I'm sorry to report that I just couldn't stick with this book.
I read a little over 10% of it, and then skimmed a bit, but I found the text too weighty, and burdensome for my taste. ( )

This is a novel about the French Revolution – so we know how it ends and we know it will be full of blood and references to beheadings. It is a sweeping saga with no lack of dramatic events, from the optimism of the early Revolution to the horrors of the Terror. Mantel tells the story through character studies of the lives, personalities, and social interactions of three primary drivers of the Revolution: Georges-Jacques Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and Maximilien Robespierre. She follows them from their childhood friendships to their deaths.

It is a novel about the abuse of power – first the monarchy, then those who overthrew the monarchy, as they turn on each other in an attempt to achieve or maintain power. One thing is certain. When civil rights are suspended, nothing good is going to come out of it. The characters are fabulous. They are deeply drawn, and the reader gains psychological insights into what motivates them. It helped me understand the roles of these people in the French Revolution, of which I had a cursory knowledge beforehand. I cared so much about one of the characters that I could hardly bear to read what happened to him even though I knew what was coming.

It is long (750 pages) and took me a quite a while to read. It is very well-constructed and, for me, worth the effort. It is the type of historical novel that I enjoy – heavy on the history. It is not a historical romance, though we do get to know the personal stories of the wives and paramours of the main characters.

This book was written well before the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light), but the writing style is similar, so if you like those books, you will probably like this one. I switched back and forth between a hard copy and audio. The audio is particularly helpful for non-French speakers to hear the proper pronunciations. The reader, Jonathan Keeble, does a brilliant job with the narration, voices, and pacing. It is one of the best audio performances I have heard. It was helpful to switch to the physical book for the more gruesome and tragic parts.

4.5
( )

In the wake of so many other reviews, I don't know that I have a heck of a lot to add. I'm a hardcore Mantel fan, and have long been fascinated by the French Revolution. I even puzzled the chief of security where I used to work when I mentioned to him that calling his department the Department of Public Safety might be an unfortunate choice...

Anyway. Mantel was 22 when she started writing this book. Living in Botswana, after years of reading and research in the UK. Without the internet. How the heck she pulled that off, I will never know. But she did, and that alone is a breathtaking achievement. Huge, swirling, overpopulated, over-busy, throwing in every approach, every technique she had at it. She said she thought the French Revolution was the most interesting, most important event in history, and she couldn't find a book that gave her what she wanted to know about it, so she wrote one, god love her. In a later interview, she said that when she pulled the manuscript out after some years, she realized that the women characters were just ciphers compared to the men, so she spent another year or so rewriting them - and that might explain why there are long sections devoted to some pretty minor and not-too-interesting women (Lucile Desmoulins, I'm looking at you). I wanted more Marat (though Mantel has said she left him in the background because otherwise he'd have overshadowed everyone else...), and Charlotte Corday would have been a LOT more interesting than Annette Duplessis, and even Anne Theroigne can't hold a candle to Madame DeFarge. And yes, there are so many Antoines and Louises and toadies and lawyers and opportunists that it's nearly impossible to keep them straight... but then I think, in the chaos of the times, even THEY probably couldn't keep track of who was who and who was your ally or your enemy... that day.

Mantel brilliantly creates the personalities of the three main characters. Her depiction of Robespierre chimes beautifully with that described in Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity; such a strange, suppressed, rather pathetic man who loved children and dogs and cats, but could barely relate to any other humans, and sincerely seemed to believe everything he ever said, with the best of intentions. Danton - a crude, shrewd force of nature, who on earth could ever play him in a movie but the horribly obnoxious and unsurpassable Gerard Depardieu? I confess, I found Camille Desmoulins such a tiresome jerk I was actually kind of glad when they chopped off his head, just to shut him up. I also rather wish Mantel had let us go to the scaffold with Max R, when we do know historically what a horrific, agonized end it was (in a Paris museum, I've seen the letter he wrote as he awaited the arrest, blotted with blood from his shattered face and jaw). I loved the brief passage from the vantage point of M. Sanson, the executioner, frustrated with the pace of work, wondering how he's going to pay for all those sacks and baskets, and while the new equipment is working out very well, he still has to get a guy in to sharpen the blades. These are the gems in Mantel's historical fiction - as she put it: we know when and where something happened, but we don't know everything about how it happened. She fills in the gaps.

Flawed, absolutely. Overstuffed, too long, scattershot in focus. But to produce such a work at an age when most aspiring writers are still laboring over cryptic, writers-workshop, autobiographical short stories is astonishing, and clearly demonstrates the incipient dazzling work she has gone on to create. Vive Madame Mantel! ( )

To get a handle on why I felt this novel is an outstanding achievement, it helped to compare it in my mind to some other “big” novels (at over 800 pages, this one can safely be put in that category). One lengthy novel that came to mind seemed to owe its bulk to the author’s desire to push a program, a big idea. Plot was secondary to this aim, and character a distant third.
In A Place of Greater Safety, the order is reversed. There is a “big idea” at its heart: the fine line, easily erased, between utopianism and tyranny. But the reader isn’t hammered over the head with this. As for the plot, the French Revolution offers a perfect setting for an ambitious historical novel, and Mantel has treated it well in this book. The variety of narrative techniques she employs saves the story from becoming monotonous.
But where the book excels is in its characterization. These are not flat figures moved across the stage in the service of plot or even worse, the big idea.
The first thing to note about the characters is that there are a lot of them. There’s a helpful cast of characters, eight pages long, to preface the book. I referred to it often, especially while reading the first half of the book. But gradually, personalities became indelibly drawn, so that I needed to refer to the list less and less.
Some potential readers may be daunted by this book’s length; others may give up before the halfway point. The first half takes its time introducing us to key players and giving us insight into their personality and motivation. I’ve never before been able to differentiate between Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and the others. For some reason, I’d hardly been aware of Camille Desmoulins and his wife Lucile, but when I closed the book, they were the most memorable.
As these leading players are established, we are introduced to them as brilliant youths, each, however, with a troubled background; both traits seem to be ingredients in their complicated friendship. They are led, to one degree or another, by idealism. Then, when other nations’ armies invade to restore the monarchy, Danton and the others react like young hoodlums who were in over their heads. Still, when the Terror comes, it is jarring. And when in the closing pages of the book (*spoiler alert*), Desmoulins and Danton mount the scaffold and approach the guillotine, I was sad and angry. That this is also the seed of the downfall of their erstwhile friend, the monkish idealist Robespierre, is clear. I think Mantel was wise to end the narrative where she did and relegate Robespierre’s execution to a brief afterword.
Another element of a great book is also excellent writing, of course. Mantel carefully crafts her prose. The result is a freshness without flashiness. One example: “On 13 July there were hail-storms; to say this is to give no idea of how the hail fell—as if God’s contempt had frozen.” ( )

I got about 20% into this and gave up. Mantel's writing is good, but she has a way of switching point of view in the middle of a paragraph without giving you much of a hint that she has done that (suddenly "he" refers to a different character than it did a few sentences ago) and it can be really confusing. I know a lot about the French Revolution, so I already know where the story is going, and Mantel didn't make me care enough about any of the characters for it to be worth the 3 months it would have taken me to read this incredibly long book. I stopped right just as the violence was beginning, and the violence was very detailed and gory. ( )