went. None of the lead characters ever has a full view of what is happening either - nothing is ever quite what it seems; there are always layers and explosions of activity going on elsewhere. A glimpse is all we can have.

I am quite familiar with the broad history of the French Revolution which helped me understand shifting allegiances and alliances. Nevertheless I felt I had to resort to an Encyclopedia and Norman Davies' mighty 'Europe, a History' from time to time to give myself some firm hooks of information. Next major read for me is Simon Schama's 'Citizens' which has been sitting on my bookshelf waiting for several years.

As others have noted, this complex work of historical fiction is the clear stylistic fore-runner to Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, in which Mantel addresses the same big questions that interested her here. In the more recent books, her mastery of great quantities of historical information is integrated more seamlessly into strong, compelling narrative. It took me two months to read 'Place of Greater Safety', giving myself breaks in between bursts. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies I read in days. ...more

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Sep 04, 2011 F.G. Cottam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Mar 23, 2012 Sarah rated it liked it · review of another edition

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 ...more

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Sep 17, 2016 S. rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 500-plus-pages, women-writers, read-in-2016, historical-fiction, recommended-novels

Warning: I don't add spoilers to history or historical fiction. Everyone dies! Look it up!

That the French Revolution happened seems amazing, more astounding than the American Revolution (colonies revolting against a distant king seems rather predictable). It’s no easy feat to topple a monarchy. You need well-placed folks with charisma and a savvy outreach program.

"A Place of Greater Safety" follows three key figures of the revolution from childhood to the guillotine (though one ekes out a few Warning: I don't add spoilers to history or historical fiction. Everyone dies! Look it up!

That the French Revolution happened seems amazing, more astounding than the American Revolution (colonies revolting against a distant king seems rather predictable). It’s no easy feat to topple a monarchy. You need well-placed folks with charisma and a savvy outreach program.

"A Place of Greater Safety" follows three key figures of the revolution from childhood to the guillotine (though one ekes out a few more months). There’s the macho Danton, the dashing bisexual Camille Desmoulins, and the idealistic ascetic Robespierre. There’s also Camille’s sympathetic wife Lucile and her mother Annette, Marat, known to me before this book only for dying in a bathtub, and the jerk with the great name, Saint-Just. There are plenty of bad guys but the consolation is that pretty much that the guillotine comes down on everyone at some point. Adieu!

There are many many other characters. It was hard to keep track of who was who, especially since I entered knowing very little about the French Revolution. The guys whose names began with H were pretty much “the guys whose names begin with H.” Luckily there’s a list of characters at the beginning, though it’s not Hugely useful. A more diligent reader would have taken notes. I resorted to secondary sources and the Revolutions podcast series. Build yourself a little scaffold of background and you’ll get through this just fine.

Two interesting things I learned: 1) I hadn’t realised the French were the Euro champions of waving heads around on pikes. Whoa. As brutal and primitive as it gets! Nothing to be proud of, that.

2) This isn’t really covered in the book, it’s just assumed you know (I didn’t), but the revolution created its own calendar with the months renamed and the weeks rejigged and it was really quite marvelous, if evocative of North Korea. It might help you forget those heads thrust onto pikes.

I admire Mantel’s writing. Of course she’s imagining most of this based on the particulars of people’s lives and the events of the revolution. But she does make it lively. She does breathe into it. Her story is very much character-based. Camille is so quick-witted. You can see clearly what each character lacks. The end scene at the guillotine is excellent. Then there’s the very last scene, recalling Robespierre’s childhood, and comparing reimagining history through fiction to tatting:

One day, a long time ago, his mother sat by window, making lace. The broad morning light streamed in on both of them. He saw it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves. ‘Show me how to do it,’ he said. ‘I want to learn.’
‘Boys don’t do it,’ she said. Her face was composed; her work continued. His throat closed at the exclusion.
Now, whenever he looks at a piece of lace —even though his eyes are bad— he seems to see every thread in the work.

I really enjoyed this and think it’s almost as good as Mantel’s Wolf Hall, but not quite. Maybe if she’d split this dense book in two …? Or three…? It really is quite long, and there are plenty of gaps not yet filled in. ...more

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Aug 25, 2019 Roman Clodia rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dnf-revisit-later

For me, this is an impressive novel - but one which is a chore to get through. For one, it needs a serious edit: it took about 400 pages, almost half the book, before the dramatic tension really started to rise for me. Before that, we're treated to long scenes during the childhood, adolescence and early careers of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins - a bit like that opener in Wolf Hall where we see Cromwell as a young battered boy, only in the latter book Mantel then moves swiftly to the ...more

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Jun 13, 2011 Jan-Maat added it · review of another edition

Shelves: novel, 20th-century, historical-fiction, french-revolution

Once upon a time Hillary Mantel took creative writing classes. The teacher asked the class what they wanted to get out of the class, apart from Mantel, everybody wanted to make a living writing for women's magazines, she however wanted to write a big serious novel about the French revolution.

Very impressive and enjoyable historical novel that runs up to the fall of Danton from the childhood of some of the leading revolutionaries, and their interrelations in the years in between. I don't remember ...more

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May 24, 2007 Pei Pei rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

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, ...more

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Dec 27, 2013 Felicia rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: history

Very cool history of the French Revolution told in a fictionalized style. The insight of the author into human behavior, and the fullness she gives these vivid yet dry characters from history is amazing! Truly a great book.

