Gardners Unconscious Conservatism and lack of historical perspective is shocking

Gardner writes sentimentally and well. This is a book for a racist nanny, horrified by the prospect of riots. The Silver Blade is the sequel of The Red Necklace, another proficiently written book whose weight lies on a coterie of characters that could be divided in two groups: the noble nobles (redundant on purpose) and the messily disgusting revolutionaries. According to the author, the Ancien Regime’s worst sin was banality and, in power, banality has no violent consequences. Should we ask Boris Johnson and his parties during COVID+19? Shockingly for a historical novelist dedicated to the French Revolution, she does not master the French language which makes her finding the materiality of the time in the virtual copying of Georgian accounts of travellers which are, without exception, understandably, horrified by the revolution. What is understandable for them comes across as alt right in Gardner. Her belief that banality does not kill nor is violent is testament of her Anglocentric white racism. She hates blood but cannot understand that its absence through the systematic establishment of exclusionary biopolitical structures of veiled violence were the very making and demise of the Ancien Regime and constitute the core of slavery, neo-slavery and that phenomenon called London. In other words, her understanding of the period is conservative to the point of delusional and her need to infantilise the Romani adds to her structuring of characters as caricatures, bidimensional and shapeless.

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