Karishma Attari

By P.D. James

Rs 499

P.D. James opens her sequel to Pride and Prejudice five years into the Darcys’ wedded bliss, and with a firecracker of a suggestion — a death at Pemberley. Murder most foul in one of England’s finest country houses? How will Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy cope with this calamity — and that it should involve Elizabeth’s unfortunate younger sister Lydia and her infamous husband Wickham just adds more powder to the potential pyrotechnics.

That’s quite an opening that James blasts through the 200-year-old uncontested classic. P.D. James is by no means small fish; she’s been writing her celebrated detective fiction for well over half a century. So when she merges a comedy of manners with the detective fiction genre, there’s bound to be some anticipatory hand-rubbing amongst her fans.
Unfortunately, despite dispensing with most of her need-to-know in the prologue, she spends much of the novel recapitulating the finer points of Pride and Prejudice. That is the first misstep — nearly everyone who reads P.D. James has read Pride and Prejudice, and for those who haven’t, it matters little what the backstory was, so long as the sequel has a new story to offer. Except that, in this case, it doesn’t: Death Comes to Pemberley crashes under the weight of Pride and Prejudice. What should be a quick recap of character relationships becomes the stuff of the novel. Darcy and Elizabeth are married but their equanimity is threatened in the form of Wickham, and Henry Alveston — both of whom nearly turned Elizabeth’s head before she fell in love with Darcy. Now that both these gents are back in Pemberley, James could have livened up the game a little, but favours conciliatory speechifying instead. Eldest sister Jane is agreeably married to Darcy’s friend Bingley and the rest of the Bennet sisters make no appearance, neither do Elizabeth’s two young sons who spend the duration of the novel being “handsome” and “healthy” in the
nursery.
Elizabeth, one of the more interesting literary heroines, adored for her candour and wit, is reduced to being as dull as her partner, who makes stilted speeches with no alteration whether he is speaking to his wife, his sworn enemy, or a lawyer. James is so intent on mirroring the rhythms of their speech in Pride and Prejudice that she cannot revive their spirit. Almost every conversation, even those between the Darcys at their finest hour, sounds conventional and unconvincing. Elizabeth, for example, says “We are neither of us the people we were then. Let us look on the past only as it gives us pleasure, and to the future with confidence and hope.”
How much more fun it would be if James were to re-invent Darcy or at least consider him through fresh 21st-century eyes? Darcy’s social awkwardness, for example. Don’t we have a name and justification for people who are socially challenged today? There is a bit role for Georgina, Darcy’s sister who challenges chauvinist assumptions, but she is no substitute for a real heroine. Instead, Elizabeth, the only woman for the job, arranges balls and writes letters, and Darcy is dutiful to a fault. Hope rests with Lydia and Wickham, grey characters who live outside the norms of society. Lydia arrives shrieking bloody murder in a carriage on a dark and stormy night, and Wickham is found with blood on his hands kneeling over his friend’s body in the estate. But the only freely speaking characters are almost immediately sidelined when the machinery of justice rolls out.
The novel is divided into six books but it’s hard to get any sense of movement. The police investigation, inquest and trial are hardly engaging, and do little to work up to a climax. This was a time without forensics, so to determine whose blood was on the hands of the accused, or even the time or object of murder with any conclusiveness, must have been a result of ingenuous deliberation and guesswork. Yet for a detective novelist, James pays little attention to making the actual detecting of the mystery exciting. There are various matters related to court proceedings, and then a completely unlikely event turns everything around at the end.
Jane Austen’s novels end with wedding bells, and P.D. James also restores us to a kind of status quo, a wholesome equilibrium. Where Austen was puppet master of a swan-dance between the sexes and classes, James comes to Pemberley only to be overwhelmed by her literary predecessor. The result of an uninspired union between a comedy of manners, and a murder mystery, Death Comes to Pemberley misses both the wit and the suspense that might have made it readable.