Michael A. Winkelman
Reader in Imaginary Books, Unseen University
17 November 2015
Review: Dawn Ius, Anne & Henry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2015)
That Bodgy Boleyn Girl; or, We Will Sometimes Be Royal
For Charles Beem, the king of queens
Rex quondam rexque futurus! Once again the Tudors rule. We have of late witnessed a veritable onslaught of books, movies, and other popular media devoted to the dynasty that reigned over England from 1485 to 1603, whilst scholarly attention to the period hath also continued unabated. The twin poles of this feverish interest have been King Henry VIII, he of the six wives, and his daughter Elizabeth I, the never-married Virgin Queen. Perhaps the most unexpected and bizarre contribution to this crowded field is the young adult novel Anne & Henry by Dawn Ius. In this story, Henry Tudor, who is Mr. Popular at a private high school in a posh suburb of Seattle, Washington, finds himself inconveniently attracted to the new bad girl in town, one Anne Boleyn. The central couple narrate events in alternating chapters, starting with Henry and ending with Anne. In some ways it’s an intriguing premise – what if?! – but unfortunately this book is not very good at all. Myriad examples of excellent, creative YA fiction abound, many based on history, but this is not one of them.
A brief summary will show how the author updates and changes things. (Caveat: plot spoilers below, but readers familiar with sixteenth-century England will anticipate that this romance is doomed to end badly.) Like his royal namesake when he ascended the throne in 1509, this Henry has recently lost his powerful father and successful older brother Arthur, but he has inherited beaucoup status as well as Arthur’s perfect girlfriend Catherine. He is seemingly poised for greatness: on the fast track to Harvard and already possessed of deep political connections, he’s riding a cursus honorum towards a Senate seat and maybe even the presidency down the road. Then Anne enters the picture. They have the hots for each other, causing Henry to alienate his demanding, brittle, mournful mother and the in-crowd he supposedly leads by dumping Catherine and dating Anne. Returning on her motorcycle in the rain from a secret tryst where they’d been drinking and making out, they crash, leaving neither seriously injured but eventuating their enforced separation. Henry is grounded and his mom blocks Anne’s number on his phone; Anne spends a few days in the hospital recovering from her wipeout. After she is released while he is still under “house arrest” (212), his friends maliciously intervene. They invite Anne to a party where they deploy maximum peer pressure to force her to drink heavily and then snap staged, incriminating photos of her with their cell phones. The circulation of these images makes Henry doubtful about her, and they also lead (preposterously) to the school’s Student Council, made up of Henry and his crew, holding a hearing and permanently expelling Anne from Medina Academy with no recourse to appeal. But studying at a café with his friends while all this drama is unfolding, Henry meets a beguiling, demure yet coquettish barista named, yes, Jane Seymour, so his future seems bright once again.
Two humungous weaknesses sink this audacious effort. The first is that the central conceit doesn’t hold up. This Henry, this Anne, don’t resemble the historical personages who share their names very much, and so the question of what those star-crossed Tudor royals would do in similar but modern circumstances isn’t very compelling. Moreover, the whole mapping of a magnificent Renaissance court, ruled by a puissant hereditary Christian monarch desperate for a legitimate male heir, onto an American high school doesn’t really work here. The possibilities exist, though. The couple have a dinner date at a swank restaurant called the London Tower, and a scene at an abandoned theater and another at a costume party cry out for some role-playing meta-historical overlay. The possibilities should have been developed. For instance, when Henry gives his girlfriend a gift of jewelry in chapter 18, I was dying for her to receive that ‘B’ necklace the real Queen Anne can be seen wearing in her painting in the National Portrait Gallery, but that doesn’t happen. Another opportunity would have been updated versions of the pleading, adoring letters King Henry infamously wrote his paramour in his own hand. But this twenty-first-century Henry is different: he has no sisters whom he will arrange political marriages for; no inconvenient daughter Mary with Catherine; no papally-approved Assertions of the Seven Sacraments, (putative) love lyrics, or romantic billets-doux to his credit.[1] Anne, meanwhile, has a rich new stepfather and an offstage sister Mary, but no pushy, ambitious male relatives angling for influence and eager to trade her maidenhead for power. (Also of course, the real Mary Boleyn was Henry VIII’s mistress before he turned to Anne; in this version Anne had allegedly seduced Mary’s boyfriend prior to her move to Medina.) The new Anne isn’t fluent in French either, though having her come from Québec would have been a nice way to make her so, especially since the author is Canadian. Understandably in this tale, she doesn’t give birth to a Princess Elizabeth, destined to be England’s Gloriana. However, the whole atmosphere at court was an essential part of the story. Here, there are no religious schisms brewing; no defenders of Queen Catherine of Aragon, a Catholic Spanish Princess, who will suffer martyrdom à la Bishop John Fisher and Sir Thomas More; no gossipy foreign ambassadors seeking to meddle behind the scenes. There’s no Cardinal Wolsey, a towering figure in his own right, ordained to fall disgracefully for not securing a divorce and solving the King’s “Great Matter.” Nor do we find the clever Machiavellian Cromwell, willing and able to fix Henry’s problems, but fated for the executioner’s block himself. We do meet a character named Wyatt, but his role is negligible – he isn’t the poetic, truth-telling Chorus of this passion play nor Anne’s special friend, so there are no sonnets like his namesake Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt,” no plaints to his lute, no wry aulic satires.
