The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant, #5) in Reading with Style

Feb 11, 2013 Megan added it

Shelves: crime-mystery-suspense, fiction

I caught Richard III fever last week. No shame here. Mostly, I've always liked the Shakespeare play (his character is an atrocious villain!), and Richard III is one of my favorite characters on Horrible Histories (there's the time his ghost confronted Shakespeare and his own song, but his presence in the English kings and queens song cracks me up the most; every single other monarch is singing and dancing and having fun, and there's Richard III, alternately waving at the camera or mocking the so I caught Richard III fever last week. No shame here. Mostly, I've always liked the Shakespeare play (his character is an atrocious villain!), and Richard III is one of my favorite characters on Horrible Histories (there's the time his ghost confronted Shakespeare and his own song, but his presence in the English kings and queens song cracks me up the most; every single other monarch is singing and dancing and having fun, and there's Richard III, alternately waving at the camera or mocking the song).

ANYWAY. I'd been meaning to read this book, and after the DNA confirmation news broke, I picked it up and didn't put it down until I was finished. As a lover of nifty structural tricks, I enjoyed how Tey sets up her book: her detective Grant is laid up in a hospital bed after a nasty fall, he doesn't leave his bed until the very end of the book, and he relies on limited resources to "solve" a mystery. And it's still an engaging read, mostly because Grant is so prickly and cantankerous and kind-of-mean, so his voice is strong and vivid enough to carry the narrative weight, and I thought it was a well-structured investigation and fun to read, the account of someone researching facts, deploying a thoughtful academic investigation, and analyzing the character and motivation of historical figures. I'm no historian myself, but I thought it was a fun demonstration of someone researching a theory about a historical event.

I did have the same frustrations I have with almost any fictional narrative that's making some kind of academic argument: I was annoyed not to have proper sources for the evidence used (a footnote, a footnote, my kingdom for a footnote!), so that I could evaluate them for myself. I was also frustrated by how long it took for Grant and his assistant to realize that they weren't the first people in all of history to doubt the Tudor-era account of Richard's alleged villainy, which made me doubt how well they were doing their research (and if Tey was manipulating the non-fictional evidence), if it took them so long to find all the other pro-Richard research that's been done in the past couple of centuries.

Given the way Grant's investigation is structured (he starts out knowing very little about Richard III except the obvious stories passed down), I think the book would still be accessible to readers who don't know much about Richard III but are interested in the controversy (and hearing a pro-Richard account). ...more

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