The Heretic by Henry-Vyner Brooks is a vivid story of the Protestant
Reformation in England under Henry VIII.
The story contains a vivid cast of characters, including a Benedictine
monk, a leper, and the children of a couple arrested for heresy. While the
story is slow to get started, it picks up in the middle and the last two
hundred pages or so are quite intense.
Although I generally don’t read
historical fiction, the Tudor period is one of my favorite eras, so I thought I’d
give this novel a try. It seemed fairly
accurate, not only in terms of events and setting, but with worldviews. One of
my pet peeves with historical fiction is when characters have fairly modern
worldviews: a 15th-century girl complaining about arranged
marriages, for example. Even if I disagree with the historical views, I want
characters to be accurate. It’s not
wrong to have ‘progressive’ characters, but they shouldn’t be the norm. And the
characters in this book were historically accurate in their perspectives.
The book was a little too long. It
covered two or three years, possibly four—necessary for some of the plot
points, but perhaps not the best decision for pacing. It’s an improvement over books in which
trials take weeks or months, but the first chapters were so heavy and full of
setting the scene and putting all the threads in place that I didn’t feel
interested in reading more.
Overall, though, it was a good
book, and I will probably reread it at some point.
