The prose work and voice crafted is just exquisite here. If only the plot beats were slightly more interesting. I had no trouble believing, after watching a performance while reading King Lear right before taking this on, that the Queen would be banished and forgotten for 15 years to an abbey. And I was even further primed since reading Matrix by Groff last year, in which a queen is banished to a similar abbey. Probably the only book I could correlate to this and it seems inspired by the real life figure, near as I can tell.

This is, plot wise, a very simple and quiet story of our banished queen reduced, hearing the news of what occurred in King Lear, and wishing to leave the abbey to… to what? Even she doesn’t seem to know. Perhaps weep, bury them properly, look upon them; who knows. But her efforts are constantly stymied and with each section of the book a new sort of arch of tribulation begins. It is also kind of a duel timeline novel, I’d say. She routinely digresses into the past during her stream-of-consciousness, in which dialogue is italicized and all else is purely in her head. An inversion I quite liked and found effective.

In this quiet life we expound the characters of King Lear greatly. And we also find it’s beating heart: a mother. A cruel one, to be sure, sometimes. But where King Lear had plenty passion, I actually don’t think it had heart. I know I didn’t care about a single character in the play. It’s pleasures come from elsewhere. But more pleasure is found here. The whit and crack of the whip that are this woman’s prose is phenomenal and far excel what’s found on the page for King Lear, as far as I’m concerned. It justifies its existence in unearthing the dismissed and growing in plentitude what the play needed to connect more fully.

The issue is that the actual story beats in the abbey are a little bit too boring. This swings the pendulum from the melodrama all the way to verisimilitude that, while brilliant rendered and always flowing from the brain, also drag interest a little bit behind it at all times. Even the height of drama near the end is so pedestrian it felt a bit perfunctory. It does fit the story. No doubt. It’s just that if it were truncated I don’t think it would have missed anything, and probably would not have overstayed it’s welcome. Which, it really didn’t go that far. It was never a chore to be sunk into the prose. It just couldn’t have hurt if those nuns got up to some more shit…