Death falls flat: P&P #6

Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James

So, my last two reviews were a little fluffy, and I'm happy to be reading and reviewing something with the gravitas, if you will, of a PD James mystery. I was looking forward to this, because I enjoy her mysteries. Sadly, I have to say that the whole thing left me feeling a bit flat.

Image source: goodreads.com

It has been six years since the events of P&P -- October 1803, to be precise. The night before the annual ball in honour of Lady Anne Darcy, Elizabeth is mostly concerned that Colonel Fitzwilliam, now no longer the younger son of an earl but next in line, is going to ask to propose to Georgiana, and she's not entirely happy about it, partly because she is unsure how Darcy will feel about it, partly because she thinks Georgiana might be in love with someone else. There is an awkward dinner and evening. Then Lydia unexpectedly arrives in a carriage, literally crying murder, and the game is afoot.

Except it's not, really. There's no real mystery, or at least, there is no detective work. By anybody. I mean, the clues to the mystery are there if you're paying attention, but the whole thing just plays out and is resolved by a bit of deus ex machina. I don't know; maybe I like my mysteries a little more active. This one is very subtle.

James captures Austen's style quite well to begin with. The wit and playfulness of the original make a brief appearance but then disappear quickly -- after an amusing prologue explaining the Lizzy/Darcy marriage from the POV of Meryton, the action shifts to Pemberley and the atmosphere becomes slightly oppressive. Elizabeth's disposition is not very lively, even before the murder. I was really looking forward to seeing her interactions with Darcy but they don't happen. We don't really get to see anyone's interactions with anybody. A lot of the story seems to be internal monologues, mostly Darcy's, which never really lead anywhere. I kept waiting for something, anything to happen... perhaps Darcy will be arrested, or Lydia will reveal something major, or Georgiana will do something, anything! But nope.

So as a detective story, it has nothing to recommend it. As a character study with a murder thrown in, it also has nothing to recommend it. Could it be viewed just as an interesting follow-up to the original, then?

Sequels are basically fan-fiction. With a publisher. And presumably an agent. The purpose of writing a sequel is to revisit known characters, and I can't really see why James bothered with P&P. Oh, there is some nice stuff in there with the secondary characters, but I feel most of it is thrown as "where are they now" instead of being important to the plot. Lady Catherine is still herself, in flashback at any rate.

"I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work."

All the bits with the Kent crowd are good. There's some nice stuff with Mr. Bennet and the library. None of it is particularly important to the story, but it was fun to read. But they were too few and far between. And the main characters are boring.

In addition, there are too many inconsistencies and down-right errors which kept pulling me out of the book. For example, James has Mary married to a curate near Pemberley and Kitty is unmarried at Longbourne, where Lydia and Wickham often visit. I would be okay with this, even though Austen herself said that Kitty married a curate near Pemberley and Mary married her uncle's clerk -- it's not canon unless it's in the book and according to John Green Austen's speculations shouldn't have any more weight than James's^* - but P&P specifically says that Kitty spends most of her time with her sisters and is kept from Lydia's influence and Mary stays at Longbourne. So this bothered me, but I was willing to let it pass because I was sure there was a good reason for James to go this way. Except there isn't. We don't even meet Mary in this book. Or Kitty. It was irritating.

Also irritating were wrong timelines. The one that nearly made me give up in disgust was Georgiana & Wickham's intended elopement eleven years before the current action. Which would make Georgiana eleven at the time. Ye gods.

But the most irritating thing for me was that James kept referring to the police all through the book; they shouldn't have moved the body until the police had seen it, the police searched the area, the police kept Wickham under guard, the police were questioning witnesses. The problem is there weren't any police in the early 1800s. The Bow Street Runners were in London only, and Metropolitan police didn't come into being until the 1820s. Drove me up a wall.

So all in all, is it worth the intellectual exercise? The book is best when revisiting the secondary characters, but I didn't care about anybody or the story and my overall feeling was meh. I'm still not sure what the point was. Very disappointing.


^*John Green likes fan-fiction, and will not tell people what happens to characters in his books afterwards. He says he has exactly the same access to the text as we do, so he doesn't know any more about what happens afterwards than we do, and he doesn't want to speculate because it would be given more weight, being the original author and all, but he feels our guess is as good as his. Fair enough.