Tombland by C. J. Sansom: A review

The year is 1549 and things are about to get very interesting in Tudor England. 

Henry VIII has been dead for two years. His son by his third wife, Jane Seymour, Edward VI, is now king. Edward is eleven years old and his uncle, Edward Seymour, rules as regent and Protector.

The Protector has pursued a prolonged and essentially senseless war against Scotland which has led to economic collapse with hyperinflation which makes life even more difficult than usual for the poor. Moreover, after three good harvest years, 1549 threatens to be a very lean year in the countryside. The peasants are restless and rebellion is brewing.

In London, lawyer Matthew Shardlake continues to pursue his profession, now with his assistant Nicholas. Shardlake had been employed by various members of the Tudor regime over the years, lastly by Henry's sixth wife, Catherine Parr. Now his services are utilized by the Lady Elizabeth, Henry's younger daughter by Ann Boleyn, who is fifteen years old. Elizabeth's older sister, Mary, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, is thirty-three.  

Shardlake is called to an audience with Elizabeth concerning a murder in Norwich. A woman named Edith Boleyn had been found murdered there in gruesome circumstances. Elizabeth had belatedly learned that the woman had approached her household seeking help but she had never been informed. Now the woman has been murdered and suspicion has fallen on her husband, John, who is a distant relative of Elizabeth's. She engages Shardlake to travel to Norwich to investigate the situation and ensure that justice is done and, if her kinsman should be found guilty of murder, she instructs Shardlake to request a pardon from the king.

By the time Shardlake and Nicholas arrive in Norwich, the restlessness of the peasants has found expression in open rebellion.  Thousands have banded together under the leadership of Robert Kett and have established a camp on Mousehold Heath from which they issue requests for redress of their grievances. They rely upon the honor of the Protector and the king to deal honorably with them. Inevitably, Shardlake and Nicholas are caught up in this rebellion and in Norwich, they meet another friend: Jack Barak, Shardlake's assistant and friend for many years, is there working for the Court of Assizes.

The major part of the narrative of Sansom's book deals with what is known as Kett's Rebellion. It was only one of many such peasant rebellions that broke out around the country in the summer of 1549, but it was one of the largest. Sansom's extensive research shows in the minutely detailed descriptions of the growth of this camp, its organization, and Robert Kett's insistence on maintaining the forms of legality and his refusal to allow executions in the camp. Shardlake is drafted against his will as an advisor on the law as Kett dispenses justice. Meantime, Shardlake and Nicholas are still pursuing their investigation of the Boleyn matter and trying to ensure that John Boleyn is not hanged. 

Sansom excels in his descriptions of the living conditions and social mores of the times. Those descriptions of the mud, the blood, the screams of the wounded, the rotting bodies, the shit, the flies, and the rats on the battlefields and on the streets and alleys of Norwich were enough to turn my stomach at times. But it was impossible to turn away from it. The aim of historical fiction, after all, is to transport the reader back to that time and give her a sense of what it was like to be alive then. Sansom does that very well. This book is well over 800 pages and it took me a week and a half of determined reading to get through it, but it was worth it.

That being said, I think the book might have been even better with a bit tighter editing. The transitions between the investigation of the death of Edith Boleyn and the rebellion on Mousehold Heath seemed rather disjointed at times. And I was utterly chagrined to find Sansom committing the capital grammatical offense of repeatedly misusing the pronoun "I" as the object of verbs and prepositions, as in "He gave the statement to Nicholas and I." Really, C.J.? How standards have fallen! Mrs. Rubenstein, my high school English teacher, would be appalled and I am appalled on her behalf.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom: A review

Lamentation by C.J. Sansom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last previous book in C.J.Sansom's excellent series set in the Tudor era in England was called Heartstone and was published in 2010. Thus, I have been waiting impatiently for almost five years for the next entry in the series. I'm delighted to say that it was worth the wait.

Lamentation is the sixth book in the series and it takes us to the end of the long and eventful reign of Henry VIII. The year is 1546 and Henry is slowly and painfully dying. It is a time of fear in the realm because of the hunt for heretics. If they are found, they are doomed to a ghastly death.

The religious struggle is between those who believe in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Holy Eucharist - that the bread and wine literally turn into the body and blood of Christ - and those who do not believe that, and those who do not believe are considered the heretics. Around the throne, Henry's Protestant and Catholic councillors are engaged in a deadly struggle for power. Whichever side wins that struggle will control the government for the present and probably for the future when Henry is gone from the scene.

Henry's wife at this time, his sixth, is Catherine Parr, a Protestant. She becomes a focus of the religious struggle as Catholics seek to create a breach in the relationship between the king and queen. They fear her influence on the man.

Catherine, for her part, has played into her enemy's hands, providing them with a weapon against her. She has written a manuscript entitled Lamentation of a Sinner. It is a radical and incendiary document, which, if it came to the king's attention, could be the ruin of the queen and those who support her.

But the king doesn't know about the manuscript because the queen has kept it secret, locked away in a strong box in her bed chamber. Then, inexplicably, the manuscript is found to be missing. Someone has managed to steal it. If it falls into the wrong hands, the queen may be doomed.

The queen and her chief supporter, her uncle, reach out to an old admirer of the queen's to help them solve the mystery of the theft and recover the manuscript. The shrewd hunchbacked lawyer, Matthew Shardlake, is called to the court and given his assignment: Find the manuscript. Contain the potential disaster. Save the queen.