The other major issue here is that Dawn Ius simply lacks any semblance of writerly skill. The story falls short with respect to characterization, style, plotting, world-building, and dialogue. The secondary players are also as thinly drawn as tissue paper. The big scenes between the principals sound awfully clunky, and major twists ring false. Anne’s downfall is especially ludicrous. The bash where this tough, savvy girl is easily and cluelessly manipulated is obviously a “set up” (268), as plausible as the unlucky, scantily-clad hot chick in a horror flick entering the dark basement or tool shed all alone. (If Anne had been Roofied there it would have probably been more believable, though that’s become a cop-out plot device in thrillers and melodramas.) Afterwards Henry and Anne never really get to discuss what did or did not happen, which would seemingly have cleared things up between them. Next, the kangaroo court expels her for that ubiquitous time-honored pastime of underage drinking, where Henry himself recognizes that “all of this evidence is contrived” (269). Said court operates without adult intervention or oversight, lawyerly involvement, due process, or any attention to the conflicts of interest present. While Queen Anne did face her own show trial in 1536, this one is more like a tribunal by Islamic fundamentalists than anything remotely resembling what a privileged, pretty white girl would face in America today (sorry Sarah Güera!). Dawn even blows her money shot, her attempt to create a figurative parallel ending to Queen Anne’s: Henry rips Anne’s photo off a bulletin board, leaving the image of her severed head – not unlike a billion online profile portraits. Shouldn’t he have torn off the top, leaving her decapitated body? Try this with a picture and judge for yourself which is more aesthetically appropriate and viscerally disturbing.
Hélas, then, Anne & Henry is more like the eye-rolling “Cruel Intentions” (1999), derived from Dangerous Liaisons, than the cute, clever “Easy A” (2010), inspired by The Scarlet Letter.[2] In fact, it may be closer to Twilight than Romeo and Juliet. Not to despair, though, Gentle Reader: you can still turn to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwelliad, a trilogy of novels centered on Thomas Cromwell’s roller-coaster career under Henry VIII, for a healthy fix of Tudormania. (The third and final volume hasn’t been finished yet, the first, Wolf Hall, won the 2009 Man Booker Prize and is my favourite historical novel ever. There have also been stage and BBC miniseries adaptations.) Another treat along these lines is the amazing Freddy and Fredericka by Mark Helprin (2005), which imagines a prince and princess of Wales, modeled on Charles and Diana, who are exiled to America after embarrassing the Crown once too often. Beyond gently satirizing its subjects, it turns into an adventurous, romantic, sparkling, poetic, neo-chivalrous tour de force and epic quest. Long live the King!
[1] For more background, see my first little book, which includes references to primary sources: Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama (Ashgate, 2005), esp. ch. 2, “The King’s Great Matter; or, Super utroque regis coniugio,” 35-65.
[2] Along those lines, the Bollywood film “Bride and Prejudice” (2004) successfully updates everyone’s favourite Regency romance, while the teen flick “Election” (1999) presents a nasty, satirical political allegory of contemporary shenanigans amongst our governing class.