THE TOWER

Mary, Queen of Scots, imprisoned in cold, damp Lochleven Castle, on an island in the middle of the loch, plots her escape while attended by a small, faithful circle of women-in-waiting.

Close-focused and vivid, British author Carr’s debut centers on a year in the famed royal’s life while encompassing the events, people, and history that brought her to this place. It’s a detailed character portrait of Mary, a charismatic, flirtatious, “high-spirited beauty” who loves poetry and dancing as much as riding with troops. A queen since she was 6 days old, thrice married, and mother to 1-year-old James, Mary, at 24, is pregnant again when captured and imprisoned. Early in her incarceration she miscarries twins and is then forced to sign abdication papers. After these dramatic events, the pace of the novel slows to accommodate a deeper consideration of the relationships among the four trapped women: Mary’s two lowly “chamberers,” Jane and Cuckoo, are joined by a third, Lady Seton, one of the aristocratic “jewelled ladies” more customary in a queen’s retinue. Friendships, jealousies, and more intense emotions crisscross the group, while their captors spy on them and Mary secretly works with loyalists to secure freedom. Carr’s interest in the women—their bodies, their allegiances, their intimacies—offers a contemporary perspective that extends beyond the foursome to other females seeking or manipulating power. These musings and observations are rendered in bright, cinematic prose—“A woman with sunburn on her chest and forearms bends down to pluck white camomile flowers”—yet there’s a circularity as well as an inevitable claustrophobia to the structure, which the narrative never entirely outgrows.

A robust modern revisiting of popular historical territory.