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Mar 04, 2019 Philip Allan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

At its worst, historical fiction can be little more than a modern tale in fancy dress. But when it is well researched, and the author has a passion for their period, it can shine a light into the past that is more illuminating than factual history. This was true for me when I read Hilary Mantel’s brilliant account of four young men, swept up by the French Revolution. I came away with a much deeper understanding of the events than I had ever gained from historical study. Mantel’s style is not to ...more

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Dec 21, 2017 Nick Pageant rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical

This is highly recommended for history buffs. Hilary Mantel is a phenomenal writer. She made me believe she was there and saw. Good stuff.

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Nov 20, 2012 Darwin8u rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2016

I will review more tomorrow. Just too much. Mantel is amazing. The book was too long. Not as good as her Cromwell cycle, but still, dear GOD can Mantel write and subvert history. I walked away from this book, I think, in love with three enfants terrible of the French Revolution. It really is true, I think, that to know someone is to love them.

In someways telling the history of the French revolution is perfect using these three men. It is like Mantel places the ID (Danton), EGO (Desmoulins), and ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Todd Smalley rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, re-read, woman-author

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 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? ...more

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Sep 09, 2014 Bruce rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This historical novel by Hilary Mantel focuses on three primary figures from the French Revolution – Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins. The exploration of their lives, their characters, their interactions, and their historical roles necessarily draws in dozens of other personages, most actually historical, and for the reader familiar with the events of the time the result is a satisfying window into the ambiance of those difficult years.

Mantel is a skillful and engaging writer. Her use of
This historical novel by Hilary Mantel focuses on three primary figures from the French Revolution – Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins. The exploration of their lives, their characters, their interactions, and their historical roles necessarily draws in dozens of other personages, most actually historical, and for the reader familiar with the events of the time the result is a satisfying window into the ambiance of those difficult years.

Mantel is a skillful and engaging writer. Her use of metaphor is often particularly striking. The house “has the sulphurous odor of family quarrels brewing.” Her novel also demonstrates a keen sense of pace. As the narrative progresses, sections become shorter and shorter, sometimes containing only a few sentences. This choppiness mirrors the increasing chaos of events as the tempo quickens.

Mantel is particularly skillful in delineating her characters, giving them distinctive personalities and voices. For each a portrait is gradually painted that is increasingly rounded even as it changes over time. This novel is notable for almost all of the characters being rather unsympathetic, none highly attractive to the reader except perhaps for Gabrielle, Danton’s wife, and she seems wholly good only because she turns her face aside from the moral compromises going on all the time around her, thus shielding herself from her own knowledge and giving her a sort of faux-innocence. All the others are flawed and, in the face of the need to progressively compromise themselves, cannot resist the slide into evil that they would never have originally countenanced but that they are too ready to excuse and justify. Thus they descend into caricatures of who they might have been, their mock-heroism a feeble and seemingly inevitable inverse of the true heroism that resistance would have required. Finding themselves inextricably entwined in webs of their own making, they lack the will or ability to break free and thus feel no alternative but to press forward, even in the face of hopelessness and violence. Initially visionary, they become reactive, and expedience replaces idealism. First the psychic stability of each starts to crack, after which they predictably begin to fall on one another. One is left wondering whether the issue is that, as Lord Acton asserted, power itself tends to corrupt, or whether these leaders of the Revolution became so ensnared by the system they had created that they were motivated primarily by fears for their own safety. Perhaps events so entangled them that they could envision no alternative to the next step toward the abyss. In developing her characters, Mantel holds up an indicting mirror to those of us who are her readers, making us examine ourselves and our own society and culture.

Mantel’s book is of course highly fictionalized, with many details of place, people, and conversation that could not have been based on actual documentation. The personalities of the chief protagonists sometimes seem crafted for their entertainment value. The novel is interesting and engaging, but is it history? For the reader knowing the chronology of the history, this is one way of fleshing it out, but a rather arbitrary way. It raises the issue of how “historical” historical fiction is, and what we have a right to expect from the genre. As always, one comes back to the need to read from multiple sources, balancing and comparing, evaluating and judging, synthesizing a composite for oneself, always provisional and ready to be changed if necessary when more information and impressions deem it necessary.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and am glad that I read it after first developing a firm grounding in the actual historical events. Mantel’s characters truly come alive.
...more

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Aug 16, 2011 John Bellamy added it · review of another edition

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, 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. ...more

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Oct 02, 2011 Denis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 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. ...more

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Jun 23, 2014 Hugh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, modern-classics, modern-lit, read-2012

An epic, detailed and lively tale of the French revolution - an assured and impressive debut novel, highly recommended to anyone who enjoyed the Cromwell novels.

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Nov 01, 2010 Christine rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-1700-1900, women-writers

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.

...more

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Nov 08, 2014 Andrea rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-foreign-locale, challenge, chunky-challenge-2016

The revolution that cannibalised itself!

My edition had 985 pages, and I'm a slow reader, so to have come to the end of this novel in 2.5 weeks has left me feeling a bit shell-shocked. I've decided to give it 3.5 because although I enjoyed it, I can't imagine ever wanting to re-read it, and that's one of my tests for 4.

Being a huge fan of the Wolf Hall (soon-to-be) trilogy, I was really interested to see how this earlier example of Mantel's epic, speculative, historical fiction compared. My ...more

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About Hilary Mantel

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award. She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An ...more

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Bring Up the Bodies (Thomas Cromwell, #2)

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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.” — 53 likes

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