Book Review (Fiction) The Queen Of Attolia

The Queen Of Attolia

Megan Whalen Turner

Greenwillow Books 2017                                                                                            359 Pages

“I wonder why it is so dull, when so much of it must be untrue.”

-          -  Catherine Morland on the subject of history, 
          in Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

History, for far too many long-suffering students, is a boringly stupefying recitation of dates and dynasties – with all the racy bits thoughtfully excised by education boards.

That’s where historical fiction and much of fantasy literature come in, proving that history in the right hands can really rock and roll.  Such as George R R Martin’s Song Of Ice And Fire fantasy sequence (now famously televised as HBO’s Game Of Thrones) for instance. These works liberally borrow characters and situations from England’s War of the Roses (1455-85) and other real-life medieval European machinations. They’re also full of interesting stuff like incest, sexual assault, torture, murder, loot, rapine, conspiracy, military atrocities, et al, that the school history textbooks tend to skim over.

Megan Whalen Turner’s The Queen Of Attolia is a far tamer affair by comparison as befits a YA fantasy, though it does feature an attractive older woman stalked by a much younger admirer and his subsequent mutilation. Second in The Queen’s Thief sequence, this features Eugenides, the thief of the mountain kingdom of Eddis. A sort of court Ninja to his queen Helen, he is sent on psy ops missions to regularly harass Irene, the icily ruthless queen of the more powerful neighbouring realm of Attolia, by intruding on her private quarters and leaving mocking traces of his shadowy presence.

After chancing his luck once too often, Eugenides is captured by the Royal Attolian Guard, tortured, with his right hand amputated by his enraged mark. Released only after upstream Eddis threatens to cut off the water supply and so disrupt Attolian agriculture, “Gen” now has to cope with the trauma of acquired disability. Convalescing from post-violent trauma, the hurt helps speed up an infuriatingly cocky brat’s journey towards maturity but not without frequently exasperating his allies with outbursts like these – “ Turning, he picked an inkpot off the desk and threw it to shatter on the door of his wardrobe, spraying black ink across the pale wood and onto the wall. Black drops like rain stained the sheets of his bed.”

 

The subsequent political manoeuvrings between the two queens, Helen of Eddis and Irene of Attolia, is the real highlight of this novel. While Eddis initially appears the kinder and gentler of the two, she is no less ruthless in the cause of her people and kingdom. Initially unsympathetic, Attolia is revealed to have her reasons for being the way she is - “She was the stone-faced queen, then and ever after. She had needed the mask to rule, and she had been glad to have it.”

Megan Whalen Turner clearly believes in the late Isaac Asimov’s famous dictum – “violence is the last resort of the incompetent” – for there is more negotiation, strategy and intrigue in The Queen Of Attolia than outright action. The author’s preferred model seems to be the Greek goddess Athena, embodying the principles of wisdom and statecraft in war, over the god Ares, who delighted in simple violence and bloodshed. To quote the official motto of the British Royal Marines’ Special Boat Service (SBS) – “Not by strength, but by guile.”

And lurking ominously in the background, is the mighty Medean empire with its not-so-veiled intention of annexing all three small kingdoms; Eddis, Attolia and Sounis. This is obviously an analogue of the Persian empire of Xerxes and the later Ottoman Turks that once threatened the autonomy of Greece and the Balkan states. The author has clearly lifted much from the geography, culture and history of this part of Europe and Asia Minor; from both the ancient classical and later Byzantine periods.