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Denise Mina’s Rizzio is superb story-telling
Book Review
By Derryll White
Mina, Denise (2021). Rizzio.
Denise Mina is a Scottish playwright and crime novelist. She also does graphic novels and is sometimes referred to as an author of Tartan Noir.
Working a number of menial jobs in her teens and twenties she eventually returned to school and received a law degree from Glasgow University. She went on to teach criminology and criminal law. ‘Rizzio’ is her latest novel, and it is a large departure from her previous work.
In this volume it is religion and politics! Politics and religion! Denise Mina is visiting Mary Queen of Scots in 1566. She aptly brings the brutality of a long-gone age into the present, encouraging the remembrance of our own tragedies – Martin Luther King, the Kennedy family, the sad stories of our Prime Ministers and the incredible machinations of Donald Trump.
Politics doesn’t change – a dirty business whether a Queen or a President. Religion doesn’t change – also a dirty business to many. Denise Mina takes some liberties with history, but she brings the nuanced sad reality of what men have done to women through 450 years of servitude to today.
Every reader will take something different from this story. Denise Mina has done a superb job.
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Excerpts from the book:
RESPONSIBILITY – Everyone has their knife out because everyone is going to stab him. That’s the deal. Caesar was stabbed by all the great men of Rome. Only one of the wounds was fatal; most were just shallow nicks, tentative little gestures of implication. The collective nature of the act meant that everyone was tainted, that no one could be prosecuted because their fates are conjoined. If anyone were punished for the deed the entire class woulde fall.
These men are cowards.
CLARITY – It takes two hundred years to lift the stink, and, when it is finally long enough in the past to morph into a romantic tale, it is the English who cherish the story of the beautiful, bullied Queen of Scots.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.