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Viper Wine
At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.
Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.
From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.
Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.
From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.
432 pages, Hardcover
First published March 13, 2014
64 people are currently reading
3696 people want to read
About the author
Hermione Eyre
2 books33 followersHermione Eyre is a journalist and former croupier. She read English at Hertford College, Oxford and became TV Critic of the Independent on Sunday at age 27. She went on to be chief interviewer at the London Evening Standard Magazine, and contributes to publications including The The Times, ELLE magazine, Prospect and the FT. Her interviewees have included Naomi Campbell, Juliette Binoche and Carey Mulligan. This is her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 205 reviews
September 17, 2022
A brilliant nod to the cost of conventional beauty and taking life for granted. This mind bending novel combines magic with science, past with future, control with chaos, to deliver a chilling and clear message: our societal obsession with eternal youth and beauty, free of any aging or flaw, is an obstacle to living life genuinely. So many wake up one day and wonder what was gained, save the fleeting approval of others. Some of the best parts of life are messy, ugly even, and the unfortunate cycle of demanding beauty standards takes a toll on our perception of others and ourselves. A truly inventive novel with some hard-hitting lessons.
June 11, 2016
Viper Wine is a 2014 Crown publishing release. I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher and Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review.
The synopsis for this book caught my attention a while back because I thought it was historical fiction, which I usually enjoy, but with a slight fantasy slant, which seems like a very interesting combination. Reading as much as I do, I am often on the lookout for something outside the box, maybe a little unusual, in order to keep me from burning out.
Well, you know what they say about being careful what you ask for. I did indeed get an imaginative historical novel and then some, but it was a very hard read and I struggled with it for a long while.
Set in the 1600’s, products and beauty rituals were actually dangerous and pretty outlandish. When Venetia Stanley, a woman so beautiful she became a muse for poets and painters, marries, she begins to experience an obsessive fear of losing her good looks, prompting her to take desperate measures to maintain her youth and beauty.
Employing an apothercary to sell her a ‘beauty potion’, it looks like she’s made a good choice as she receives the desired results. But, a horrible price will be paid in the end, as unforeseen side effects take hold.
This story is based on the real life Venetia Stanley, but is pure fiction, of course. I’m not sure what the author’s precise goal was in writing this novel. Was it a commentary on the beauty industry masked by historical details where the desperation to remain youthful and relevant is as important now as it was in the distant past?
Has anything really changed in all this time? The mentality seems to still exist, with dangerous practices prevailing even now, with too many surgical procedures and needle injections and chemical peels, not to mention all the products on the market promising firmer skin and a younger looking complexion.
Yet the author’s approach was odd. The combination of fantasy and history mixed in with a kind of dark humor, suggesting the book is somewhat satirical, kept me confused and it was very hard to stay interested in the book.
It took me a very long time to get through this book. I stopped and started it countless times, but finally managed to complete it, despite the temptation to give up on it.
Overall, this a very ambitious undertaking, and I can say it is certainly unlike anything else I’ve read, so there is that. But, ultimately it was not my kind of thing, although I did appreciate the message I think the author was trying to convey, and I give the author kudos for writing something unique.
So, that leaves me with the dilemma of how to rate this book. After some hemming and hawing, I think 2.5 stars is fair. (Rounded to 3)
The synopsis for this book caught my attention a while back because I thought it was historical fiction, which I usually enjoy, but with a slight fantasy slant, which seems like a very interesting combination. Reading as much as I do, I am often on the lookout for something outside the box, maybe a little unusual, in order to keep me from burning out.
Well, you know what they say about being careful what you ask for. I did indeed get an imaginative historical novel and then some, but it was a very hard read and I struggled with it for a long while.
Set in the 1600’s, products and beauty rituals were actually dangerous and pretty outlandish. When Venetia Stanley, a woman so beautiful she became a muse for poets and painters, marries, she begins to experience an obsessive fear of losing her good looks, prompting her to take desperate measures to maintain her youth and beauty.
Employing an apothercary to sell her a ‘beauty potion’, it looks like she’s made a good choice as she receives the desired results. But, a horrible price will be paid in the end, as unforeseen side effects take hold.
This story is based on the real life Venetia Stanley, but is pure fiction, of course. I’m not sure what the author’s precise goal was in writing this novel. Was it a commentary on the beauty industry masked by historical details where the desperation to remain youthful and relevant is as important now as it was in the distant past?
Has anything really changed in all this time? The mentality seems to still exist, with dangerous practices prevailing even now, with too many surgical procedures and needle injections and chemical peels, not to mention all the products on the market promising firmer skin and a younger looking complexion.
Yet the author’s approach was odd. The combination of fantasy and history mixed in with a kind of dark humor, suggesting the book is somewhat satirical, kept me confused and it was very hard to stay interested in the book.
It took me a very long time to get through this book. I stopped and started it countless times, but finally managed to complete it, despite the temptation to give up on it.
Overall, this a very ambitious undertaking, and I can say it is certainly unlike anything else I’ve read, so there is that. But, ultimately it was not my kind of thing, although I did appreciate the message I think the author was trying to convey, and I give the author kudos for writing something unique.
So, that leaves me with the dilemma of how to rate this book. After some hemming and hawing, I think 2.5 stars is fair. (Rounded to 3)
February 13, 2019
... gums blackened by painting with lead; breasts operated on seventeen times for a non-existent problem; healthy bodies, cut apart by greedy physicians; women misled, traduced, deluded.
What makes this book extraordinary is the dazzlingly brilliant prose style which fizzes and smoulders, shooting off fireworks of allusions and intertexts at every turn. In fact, the whole novel is almost literary postmodernism made physical in hard-copy: from the witty cover featuring Venetia Digby in a Van Dyke portrait... and a sneaky iphone in her hand, to the collage-effect of inset photos, news clippings, alchemical receipts, snippets from the DNB and other sources.
Eyre exuberantly collapses time and periodisation for bravura set-pieces where Barbara Streisand sings at a masque at Charles I's court; Inigo Jones calls up spotlights for a 'lights, camera, action' moment; and - one of my favourites - Kenelm Digby and his men embark on a submarine to sail beneath the Thames to the 'march' of 'Yellow Submarine' while Venetia looks on in sunglasses.
But it's not all fun and games: at the heart of the book is the portrait of a marriage where Venetia and Kenelm love but cannot understand each other. Her vulnerability about her fading youth and beauty (ok, she's 34 but at the time that was well beyond middle-aged given average life expectancies) is crucial to her sense of self, but he underestimates what it means to her - leaving her vulnerable to the predations of the unscrupulous Choice and his patent Viper Wine, a mix of snake venom and opium (akin to a concoction of botox and heroin). For all Eyre's C17th research (and she includes an impressive bibliography at the end) this is a commentary on our cultural obsessions with youth and beauty, however addictive and harmful.
There's a slight lag at around the halfway point and Kenelm Digby takes up more page space than I enjoyed but it picks up again for what is, alongside all the sizzle and wit, ultimately a tragedy.
When he was young he thought they were Plato's ideal lovers, that they were the same person, ripped apart at the Fall, and forever searching for one another, till they sealed each other up with congress, in this lifetime and the next. Now he was uncertain. Perhaps men and women could not make one another whole; perhaps love wasn't sufficient.
March 11, 2015
I received this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
Truly an ingenious and original story, VIPER WINE follows Venetia Digby (née Stanley) who revels in her beauty at the court of Charles I of England. It's 1632, and Venetia feels as though she is aging quite rapidly. She takes matters into her own hands by visiting a local apothecary and procuring a draught of the elixir, Viper Wine. It allegedly cures the drinker of signs of aging, i.e. wrinkles, loose skin, and the like. The narrative centers around the proceedings of Venetia and her husband, Kenelm Digby, a renowned explorer, alchemist, and secret future-seer? Yeah, that's right. Kenelm receives strange messages and blips from the future.
So this book turns from historical, literary fiction to a sort of magical, fantastical realism with occasional allusions and intrusions of the future. It is quite anachronistic and mystifying. Throughout the novel there are epigraphs that come anywhere from Kenelm Digby's own writing to Naomi Campbell and contemporary literary publications. The author, Hermione Eyre, (who can I just say has the coolest name ever) utilizes these modern references to tie together the universal and historical fascination with beauty.
Where I struggled most to connect with this novel was what, at other times, I enjoyed most about it: the writing. It become quite slushy and difficult to wade through on occasion, which slowed down the narrative and muddled it all together. But at other moments, I was drawn briskly into the story, trailing Venetia on her journey to feel beautiful and go to great lengths to achieve that feeling.
Something truly remarkable and innovative about this novel is Eyre's bold decision to quite literally step into the novel. At times, she alludes to herself as 'the writer' or 'the author,' and even directly addresses the reader. These moments of recognition bridge the gap between the writing and the reader and work excellently with Eyre's mission of universalizing the themes which she is addressing. Plus, they are quite fun moments.
If you are at all a fan of things like English court life, Ben Jonson, art history, the Kardashians (they don't appear in the novel, but Venetia is basically the 17th century version of Kim), and postmodern fiction, I highly recommend this book. It's most definitely not for everyone, as there is very little plot and quite experimental prose, but it's original, deliciously snarky, and well-researched.
3.5/5 stars
Truly an ingenious and original story, VIPER WINE follows Venetia Digby (née Stanley) who revels in her beauty at the court of Charles I of England. It's 1632, and Venetia feels as though she is aging quite rapidly. She takes matters into her own hands by visiting a local apothecary and procuring a draught of the elixir, Viper Wine. It allegedly cures the drinker of signs of aging, i.e. wrinkles, loose skin, and the like. The narrative centers around the proceedings of Venetia and her husband, Kenelm Digby, a renowned explorer, alchemist, and secret future-seer? Yeah, that's right. Kenelm receives strange messages and blips from the future.