Shardlake takes on the mission willingly.

After one page of the manuscript is found, clutched in the hand of a murdered printer, he investigates the man's murder, which ultimately leads him to uncover a group of Anabaptists, who want to do away with government and society as presently constituted, and practice Christianity as it was at its beginnings, with all goods and property held in common and shared equally. One by one, other members of that group turn up dead, murdered. But Shardlake is no closer to finding the manuscript.

Meantime, Shardlake's practice of law continues with his other cases, one of which involves a family dispute so charged with hatred that it threatens to consume all the parties involved.

Shardlake, realizing that he needs help in fulfilling his assignment for the queen, asks his young apprentice, Nicholas, and his long-time assistant, Jack Barak, to assist him. But will that be enough to deal with the forces that are arrayed against him?

As always, Matthew Shardlake is the humane center of a story that otherwise is peopled by characters who practice unthinking cruelty in the name of political expediency. Through his eyes, we see the people of 1546 England, both high and low - those who struggle for mere survival and those who float through life blissfully unaware of any struggle, except the struggle to climb the ladder of influence in the king's inner circle. It is a chilling, meticulously researched portrayal of life as it was lived in that society and, unfortunately, it has some sad parallels to our own modern society.

C.J. Sansom's prose draws the reader inexorably into this tale and makes one feel a part of it. It's a book that is very hard to put down, even when one has read the last sentence, in which we find Shardlake being carried downriver by barge on his way to a new assignment, this time for the Lady Elizabeth, described as "the least important of the King's children."

And now the waiting begins for the next installment in this fascinating series. Perhaps we will meet that "least important" child again.


View all my reviews

Heartstone by C.J. Sansom: A review

I admit it. I am a mystery series junkie. I enjoy nothing better than discovering a well-written mystery series with sympathetic characters that I can care about. I love following the development of the series and the characters. If it happens to be a historical mystery, then I have truly found nirvana. I might just OD.

Probably my favorite mystery series at the moment, and it does just happen to be historical, is C.J.Sansom's Tudor mysteries featuring the hunchback lawyer/detective Matthew Shardlake. Part way through the series Shardlake was joined by an assistant, Jack Barak. The two of them together make a very effective team, a team which exhibits a humanistic philosophy in what is, in many ways, the very inhumane society that was Henry XIII's England of the mid-1500s.

Heartstone is the fifth book in the series and is one of the best. Of course, I think I say that about them all.

In this entry, we are nearing the end of Henry's reign. He is conducting a war of choice against France, a war that has financially devastated his country and caused the devaluation of the currency. It has also devastated the population with thousands of unnecessary deaths and disabling injuries. Still, Henry continues to draft more men into his army and navy, even hiring mercenaries from other countries to help fight his ill-conceived war. Much of this seems very relevant to our own recent history.

Henry's current wife is Catherine Parr who has been a friend to Shardlake, and he to her in the past. Now she sends for him and asks him to pursue a court case that had been initiated by a tutor against a former employer who he believed was mistreating and robbing his two rich wards. The tutor, who subsequently committed suicide under mysterious circumstances, was the much-loved son of a former servant of Catherine Parr. She and her former servant seek justice for the young man.

(As an aside, when Shardlake goes to meet with the queen, he meets the king's daughter, Elizabeth, who impresses him greatly. Foreshadowing, perhaps?)

Accepting the assignment will take Shardlake and Barak into the very teeth of what appears to be a planned French invasion of England at Portsmouth. They must travel some tortuous roads which are already clogged with military personnel and supplies also trying to get to Portsmouth. Along the way, Shardlake sees the misery and hardships of the recently conscripted soldiers and he sees the struggles and heartaches of the citizens whose labors are financing a foolish king's prideful venture.

While in the area, Shardlake plans to investigate another case, that of Ellen Fettiplace, a woman inmate of Bedlam whom he has befriended. Something happened to her nineteen years before that unhinged her mind and left her unable to face the world. Shardlake, that inveterate righter of wrongs, wants to find out what it was and free Ellen from the fear which has entrapped her.

Meantime, all Barak wants is to avoid being conscripted into the army and to get home as soon as possible to his beloved Tamasin who is expecting their child.

The plot with all its intermingled mysteries is too richly drawn to do any real justice to it in a brief review. Sansom, who is a lawyer with a Ph.D. in history, knows this period. The book is rigorously researched and the real-life characters that appear in it stay true to their historical facts of life. It is a big book with plenty of rousing fictional adventures, but it remains true throughout to its time and place. It is a very satisfying read.

And yet...

There is one quibble that I have with this book that just sets my teeth on edge! Throughout, Sansom, the lawyer and Ph.D, continually uses subjective pronouns as objects, as in "The red-faced soldier cursed Barak and I." Barak and I. Really? Does Viking have no editors? Have the rules of English grammar really changed so much since my elementary school days of diagramming sentences? Do children even diagram sentences any more? Would Sansom really write "The red-faced soldier cursed I?" Somehow I don't think so. Why then would he write "Barak and I" in that same context?

The misuse of subjective pronouns really is my absolute pet peeve in grammar, enough so that it caused me to give this five-star book only four stars. Please do better next time, Dr. Sansom!