Poison

Starred review from April 3, 1995
Perhaps Harrison's most signal achievement in this story of two doomed women is her reflection of their time and place: Spain in the 17th century, a sordid and barbarous era. Harrison (Exposure) is totally in command of her tragic narrative, which proceeds with the stately, mesmerizing pace of a pavane, stepping to one side to look behind, to the other to look ahead. Francesca Luarca, a humble silk farmer's daughter, is arrested for witchery. Her story parallels that of Queen Maria Luisa, the French Bourbon princess married to the impotent king of Spain, whose inability to produce an heir to the throne condemns her to death as surely as imprisonment in the Inquisition's prisons dooms Francesca. Francesca commits several sins: she begs a priest to teach her to read (a dangerous ambition for a woman); he also introduces her to carnal delights and impregnates her. Francesca is destroyed by passion, the queen-who is also called a witch by the jeering mob-by its complete absence. Hovering over everything is the ominous shadow of the Inquisition, fed by a greedy, corrupt church that plays on fears of devils and witches but forgives ``sins'' on the payment of hefty fines. Harrison weaves a marvelous tapestry of almost palpable details: people in Madrid wore enormous jeweled spectacles, ``an enhancement to dignity rather than eyesight''; ``the Spanish nobility's desire for loftiness was so intense and so literal that aristocratic women balanced on stilts.'' This is hardly an historical novel in its accepted sense, however, since Harrison pulls free of exact historical documentation. While richly imagined, the narrative is sometimes overwrought; being confined inside the heads of the poisoned, delirious queen and the peasant woman torn by the Inquisition's rack is a feverish experience. This claustrophobic darkness, the unremitting misery of the story, may deter some readers. For others, it will be an illuminating portrait of a woman's lot in an age poisoned by superstition and the church's tyranny.

January 1, 1995
The publisher is steadily building Harrison (Exposure, LJ 12/92), whose latest work concerns the Spanish Inquisition.

Starred review from May 1, 1995
Harrison is fascinated with the perils of eroticism. In "Exposure" (1993), she considered sexuality in our world. Here, in this highly unusual and beautifully written historical novel, she explores the consequences of forbidden desire in an era of cruel and demented extremes, the fearful years of the Spanish Inquisition. Harrison's strange, appalling, yet enrapturing tale focuses on two young women: Francisca de Luarca, the free-spirited daughter of a failed silkworm cultivator, and Marie Louise de Bourbon, doomed to marry the last surviving Hapsburg, the deformed and aberrant King Carlos. In an amazing feat of the imagination, Harrison dramatizes the horror of Marie's virtual imprisonment and her disgusting husband's inability to impregnate her. It's clear that the king's impotence promises death for his queen. Meanwhile, Francisca, sad and rebellious after her mother's death, asks a priest to teach her to read, but they quickly turn their attention from books to flesh and their lovemaking, gloriously described, becomes as serious a crime as the queen's seeming barrenness. As Marie writhes on her death bed and Francisca suffers on the rack, poison becomes a powerful metaphor for cultural insanity and spiritual death. A darkly lyrical and deeply disturbing tour de force. ((Reviewed May 01, 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)