So this book turns from historical, literary fiction to a sort of magical, fantastical realism with occasional allusions and intrusions of the future. It is quite anachronistic and mystifying. Throughout the novel there are epigraphs that come anywhere from Kenelm Digby's own writing to Naomi Campbell and contemporary literary publications. The author, Hermione Eyre, (who can I just say has the coolest name ever) utilizes these modern references to tie together the universal and historical fascination with beauty.
Where I struggled most to connect with this novel was what, at other times, I enjoyed most about it: the writing. It become quite slushy and difficult to wade through on occasion, which slowed down the narrative and muddled it all together. But at other moments, I was drawn briskly into the story, trailing Venetia on her journey to feel beautiful and go to great lengths to achieve that feeling.
Something truly remarkable and innovative about this novel is Eyre's bold decision to quite literally step into the novel. At times, she alludes to herself as 'the writer' or 'the author,' and even directly addresses the reader. These moments of recognition bridge the gap between the writing and the reader and work excellently with Eyre's mission of universalizing the themes which she is addressing. Plus, they are quite fun moments.
If you are at all a fan of things like English court life, Ben Jonson, art history, the Kardashians (they don't appear in the novel, but Venetia is basically the 17th century version of Kim), and postmodern fiction, I highly recommend this book. It's most definitely not for everyone, as there is very little plot and quite experimental prose, but it's original, deliciously snarky, and well-researched.
3.5/5 stars
December 14, 2015
A friend of mine refuses to read fiction, instead contenting himself to tomes of history and philosophy. His case against fiction is that authors take too long getting to their point, and that sometimes they never get to a point at all. In more fact based books, he argues, the author’s argument is swiftly made clear and the book stands or falls on how well he or she makes that argument (unless of course the argument is obviously bat-shit crazy at the outset, although even then there’s pleasure to be gained from reading something so ludicrously wrong-headed). Fiction, because it doesn’t immediately state where it’s going, fails for him.
Obviously I disagree, as a quick glance at my reading list will confirm. But there are some books which are so meandering and besotted by their own cleverness, that they are completely unconcerned with whether their point has been made, well made, or adequately made a couple of hundred pages back. ‘Viper Wine’ is one such novel, and if I was to hand it to my friend he would have a gleeful field day with it.
Set in the reign of Charles the First, but incongruously taking in such items as The Beatles, Neil Armstrong, Jeremy Paxman and other such modern day paraphernalia, this is a book about beauty. It’s a book about the pursuit of beauty, the preservation of beauty, the craving of lost beauty. More specifically it’s about female beauty and what some women will do to maintain that aura of beauty. The title refers to a tonic that women of the court drink to restore their youth (and since its poison based, the book doesn’t have to strain hard to liken it to Botox). Along the way we get renaissance plastic surgery and all kinds of other treatments, potions, victuals and ablutions designed to keep our central lady (a fictionalised version of the aristocrat, Venetia Stanley) fresh in the eyes of her time travelling husband (Sir Kenelm Digby) and the wider world.
It’s entertaining and does expertly conjure its pre-civil war world, but the points it makes about chasing beauty and how the pressures women go through today aren’t so far from the trials of our foremothers hundreds of years back, is well made by about half way through – yet the book just keeps going on, lost in the bliss of its own artfulness, cleverness and loveliness. It’s vanity in a way, but then I guess that’s an appropriate vice for a book about beauty.
Obviously I disagree, as a quick glance at my reading list will confirm. But there are some books which are so meandering and besotted by their own cleverness, that they are completely unconcerned with whether their point has been made, well made, or adequately made a couple of hundred pages back. ‘Viper Wine’ is one such novel, and if I was to hand it to my friend he would have a gleeful field day with it.
Set in the reign of Charles the First, but incongruously taking in such items as The Beatles, Neil Armstrong, Jeremy Paxman and other such modern day paraphernalia, this is a book about beauty. It’s a book about the pursuit of beauty, the preservation of beauty, the craving of lost beauty. More specifically it’s about female beauty and what some women will do to maintain that aura of beauty. The title refers to a tonic that women of the court drink to restore their youth (and since its poison based, the book doesn’t have to strain hard to liken it to Botox). Along the way we get renaissance plastic surgery and all kinds of other treatments, potions, victuals and ablutions designed to keep our central lady (a fictionalised version of the aristocrat, Venetia Stanley) fresh in the eyes of her time travelling husband (Sir Kenelm Digby) and the wider world.
It’s entertaining and does expertly conjure its pre-civil war world, but the points it makes about chasing beauty and how the pressures women go through today aren’t so far from the trials of our foremothers hundreds of years back, is well made by about half way through – yet the book just keeps going on, lost in the bliss of its own artfulness, cleverness and loveliness. It’s vanity in a way, but then I guess that’s an appropriate vice for a book about beauty.
September 17, 2015
I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
This is the kind of book to which people have very individual reactions. I've read other reviews which complain of the vagueness in how the plot moves forward or the dreamlike quality of the book. To me, these were features, not bugs. I've certainly complained about my share of books that don't seem to go anywhere. But there's so much going on under the surface of this book that I was continuously fascinated.
This book is a commentary on the unhealthiness of the fixation on women's appearance. It's also making note of the cyclical nature of the cosmos. Everything old is new again, and there's nothing really new under the sun. Chapters are punctuated with quotes from either the seventeenth or the twentieth century about beauty fads, from belladonna to botox. Women have always been willing, it seems, to poison themselves in order to look good.
Venetia Digby is the wife of Sir Kenelm. She is in her mid-thirties, and in the seventeenth century, she was middle-aged. She has noticed the beginnings of a double-chin, of her skin becoming less luminous, of not being noticed. Since she was a very famous beauty, Venetia's entire vision of herself is collapsing. She doesn't know how to act or what to do.
I can relate to this- as I've gotten older, I feel that I'm perceived differently. I am treated differently ( not necessarily badly, just not as a cute young girl) and the invisibility of older women feels like it's hovering. It's very disturbing to be dealing with changes not only in how you feel and how you look, but how you are now seen. I confess that I have not always been graceful about it- it's confusing.
Venetia takes action by probing her female friends who seem to be coping unusually well with their own appearance and finds out about viper wine. This was a real thing dealt by alchemists. Apparently, it consisted of various and sundry things including the urine of a pregnant mare and opiates. It seems that the high levels of estrogen in the urine would have had a mitigating effect on menopause, and the opiates would both dilate pupils and confer a sense of well-being. It goes without saying that it would be addictive. But I'll say it anyway. The book begins with Venetia's death, so I don't think I'm giving this away when I say that she overdoses. This also makes sense biiologically- opiate tolerance disappears within a couple of weeks and you can probably remember more than one famous musician or actor who went clean and then od'd on heroin- they took what would once have been a normal dose for them, but with their tolerance gone, that dose became deadly.
"Most people would tell you that vain women drank Viper Wine, and drinking made them vainer. But that only showed how little understanding most people had. The Wine had freed her from her riddling disquiet about her own appearance, so instead of squandering her time on looking in the bottomless glass, she could turn her powers outside herself, free to go into the world and do better deed, as far as she was able."
After applying her makeup:
"Venetia put down her brush and smiled at what she had created: the representation of a beautiful wmoan. Not quite herself, but certainly, a beautiful woman. For when we dress, we symbolise ourselves."
The other side of the coin is Kenelm, her well-meaning and loving husband who really doesn't get what's going on with Venetia. This cluelessness also rings true- this is something that is hard to share with a gender that does not experience aging in the same way. Kenelm is a natural scholar, an adventurer, and a philosopher. Sometimes in the ether, he'll have glimpses of the future and its magical technology This feels a bit like magical realism but also stresses the cyclical nature of time which the author wishes to explore.
This book made me think. I also enjoyed the story for itself. The research seemed thorough and the author's seventeenth century was therefore believable. Her characters felt real and tragic. The writing itself was beautiful without being obtrusive. I would love to see more from this author.
This is the kind of book to which people have very individual reactions. I've read other reviews which complain of the vagueness in how the plot moves forward or the dreamlike quality of the book. To me, these were features, not bugs. I've certainly complained about my share of books that don't seem to go anywhere. But there's so much going on under the surface of this book that I was continuously fascinated.
This book is a commentary on the unhealthiness of the fixation on women's appearance. It's also making note of the cyclical nature of the cosmos. Everything old is new again, and there's nothing really new under the sun. Chapters are punctuated with quotes from either the seventeenth or the twentieth century about beauty fads, from belladonna to botox. Women have always been willing, it seems, to poison themselves in order to look good.
Venetia Digby is the wife of Sir Kenelm. She is in her mid-thirties, and in the seventeenth century, she was middle-aged. She has noticed the beginnings of a double-chin, of her skin becoming less luminous, of not being noticed. Since she was a very famous beauty, Venetia's entire vision of herself is collapsing. She doesn't know how to act or what to do.
I can relate to this- as I've gotten older, I feel that I'm perceived differently. I am treated differently ( not necessarily badly, just not as a cute young girl) and the invisibility of older women feels like it's hovering. It's very disturbing to be dealing with changes not only in how you feel and how you look, but how you are now seen. I confess that I have not always been graceful about it- it's confusing.
Venetia takes action by probing her female friends who seem to be coping unusually well with their own appearance and finds out about viper wine. This was a real thing dealt by alchemists. Apparently, it consisted of various and sundry things including the urine of a pregnant mare and opiates. It seems that the high levels of estrogen in the urine would have had a mitigating effect on menopause, and the opiates would both dilate pupils and confer a sense of well-being. It goes without saying that it would be addictive. But I'll say it anyway. The book begins with Venetia's death, so I don't think I'm giving this away when I say that she overdoses. This also makes sense biiologically- opiate tolerance disappears within a couple of weeks and you can probably remember more than one famous musician or actor who went clean and then od'd on heroin- they took what would once have been a normal dose for them, but with their tolerance gone, that dose became deadly.
