Matthew Shardlake, the hunchbacked lawyer and investigator living during the reign of Henry VIII, is back for a fourth innings in CJ Sansom’s new novel, Revelation (Macmillan). And what a pleasure it is to see him again. He is accompanied by his now regular sidekicks, his Jewish assistant Barak and the Moorish physician Guy. Through these characters, Sansom is able to give voice to views of the time that are outside, or at an angle to, the general social consensus.
Shardlake, for instance, was once a supporter of religious reform, but has been steadily losing his faith since the first novel (which took place during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries). This forms a key element in Revelation, where the religious wars are heating up once more, and Shardlake must hunt a serial killer who draws his inspiration from the last book of the Bible — in the same way as Jack the Ripper, in Charles van Onselen’s rendition, was fired up by Ezekiel.
The physician Guy is intrigued by a new work of medical science and questions the long-held views of the day on such things as bloodletting as a cure. This makes for an enjoyable subplot.
In this novel we now reach the last years of Henry VIII’s reign. He’s courting the woman who would become his sixth and final wife, Katherine Parr. Despite his reforms and schism with Rome, the king is tending back towards religious conservatism — while ever more “hot-gospellers” spew their violent rhetoric in the streets and churches.
The king has in his service both the reformist Archbishop Cranmer and the conservative heretic-seeking Bishop Bonner. Power struggles are afoot. Shardlake is called in by Cranmer to help solve a dire mystery that threatens to impinge on the monarchy itself.
The sense Sansom gives of life during these times is wonderfully rich and resonant; by comparison, the film about the same era now on our screens, The Other Boleyn Girl, is quite vapid and almost devoid of context. There may be a little too much coincidence or unlikely convergence in the plot of Revelation, but I found that forgivable.
Sansom, Shardlake and others also get a bit repetitive in their views of the Book of Revelation, but there is certainly a point to be made about religious fanaticism (in the 1500s as well as the 2000s), and maybe I just noted such repetitions only because I read the book as fast as I could. As with the previous Shardlake novels, I was barely able to put it down.