The Royal Physician's Visit: A Novel (Paperback)

It, too, tells the story of Princess Caroline Mathilde of England, sister to King George III. At the age of fifteen she was wed to young King Christian VII, who eventually became known as the mad king of Denmark. Temperamental, high strung, and given to strange outbursts, his predilection for odd behavior was known early on, but despite this the two kingdoms would still see these two wed, as the unification of England and Denmark was more important than individual happiness.

King Christian VII was a truly pitiable figure who had survived a childhood fueled by rank cruelty and was easy prey for the sycophants of the Danish court. He developed a peculiar aversion to his wife and, consequently, had conjugal relations with her only once, which propitiously resulted in the birth of a son nine months later. Alone in a foreign country, whose language she was only beginning to learn, and estranged from a King surrounded by sycophants, the young queen gravitated to the one person who treated her as a person in her own right, the King's physician, Johann Struensee.

An advocate of the philosophy of Enlightenment that was overtaking Europe, the idealistic Struensee had many ideas that were introduced as reforms in Denmark, through his influence with the King, who by now was easily led, since his madness left a void in leadership that Struensee was all to happy to fill. These reforms were to make many enemies for him, as they upset the established feudal system that still existed in eighteenth century Denmark. As he gained power through his influence, resentment against him grew within those circles that had formerly been close to the King. Unaware of the growing animosity against him and lacking political canniness, Struensee and the Queen became close intimates, bound by shared ideas and interests.

Struensee's relationship with the Queen, who was lonely and starved for affection, eventually transgressed the bounds set by propriety. Now lovers in fact, their relationship became grist for the rumor mill. She even gave birth to a daughter who the King acknowledged as his own but who was actually Stuensee's. As gossip and innuendo about their relationship swirled across royal circles in Europe, it ultimately became the focal point for a political coup that saw them both arrested and charged with treason. It was a relationship that was to have great personal and political ramifications for the protagonists, as well as for Denmark. What ultimately happened to each of them was tragic, governed as it was by the initial reluctance of the Danes to give up their feudal system. Even those whom Struensee championed through his reforms, the peasant class, turned against him in the end.

This is a richly atmospheric work of historical fiction, filled with political intrigue, historical personages and events, shadowed by darkness and a palpable sorrow apparent in each and every one of its pages. It is as if the individual psyche of each of the protagonists were driving the book, giving it texture, shadings, and glimpses into the psyche of those involved in this high drama. It is an angst filled, almost surreal, rendering of lives that were to come together and leave a mark on the world, making for a story that to this day has the power to captivate the reader. Bravo!

Well, you won't find great drama in the Royal Physician's Visit, because the author is primarily interested in presenting a series of very irritating aphoristic fragments of the various characters and scenes of this story to emphasize the serious moral conflicts and the pathetic depths to which royal society had plunged. That's all very nice but it makes for terrible fiction, especially when every character is approached from the most oblique angles imaginable, and Struensee in particular gets a completely bloodless portrait. And if you're naive enough to think that a tragic story should have moments of humor, you'll be even more disappointed, because this novel will bludgeon you with its intensely gloomy moral tone, with one scene after another to emphasize the same points about moral decay and ambivalence. Not exactly a page turner. One of the pivotal moments in the drama, the meeting of Christian VII with the French encylopedists, is presented so superficially as to leave the impression that nothing of any consequence was ever spoken in a French salon.

To be fair, it's generally intelligently written, given the author's apparent ambition to show the pathetic struggles and sexual fumblings of a couple misplaced in time, but a genuine history of Struensee and his world would have been immensely more satisfying, and I'm afraid that none appear to exist in English. The reader of this novel can never be sure what is fiction and what is history, especially since the writer insists on making references to the writings of various characters, without giving us nice details about such trivial matters of whether these are letters, diaries, or publications, and without a hint of whether this is merely a fictional device.

Read at your own risk.