"Most people would tell you that vain women drank Viper Wine, and drinking made them vainer. But that only showed how little understanding most people had. The Wine had freed her from her riddling disquiet about her own appearance, so instead of squandering her time on looking in the bottomless glass, she could turn her powers outside herself, free to go into the world and do better deed, as far as she was able."
After applying her makeup:
"Venetia put down her brush and smiled at what she had created: the representation of a beautiful wmoan. Not quite herself, but certainly, a beautiful woman. For when we dress, we symbolise ourselves."
The other side of the coin is Kenelm, her well-meaning and loving husband who really doesn't get what's going on with Venetia. This cluelessness also rings true- this is something that is hard to share with a gender that does not experience aging in the same way. Kenelm is a natural scholar, an adventurer, and a philosopher. Sometimes in the ether, he'll have glimpses of the future and its magical technology This feels a bit like magical realism but also stresses the cyclical nature of time which the author wishes to explore.
This book made me think. I also enjoyed the story for itself. The research seemed thorough and the author's seventeenth century was therefore believable. Her characters felt real and tragic. The writing itself was beautiful without being obtrusive. I would love to see more from this author.
March 2, 2018
I am so glad that is over.
This book had tremendous potential, both in its premise and the author's apparent talent for writing.
A spring morning dawned, shared by all those who happened to be alive at the same time as one another, that unwitting complicity that means everything and nothing, and goes unnoticed, or glimpsed by historians or curious novelists.
Her writing, even though verbose, was quite beautiful at times and drew me into the book at first. I also really found the topic fascinating - a woman obsessed with looking young, turning to dangerous concoctions to keep her from aging. But all of what this book could have been was overshadowed by the completely incoherent, pretentious mess it turned out to be.
The amount of anachronisms, breakings of the fourth wall and general nonsense in this book is mind boggling. I understand it was designed this way, but that does not make it any better in my eyes. I felt like this book didn't know what it wanted to be and kept digressing from the main story. There were so many unnecessary, irrelevant points of view, it kept jumping in time and place unannounced and most of the time I wasn't even sure what this book was trying to tell me. Obsession with beauty is timeless? Wowee who would have thought.
The characters were fine for the most part, except for Kenelm Digby who was a weird amalgamation of... well, weirdness. He's apparently a time traveller and can access future information when meditating... which was so far from making any kind of sense I would rather not dwell on it.
"Blimey", said Kenelm, meaning to say "Blind me" but coining the modern version accidentally.
[the book is full of these on-the-nose attempts at, I don't even know what, humour? wit? elbow-to-the-side-while-winking-conspicuously?]
The worst part is that I really did enjoy most of the sections that directly related to Venetia and her process of beautification. I was morbidly curious about the whole situation, but as the book progressed these sections grew few and far between. I ended up only skim reading the last third of the book, desperately praying for it to finally be over so I could toss this book across the room and never look at it again.
This book had tremendous potential, both in its premise and the author's apparent talent for writing.
A spring morning dawned, shared by all those who happened to be alive at the same time as one another, that unwitting complicity that means everything and nothing, and goes unnoticed, or glimpsed by historians or curious novelists.
Her writing, even though verbose, was quite beautiful at times and drew me into the book at first. I also really found the topic fascinating - a woman obsessed with looking young, turning to dangerous concoctions to keep her from aging. But all of what this book could have been was overshadowed by the completely incoherent, pretentious mess it turned out to be.
The amount of anachronisms, breakings of the fourth wall and general nonsense in this book is mind boggling. I understand it was designed this way, but that does not make it any better in my eyes. I felt like this book didn't know what it wanted to be and kept digressing from the main story. There were so many unnecessary, irrelevant points of view, it kept jumping in time and place unannounced and most of the time I wasn't even sure what this book was trying to tell me. Obsession with beauty is timeless? Wowee who would have thought.
The characters were fine for the most part, except for Kenelm Digby who was a weird amalgamation of... well, weirdness. He's apparently a time traveller and can access future information when meditating... which was so far from making any kind of sense I would rather not dwell on it.
"Blimey", said Kenelm, meaning to say "Blind me" but coining the modern version accidentally.
[the book is full of these on-the-nose attempts at, I don't even know what, humour? wit? elbow-to-the-side-while-winking-conspicuously?]
The worst part is that I really did enjoy most of the sections that directly related to Venetia and her process of beautification. I was morbidly curious about the whole situation, but as the book progressed these sections grew few and far between. I ended up only skim reading the last third of the book, desperately praying for it to finally be over so I could toss this book across the room and never look at it again.
February 21, 2014
Beauty
Vanity
Rumour
Addiction
An inspired, controversial glimpse into an era wrought with conspiracy and flamboyancy
In an England on the cusp between magic and science… VIPER WINE delves into the deliciously evocative world of Venetia Stanley, whose position in life is so markedly notable.
Set in 1632, the court is dazzled by the captivating beauty of such an astute woman. Surrounded by alchemists, explorers, philosophers and time-travellers the company in which Venetia finds herself encapsulates diverse eccentricity and divergence.
She inspires Ben Jonson to write poetry
She inspires Van Dyck to paint
And…
She provokes adoration, emulation and gossip in equal measure.
This tantalizing tale of temptation, indulgence in all extravagance and innate creativity is an explosion of brilliance and genius. Hermione Eyre writes with such vivacity and captures the exquisite ambience, in all its glorious detail and precise historical fact. Anyone interested in Charles I and the court will devour this book, that’s a potent tonic of social charade with a country on the brink of Civil War. This novel transports its readers into the heart of a puritan community, whilst also touching upon very real events that occurred in the seventeenth century and a turbulent time.
Richly detailed and wonderfully realised this deftly woven narrative is clever and assured. Incorporated within the text are various images of Venetia in 1619 and Kenelm and Gresham College as well as various other portraits of interest. This historical novel is a sensational story told with enthusiastic flair and unique originality.
*I won a Free Uncorrected Proof copy of VIPER WINE by Hermione Eyre through a Goodreads, first-read giveaway *
4.5 STARS!
Vanity
Rumour
Addiction
An inspired, controversial glimpse into an era wrought with conspiracy and flamboyancy
In an England on the cusp between magic and science… VIPER WINE delves into the deliciously evocative world of Venetia Stanley, whose position in life is so markedly notable.
Set in 1632, the court is dazzled by the captivating beauty of such an astute woman. Surrounded by alchemists, explorers, philosophers and time-travellers the company in which Venetia finds herself encapsulates diverse eccentricity and divergence.
She inspires Ben Jonson to write poetry
She inspires Van Dyck to paint
And…
She provokes adoration, emulation and gossip in equal measure.
This tantalizing tale of temptation, indulgence in all extravagance and innate creativity is an explosion of brilliance and genius. Hermione Eyre writes with such vivacity and captures the exquisite ambience, in all its glorious detail and precise historical fact. Anyone interested in Charles I and the court will devour this book, that’s a potent tonic of social charade with a country on the brink of Civil War. This novel transports its readers into the heart of a puritan community, whilst also touching upon very real events that occurred in the seventeenth century and a turbulent time.
Richly detailed and wonderfully realised this deftly woven narrative is clever and assured. Incorporated within the text are various images of Venetia in 1619 and Kenelm and Gresham College as well as various other portraits of interest. This historical novel is a sensational story told with enthusiastic flair and unique originality.
*I won a Free Uncorrected Proof copy of VIPER WINE by Hermione Eyre through a Goodreads, first-read giveaway *
4.5 STARS!
Read
May 18, 2015A lot of historical fiction is just an expression of nostalgia for a time that will never come again, and reading that sort of thing is a perfectly pleasurable indulgence. The historical fiction I like best, though, is the kind that truthfully re-creates a long-gone era as a way of commenting on the present moment. It gives the reader the best of both worlds. This seems to be exactly what Hermione Eyre is up to with her debut novel, set in the 17th century and focusing on a fascinating couple, Kenelm and Venetia Digby. He was an adventurer and natural philosopher, and she was the most celebrated beauty of her time. In Eyre’s version of their life together, it’s clear that she’d be remembered for much more today if her society had allowed her broader avenues of expression. As is, the fictional Venetia is compelled to cling to her fading appearance through desperate and dangerous pseudo-scientific means. The language is rich, the plot is corkscrewing and complex, and the period detail is thoroughly convincing without being at all dusty or cobwebby. Viper Wine may look at first like an antique, but a it’s really a reinterpretation of one, a book with a fresh, feminist, and very modern perspective. — James Crossley
from The Best Books We Read in April: http://bookriot.com/2015/05/01/riot-r...
from The Best Books We Read in April: http://bookriot.com/2015/05/01/riot-r...
May 5, 2015
Wow! What a way to write historical fiction. Unlike some readers, I loved the addition of modern figures, ideas, words into the story: Groucho Marx entertaining at a masque, Mary Shelley attending one of Digby's scientific lectures, and quotes from famous actresses and models. My favorite is when Digby just "knew" the modern science terminology to a concept he was thinking of. It showed that Digby was ahead of his time. He's an interesting man with interesting ideas. I also loved how the author interspersed the novel with quotes from Digby's actual journals, letters, etc.
It also shows how unfortunately apropos this story is to our time- which is one of the reasons why we look at history. This book is about the passage of time and beauty and the lengths we go to to get it all back. This includes, "gums blackened by painting with lead; breasts operated on seventeen times for a non-existent problem; healthy bodies, cut apart by greedy physicians; women misled, traduced, deluded. ...He had not realised vanity had undone so many" (392). Like the time I chemically burnt my upper lip trying to remove its tiny, practically nonexistent hairs after my sister egged me on. Or the time I dyed my hair in high school and it turned black (ie- not the color I was going for) ...Just saying, we've all been there.
