Back to Pemberley

Lead review

Pemberley, Jane Austen fans will recall, is the large Derbyshire estate owned by Fitzwilliam Darcy, who weds Elizabeth Bennet at the end of Pride and Prejudice, and in Death Comes to Pemberley, P D James’s surprising new sequel to that novel, it becomes the scene of a murder.

The story is set in 1803, six years after Pride and Prejudice was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place.

They have two young sons now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. But their tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected carriage comes rocketing up the drive.

Inside is Elizabeth’s airhead sister Lydia, the one who eloped with the charming but unreliable George Wickham, screaming that her husband is dead. Actually he isn’t, though many, including Darcy, for whom Wickham is a constant source of embarrassment and irritation, might wish he were.

A search party discovers Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodstained, beside the body of his best friend, Captain Denny, and he babbles what sounds like a confession. But, is Wickham, although a deadbeat and a serial seducer of young women, really a murderer? Even Darcy can’t quite believe that of him.

James, 91 and the author of 20 previous books, is the greatest living writer of British crime fiction, and probably that genre’s most talented practitioner ever. It’s hard to imagine any of her predecessors — like Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Julian Symons or even Agatha Christie, who for all her plotting skills was not much of a prose stylist — having the nerve to attempt an Austen sequel, let alone the ability to pull it off.

The style of Death Comes to Pemberley is a loose approximation of 19th century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a painstaking imitation. But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note.

The prologue remarks, for example: “A family of five unmarried daughters is sure of attracting the sympathetic concern of all their neighbours, particularly where other diversions are few.” And the odious Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s aunt, makes a characteristic appearance, declaring, “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.”

James cleverly weaves in references to both Emma and Persuasion in a way that expands the world of her novel, and Death Comes to Pemberley also has a descriptive density greater than any of Austen’s books. Austen could take the 19th century, its customs and culture, for granted. James very satisfyingly recreates them.

If the novel has a weakness, oddly, it’s the mystery, which by James’s standards is pretty tame and uncomplicated. There is no detective work to speak of, because in those days there were no real police. The crime is investigated by local magistrates, of whom Darcy is one, and he has to recuse himself because of his known dislike of Wickham and because the crime happened on his property.

Needless to say, there is no forensic lab. (“I take it,” a magistrate asks a doctor called in to advise on the case, “that your clever scientific colleagues have not yet found a way of distinguishing one man’s blood from another?” )

So the mystery more or less solves itself at a local inquest and a subsequent trial at the Old Bailey, with the help of some last-minute revelations, including a letter dictated by one character on his deathbed.

The whole plot feels more like an invention by Wilkie Collins, a writer James admires and may even be trying to imitate here, on grounds of historical appropriateness, than the kind of dark, intricate investigation that her favourite detective, Adam Dalgliesh, typically finds himself involved in.

The other surprise in Death Comes to Pemberley is that marriage has made Elizabeth Bennet, Austen’s smartest, sharpest-tongued and most beloved character, a little dull. Apparently weighed down by her responsibilities as chatelaine of Pemberley — the need to keep up appearances and propriety — she’s become earnest and dutiful, seldom speaking her mind.

And though the novel keeps insisting on how much she and Darcy are in love, they get little chance to show it. Each is so involved in his or her own sphere, and so solicitous of intruding on the other, that they have to make appointments to have a conversation.

Darcy, on the other hand, who in Pride and Prejudice is figure stiff, priggish and remote, mostly interesting for his fortune, is here enlarged and given a surprising inner life. He’s not Dalgliesh, exactly — he’s far less brainy — but they have an observant, brooding quality in common, and the amount of attention James devotes to him is a reminder that her strongest, most interesting characters have usually been male.

Her Darcy is full of self-doubt and self-recrimination, constantly examining his conscience with regard to Wickham and even returning in his mind several times to the subject of his own marriage.

That he made the right choice in marrying Elizabeth he has no doubt, but even so, he can’t help reminding himself that “he had married in defiance of every principle which from childhood had ruled his life, every conviction of what was owed to the memory of his parents, to Pemberley and to the responsibility of class and wealth.”

Pemberley, which the novel suggests, is like any great estate in having a continuing life, regardless of who happens to hold the title, turns out to be a burden more than the blessing it first appears to Elizabeth (and even more so to her grasping mother). With a great fortune, it turns out, comes great responsibility.

The most original invention in Death Comes to Pemberley is Darcy’s great-grandfather, an eccentric but not unsympathetic character who couldn’t stand the pressure of being lord of the manor and went to live alone in the woods with his dog.