Title: The Steel Beneath the Silk Series: Emma of Normandy #3
Author: Patricia Bracewell
Published: March 2, 2021
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 440
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:In the year 1012 England’s Norman-born Queen Emma has been ten years wed to an aging, ruthless, haunted King Æthelred. The marriage is a bitterly unhappy one, between a queen who seeks to create her own sphere of influence within the court and a suspicious king who eyes her efforts with hostility and resentment. But royal discord shifts to grudging alliance when Cnut of Denmark, with the secret collusion of his English concubine Elgiva, invades England at the head of a massive viking army. Amid the chaos of war, Emma must outwit a fierce enemy whose goal is conquest; outmaneuver the cunning Elgiva, who threatens all those whom Emma loves; and rise to her role as peaceweaver and mother of kings.
After a six-year wait, Patricia Bracewell’s trilogy about Queen Emma of Normandy comes to a close in The Steel Beneath the Silk. The is an ambitious book that chronicles the massive upheaval during the final years of King Æthelred the Unready’s reign, as seen through the eyes of several key players during the era—not least of all his wife, Emma. After re-reading Bracewell’s first two books and then this one, my verdict is as follows: this is a perfectly good book, but it doesn’t fully satisfy.
My primary complaint with respect to this novel is that it feels rushed, wooden, and a bit clumsy. While I don’t think there is enough material here to expand out into two books, Bracewell had a lot of ground to cover, and in her attempts to fully paint the sociopolitical picture of the time, other aspects of good fiction writing had to be scaled back or altogether abandoned. In order to keep the complex dynamics between the various military leaders straight for her readers, Bracewell primarily relies on dry expository passages that read more like a summary than true, in-the-moment storytelling. And between the cramped plot movements and historical events, there is little space for the author to invest in the people who populate her pages. I do understand that certain genres (historical fiction included) tend not to emphasize character development to the extent that you might expect in, say…romance novels or many types of literary fiction, but Bracewell truly lost sight of her protagonist here amidst all of the war and scheming and moving pieces of international conflict. The Steel Beneath the Silk spends a fair amount of time telling readers what Emma and the other characters do, but aside from a few awkward attempts to tell the audience how Emma feels, there isn’t much of a sense of character here. And there’s certainly no “showing” at all. (This is made particularly worse, by the way, when the author crams a poorly constructed romantic arc into the final three chapters.)
I can say that it’s evident that The Steel Beneath the Silk was meticulously researched, and considering all of the ground that needed to be covered, it’s tightly plotted. I just can’t help but feel that, in terms of execution, this book was not as polished as Bracewell’s prior novels. I don’t know the circumstances that led to the book’s delayed release and change in publishers, but from an outside perspective, it seems to me that any difficulty in molding the source material into a workable novel is reflected in the way this book comes across as graceless and inelegant in terms of both style and narrative voice.
Overall, I found this to be a somewhat disappointing conclusion to the series. Particularly disappointing because, if you had asked me in 2015 to list my favorite books, I would have included Bracewell’s Emma of Normandy trilogy in the lineup. But a lot of rain has fallen since that time, and my 2021 reaction to The Steel Beneath the Silk is more akin to a shrug and a nod than any kind of satisfaction or celebration.