The notorious apothecary of this tale, Choice, was quite the character. The author did a marvelous job showing this forefather of ratty quacks and greasy, untrustworthy "doctors"- or money hungry prescription pushers. I wish we got to read more of him or others like him- maybe I'll pick up a few nonfiction books on this subject; I can't believe what they believed back then, but then again, there are still strong parallels of this nowadays!
This was such a refreshing addition to the historical fiction drama- connecting the past with the present. The ending chapters that draw this story to a full circle are lovely.
It also shows how unfortunately apropos this story is to our time- which is one of the reasons why we look at history. This book is about the passage of time and beauty and the lengths we go to to get it all back. This includes, "gums blackened by painting with lead; breasts operated on seventeen times for a non-existent problem; healthy bodies, cut apart by greedy physicians; women misled, traduced, deluded. ...He had not realised vanity had undone so many" (392). Like the time I chemically burnt my upper lip trying to remove its tiny, practically nonexistent hairs after my sister egged me on. Or the time I dyed my hair in high school and it turned black (ie- not the color I was going for) ...Just saying, we've all been there.
The notorious apothecary of this tale, Choice, was quite the character. The author did a marvelous job showing this forefather of ratty quacks and greasy, untrustworthy "doctors"- or money hungry prescription pushers. I wish we got to read more of him or others like him- maybe I'll pick up a few nonfiction books on this subject; I can't believe what they believed back then, but then again, there are still strong parallels of this nowadays!
This was such a refreshing addition to the historical fiction drama- connecting the past with the present. The ending chapters that draw this story to a full circle are lovely.
March 31, 2017
A new favorite, I can't say enough good things about this intriguing, unique and ultimately very magical novel. Just. Wow.
The story is set in 1632 England, where nobility, bawdiness, vanity and religion, on the precipice of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s converge. It's where we meet Sir Kenelm Digby and his beautiful, but terminally vain wife, Venetia Digby (nee Stanley). Sir Kenelm, an alchemist, is quite the dabbler in all things scientific and futuristic as it turns out (including the invention of the submarine). His beloved good-natured and compassionate Venetia (they married for love and despite his mother's grievances against her, ahem, reputation) is five years older than Sir K, and at 31, is already feeling - egads! - the ravages of old age and waning beauty. Venetia begs Sir Kenelm to create a chemical Physick potion to bring the blush back to her cheek, revive her smile, remove the crows' feet, "11s" and other wrinkles that have recently set in. Consumed with vanity, she becomes depressed, leaving their estates heavily veiled (at Gayhurst and later, London) and neglecting her life and family. Hubby refuses, which sends her on a quest to find the perfect restorative elixir. She (and other women just as desperate) find the cure in the sensuous, toxic, deadly, yet addictive, Viper Wine being produced by a seedy London apothecary and his wife, Lancelot and Margaret Choice.
While the book is fiction, it's based on real persons who lived during this time, when philosophy and science were just being introduced, during the Age of Reason, when those like Galileo, Ben Jonson, Rubens were all the rage.
One major plot point concerns our neverending quest for youth and beauty that is just as much a part of our modern times as it was back then. Another major theme is that despite all our advances, man has yet to find a cure for loss, which plagues us still.
Yet, the real accomplishment of this book is in the writing; especially the wonderful and unique flourishes that Ms. Eyre infuses in her novel. For instance, as a man of enlightenment and intelligence (as well as a great collector of books) Sir Kenelm's magic and science come together, producing some magical visions of the future. Sunflowers that are just coming into existence, which are painted by Van Dyck (and planted by Sir K) include a nod to Van Gogh centuries later. Nanobiotechnology is mentioned. There is an ironic scene where Sir Kenelm wishes for greater concentration, hinting at PDAs and iPhones, believing that in the future man will be able to concentrate without interruption because of these new inventions. Seriously.
And, oh, the book abounds with fun references! Each chapter starts off with a quote, either old or new, borrowed from such present-day personalities as Naomi Campbell, Carmen dell'Orifice and Helen Gurly Brown -- even Trump is quoted talking about his hair. Fun, wink-wink comments are made regarding atomic particles, eBay, pixelation, JavaScript, cloning (Dolly the Sheep), meditation, Disney, Barbra Steisand, the cover art for "Sgt. Pepper", "Made in China" labels, Groucho Marx, Andy Warhol, British ice cream wrappers, a Kodak film canister. And in one of my favorite scenes, Sir K hums Bowie's "Starman" to his little sons. "He's a Starman, waiting in the sky," cooed Sir Kenelm, as little fireworks whizzed round the sky like fiery maggots.
Eyre's wit and cleverness work magic whenever she's pointing out through her storytelling how, as much as things change, they still stay the same. How we remain slaves to beauty. As Kenelm's library is being inscribed, the calligrapher gets called away in the midst of his dedication. Kenelm's keen inscription, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind appears as One small step for ma. We really haven't come that far, have we?
Drinking, gambling, drugs, religion, naughtiness - they're all here. The various interactions between the many friends and acquaintances of the Digbys are truly entertaining. And back to the subject of beauty. After the painter Antoon Van Dyck hangs his painting of the Digby family in his salon, Venetia's lovely image sends tongues wagging throughout Europe. Sir K's reaction to it is like that of current day celebs being splashed across magazines with hints of Photoshop and retouching, reminding us that even then, all the world was in love with the image perhaps more than the real thing.
Such a unique, witty and intelligent read, I had to keep my phone nearby to constantly Google people, places, events, scientific terms and other old or rare minutiae of which I was clueless. I really recommend Viper Wine to those who love historical fiction, magic realism, some weirdness and extremely likeable characters (I loved the Digbys).
The story is set in 1632 England, where nobility, bawdiness, vanity and religion, on the precipice of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s converge. It's where we meet Sir Kenelm Digby and his beautiful, but terminally vain wife, Venetia Digby (nee Stanley). Sir Kenelm, an alchemist, is quite the dabbler in all things scientific and futuristic as it turns out (including the invention of the submarine). His beloved good-natured and compassionate Venetia (they married for love and despite his mother's grievances against her, ahem, reputation) is five years older than Sir K, and at 31, is already feeling - egads! - the ravages of old age and waning beauty. Venetia begs Sir Kenelm to create a chemical Physick potion to bring the blush back to her cheek, revive her smile, remove the crows' feet, "11s" and other wrinkles that have recently set in. Consumed with vanity, she becomes depressed, leaving their estates heavily veiled (at Gayhurst and later, London) and neglecting her life and family. Hubby refuses, which sends her on a quest to find the perfect restorative elixir. She (and other women just as desperate) find the cure in the sensuous, toxic, deadly, yet addictive, Viper Wine being produced by a seedy London apothecary and his wife, Lancelot and Margaret Choice.
While the book is fiction, it's based on real persons who lived during this time, when philosophy and science were just being introduced, during the Age of Reason, when those like Galileo, Ben Jonson, Rubens were all the rage.
One major plot point concerns our neverending quest for youth and beauty that is just as much a part of our modern times as it was back then. Another major theme is that despite all our advances, man has yet to find a cure for loss, which plagues us still.
Yet, the real accomplishment of this book is in the writing; especially the wonderful and unique flourishes that Ms. Eyre infuses in her novel. For instance, as a man of enlightenment and intelligence (as well as a great collector of books) Sir Kenelm's magic and science come together, producing some magical visions of the future. Sunflowers that are just coming into existence, which are painted by Van Dyck (and planted by Sir K) include a nod to Van Gogh centuries later. Nanobiotechnology is mentioned. There is an ironic scene where Sir Kenelm wishes for greater concentration, hinting at PDAs and iPhones, believing that in the future man will be able to concentrate without interruption because of these new inventions. Seriously.
And, oh, the book abounds with fun references! Each chapter starts off with a quote, either old or new, borrowed from such present-day personalities as Naomi Campbell, Carmen dell'Orifice and Helen Gurly Brown -- even Trump is quoted talking about his hair. Fun, wink-wink comments are made regarding atomic particles, eBay, pixelation, JavaScript, cloning (Dolly the Sheep), meditation, Disney, Barbra Steisand, the cover art for "Sgt. Pepper", "Made in China" labels, Groucho Marx, Andy Warhol, British ice cream wrappers, a Kodak film canister. And in one of my favorite scenes, Sir K hums Bowie's "Starman" to his little sons. "He's a Starman, waiting in the sky," cooed Sir Kenelm, as little fireworks whizzed round the sky like fiery maggots.
Eyre's wit and cleverness work magic whenever she's pointing out through her storytelling how, as much as things change, they still stay the same. How we remain slaves to beauty. As Kenelm's library is being inscribed, the calligrapher gets called away in the midst of his dedication. Kenelm's keen inscription, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind appears as One small step for ma. We really haven't come that far, have we?
Drinking, gambling, drugs, religion, naughtiness - they're all here. The various interactions between the many friends and acquaintances of the Digbys are truly entertaining. And back to the subject of beauty. After the painter Antoon Van Dyck hangs his painting of the Digby family in his salon, Venetia's lovely image sends tongues wagging throughout Europe. Sir K's reaction to it is like that of current day celebs being splashed across magazines with hints of Photoshop and retouching, reminding us that even then, all the world was in love with the image perhaps more than the real thing.
Such a unique, witty and intelligent read, I had to keep my phone nearby to constantly Google people, places, events, scientific terms and other old or rare minutiae of which I was clueless. I really recommend Viper Wine to those who love historical fiction, magic realism, some weirdness and extremely likeable characters (I loved the Digbys).
