Death Comes to Pemberley by PD James (Faber)
PD James has previously expressed her great admiration for Jane Austen. Now she has gone the whole hog and written an Austen pastiche, picking up the story of Elizabeth and Darcy, who met and fell in love, after some difficulties, in Pride and Prejudice.
Set six years after the end of that novel, Death Comes to Pemberley has Elizabeth and Darcy happily married, with two young sons. As well as providing such dynastic security, Elizabeth has fully become mistress of Pemberley, the great country home inherited by the aristocratic Darcy; as the novel opens she is preparing for the grand annual ball the locals expect of this, the leading family of the area.
Elizabeth’s serenity is troubled only by a possible marriage offer to Darcy’s sister — precisely the kind of thing around which Austen novels are built.
But a more serious disturbance soon occurs, as it must if this is to be a PD James novel and not just a retread of Austen. Elizabeth’s wayward sister Lydia arrives, hysterical, at Pemberley; she fears her disgraced husband, Wickham, dead. He isn’t, but after some investigation he will prove to be the prime suspect in a grisly murder. And so we are thrust deep into PD James territory, and although the faultless recreation of Austen’s cool, sly prose continues, we are surely not in Austenland any more.
Death Comes to Pemberley works as a pastiche of Austen (surely more convincingly than, say, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), but it is not the detective story it claims to be. It is a murder mystery, certainly, but a detective story has at least to have a detective, whereas here there is no single character who fills that role. The local magistrate, Sir Selwyn Hardcastle, is an enjoyably crusty figure, but he doesn’t last beyond his initial investigation of the crime.
Moreover, the way the mystery is constructed and finally unravelled provides none of the satisfaction of the classic detective story. Clues that the reader may conceivably be able to work out or add up are barely offered, and there is no clear through-line in the development of the mystery.
Basically, part one sets it up, part two complicates and delays matters, and then part three offers both a deus exmachina climax and a rush of detailed explanation, placed in the mouths of characters to whose thoughts we have previously not been privy. This has more in common with a Wilkie Collins “novel of sensation”, say, than one of James’s Adam Dalgliesh mysteries.
Also, James perhaps presumes too great a familiarity with Pride and Prejudice: readers like me, who are more James fans than Austen fans, may find themselves muddling their Bingleys and their Bidwells. Still, aside from the desire for a tightly constructed mystery, Dame PD’s new novel is much to be enjoyed for its prose, its leisurely insights and its cunning wit.