THIS MARLOWE, an historical novel of espionage, treason, suborned honor, and gay love

THIS MARLOWE
MICHELLE BUTLER HALLETT
Goose Lane Editions
$22.95 paperback edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: 1593. Queen Elizabeth reigns from the throne while two rival spymasters Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex plot from the shadows. Their goal? To control succession upon the aged queen's death. The man on which their schemes depend? Christopher Marlowe, a cobbler's son from Canterbury who has defied expectations and become an accomplished poet and playwright. Now that the plague has closed theatres, Marlowe must resume the work for which he was originally recruited: intelligence and espionage.

Fighting to stay one step ahead in a dizzying game that threatens the lives of those he holds most dear, Marlowe comes to question his allegiances and nearly everything he once believed. As tensions mount, he is tossed into an impossible bind. He must choose between paths that lead either to wretched guilt and miserable death or to love and honour.

An historical novel with a contemporary edge, This Marlowe measures the weight of the body politic, the torment of the flesh, and the state of the soul.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: Kit, as the narrator of this delight of a tale thinks of himself, is (all unknowing, as are we all) approaching the end of his life. We know this so we're listening on on his thoughts, viewing his activities, with an odd finality that lends them extra poignance: seeing a man's ego up close is often off-putting, but seeing it knowing the trap it's led him into, knowing it's not in him to see the trap and escape it...very intense, and in Author Hallett's capable hands, deeply moving.

This Marlowe is fleshing out the sketchy official record of Kit's entanglement in Elizabeth Tudor's complex web of overlapping espionage networks domestic and foreign. Stories are always built on some rock of reality or another, they can't nucleate otherwise (all y'all blocked novelists make a note of that). Choosing Marlowe's fairly scanty official records as a launching point for the fleshed-out myth of the playwright's life was savvy. Author Hallett succeeds in stitching the myth, the records, and the ideas that bridge them into a tapestry. It would be easy to make an attractive quilt for any author of sensitivity. Author Hallett unpicks each existing strand of story-stuff, then reweaves them into a satisfying whole with an almost Biblical sweep.

That whole is not a sweetness-and-light New Testament scene, but a sturm-und-drang Old Testament screamfest. There is intensity in any Tudor era story, it was a paranoid police state doing its awful worst to scare people into surface conformity via constant surveillance and disproportionate punishment for disobedience. Their external enemies were determinedly sabotaging the regime's efforts to establish a new normal, to refashion the rituals of daily life to reflect a manufactured consensus that was different from the old one (therefore better, obviously). Kit's incredible rise depended on that new consensus succeding. His loyalty was assumed to be absolute.

Many of y'all have heard of Marlowe solely in relation to Shakespeare...lots of you are now picturing Rupert Everett from Shakespeare in Love when thinking of Kit Marlowe. *swoon* so pretty *ahem* So Mrlowe was Shakespeare's role model in the sense that he was more successful as a playwright when Shakespeare was a tyro. Marlowe began life as a cobbler's son, somehow becoming a university graduate in a time when not even that many noblemen's sons could claim a degree. Then as now, there are those whose innate gifts gain them access to education and the rewards thereof...and the notice from the Powers That Be. Marlowe's life was charmed, as Author Hallett's storytelling shows us, and wasn't he just the smartest manipulator of the system! Didn't he just make it his business to know and be known to the greatest and goodest he could reach! If they needed an intelligent pair of eyes to suss out the secrets, the plans, the sort of things a man would say to a pretty, talented, intelligent, pliant catamite...well, Kit lived to serve.

Never for a moment believing that service would not buy loyalty and protection.

It's a story that never stops being relevant, isn't it...and one we would all do well to heed in parlous times.