This has been on my reading list since I listened to several podcasts from different providers who all visited the National Archives' exhibition on treason and completely sold it to me. I never had the opportunity to visit, but I hoped that the accompanying book might give me a glimpse into their work. Especially since I can read about gruesome executions and torture until the cows come home, but show me pictures, or even worse dramatised versions from TV and film, and I'll have nightmares for weeks!

I'm not going to say this book was without merit or interest, but it wasn't really what I was expecting. I had imagined it to be almost a written walk through of the exhibition, with the curators explaining why they had chosen particular artifacts or stories to report, before going into detail about those stories, how they shaped the overall development of treason laws and their impact. On some level, I assume this is exactly what the book does do, but it comes through as a straight recounting of facts, names and dates, rather than a labour of love by those involved. It does chart the development of the law, but in quite an uneven way; while there is a chronological order to it, there are some periods which feel like they've been sacrificed unnecessarily, and others where there is almost too-much-but-not-enough detail. For example, after the punishment for treason has been explained initially (hung drawn and quartered), the description very quickly just tapers off into 'and he was hanged'. As stated above, I'm not a huge fan of the bloody endings, but it's clear that things change through time and the drawing and quartering part (if not the beheading part) falls by the wayside at some point. Here is a clear case of where a bit of social commentary and wider context would come in handy, to educate the reader on the changing attitudes of society and lawmakers which led to the punishment being changed. 

I suspect some of the lack of feeling is due to the narrator. Right from the off, his voice reminded me alternately of a) a 1990's newsreader and b) someone who reads the football results. Basically, good intonation and someone you can listen to for a short period, but who is determinedly divorced from emotional involvement in the story he's telling. This made the whole thing come across a very dry and clinical, when at the heart of it are human beings who, whether legitimately or not, are deemed traitors to the state. As a result, it became too easy to zone out of listening, especially when the subject being covered wasn't a time period or case that particularly drew my focus. There are also moments where you can clearly hear in his pauses his panic of 'OK, there's a name I haven't come across before and have no idea how to say it, so here goes nothing...', followed by an inevitability odd pronunciation. I appreciate that it's not a novel and so does require a different sort of narration, but I thought we had moved on a bit from the stuffy professor style...

There is also a lot of repetitive energy going on in here. I'm unclear if this is down to their being multiple authors covering overlapping periods or some other reason, but I found it a bit frustrating. However, it did help a little in the moment given the ease with which my mind wandered.  But unfortunately it didn't help me retain the information any better. All this is not to say it isn't a fascinating insight into the law and the cases that resulted; some of the episodes that are covered are foundational moments of British history (the Gunpowder plot, the American Revolution, the Easter Rising etc), and other are more personal or obscure (at least to me!). 

Overall, I suspect I would have gotten more from a physical read of this book. A passing knowledge and enjoyment of history isn't quite enough to get you solidly through the audio version. However, it wouldn't put me off going to see the exhibition!