DISSOLUTION
CJ Sansom, Pan Books, US$11
The Shardlake novels – Dissolution, Dark Fire, Sovereign and Revelation – are relatively young for a crime series, yet old both in their setting (England in the 1540s) and their conformity to certain conventions of the crime genre. Our hero, Matthew Shardlake, is damaged physically, a hunchbacked lawyer, trained by priests but rejected – literally laughed out of the church when he articulates his aim to become a priest.
Instead, he arrives in London at the Inns of Court in 1518 “…already days of controversy, the common lawyers arguing against the spreading use of the Church courts” and by the 1520s, has been introduced to Thomas Cromwell. “And so, I was set on my future path, riding behind Cromwell, as he rose to supplant Wolsey and became the king’s secretary, commissioner general, vicar general, all the time keeping the full extent of his religious radicalism from his sovereign.”
In this first novel, Cromwell’s commissioner Robin Singleton has been murdered, so Shardlake is sent to investigate. What he quickly learns is that his support for Cromwell’s reforms now also makes him a party to rigged trials, a nationwide network of informers, oppression and the corruption of the pre-reformation church being replaced by more modern forms of exploitation as the lands of the church are appropriated by the “new men”.
The power of this first novel comes from the brilliantly recreated cold mid-winter in Scarnsea, Sussex, the monasteries fighting Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and Shardlake himself, a profoundly good and humble man who, nevertheless, is aware of the potential for evil in his actions.
It isn’t the most intricate of plots, though the whodunit aspect powers the novel through its 440 pages. Fans of quick-moving action may be disappointed, though there’s certainly plenty of blood and gore, as you’d expect in an age when capital punishment was inflicted on women and children.
And, of course, as you’d expect, the closing pages contain a teaser for the next Shardlake novel – Dark Fire. The series is also being filmed, with Kenneth Branagh in the role, although it’s going to take quite a lot of imagination to see him as a man who “could manage nothing more than a crab-like scuttle”. The description is from Shardlake himself, though, so perhaps he is too harsh on himself in this, as he is in moral matters. There are four of these novels so far, and there can’t be many who have read this first one alone.
