torsdag 14 april 2016

Matthew Shardlake - a hunchback worth the hype

Can a bestselling crime story be considered an Ambitious Book Project? I confess I felt pretty smug when I finally got round to reading C.J. Sansom's Dissolution, the first in his much-hyped Shardlake series. The hefty tome had a sombre, brown cover and a title in stylish, Tudor-y writing: this book, it seemed to proclaim, is no romp written by some Philippa Gregory wannabe, so serious readers - and male readers - need not be put off. But what about me? Would all this immersion-in-Tudor-times prove too much for me, who have never liked too abundant local colour in historical novels?

Sansom's pleasant prose soon dispelled my fears. He has a knack of breathing life into both scenarios and characters which saves him from the kind of show-offy look-how-much-I-know-about-this-period writing so many authors of historical novels stoop to. Whether central to solving the murder mystery or not, Shardlake's experiences in Tudor England are all of a piece, and so I swallowed a fair amount of local colour not completely necessary to the plot without a murmur

Sansom's hero, the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, is flawed but fundamentally decent, and very likeable with it. In Dissolution he is still an ardent reformer and chummy with Thomas Cromwell, who sends him as a commissioner to the monastery of Scarnsea in order to investigate the brutal murder of his predecessor. He is also supposed to persuade the abbot to agree to a voluntary surrender of the monastery - earlier forced dissolutions of monasteries sparked a rebellion, so Cromwell has to tread carefully for a while. Shardlake sets off with his young assistant Mark, who is an idealist (and alas, like so many idealists, self-righteous with it), and soon finds that both assignments are a lot trickier than he could have imagined.

Which brings me back to my initial question, whether I can justifiably label this novel an ABP. Because, as critically acclaimed as it is, it's also - unpretentiously - a whodunnit. With monks.

Shardlake comments to Mark that "people love tales of naughty monks". I'm rather like the Tudor populace in this regard. At first glance, though, the monks of Scarnsea are a lot less naughty than Cromwell or I might have hoped. The worldly abbot has no intention of forfeiting his position, not even for a handsome pension, and has made sure all new rules from the King are strictly followed. Nothing seems amiss with the monastery's finances, handled by a skinflint bursar. The old prior, who was a bit of a card, was replaced two years back by a Scots disciplinarian who takes a very dim view indeed of monk-on-monk action. Everyone minds their Ps ad Qs, and even with the little matter of a headless corpse at hand, Shardlake is hard pressed to find any way in which to pressure the abbot into giving the monastery up. Not to mention the difficulty of actually finding the killer.

The characterisation is a highlight of this novel. Apart from Shardlake himself, we have his monk suspects, who fairly leap off the page. It's true that the least flawed of the bunch, the infirmarian Brother Guy - a Moor from Spain - is also the least vivid, and has a certain approved-by-the-British-Council air, but he has his moments too. The love interest is less of a joy. Shardlake acts more like Hastings than Poirot when both he and the handsome Mark fall for the only available girl in the place, Brother Guy's female servant Alice. I couldn't but think that those of the monks who question the wisdom of having a comely wench within the monastery walls have a good point. You certainly wouldn't expect, though, that two London visitors who have a murder to solve would lose their heads so easily, and I got quite impatient with them both. Perhaps it is proof of my involvement with the characters that I wanted to tell Shardlake - and not just him, either, but another character in another context - "give it up, brother, you can do a lot better than that".

I also liked that religious differences are discussed in a way that makes it plain how much these questions matter to the characters. The second Shardlake novel Dark Fire, which I've also torn through by now, is a page turner as well, but felt a little less genuine when it came to envoking the Tudor mindset. I can well understand that Shardlake's reformist zeal would cool owing to the events in Dissolution, but his religious doubts in Dark Fire feel disappointingly modern, as do some comments on social injustice which I'd guess are more typical of the author than of his Tudor characters. Sansom pulls up in time, though, and mostly remembers that it is Shardlake who tells the story, not himself. Furthermore, there is a new sidekick in the form of the cheerfully cynical John Barak. Even with occasional lapses into class-warriordom, he is vastly preferable to the priggish Mark. I look forward to more Shardlake and Barak adventures, with or without monks.         

torsdag 7 april 2016

Help, a hot Compeyson!

