King David spies on beautiful Bathsheba as she bathes and his desire
drives him to acts of such callousness that even his god turns away from
him. Only through searching penitence and the psalms that express this
can he find him way back into the light.
A world and centuries away, King Henry VIII looks up at his prized
tapestries of David and Bathsheba and sees in David a mighty
predecessor, defender of the faith.
Henry's courtier-poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, sees instead two kings who take
what they want, careless of the lives they destroy in the
process--David's lust led him to murder, while Henry is ruthless in his
pursuit of Ann Boleyn and the son she has promised him...more ruthless
still when she fails to provide an heir.
Wyatt too, once dangerously close to Ann himself, is caught in the
slipstream of wilful power. David's psalms of penitence reach across the
years to touch and speak to him directly. Shackled in a cell in the
Tower of London, not expecting to get out alive, he thinks of his
beloved falcon Lukkes, and wishes he too could fly.
Lux weaves past and present into a story of love and its reach,
fidelity and faith, power and poetry, for readers of Marilynne Robinson,
Anne Carson, and Hilary Mantel.