November 30, 2021
this has the soul i'd hoped to find in margaret the first; haunted by the future ! loud with the chorus of science and art and technology and alchemy and celebrity ! confident and clever and kaleidoscopic in its layering of time and space, truth and speculation, art and interview and allusion ! weird & wonderful, and, under it all, terribly sad.
August 30, 2015
Viper Wine is a novel of contradictions. Set in the 17th Century and starring the Brad and Angelina of their time – Kenelm and Venetia Digby – the novel critiques today’s beauty industry while also illustrating the transition from science based on mysticism to science based on rationality and evidence. The contradiction is that while the desire to be beautiful at whatever cost still plagues Western society, that same society now takes a very rational and methodical approach to scientific discovery. And one wonder how a society that still pushes woman (and men) toward the quackery of revitalising creams and salves can also be the same society that’s cured any number of diseases, put men on the moon and invented the internet.
Hermione Eyre’s intent is not to answer that question or to resolve the contradiction, but to highlight its existence. Venetia and Kenelm, famous in their time, though I had never heard of them prior to reading Viper Wine, provide Eyre with the perfect case study.
In Venetia Digby we have a woman whose youthful beauty captured the imagination of poet Ben Johnson. A woman who is desperate to maintain her looks, who refuses to accept that she is getting older, that she might be losing the ability to turn the heads of men. And Venetia will go to any lengths to keep those wrinkles at bay:
In the end she is compelled to use Viper Wine, “an addictive mixture of tongues, hearts and innards of vipers baked overnight, and combined with rare aloes and balsams.” While the physicians of the time were less than clear as to what led to Venetia’s death at such a young age – many believed Kenelm murdered her – Eyre proposes that it was Venetia’s fruitless search for the fountain of youth and her ingestion of Viper Wine that ultimately sent her to an early grave.
And then we have Kenelm Digby, a natural philosopher and alchemist, whose interest in science drew him closer to a rational understanding of the world around us. He’s a man fascinated by scientific discovery, epitomised by a brilliant scene, set on the Thames, where he watches the voyage of one of the first submersible vessels. It’s a moment of steampunk that also happens to be historically accurate.
That’s not to say that Kenelm was the one rationalist in a world of mystics and spiritualists. Like most natural philosophers and thinkers of his time, Kenelm had a number of wacky theories – such as the ability to use “sympathetic magic” to cure people over great distances – but he also believed there were such thing as atoms (based on the Aristotelian concept). It was a view that put him at odds with the Catholic church*:
Acknowledging his foresight, Eyre provides Kenelm with glimpses of the future. These hallucinatory moments, which Kenelm takes in his stride, frame him as a modern man who, with some minor modifications to his worldview, would have been very much at home in the 20th and 21st Century.
But even as a man transitioning from spiritualism to evidence-based science, when it comes to gender and the role of woman, Kenelm’s attitudes are very much of his time. He does warn Ventia away from dangerous ointments and potions inspite of her protestations that he’s not doing enough to help her:
And yet, he expects her to remain beautiful:
While Venetia desire to remain gorgeous can’t entirely be laid at the feet of Kenelm and his want for a beautiful wife, it’s interesting that he sees her beauty as a reward that he has earned. A possession that he owns. And this idea that women pretty themselves for the sake of men continues to fuel and fill the coffers of the beauty industry. Philosophers and thinkers, like Kenelm, may have allowed humanity to make leaps and bounds in significant areas of science, however our backward attitudes toward gender has given the beauty industry the permission to peddle the same non scientific rubbish they were hawking more than three hundred years ago.
As depressing as all that sounds, there’s a cheekiness to Eyre’s prose that results in a number of funny scenes – such as Venetia and her friends outdoing each other in terms of the beauty treatments they’re undergoing – and memorable characters such as Chater the priest. Yes, he has the stereotypical aspect of the closeted gay, but his love for Venetia is a highlight of the novel.
However, Viper Wine does have some structural issues, other being a little overlong. Mary’s story, that wends its way through the narrative (she’s hoping that Kenelm can help her mortally wounded friend with his ability to cure disease from a distance) adds very little to the overall story. And some of the glimpses into the future are just a tad too pretentious and self aware, including a cringe-worthy scene where Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross and Hermione Eyre (though she’s not named) interview Kenelm about his recent journey and his wife.
Still, this is a historical fiction that not only pushes the boundaries as to what historical fiction should look like (and mostly succeeds) but has something fascinating to say about our current attitude to science and beauty and vanity. I might not have heard of Venetia and Kenelm Digby before I read this good, but I won’t soon forget them.
—————————————————————————————-
* Eyre also deals with Kenelm’s struggle to reconcile his Catholic upbringing with the political need to convert to Anglicanism.
Hermione Eyre’s intent is not to answer that question or to resolve the contradiction, but to highlight its existence. Venetia and Kenelm, famous in their time, though I had never heard of them prior to reading Viper Wine, provide Eyre with the perfect case study.
In Venetia Digby we have a woman whose youthful beauty captured the imagination of poet Ben Johnson. A woman who is desperate to maintain her looks, who refuses to accept that she is getting older, that she might be losing the ability to turn the heads of men. And Venetia will go to any lengths to keep those wrinkles at bay:
[Venetia] ‘I have been peeled weekly with sulphur mithridate, and then every night I apply butter of antimony. It is said to counteract all the lead that has embedded in my cheeks from too much painting, which is the reason for my runckles . . .’ She started to cry a little, at the unfairness of it. No one warned her that painting with lead would be so injurious – it was what every beauty used. ‘The mithridate burns, to be sure, and sometimes welts a little, but I have grown to love its whip upon my cheek. I miss it dreadfully now I have run out. But my poor apothecary tried to cure his hot gout with drinking lily-water, and it did not work, and now his shop is shut up and he is quite dead.’
She giggled again, while wiping a tear.
In the end she is compelled to use Viper Wine, “an addictive mixture of tongues, hearts and innards of vipers baked overnight, and combined with rare aloes and balsams.” While the physicians of the time were less than clear as to what led to Venetia’s death at such a young age – many believed Kenelm murdered her – Eyre proposes that it was Venetia’s fruitless search for the fountain of youth and her ingestion of Viper Wine that ultimately sent her to an early grave.
And then we have Kenelm Digby, a natural philosopher and alchemist, whose interest in science drew him closer to a rational understanding of the world around us. He’s a man fascinated by scientific discovery, epitomised by a brilliant scene, set on the Thames, where he watches the voyage of one of the first submersible vessels. It’s a moment of steampunk that also happens to be historically accurate.
That’s not to say that Kenelm was the one rationalist in a world of mystics and spiritualists. Like most natural philosophers and thinkers of his time, Kenelm had a number of wacky theories – such as the ability to use “sympathetic magic” to cure people over great distances – but he also believed there were such thing as atoms (based on the Aristotelian concept). It was a view that put him at odds with the Catholic church*:
Plenty of men found him Overreaching, or Heretical, because he believed the air was full of thousands of tiny invisible particles, darting about in the void, giving life and breath, without divine direction. This was clearly heresy, and the Jesuits even made a prayer to deny it: ‘Nothing comes of Atomes . . .’ Kenelm had doubted it himself, at first – who could easily believe that the air was not empty, but vastly manifest and substantial?
Acknowledging his foresight, Eyre provides Kenelm with glimpses of the future. These hallucinatory moments, which Kenelm takes in his stride, frame him as a modern man who, with some minor modifications to his worldview, would have been very much at home in the 20th and 21st Century.
But even as a man transitioning from spiritualism to evidence-based science, when it comes to gender and the role of woman, Kenelm’s attitudes are very much of his time. He does warn Ventia away from dangerous ointments and potions inspite of her protestations that he’s not doing enough to help her:
[Venetia] ‘I cannot bear it. I do not know why you persist in this nonsense of moonlight – this, ha, lunacy – when there are other, better cures available, which you well know.’
[Kenelm] ‘Other cures? What do you mean? Have I not provided you with every safe cure I know of? Have I not imported snails into our grounds from distant climes, at some cost? And yet you will not have them for healing purposes, neither taking their slime to drink nor submitting to have them crawl upon your face.’
She turned to look at him, and her skin was blotchy with tears. ‘I will not speak of those snails! I would have thought that you, a man of Physick, schooled in chemistry, would know better than to chase after village remedies.’
Sir Kenelm leaned forward, very serious. ‘It is because I know the power of Physick that I caution you against it.’
‘Other ladies drink preparations.’
‘You have no need of other ladies’ cures. You barely have any need of a cure at all.’ ‘You do not understand.’ ‘I do, my love.’
And yet, he expects her to remain beautiful:
Kenelm, on his side of the bed, was fighting to stop himself feeling cross with her. He had come home in triumph; it was the very least she could do to stay beautiful for him. She was only five years older than him – many wives were older than their husbands. And if she could not keep her beauty, she should at least maintain her faith in her beauty, since that was the chiefest thing, was it not?
While Venetia desire to remain gorgeous can’t entirely be laid at the feet of Kenelm and his want for a beautiful wife, it’s interesting that he sees her beauty as a reward that he has earned. A possession that he owns. And this idea that women pretty themselves for the sake of men continues to fuel and fill the coffers of the beauty industry. Philosophers and thinkers, like Kenelm, may have allowed humanity to make leaps and bounds in significant areas of science, however our backward attitudes toward gender has given the beauty industry the permission to peddle the same non scientific rubbish they were hawking more than three hundred years ago.
As depressing as all that sounds, there’s a cheekiness to Eyre’s prose that results in a number of funny scenes – such as Venetia and her friends outdoing each other in terms of the beauty treatments they’re undergoing – and memorable characters such as Chater the priest. Yes, he has the stereotypical aspect of the closeted gay, but his love for Venetia is a highlight of the novel.
