Viper Wine: A Novel

Author: Hermione Eyre

This first novel seems like a fairly conventional historical fiction telling the true story of the death of the Stuart beauty Venetia Stanley in 1633. In her thirties she began to fear that her beauty was fading, and since her whole sense of being was tied up in how she looked, she took to using one of the mad beauty concoctions common at the time, Viper Wine, which is here described as including snake blood, horse urine and opium. Given that, it is probably no real surprise that she died, though at the time her husband, Sir KenelmDigby, the son of one of the Gunpowder Plotters and one of the more eccentric scientists of the Stuart court, was suspected of poisoning her. Even at its simplest there's enough of a story here for a fascinating novel. But while the story of Venetia Stanley provides a satiric take on the whole cosmetic industry, her husband, Sir KenelmDigby, wanders in and out of the background of the novel quoting lines from Monty Python and David Bowie, and clutching pieces of technology that wouldn't be invented for centuries yet. He is, in other words, a time traveller, giving the whole novel an extra and extraordinary twist. Viper Wine won the Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award for best debut, and certainly lives up to that awards remit of honouring the most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works.