Ishbel Addyman

Addyman gave herself a gift with the subject of her first book. Who wouldn't be enraptured by a biography of Cyrano de Bergerac? She has a very firm purpose: to rescue the real Cyrano from the shadow cast by Rostand's immensely popular stage and screen version. In doing so, she conjures up a surprisingly modern figure. The real Cyrano was neither Gascon nor noble, and yet by the end of his life he'd managed to convince many of his friends that he was from a wealthy family in Bergerac. With one eye always open for publicity opportunities, he created a legend around his swordsmanship, fighting duels at every opportunity, including the famous incident at the de Nesle Gate. Risking the Inquisition, he constantly questioned the assumptions of the church, turning instead to natural philosophy: this inspired him to create some of the first science fiction novels, in which his hero travels in a rocket to the moon and the sun.

Like his fictional alter ego, the seventeenth-century duellist had a great deal of panache and Addyman clearly adores her subject. Her enthusiasm is genuinely catching. She notes in her biography, at the start, that she even took fencing lessons in preparation for writing the book. Along the way she comes up with little nuggets of information that delighted me: for example, Cyrano very probably knew d'Artagnan and the three real-life figures who inspired Porthos, Athos and Aramis. She does her best to set out all the sources and to consider what can be trusted and what can't be. When she cites original sources, the translations are often wonderfully lively and I presume they're her own.

However, I've only given the book three stars because ultimately Addyman's love for her subject can't disguise the weaknesses of her writing. Sentences are short and choppy, and her use of punctuation is erratic. Some sentences aren't even sentences, simply phrases that seem to have been severed from the rest of the flow. This may not bother you overmuch, but it does make the book difficult to read and Addyman's argument difficult to follow. There is also little discernable focus within chapters, which tend to dance all over the place. Often the book reads like a student dissertation which has been assembled from bullet points without the benefit of some good, hard editing. Addyman is clearly writing popular history, but even so the style needs to be tidied up and she needs to make her arguments clearer. She also tends to start talking about Cyrano's associates without fully explaining who they are; such an explanation might turn up a few paragraphs later, but by then I'd lost track of her argument. And she seems excessively fixated on the question of Cyrano's sexuality, as if his being gay carries extra importance because it makes him even more 'modern'. Based on the sources which she quoted, I can see very little proof either way, and Addyman doesn't carry her argument with enough force to convince me.

There's no doubt that Cyrano is a controversial, contentious and yet highly appealing figure. Reading this book definitely made me more aware of his complexity and I'm keen to get my hands on his novels so that I can read them for myself. It's just a shame that a historical figure who's renowned for his equal facility with sword and pen wasn't served with a more fluid and authoritative biography.… (altro)