However, Viper Wine does have some structural issues, other being a little overlong. Mary’s story, that wends its way through the narrative (she’s hoping that Kenelm can help her mortally wounded friend with his ability to cure disease from a distance) adds very little to the overall story. And some of the glimpses into the future are just a tad too pretentious and self aware, including a cringe-worthy scene where Michael Parkinson, Jonathan Ross and Hermione Eyre (though she’s not named) interview Kenelm about his recent journey and his wife.
Still, this is a historical fiction that not only pushes the boundaries as to what historical fiction should look like (and mostly succeeds) but has something fascinating to say about our current attitude to science and beauty and vanity. I might not have heard of Venetia and Kenelm Digby before I read this good, but I won’t soon forget them.
—————————————————————————————-
* Eyre also deals with Kenelm’s struggle to reconcile his Catholic upbringing with the political need to convert to Anglicanism.
July 28, 2022
Van begin tot eind genoten
June 5, 2015
I would have given this five stars if Eyre had done a better job integrating the parts with Mary Tree into the rest of the novel. I do think Mary's story has a good pay-off, but it's too disconnected from the rest of the book to make much sense. That said, I think this is in general a really great novel and I never actually was like "ugh, why are we hearing from this character" or anything - I enjoyed those parts too! But they weren't as well connected to the rest of the novel as they needed to be.
Part of me thinks that if Viper Wine were a book by a male author about Guy Stuff, it would be getting praised to the high heavens and shoved down all our throats. But it isn't that kind of book - it's about Girl Stuff. Stuff that is ostensibly girly, anyway: it's about plastic surgery and fear of death, and Betty Draper, and Kim Kardashian, and actual death (Donda West, guys? I really hope I just missed Eyre's Kanye quotations, because surely they're in here).
There's a part of Atwood's Year of the Flood I really like (Atwood's own well-chosen italics):
Viper Wine is working with that same worry, the same horror, but from a different angle. (Another book, also very different from these books, but with the same theme: The Next Time You See Me.) And with more Bowie. It's awfully witty and profoundly playful and postmodern (I guess? Does that word mean anything anymore?). I also thought about Patricia Finney's Ames and Becket books, particularly the parts where we get Elizabeth's POV - or, for that matter, when we get the POV of crazy hags and crones. Eyre has an intimacy with her characters, but for all that there is something impersonal about the way she shows them to us - something clinical.
This is a really great book. I hope there will be a new one from Eyre soon! But not too soon, because I want to anticipate it.
Part of me thinks that if Viper Wine were a book by a male author about Guy Stuff, it would be getting praised to the high heavens and shoved down all our throats. But it isn't that kind of book - it's about Girl Stuff. Stuff that is ostensibly girly, anyway: it's about plastic surgery and fear of death, and Betty Draper, and Kim Kardashian, and actual death (Donda West, guys? I really hope I just missed Eyre's Kanye quotations, because surely they're in here).
There's a part of Atwood's Year of the Flood I really like (Atwood's own well-chosen italics):
The Spa had no big secrets to defend, so the guards did nothing but monitor the ladies who were going in, frightened by the first signs of droop and pucker, then going out again, buffed and tightened and resurfaced, irradiated and despotted.
But still frightened, because when might the whole problem - the whole thing - start happening to them again? The whole signs-of-mortality thing. The whole thing thing. Nobody likes it, thought Toby - being a body, a thing. Nobody wants to be limited in that way. We'd rather have wings. Even the word flesh has a mushy sound to it.
We're not selling only beauty, the AnooYoo Corp said in their staff instructionals. We're selling hope.
Some of the customers could be demanding. They couldn't understand why even the most advanced AnooYoo treatments wouldn't make them twenty-one again. "Our laboratories are well on the way to age reversal," Toby would tell them in soothing tones, "but they aren't quite there yet. In a few years ..."
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she'd be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death's a sure-fire method for stopping time.
Viper Wine is working with that same worry, the same horror, but from a different angle. (Another book, also very different from these books, but with the same theme: The Next Time You See Me.) And with more Bowie. It's awfully witty and profoundly playful and postmodern (I guess? Does that word mean anything anymore?). I also thought about Patricia Finney's Ames and Becket books, particularly the parts where we get Elizabeth's POV - or, for that matter, when we get the POV of crazy hags and crones. Eyre has an intimacy with her characters, but for all that there is something impersonal about the way she shows them to us - something clinical.
This is a really great book. I hope there will be a new one from Eyre soon! But not too soon, because I want to anticipate it.
April 12, 2015
The best way I can describe this book to other readers is: think of a cross of an episode of The Twilight Zone with a history channel documentary on the court of Charles I and a certain movie directed by Robert Zemeckis (but sadly without the madcap black humor).
This novel did have its moments for this reader especially in the beginning chapters that explored the delicate psyche of Venetia Stanley and later when the viper wine made its appearance. In fact, if this story stayed completely in the historical realm with its fascinating macabre notes and 17th-century English Court drama and out of the irritating post modern walk-ins and the static tangents then I would have enjoyed this novel more. I believe the real life mystery that made up a crucial part of this story is what kept me reading and yes I did manage to finish this. Viper Wine was completely out of the box in terms of anything I have ever read but it also reminded me why I prefer my little boxes of purely historical fiction. Still it was overall daring in its approach and if the reader has been searching for a literary experience that can be truly called unique try some Viper Wine, you just may like it.
*I would like to thank Hogarth and Edelweiss for the opportunity to read Viper Wine: A Novel
This novel did have its moments for this reader especially in the beginning chapters that explored the delicate psyche of Venetia Stanley and later when the viper wine made its appearance. In fact, if this story stayed completely in the historical realm with its fascinating macabre notes and 17th-century English Court drama and out of the irritating post modern walk-ins and the static tangents then I would have enjoyed this novel more. I believe the real life mystery that made up a crucial part of this story is what kept me reading and yes I did manage to finish this. Viper Wine was completely out of the box in terms of anything I have ever read but it also reminded me why I prefer my little boxes of purely historical fiction. Still it was overall daring in its approach and if the reader has been searching for a literary experience that can be truly called unique try some Viper Wine, you just may like it.
*I would like to thank Hogarth and Edelweiss for the opportunity to read Viper Wine: A Novel
January 19, 2015
Culture places a lot of demands on women - and the most unreasonable ones are physical. No gray hair, no crows' feet, no laugh lines, no general softening of the body. Women must look, act and feel like they did in their 20's...or at least their 30's. Viper Wine addresses these ideas in 17th century England. Frighteningly, it's based on true events. And sadly, in 400 years, not much has changed. Women were - and are - willing to try anything (and I do mean anything) to remain beautiful.
Venetia, the main character is hard to like, but somewhat easier to sympathize with. Actually, many of the characters seem shallow and self-absorbed. Sound familiar? There are many intentional and jarring anachronisms thrown in throughout the story. I suspect there will be some who find them distracting. I found them unifying. This is a story about "then," but also about "now."
Be warned, there is a point about 2/3 through, where reading felt like wading through pudding. Don't give up; keep reading. The payoff is worth it.
Venetia, the main character is hard to like, but somewhat easier to sympathize with. Actually, many of the characters seem shallow and self-absorbed. Sound familiar? There are many intentional and jarring anachronisms thrown in throughout the story. I suspect there will be some who find them distracting. I found them unifying. This is a story about "then," but also about "now."
Be warned, there is a point about 2/3 through, where reading felt like wading through pudding. Don't give up; keep reading. The payoff is worth it.
March 5, 2021
Such a complex and ingenious story that plays with time in such a unique and fascinating way. I would recommend this to fans of Cloud Atlas (and not to anyone looking a quick, simple read.) SO GOOD!
July 31, 2019
2.5 quando si suol dire che il troppo stroppia forse dovrebbero mettere la foto della copertina di questo libro. Idea di partenza geniale, esecuzione inutilmente convoluta.
Peccato.
Peccato.
March 4, 2024
This is absolutely my jam! The melding of 1630s with contemporary allusions, references and cameos lends itself to both the feeling of Kenelm as a mind too brilliant for its time, the excerpts of contemporary beauty practises points to how women's insecurities are still prayed upon to this day, and the unreality of some of the passages mimics the intoxicating, mind bending effects of the Viper Wine. Venetia and Kenelm love each other dearly but they don't understand each other and these temporal tricks highlight the gulf between them.
I loved the visual spectacles, the dark humour, the way 1600s details painted a vivid scene which was kind of enhanced by introducing achronisms (a la A Knight's Tale, giving unfamiliar readers shorthand to understanding). This absolutely will not work for everyone but very much does for me!
I loved the visual spectacles, the dark humour, the way 1600s details painted a vivid scene which was kind of enhanced by introducing achronisms (a la A Knight's Tale, giving unfamiliar readers shorthand to understanding). This absolutely will not work for everyone but very much does for me!
August 26, 2015
Venetia Stanley and her husband, Sir Kenelm Digby, were real people. She really did die mysteriously. Wealthy ladies of the time really did buy and apply and ingest all sorts of potions guaranteed to make them youthful again- or, at the very least, arrest aging. Digby really did have Anthony Van Dyck paint her portrait after her death.
In this book, Digby’s mind picks up on voices from the future. He has a radio mast in his backyard, although it’s 1632. Sometimes he sees his estate, Gayhurst, as it will be in four centuries, used for Alan Turing’s Enigma Machine. Perhaps this is why he frequently seems to be not quite all there. Venetia, once thought a great beauty, is now facing being thirty years of age- ancient, to the people of that era. She has two children; she cannot be the fascinating and beautiful woman she once was. And, sadly, that’s all she knows how to be. When she hears of potions that can make a person young and beautiful, she begs her husband-an alchemist- to make her some. When he refuses, feeling that she is so beautiful she could not be improved upon, she seeks help from her circle of women friends at court. Despite youth formulas sometimes horrible side effects, most of the ladies of the court are using them. And some of them really work.
