the science of Angélique

Trying to organise my book reviews, I came across this text I wrote in March 2016 after re-reading Angélique, which for some reason I didn't post then. As my recent reviews masterpost has a dramatic shortage of French novels, I'm now adding this as an almost review:

reasons to read Angélique

Each time my random path through life intersects with a copy of the historic novel Angélique by Anne and Serge Golon, I get asked why I would read that kind of nonsense. As it happens, I can think of a few good reasons, so here goes:

For the science – the first volume of the franchise revolves around a trial for sorcery, the pretext for which is the mining operation of the accused, which involves extraction of gold from minerals using lead as a solvent (cupellation). The argument why this is just chemistry and not the “transmutation” the mediaeval alchemists were after is a difficult one and handled competently. Serge Golon (1903-1972), who was probably more of a technical advisor than a co-author, was an engineer and geologist, so he would have known this sort of stuff.

For the social history – I don’t care what the courtiers were wearing for the wedding of Louis XIV, but the whole mining story also involves skilled miners immigrating from Germany. Plus there is the backdrop of the Huguenot persecution. Both issue figure prominently in my family history. Also fun to explore 17th century Paris – much of which disappeared when Napoleon III and Haussmann set to their grand-scale building project that created the city we know today.

For the literary merit – I wouldn’t vouch for the translations, but the original doesn’t quite deserve the trashy reputation it appears to have. One can certainly make out the author’s ambition to write a Dumas novel with a female lead, and I’m guessing that much of the stick she’s been getting over the year was simply sexism – a historic novel by a woman about a woman can’t be any good. Of note, for a book written in the 1950s, it is remarkably fearless in dealing with issues that were unmentionable back then, such as rape.

Incidentally, I only found out recently that Anne Golon has re-published the series to correct some mutilations that the original publishers made without her knowledge. Think I might just invest in a copy of that version.

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Update 2018

Checking the facts for this post, I just found out that Anne Golon died on Bastille Day last year, aged 95. I was travelling at that time and must have missed the news.

It looks like those "restored" versions of at least four of the Angélique novels have been published as "version augmentée", swiftly followed by a new edition billed as "version originale" to confuse readers completely. So the restored / augmented version looks like this, but sadly volume 1 doesn't seem to be available right now, although the following ones are:



Oh and from today, the tag for French books is livres en français