#Blogtour #Review - Scarlet by Genevieve Cogman

Scarlet
Genevieve Cogman
Macmillan, 11 May 2023

Available as: HB, 320pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(HB): 9781529083729

Today I'm belatedly posting my entry for the Scarlet blogtour, which due to an admin error with the post-it notes, didn't appear when it should have. I'm grateful to Black Crow for sending me a copy of Scarlet to consider for review, and for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

When I saw this book coming I knew I would have to read it, having loved Cogman's Invisible Library alternate universe novels. And indeed in Eleanor we have a similar quiet seeming but really kickass heroine to Irene. But there's much more to Scarlet than that. I was also taken by the premise, and wondered how Cogman would tackle it. The book features the characters, and setting, of Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel series (the first part of which was published in 1905) - an English nobleman and his friends acting anonymously to rescue French aristocrats from the Terror during the Revolution.

A secret hero is always an excellent premise, but I did wonder if the Pimpernel wasn't, well, just too dated. Sensibilities change over time and the Revolution is an interesting barometer of that. Like, I suspect, many, my knowledge of the earlier books is limited to the "They seek him here, they seek him there" couplet and the Carry On parody. (Is there a proper literary term for works better known from derivatives and parodies than from the original text?) In part I suspect that's because to modern eyes, the whole "rescuing nobility" thing just doesn't seem interesting, or particularly laudable. Liberty, Equality and Fraternity seem much more engaging, as Les Miserables has shown, and despite the excesses of the Terror, I find it much more objectionable that the French population was downtrodden and starved to the point that they felt a revolution might help them than that a few bigwigs lost their lives in that revolution.

Cogman is clearly well engaged with the contradictions here. Eleanor, a humble serving maid, is added to the aristocratic clique of The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel, indeed she's a vital part of it. She may begin the book a "lowly maid" but she is fully the equal of her co-conspirators in courage, determination, resourcefulness and intelligence, and she also brings a well articulated social critique to the tale. One of the fascinating aspects of this book - and one that's very well done - is Eleanor's internal debate responding to the attitudes of those around her. She's been recruited by the League to assist in reaching Marie Antoinette and her children, as she bears an uncanny resemblance the "Austrian Woman". But Eleanor is very conscious of the downside of Regency Britain - and of France under the rule of the Kings - and she constantly weighs her sense that, no,  no it isn't right to execute a mother and her personal loyalty to her aristocratic friends with her knowledge that the French people had been treated unbearably. 

The interplay of personal relationships and political strands make this a book with philosophical as well as adventurous themes, and Eleanor's uncertain place in society (she was basically enlisted to a dangerous mission with no alternative given) gives it real emotional point. Succeed or fail, the aristocrats of the League have agency and will be celebrated, Eleanor faces an uncertain future even if she survives and at the worst, she may end up dead ion some dark cellar. Actually, that's not the worst because Cogman wanders from the merely historical to add a vampiric strand to the peril here. Besides being a neat encapsulation of the overmighty aristocrats (described as "sanguinocrats" by the Revolutionaries) the vampires add a genuinely disturbing strand to the tapestry of this story. It's one that will I suspect be further explored in sequels, because there seems to be some hidden backstory to the vampires that will surely come back and, er, bite our brave heroine. 

Or at least, they may try, but I suspect that Eleanor is up to the challenge. She's already coping here not only with the assumptions of her time - know your place and grateful to your master, but with the currents of Revolutionary France, and coming out pretty much on top.

I look forward to seeing where Cogman takes this story next.

For more information about Scarlet, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below.

You can buy Scarlet from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.