The King, The Queen, the Mistress...and the Musician (SPOILERS)
I repeat--SPOILERS. Of Season 1 of The Tudors and of the new Tudors book, The Tudors: The King, the Queen and the Mistress by Anne Gracie, based on the TV show written by Michael Hirst. All remarks below are my personal opinions based on my own peculiar biases (one in particular which you know very well :).
In an attempt to be fair, let me say that the book does entertain me...not as much as it could have, but enough to warrant my keeping it as opposed to throwing it in the wood stove. It has little tidbits here and there which weren't in the episodes, so that's interesting. In fact, the part which initially raised my hopes high is a new scene right in the first pages of the book which features...not the King, nor the Queen nor the mistress, but the musician. That's right. Thomas enters the book in the second line. The first few pages are from his point of view. Very promising! I read on, then couldn't wait any longer and scoured through the book looking for more Thomas, then Thomas and William....
There was the banquet scene, with the twins trying to seduce Thomas and failing, Compton pausing to gaze down at him, Thomas looking up at him wide-eyed, unable to look away for a long time....
I plowed ahead, looking for the scene in the chapel. Looking for the seduction scene, the sweet scene of the two of them side-by-side in bed, the scene at Compton Wynates.... I went back to the banquet scene and went through again, more carefully....
Nothing.
Not a trace of Tom and Will's romance.
Angered by what seemed like blatant homophobia on the writer's part I went on scouring pages, and finally ran across Compton's death scene, which the writer dwelt upon a bit longer than seemed necessary, strange considering her tendency to hurry along in other places where more development would have been warranted.
I wondered if Tallis would inexplicably show up at the house to learn of William's fate from Anne. No. The chest which in the show went to Henry via Thomas just magically turns up at court all by itself.
Finally I caught sight of a paragraph which contained both Tallis and Compton. The memorial Mass at the end of Ep. 7. Tallis was weeping as he conducted the choir in a Requiem setting of his own composition, written in memory of his friend William Compton....
His friend.
Well.
Aside from the screen-fact that they were leaps beyond simple friendship, in the book Gracie gives them not a single word of dialog with each other--nothing at all beyond a gaze at the banquet to indicate they so much as know each other exists, let alone that they're friends. This is plain bad writing, something we would have pounced upon in Creative Writing 101 as we learned by critiquing everyone else's work and hearing our own taken apart at the seams.
Having been cheated out of the most endearing and beautiful relationship in Season 1, I turned my thoughts to the twins and began scouring pages for Thomas' interactions with them. The sweats reached London. I went on reading. No mention of the girls. None. I went on reading. No dead sister, which was fine, but no living sisters either. Nothing. No Thomas going to woo Jane and bring her back to London, no lyrical, smokin'-hot world tour down her body...nothing.
That heartless git of a so-called 'romance writer' completely ignored poor Thomas' love life as if Hirst had never bothered to write it.
Not that she did poorly by Tom anywhere else. He's still nice, sweet Thomas, more-or-less. His genius is intact, though William isn't there to call him a genius. But his dimensionality is gone. Being in relationship provides everybody the opportunity to reveal their depths, or at least unnoticed facets of themselves, and in being deprived of the people who love him most, Thomas is a lonely figure indeed. He has respect and I'm sure there are others who love him, but he doesn't have anybody to drag him out of his ivory tower. William catalyzed his growth from a withdrawn little geek-boy into a confident, if quiet, young man; the twins gave him further opportunity to reach out, love, comfort, grow up and take responsibility for someone else's life. He needs his loves just as the other characters need theirs; moreso, because he's more capable of really loving than almost all of them.
What Gracie was thinking when she chose to leave out his relationships, I can't imagine. Her website is in the back of the book. I may have to write her and ask.
And to Michael Hirst--PLEASE, for the love of Tom, follow up It's Good to be King with a book called, I don't know, But Better to be Alive, call it anything you like, just please include the final shooting scripts of Season 1, Eps. 6-10 so we can have the straight take on them. None of this novelization stuff unless you do it yourself. We don't need some so-called 'romance writer' screwing up the story line for the sweetest character in the show. (Some romance writer!) Poor Thomas needs his loves if he's going to be a fully realized character, and those of us who love him don't like to see him shortchanged.