It's with a mixture of relief and deep envy that I can say that BBC's Dickensian is seriously good. This project, mixing characters from different Dickens novels together in one costume drama, is such a dream for any Dickens fan who has ever strung two words together that it is difficult to accept with good grace that someone else is penning it, especially if that someone admits to not being a Dickens expert. This seems to have been misplaced modesty, however - Tony Jordan and his co-authors show a good grasp of Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Christmas Carol and - on the whole - Oliver Twist, which is a good start. There are also the nerdy references to other Dickens books which a project like this needs - for example, the clothes shop where both Honoria Barbary and Martha Cratchit work is Mantalini's from Nicholas Nickleby. But no mention of anything Dombey-related so far.

I'm twelve episodes into the twenty-episode-long first series. (Will there be a second? Here's hoping.) There are three main storylines, two prequels and a murder mystery. We get to see what really happened between Honoria Barbary and Captain Hawdon and why she consented to become Lady Dedlock. We also see the events leading up to Miss Havisham's abandonment on her wedding day - Satis House has unceremoniously been moved to the middle of London. In the meantime, Inspector Bucket (Stephen Rea - perfect for this part) is trying to find out who killed Jacob Marley. Notable subplots include Fagin, Nancy and Bill Sikes, who are also very much suspects in the ongoing murder investigation.

But will Honoria really be forced to give up her captain? Will Amelia (of all suggested first names for Miss Havisham, the best that I've come across) be abandoned, or will she see through Compeyson in time? In the very first episode, we see Little Nell surviving her illness, which is a sign that everything may not turn out as it does in the novels. It's a delightful idea and keeps us on our toes, though I wonder how future storylines would look if the Dedlock marriage and Havisham tragedy do not go ahead, as they're the starting point of Bleak House and Great Expectations respectively.

Of course there are gripes. I was sorry to see that the wonderfully unreconstructed Scrooge thinks as little of his ex-partner as everyone else (so as to make him a plausible suspect): Scrooge and Marley in Carol may have been bad men, but they were good friends. And while Carol's Marley was no saint, he's hardly as wicked as he's depicted here (again, the better to make him a person as many people as possible would have liked to murder). Characters from Dickens's lesser-known novels are a little undefined and not quite like themselves: Wegg has a wooden leg, Mrs Gamp is fond of gin and, er, that's pretty much it. In the latter case, there is no mention of Mrs Harris. I don't think the series writers have quite grasped the nature of the Bumble marriage - no long-standing affair, as is hinted here, but a late-blossoming romance which quicky turned sour - and I don't really see what part the Bumbles have to play in the plot, unless one of them brained Marley, which admittedly would be something. All in all, though, Dickens's characters are recognisable, intelligently handled and excellently acted.

What about villains, then? Ah. Now we get down to it. There is a villain around - apart from Fagin and Scrooge - who pursues his plans with consummate skill and is mesmerisingly played by the remarkably handsome Tom Weston-Jones. The bad news is, it's Compeyson.

Yes, Compeyson, Dickens's least likeable villain ever. Worse than Sikes, who at least loved Nancy. Worse than Bounderby, who was just an idiot. Worse than Old Orlick who, though an oaf, did have a fraction of a case. Worse than seducer colleagues Steerforth and Harthouse, who had some sort of tender feelings, however fleeting, for the girls they were pursuing. One of my pet Dickens theories is that he deliberately kept Compeyson in the background as much as possible in Great Expectations and didn't give him any memorable lines - hardly any lines at all - so as to make it completely impossible for anyone to be charmed by the worm who blighted Miss Havisham's and Magwitch's lives. Yet a man who could seduce a bright lass like Miss H and convince a judge that he was a gentleman and deserved a lenient sentence must have had charm, and that's what we see in Dickensian.

So what's the problem - I'm a villain-lover, aren't I? Yes, but there's more to villain-loving than thinking a baddie is a bit of all right. It entails feeling affection and sympathy for the selected villain, rooting for him and seeing things from his point of view. It's impossible to do this with Compeyson, who is just as cruel and heartless in Dickensian as in Great Expectations, and has no excuse for his behaviour whatsoever. (Though it's interesting to see how the whole abandoning-on-wedding-day scenario wasn't part of the original plan at all, the original plan being somewhat hazy - I could write a whole separate post on the complicated sibling relationship between Amelia and her half-brother Arthur, and the even more complicated relationship between Arthur and Compeyson.) The result is a sort of villain-related cognitive dissonance where I have to acknowledge the hotness of Compeyson as played by Weston-Jones, while still finding him - Compeyson, that is - a despicable human being.

Hm, maybe non-villain-lovers have these sort of experiences quite often?