I’m not sure the decision to make this story magical realism really worked. While the fact that the potions really functioned - how they could ruin a woman as easily as make them young- added to the story, I didn’t feel that the 21st century bleeding through really added anything. It was, as they say in The Simpson’s, “Weird for the sake of weird”.
I felt sorry for Venetia; she was merely fulfilling the role given to titled women in those days, but her inability to be anything *other* than a beauty was frustrating. She was a good mother, but even that was background to her looks. The time slippage allows the author to draw parallels to our age’s obsession with youth and the things women will go through to stave off the signs of aging, but it wasn’t really needed. It was pretty obvious what her view of that was without it. The prose is lovely, but the whole thing just didn’t come together in the end. It was, sadly, boring.
In this book, Digby’s mind picks up on voices from the future. He has a radio mast in his backyard, although it’s 1632. Sometimes he sees his estate, Gayhurst, as it will be in four centuries, used for Alan Turing’s Enigma Machine. Perhaps this is why he frequently seems to be not quite all there. Venetia, once thought a great beauty, is now facing being thirty years of age- ancient, to the people of that era. She has two children; she cannot be the fascinating and beautiful woman she once was. And, sadly, that’s all she knows how to be. When she hears of potions that can make a person young and beautiful, she begs her husband-an alchemist- to make her some. When he refuses, feeling that she is so beautiful she could not be improved upon, she seeks help from her circle of women friends at court. Despite youth formulas sometimes horrible side effects, most of the ladies of the court are using them. And some of them really work.
I’m not sure the decision to make this story magical realism really worked. While the fact that the potions really functioned - how they could ruin a woman as easily as make them young- added to the story, I didn’t feel that the 21st century bleeding through really added anything. It was, as they say in The Simpson’s, “Weird for the sake of weird”.
I felt sorry for Venetia; she was merely fulfilling the role given to titled women in those days, but her inability to be anything *other* than a beauty was frustrating. She was a good mother, but even that was background to her looks. The time slippage allows the author to draw parallels to our age’s obsession with youth and the things women will go through to stave off the signs of aging, but it wasn’t really needed. It was pretty obvious what her view of that was without it. The prose is lovely, but the whole thing just didn’t come together in the end. It was, sadly, boring.
February 28, 2014
This is rather a confusing book to read and I am deeply torn about how I feel about it. It works really well as a historical novel looking at the lives of a pair of uniquely fascinating 17th century characters. Alongside this it makes clever use of extracts from 17th century writings alongside contemporary interviews from 'celebrities' to provide a comparative look at medical practice and the 'treatment' of aging. This not only delves into the bizarre ways in which some people are willing to treat signs of aging, but also shows that many of the weird and wonderful methods used historically actually have enough basis in reality to continue to be used to this day. So as a look into historic medical practice this works, and as a look into the corrupt and slightly manic world of high society just prior to the revolution and upheaval of civil war it also works, and works very well. Where I got a little confused, and if I'm honest annoyed, was with the sections where the modern world quite literally bleeds into the period narrative. You will be happily reading about Sir Kenelm Digby's studies into alchemy and suddenly he will start receiving messages from the future, in the form of mental text messages or spam email. This makes the story seem a little disjointed and slightly insane. I appreciate that the intention is to make Kenelm seem like a man ahead of his time, but it just comes across as bizarre and jarring. I found myself reading these sections rather more quickly than normal in order to continue with the actual story. I think that this might genuinely cause this book to do more poorly than it would otherwise; it comes across as essentially a literary Knight's Tale (film not Chaucer extract). While there is a market for properly quirky historic fiction, it is a lot more difficult to find, and although I really hope that this will do as well as it deserves, I can see it being a difficult one to pitch to prospective readers.
March 12, 2018
I can be stingy with five-star ratings, and often they go to undisputed classics. The rest of the time, they go to books like Viper Wine that are not without their faults, but that overall are so exhilarating, so well-crafted and so clearly written with love and enthusiasm and the author's pouring everything they have in them, that they are a joy to read.
I agree with some of the criticisms I've seen in other reviews: some of the book's points are made well by the half-way point, a subplot is a little wavery in its relevance.... But. This is historical fiction done well, although ironically done with all sorts of interference from the present. The book is full of fascinating tidbits about past life, but they do not feel as though they author is ramming her research down your throat, they feel like authentic quirks in the text. The period dialogue is, to my non-expert ears, superb. The characters are flawed and yet profoundly loveable. The writing is beautifully evocative (not without the occasional misstep, but I have dozens of pencil-markings in margins signalling wonderful passages). The post-modern elements are earned. The themes are timeless.
I found this book in the comments section of an article about books that had been shortlisted for various major literary prizes. Like the commenter who tipped me off to it, I feel this book deserves so much more attention than it has received. I note the author's Wikipedia page cites Borges, Dorothy Parker and Dickens as her literary influences. We absolutely need more of this kind of thing.
I agree with some of the criticisms I've seen in other reviews: some of the book's points are made well by the half-way point, a subplot is a little wavery in its relevance.... But. This is historical fiction done well, although ironically done with all sorts of interference from the present. The book is full of fascinating tidbits about past life, but they do not feel as though they author is ramming her research down your throat, they feel like authentic quirks in the text. The period dialogue is, to my non-expert ears, superb. The characters are flawed and yet profoundly loveable. The writing is beautifully evocative (not without the occasional misstep, but I have dozens of pencil-markings in margins signalling wonderful passages). The post-modern elements are earned. The themes are timeless.
I found this book in the comments section of an article about books that had been shortlisted for various major literary prizes. Like the commenter who tipped me off to it, I feel this book deserves so much more attention than it has received. I note the author's Wikipedia page cites Borges, Dorothy Parker and Dickens as her literary influences. We absolutely need more of this kind of thing.
May 12, 2017
Apparently, the Observer called this book, “dazzling”, the Independent on Sunday said it was “intoxicating”, and The Times described it as “wickedly funny” (did we read the same book?). I – lamentably – found it pretentiously verbose, oftentimes boring, and, at times, at or bordering on the ridiculous. I know this comes across as harsh, something I try to avoid in my reviews, but I think I have good reason. Eyre’s Digby is a kind of hipster who eats Spam and meditates like a modern-day yogi (I was half expecting him to start listening to Chill on his Internet radio and pop into Whole Foods for some quinoa and a wheatgrass smoothie). His age-and-beauty-obsessed wife, Venetia, seems less like the Venetia Digby of history and more like a Housewife of Beverly Hills stuck in the seventeenth century and searching for the latest fad to help her cling onto her fading beauty.
Read the full review on The Seventeenth Century Lady: http://www.andreazuvich.com/book-revi...
Read the full review on The Seventeenth Century Lady: http://www.andreazuvich.com/book-revi...
April 30, 2015
An audaciously clever approach to historical fiction - Eyre besets her hero, the polymath Sir Kenelm Digby, with messages from the future in order to draw witty parallels between the status-and-beauty-obsessed 17th century and today. For the most part, it works. Fans of purely traditional historical fiction will either love it or hate it - it reminds me of the recent trend in films like Marie Antoinette and Vanity Fair, which layer a modern sensibility onto a historical plot. I really enjoyed it, although Eyre lavishes much more attention on Digby's inner life than on the desperately-seeking-beauty Venetia's, so we never really get a sense of why she is so desperate. Her tempestuous early life was more interesting than her "reformed" last years, so I would wish that Eyre had given us more of that, and had brought both characters more fully to life.
October 28, 2019
(3.5 Stars)
March 20, 2018
Eyre's debut novel shows writing skill and moments of brilliance, although the postmodern approach to her subject matter is not to my taste. The story itself takes place in 1600s England during Charles I's reign, when Catholic/Protestant antagonism is heating up, Puritans are rejecting the hedonistic lifestyle of many, and it's less than a decade before the unrest between Parliament and the king will become Civil War. The characters of the story were real personages of the times (most of them) and Eyre sets up the period with well-researched details and fact-based fascinating tidbits about 17th-century life.
The two main protagonists here are Sir Kenelm Digby and his wife Venetia Stanley Digby, who were real historical persons. Sir Kenelm was quite the Renaissance man. When he wasn't gallivanting around the world or doing and recording alchemical experiments or checking out the heavens in the pursuit of astrology or corresponding with learned men of the times, and more, he could be found adding to his collection of books. So many books that even by creating a large room in his home dedicated to them, they would still overflow into other areas of the house.
Sir Kenelm's mind was never still. He's even credited with the invention of the modern wine bottle. He showed an interest in so many varied topics that even a cookbook of his recipes was published posthumously. His world was so big, encompassing even the possibilities of the future (or so Eyre would have us think in her postmodern approach, anachronisms and references to the future) that he didn't see the little world his wife Venetia was struggling in.
Venetia, a renowned beauty of the times, lived in a very narrow, limited world, focused on her beauty and social position. Poets expound on her beauty, painters want to do her portrait, women all want to look like her and even wear her favorite color of clothing. She's so obsessed with staying young that she resorts to 1600s versions of modern beauty treatments: dermabrasions, face peels with sulphur mithridate, depilatories of quicklime and arsenic, temporary facelifts achieved by pulling back the skin with tiny pegs, covering up grey hair with mixtures of blackberry leaves, walnuts and gull turds, etc.
But none of this is enough for her. She's going around in a veil now so others cannot see how old and ugly she is at 33. Desperate, she decides that what she needs is this special potion called Viper Wine, mainly composed of tongues, hearts and livers of vipers baked overnight and combined with Peruvian balsam, opium, and mares' urine. As Eyre writes about this wine in the book, "It thickened her veins, and filled her up with all its magical properties--later understood as iron from the viper's blood, ascorbic acid from the tartar, artificial hormones from the urine of pregnant mares, and hope, faith and comfort from the dribbles of delicious opium."
