I started this with a bang but fizzled out. The prose is beautiful and evocative but the action moves so very slowly that I found myself struggling to engage. There's a load of character who don't yet have a role in the narrative but we are given glimpses into their lives and thoughts that are pleasant but confusing. Who are these people and why are they here? I know that it will all come together later but I've gradually stopped caring! Maybe I'll take it on holiday sometime and give it a bash then but for now its lost momentum. ( )

H. F. M. Prescott’s Man on a Donkey must surely be one of the finest historical novels ever written. Its subject is the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion (1536-1537) of England’s northern Catholics against the harshly imposed reforms of Henry VIII to the power structure and observances of the Church in England.

Prescott calls her story a chronicle, and she tells it in chronicle-like fashion. Historical figures people its pages, among them, Henry VIII and his first three queens, Princess Mary, Cardinal Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, the Duke of Norfolk, and members of the Percy family. The story progresses by dated entries through the first three decades of the 16th century, keeping its focus on its main characters. They are the ordinary folk of their day trying to determine how best to respond to the deeply significant changes thrust upon them; “the Chronicle is mainly of five:—of Christabel Cowper, Prioress; Thomas, Lord Darcy; Julian Savage, Gentlewoman; Robert Aske, squire; Gilbert Dawe, Priest....There is also Malle, the Serving-woman.”

Told in beautiful language that skillfully evokes the spirit of a medieval chronicle, The Man on a Donkey is not a book to read quickly. It moves at a slow pace, though its central events are momentous. It absorbs the reader into its atmosphere of struggle, physical, mental, and spiritual. It raises for its characters (and for its readers!) such questions as how to live with integrity in a world filled with injustice. How to find within oneself the courage to follow one’s conscience, knowing the risk involved. How to maintain one’s faith in a time so filled with despair.

Violence, cruelty, betrayal, greed, tyranny are present everywhere in this novel; but so also are gentleness, compassion, loyalty, self-sacrifice, and love. I think anyone who enjoys historical fiction, especially fiction set in Tudor times, would enjoy it.
5 stars ( )

Henry VIII seizes control of English church, history of local abbey, its nuns and neighbors