Echoes of old grace

Book Title: Death comes to Pemberley

Author: P.D. James

Publisher: Faber

Pages:

Price: Rs 499

It is a rare writer who deliberately enters the world of Pride and Prejudice as it could be six years after Elizabeth and Darcy were married. P.D. James is both rare and stylish, and Death Comes to Pemberley is a surprise package for both Jane Austen devotees and James fans.

It is a detective story set in the beautiful, sprawling estates of Darcy’s Pemberley, in which Elizabeth and Jane, Darcy and Bingley, Wickham and Lydia, Mr Bennet, Mr and Mrs Gardiner, Darcy’s sister, even Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mary — trailing a new pastor husband — all come alive again. The supporting cast, of course, is new, and there are a number of new developments in relationships that are inevitable, else the fresh lease of life in the fictional future would flicker out and the new plot never get off the ground.James is wisely content with giving her readers a strong echo of Austen’s voice, without overdoing the mimicry. She concentrates instead on conversation, manners, details of houses and roads, habits and actions, and the sketchy criminal law system to evoke the world Austen depicted.

James’s Pemberley, torn by violence and murder, is far from the sunny expanse of visible grace that Elizabeth saw when she first arrived.

But it is not the sombre mood alone that creates the difference. Austen’s oeuvre could well accommodate sombreness, fear, shame, intrigue and all the dark angels — with comedy always just a phrase away. Without the profoundly seeing comic eye and the crystal pen recording its observations as though just below the surface, some parts of Austen’s tales may have run the risk of falling flat as James’s does.

“It was generally agreed by the female residents of Meryton,” opens the novel, “that Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn had been fortunate in the disposal in marriage of four of their five daughters.” It is useless to look for the mischievous irony and laughing wit that made the original of the echo comically piercing. The hope of such pleasures must be abandoned at the outset.

James could have redeemed the stodginess with a scintillating mystery, the kind in which she is supreme. She is also among the writers best placed to make the solving of a murder in 1803 credible, for she and T.A. Critchley had discussed the evolution of policing in England in the early 19th century in The Maul and the Pear-Tree. Maybe it is the lack of method and system that causes the unravelling of the mystery — after the wrong man has been convicted, but, fortunately, not sentenced — to turn on a deathbed confession. That is followed by explanations and confessions by other characters to fill in the blanks. We miss the emergence of an original detective brain (I had hopes of Elizabeth).

Plot is, of course, another name for artifice, but an artifice is no fun if its joints creak. And James’s plot creaks like an arthritic Victorian lady as it carries the reader down its convoluted course to a wishful ending. Darcy, Fitzwilliam and Wickham try to reveal new depths and fail resoundingly. Austen’s spirit is elusive. Maybe that is why James’s most Austenian moments turn into dry exercises in style.

REVIEWER: BHASWATI CHAKRAVORTY

Published on March 16, 2012

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120316/jsp/northeast/story_15257233.jsp#.T4y1E4G-bCM