C J Sansom – Dissolution

My friend Sara recommended this to me by saying ‘you’ll never be able to read Wolf Hall in the same way again, because you’ll keep expecting Matthew Shardlake to mysteriously pop up next to Cromwell’. She later added ‘he has strange feelings about people, like us’.

Yes, I do often have strange feelings about people, but my feelings about Shardlake are entirely good. My first response: WHOOP, a crime-fighting monk, you can never have enough of those. I also had a whole mini-daydream about how Royal Wedding security would be much improved if entirely comprised of a crime-fighting monk-squad.

(Advanced pregnancy will give you too much time on your hands AND a tendency to elaborate and ludicrous daydreams, my friends. Be ye warned).

BUT NO. The wheels of my brain were whirring in the wrong direction.

Shardlake is not a crime fighting monk, because these are Tudor times. Monks are not holy and pious and handy with their policing; they are greedy and corrupt and represent Satan/the Pope. Even when they are not, people have to pretend they are because the pesky monks have spectacularly fallen out with Henry the Eighth owing to their stubborn refusal to just do what he bloody well says.

One den of iniquity is worse than most, because Cromwell sent off one of his Special Investigatey Snoopers to see what they had been up to and he has been murdered most horribly in a Satanic ritual. Bad monks. Cromwell assigns diligent and secretly-sad Matthew Shardlake to solve the mystery and clean up the mess before Henry finds out and rains down hell fire on all the monks.

The beauty of this book is not really in the murder-mystery, which is interesting enough, but ultimately has a blindingly obvious solution. It’s the character of Shardlake and the broader issues of Monks vs Kings.

Shardlake is not a super-human crime-fighting deduction-machine like Poirot. In fact, he often barks up the wrong evil monk tree, and has to climb down again sharpish. He also has a handy apprentice, Mark, who serves a triple purpose:
1) the Dr Watson-like incompetent enabling Shardlake to patiently explain his theories;
2) generic English Everyman so that we can see what the fate of Such People was like under Henry;
3) Attractive Buff Alternative Hero, so that we get to see Shardlake’s human side. Underneath his lawyerly exterior he is seething with needing to be loved, and very jealous of Mark and his luck with The Ladies.

The beginning is a bit irritating, because there is a lot of ground-work laying for people who do not know their Tudors and have not read Philippa Gregory (are there any of of those people?) The author also has a tendency to have a HUGELY OVERDRAMATIC CLIFF HANGER at the end of a chapter which is then immediately and anti-climatically resolved three sentences later. ARGH there is another dead body! Oh no, someone has just fallen down. ARGH someone is screaming! Oh no, they have just shut themselves in the cupboard. Umm, it’s ok, dude. I’m going to keep reading. No need to go over the top.

But overall, I say fabulous. Samson uses words like ‘malapert’ and ‘noddle’ which I just don’t get to read often enough. (Actually, having found these words in his Tudor dictionary, he perhaps slightly overuses them, but who am I to deny him this linguistic fun). It can be tricky sometimes to keep up with which evil monk is which, but helpfully there is a cut out and keep reference guide to the various evil monks at the beginning which came in handy. And Sara is right, I will be highly upset if Shardlake does not turn up in the Wolf Hall sequel.

In the meantime, there are many other Shardlake books. Surely someone must be adapting it for TV? Because crime + Tudors = win.