He is cut from a different cloth than many of the men of his time, and he is the seed that produced America.
The most interesting character for me is still Bruce Carlton. It is a long read, but it has a fast pace and Amber holds your interest navigating between her husbands and her lover. It is a period for which I have little frame of reference, so I enjoyed the historical aspects of the novel. Little does she know, she has in fact sunk far below her station, even when she is the whore of the King.įinally, this is a very interesting peek into the court of Charles II, the great fire, the plague, the troubles of the restoration, the constant wars with France and the Dutch, and the rise of English imperialism. She believes herself to be common and to have risen above her beginnings. Parents who would have married and raised her in exactly the world she desires never got that opportunity because of the civil war and the rise of Cromwell. Her greatest misfortune is the one she knows nothing of: she was born to an aristocrat.
She has no respect for any achievement that doesn’t show itself in the form of gold and property, and she does not know what happiness is. She sees nothing of what makes a person great or even good. I’m somebody, Almsbury! If I’d stayed in Marygreen and married some lout of a farmer and bred his brats and cooked his food and spun his linen-what would I be? I’ve done some things I hated, but that’s over now and I’m where I want to be. He knows she is not evil, but he also knows she is amoral and insatiable. She does not understand him at all, while I think he has her nailed. I suspect Bruce Carlton would not be enough for her either, but the fact that she cannot have him makes him seem like the ultimate prize. Amber is never happy with anything she gets, no prestige, no material wealth, no amount of admiration, nothing is enough for her. Toward the end of the novel, there is a passage which says, “But it was not enough, now she had it, to make her happy.” This, I think is the true theme of this novel. But, like her, he is willing to take whatever he wants and damn the consequences. There is much to be said for he never lies to her. Amber is not a lovely or likable person, and Bruce Carlton is much more callous, but for much better reason, than I had thought. What I took away from it this time was quite different. For me then, there was this marvelous love she had for this man who was always just out of reach (I would mistakenly have said through no fault of her own). Probably because of my own innocence, I failed to see how very jaded this character actually was. I first read this book when I was about twelve years old and I am surprised none of the adults around me prohibited it. I am always interested in how my adult self reacts differently to books than my adolescent self did.
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