Meanwhile, Sir Kenelm continues in his flitty, distracted, academic ways, loving his wife but not really paying all that much attention and even continuing his exploring and travels. He barely notices, upon returning from his latest trip, that Venetia had taken to the Botox treatment of the times: making cuts in the face and injecting viper venom. This cannot end well but it certainly takes our absent minded academic by surprise when tragedy occurs.
There should be a grand scope to the story. It takes place at a critical moment in the history of England and could be a fascinating part of that history. However, by focusing on Venetia and her obsession with self-worth through beauty, this book mostly came off for me as a small story of vanity and how we have always been obsessed with youth and beauty and suffered for it.
In addition, it's not the author's fault but I'm not all that into postmodern literature. Eyre seems to have that Sir Kenelm kind of brain, continually creating and imagining and full of flights of fancy (to my prosaic mind). Eyre's flitty references to future people and ideas often fell flat for me, especially when she has Groucho Marx and Barbara Streisand performing at the Queen's Masque, or radio masts in the Digby gardens, or characters listening to modern music, or news conferences with modern journalists, etc. Yeah, I get it. I'm just not sure I like it.
The two main protagonists here are Sir Kenelm Digby and his wife Venetia Stanley Digby, who were real historical persons. Sir Kenelm was quite the Renaissance man. When he wasn't gallivanting around the world or doing and recording alchemical experiments or checking out the heavens in the pursuit of astrology or corresponding with learned men of the times, and more, he could be found adding to his collection of books. So many books that even by creating a large room in his home dedicated to them, they would still overflow into other areas of the house.
Sir Kenelm's mind was never still. He's even credited with the invention of the modern wine bottle. He showed an interest in so many varied topics that even a cookbook of his recipes was published posthumously. His world was so big, encompassing even the possibilities of the future (or so Eyre would have us think in her postmodern approach, anachronisms and references to the future) that he didn't see the little world his wife Venetia was struggling in.
Venetia, a renowned beauty of the times, lived in a very narrow, limited world, focused on her beauty and social position. Poets expound on her beauty, painters want to do her portrait, women all want to look like her and even wear her favorite color of clothing. She's so obsessed with staying young that she resorts to 1600s versions of modern beauty treatments: dermabrasions, face peels with sulphur mithridate, depilatories of quicklime and arsenic, temporary facelifts achieved by pulling back the skin with tiny pegs, covering up grey hair with mixtures of blackberry leaves, walnuts and gull turds, etc.
But none of this is enough for her. She's going around in a veil now so others cannot see how old and ugly she is at 33. Desperate, she decides that what she needs is this special potion called Viper Wine, mainly composed of tongues, hearts and livers of vipers baked overnight and combined with Peruvian balsam, opium, and mares' urine. As Eyre writes about this wine in the book, "It thickened her veins, and filled her up with all its magical properties--later understood as iron from the viper's blood, ascorbic acid from the tartar, artificial hormones from the urine of pregnant mares, and hope, faith and comfort from the dribbles of delicious opium."
Meanwhile, Sir Kenelm continues in his flitty, distracted, academic ways, loving his wife but not really paying all that much attention and even continuing his exploring and travels. He barely notices, upon returning from his latest trip, that Venetia had taken to the Botox treatment of the times: making cuts in the face and injecting viper venom. This cannot end well but it certainly takes our absent minded academic by surprise when tragedy occurs.
There should be a grand scope to the story. It takes place at a critical moment in the history of England and could be a fascinating part of that history. However, by focusing on Venetia and her obsession with self-worth through beauty, this book mostly came off for me as a small story of vanity and how we have always been obsessed with youth and beauty and suffered for it.
In addition, it's not the author's fault but I'm not all that into postmodern literature. Eyre seems to have that Sir Kenelm kind of brain, continually creating and imagining and full of flights of fancy (to my prosaic mind). Eyre's flitty references to future people and ideas often fell flat for me, especially when she has Groucho Marx and Barbara Streisand performing at the Queen's Masque, or radio masts in the Digby gardens, or characters listening to modern music, or news conferences with modern journalists, etc. Yeah, I get it. I'm just not sure I like it.
July 6, 2017
This book is a mess, but does keep running through my mind. Parts of it would have been 5 stars. Other bits you can sense the author's so pleased with their own cleverness at dropping in contemporary pop culture it radiates off the page to distraction.
But the conceit of modern references was usually unsuccessful. Eyre's historic setting was so vivid and immediate already and then there was a jarring reference to Jonathan Ross or Hob Nobs. (There was a section about novels and the wonders of reading which threw in a David Foster Wallace reference (among others) that didn't make me want to hurl the book across the room.)
Good ideas to grapple with in novel form--for example, aligning the pressures and procedures women today are subjected to in the name of beauty with the ridiculousness of the ingesting snake venom in the 17th century for the same end. But Eyre never gives Venetia a true spotlight, and instead splits focus between her, her husband's feelings for and interpretation of her, and her husband's love of academia and learning. It also does a disservice to a story trying to be about women and the pressures they're under, if you never give the women any point of view beyond pursuit of beauty.
The effect was bereft and bloated diversions, rather than several threads coming together to make the tapestry of a novel.
The denouement/last 5 pages of this book took me about 2 months to read, because I couldn't be bothered.
There are so many good ideas here, and exciting writing to be found. A better editor was needed to help hone this book from its evident potential into something extraordinary.
But the conceit of modern references was usually unsuccessful. Eyre's historic setting was so vivid and immediate already and then there was a jarring reference to Jonathan Ross or Hob Nobs. (There was a section about novels and the wonders of reading which threw in a David Foster Wallace reference (among others) that didn't make me want to hurl the book across the room.)
Good ideas to grapple with in novel form--for example, aligning the pressures and procedures women today are subjected to in the name of beauty with the ridiculousness of the ingesting snake venom in the 17th century for the same end. But Eyre never gives Venetia a true spotlight, and instead splits focus between her, her husband's feelings for and interpretation of her, and her husband's love of academia and learning. It also does a disservice to a story trying to be about women and the pressures they're under, if you never give the women any point of view beyond pursuit of beauty.
The effect was bereft and bloated diversions, rather than several threads coming together to make the tapestry of a novel.
The denouement/last 5 pages of this book took me about 2 months to read, because I couldn't be bothered.
There are so many good ideas here, and exciting writing to be found. A better editor was needed to help hone this book from its evident potential into something extraordinary.
December 10, 2018
This is extremely my sort of thing, and gloriously, it did not disappoint. It is a novel about the marriage of Sir Kenelm Digby, famed sailor, alchemist and adventurer in the time of Charles I, and his wife Venetia, the most renowned beauty of her day. Venetia is aging as the novel opens (well, she's thirty, but obviously in the 1630s that made her past her prime), and Kenelm's refusal to provide a medical beauty aid drives her—along with several of her friends—into the arms of Lancelot Choice, a convincing quack who prescribes a tonic known as viper wine, distilled from the bodies of serpents which he farms in industrial quantities in his cellar. Eyre melds this historical narrative with what might be called flashes, or glimpses, of the future; Sir Kenelm's ornamental obelisk at his country home, Gayhurst, becomes a radio mast, the narrative voice conflates his voyages with the space travel that humans will achieve a few centuries hence, and Venetia's obsession with controlling not only her face, but the production and distribution of her image, is shown to be the forerunner of the modern brand management practiced by celebrities like the Kardashians. Eyre takes advantage of Kenelm Digby's unique intellectual and historical position: one of the sources she quotes describes him as the single English mind that links the medieval and the modern, just as happy distilling mercury in alembics as he is keen to follow the latest scholarship from Galileo. She figures him, and Venetia, and the age in which they lived, as a kind of conduit, through which the past and the future can mingle. Viper Wine's a clever book; it's also witty and contains some marvelous setpieces, including a voyage in a sort of proto-submarine. Not to be missed.
July 16, 2018
A historical fantasy on Kenelm Digby and his wife Venetia. Digby was an interesting character during the 1600's, a kind of Zelig. He was instrumental in forming the Royal Society but also found time to be a privateer (pirate with state support). The Digby in this novel is a bit different in that he apparently can tune in on happenings throughout history - like he pick up that DNA will be discovered. Eyre doesn't really do much with this freakish ability and it is not needed for any of the plot. Personally I think it was a device by the author for po-mo cred.
The main interest in the book is in Venetia who is aging. And wants to find the elixir to stop the effects of that aging. This part is interesting so far as it tells us that cosmetics have been and will always be with us, and users will put themselves in peril for that last bit of glowing skin. It was amusing that some of the elixirs she took actually did have substances that could actually do stuff - like estrogen. The Viper Wine of the title is a concoction made from adder venom and becomes a sensation that everybody wants. The vendor/conman, Lancelot Choice, is a hoot - I think of Mr. Haney in "Green Acres".
In the end I just didn't much care what happened to Venetia. Kenelm was always a bit of a cipher, and the saga of the cosmetics and court intrigues just didn't grab me. The pages of book titles that Eyre apparently used for the novel seemed like "look, I did my homework".
The main interest in the book is in Venetia who is aging. And wants to find the elixir to stop the effects of that aging. This part is interesting so far as it tells us that cosmetics have been and will always be with us, and users will put themselves in peril for that last bit of glowing skin. It was amusing that some of the elixirs she took actually did have substances that could actually do stuff - like estrogen. The Viper Wine of the title is a concoction made from adder venom and becomes a sensation that everybody wants. The vendor/conman, Lancelot Choice, is a hoot - I think of Mr. Haney in "Green Acres".
In the end I just didn't much care what happened to Venetia. Kenelm was always a bit of a cipher, and the saga of the cosmetics and court intrigues just didn't grab me. The pages of book titles that Eyre apparently used for the novel seemed like "look, I did my homework".
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