[3AJ]⋙ PDF Gratis Viper Wine Hermione Eyre 9780224097598 Books

Viper Wine Hermione Eyre 9780224097598 Books

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Viper Wine Hermione Eyre 9780224097598 Books

This is a shining curate's egg of a book (delicious in parts). The prose style is at times dazzling , its innovation of mixing the modern with the historical always amusing and at times brilliant (especially the David Bowie quotations). But my reservation is that the narrative is predictable, chained to the historical - so since we do not know much of the actual life of the central character we have a sense that she does nothing except preen herself. The result is that the narrative is far weaker than the prose in which it is delivered, the subplot of the servant girl is equally plodding but above all so little happens that that we are left with the central character as our focus and she is a rather dull woman who is obsessed with her own fading beauty from first to last. The book cannot help reminding me of Rose Tremaine's novel RESTORATION and suffers in comparison wit that masterpiece. But this is not to damn VIPER WINE - it is a finely written book, perhaps Eyre simply needs to find a more dynamic narrative to match her dynamic style.


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Viper Wine Hermione Eyre 9780224097598 Books Reviews

It is the early 1630s and the ladies of the court are obsessed with their looks, none more so than real-life Venetia Stanley, the most famous beauty of her day. She is married to Sir Kenelm Digby, naval explorer, philosopher, scientist, all-round brainbox and time-traveller, able to sense the great discoveries to come in our modern age via 'celestial spam'. Their marriage is an ecstatically happy one but for the fact that Venetia, all of thirtysomething, is desperate to regain her youth.

Naturally enough, she turns to her husband for one of his cutting-edge alchemical tinctures. Kenelm refuses, insisting that his adored wife is as ravishing as ever. Venetia will have to seek help elsewhere. Enter Lancelot Choice, a handsome quack who runs a clandestine operation supplying the wives of the well-to-do with a stunningly successful new serum. It involves the blood of vipers and a goodly helping of opium and it works very well indeed. For a while...

Set in the dying embers of Charles I's reign, Hermione Eyre brings the fortunate reader a heady brew of palace intrigue, religious power-politics, architecture, art, drama, patronage, all entwined with the beauty business in a world where the women at court are obsessed with their looks and will go to dangerous lengths to preserve them. The author also points up the parallels with our own appearance-obsessed age and does this in such an audacious way as to make the book an unusually scintillating read. Here is Venetia studying a tapestry on her bedroom wall and discovering that her new beauty treatment, Viper Wine, brings some unexpected benefits

"Each thread of colour served a larger purpose in the picture; her step backwards had created order out of chaos. Perception was everything. She reached for the word pixelated - but it was three hundred years away."

It is astonishing to realise that this dazzling book is Hermione Eyre's first novel. It is quite one of the most stunning debuts I have ever read. Equally astonishing, it is revealed on the back fly-leaf that the author is a former croupier. I can only congratulate her on this auspicious beginning to her new career as a novelist and wish her well. Judging by her photograph, it's clear that she has no need of any Viper Wine.
There's a lot going on here. Historical novel. Beauty industry satire. Metafiction. There's alchemy, vague psychic abilities, and a tendency for the future to pop up in the past. Overall it's basically enjoyable, but for my money, it disappears a little too far into itself at times.
Was boring to me (
This is a shining curate's egg of a book (delicious in parts). The prose style is at times dazzling , its innovation of mixing the modern with the historical always amusing and at times brilliant (especially the David Bowie quotations). But my reservation is that the narrative is predictable, chained to the historical - so since we do not know much of the actual life of the central character we have a sense that she does nothing except preen herself. The result is that the narrative is far weaker than the prose in which it is delivered, the subplot of the servant girl is equally plodding but above all so little happens that that we are left with the central character as our focus and she is a rather dull woman who is obsessed with her own fading beauty from first to last. The book cannot help reminding me of Rose Tremaine's novel RESTORATION and suffers in comparison wit that masterpiece. But this is not to damn VIPER WINE - it is a finely written book, perhaps Eyre simply needs to find a more dynamic narrative to match her dynamic style.