Jacqueline Park’s story hews to known tropes.Darren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
Of all literature's classifications, "historical fiction" must be among the most slippery. Self-consciously literary works eschew the "historical" tag to imply that style and theme are paramount, while accuracy and rigour in research are assumed. Commercial historical fiction often relies more heavily on thrills promised by anything "based on a true story": here, artistic interpretation takes a back seat to facts delightfully stranger than fiction.
Jacqueline Park's first novel, the bestselling The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi – a sweeping saga set during the Italian Renaissance, narrated by a woman torn between her Jewish roots and the seductions of the Christian world – struck a fine balance between these extremes. Her long-awaited sequel, The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi, paints on an equally epic canvas, but too often boasts its research at the expense of artistry.
Park rides the caftan-tails of history to the golden age of the Ottoman Empire, conjuring another sprawling tale of romance and intrigue and characters torn between duty and love. This time she focuses on Grazia's son, Danilo, and his forbidden affair with Saida, a fictitious daughter of Suleiman the Magnificent. Their tale opens with Judah del Medigo, physician to the Sultan and husband of Grazia, receiving news that their son has perished at sea en route to Istanbul. Within the first five pages, Grazia is dispatched, a ransom is demanded for Danilo's life, and the Sultan offers the boy a place at the harem school for royal children.
It's a pacey exposition, but what begins as colourful scene-setting risks becoming the breathless account of an author too much in thrall to her research. Park often seems in a rush to get to the heart of her story, which unfolds in the middle section through a series of letters. The epistolary structure suits her well, allowing for ambiguity and irony and permitting the reader to make the sort of imaginative leaps that are too often crowded out in the overstuffed omniscient narration of the first section, where a combination of melodrama and stilted dialogue too often feel like heavy-handed attempts at delivering a reasonably interesting history lesson.
At the School for Pages, Danilo distinguishes himself at the gerit (described by a foreign observer as resembling "a battle more than a jousting contest…To one not caught up in it early in life, the gerit is simply a war of each against all"). Meanwhile, the princess Saida is absorbed into the harem and taken under the wing of the concubine Hurrem. A Polish slave who rose to be a Kadin (Mother of Princes) and, ultimately, the Sultan's wife, Hurrem is cast here as a scheming stepmother intent on marrying off Saida and securing her son's position as heir to the throne.
Of course, Danilo and Saida embark on a clandestine and star-crossed romance. The golden-haired paladin and the daring, sensual princess share trysts on the island of Kinali; he wears an amulet she gives him, and it saves his life in a gerit contest. When Danilo accompanies the Sultan on campaign as Suleiman's personal interpreter, the lovers communicate through brief postscripts added in invisible ink to their guardians' missives. I waited – in vain – for Park to subvert some of the more predictable tropes. Too often, when a character insists that "This is not a story in a French romance," you can bet that there are probably more implicit similarities than the author might like to admit.
Corny romance aside, the novel incorporates some delightfully evocative historical treats. I've walked through the Passage of the Black Eunuchs at Topkapi – an ornate connecting chamber of blue and white tile that marries the twin Islamic arts of geometry and calligraphy – but learned for the first time here of the rivalry between the white eunuchs of the palace and the black eunuchs of the harem.
Similarly, the novel's middle section is rich in historical detail. On the road to Baghdad, the romantic storyline is eclipsed by personal and political intrigue, and the eastward march is illuminated by Danilo's nightly readings from Arrian's Life of Alexander. Like Alexander (or Iskender, as he was known to the Turks), Suleiman strove to conquer East and West to forge a formidable world empire. Baghdad's capture by the Ottomans confirmed Suleiman as master of the East and brought the last corner of the golden triangle – also comprising Mecca and Medina – into Sunni hands.
When Suleiman and Danilo return in triumph to Istanbul, and the lovers' hopes of a happy ending are threatened by the schemes of Hurrem and a jealous Grand Vizier, Park's prose becomes heavily expository again. Fascinated though we may be by the oral histories of the Kurds, traditional processes of making sherbet, or processing buffalo cheese from milk indigestible by humans, such colourful and edifying tidbits alone can't add substance to static characters and predictable plotting.
As a literary achievement, The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi is less convincing than its predecessor – but if Park can kill some of her historical darlings to create room for more nuanced characterisation and storytelling, there is hope for a return to form in the forthcoming final instalment.
Trilby Kent's most recent novel is Silent Noon.