A new start!

One of my many New Year resolutions is to restart this blog and from now on update it more than once annually! So...

My first read of the year was C.J. Sansom's 'Sovereign', the third in his series of crime novels set during the dramatic late years of Henry VIII's reign and narrated by the hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake, who once again is pulled against his will into all sorts of political shenanigans.

I haven't read many crime genre novels but was attracted to the Shardlake series because of the historical setting. All English schoolchildren learn about Henry VIII, of course: the six wives are what first leap to mind, but his reign really was a significant one with the break from Rome and the beginnings of the modern state. I studied this fascinating period for two years when I took A-Level History and have since remained very interested in fat old Henry.

So I delved into Sansom's first in the series, 'Dissolution', a couple of Christmases ago and was amply rewarded with a great tale of murder and intrigue as Shardlake is tasked by Thomas Cromwell to investigate the killing of a royal commissioner sent to a Sussex monastery to total up just how much money the king would make out of the place upon its imminent destruction. The book reminded me of Umberto Eco's 'The Name Of The Rose', minus the heavy philosophizing but with heaps of historical detail, solid characterisations and a nice twisty plot. I now treat myself to a new instalment around every Christmas/New Year period. There are two more in the series and by the time I get to part five, 'Heartstone', in a couple of years I expect the sixth will have been published!

'Sovereign' was a pleasurable read. In brief, it is 1541 and Shardlake has been sent by Archbishop Cranmer to York to help arbitrate petitions to the king, who is travelling to the North with an enormous retinue to overawe the Yorkshire populace as they had recently risen up against him in protest at the vast religious changes sweeping the kingdom. Much is made of the contrasts between south and north Tudor England, which back then were almost like two separate countries. The people of York feel neglected by Henry and the atmosphere is explosive. Shardlake's other duty is to ensure the good health of a political prisoner, due to be transported to the Tower of London to be tortured into revealing details of the recent conspiracy. Things become even more complicated when a glazier removing stained glass windows from the dissolved city abbey dies a horrible death and Shardlake finds out more than he wanted to know about the king's true ancestry.

The novel is very cleverly plotted, full of juicy thrills, the usual excellent historical background and some great characters. However, it didn't always warrant its 650 pages. At times it plodded along with too much extraneous detail and repetitive, expository dialogue. Sansom must have wanted to make sure the reader understood the complicated family tree of the Tudors but at times his obviously wide historical knowledge didn't quite integrate with the flow of the storytelling and so in parts the book became heavy-handed. The last parts dragged somewhat, though a scene in the dungeons of the Tower was really gripping. The novel could have done with some closer proof-reading. For example, there was one point when Shardlake said he had no time to put on his cloak, having risen early from bed to attend to some emergency, but on the next page he lifted his cloak to ensure it didn't trail in the mud! Still, though Sansom won't ever be feted for the quality of his prose on a sentence-by-sentence basis, he certainly knows a lot about the mechanics of whodunit plot. All in all, a fun way to start my reading in 2011.

I've decided to continue my immersion in the Tudor world by finally getting around to reading Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall', which won the 2009 Man Booker prize and is about the life of Thomas Cromwell, portraying him not as the brutal enforcer he is usually seen as but as a fully-rounded, sympathetically rendered human being. I'm 150 pages in so far and as well as being magnificent it's an interesting contrast to Sansom's series. The setting's the same and both authors are good at conjuring up the period, but it's clear that Mantel is a great writer of literature as opposed to 'just' a genre author. It's an absolute delight so far and difficult to put down. More details soon.