Preview of Death of the Fox Summary:

Death of the Fox explores the complex relationships between illusion and reality. The novel finds the truth about the individual devilishly difficult to obtain. And it finds the truth about humans completely inaccessible to those who see only the social or only the personal, only the body or only the soul, only the physical or only the spiritual.

In the broadest terms the novel refuses to take the cliche romantic view of Ralegh and the Elizabethans, the view that all was well in the Golden Age, that a goddess like Elizabeth was universally loved and utterly benevolent and that Ralegh was the cardboard courtier whose greatest achievement was that he gallantly draped his expensive cape over a puddle to keep a little mud from his lady's dainty feet. Garrett's Renaissance England is vicious with intrigue, filled with the brutality of death and the smells of decay and mortality...