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LAMENTATION
by C.J. Sansom
Random House Canada, February 2015
656 pages
$34.95 CAD
ISBN: 0345815424


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The year is 1546 and England is in an uneasy state. The recent war with France has brought the country close to bankruptcy and even the coins are being debased. The King now sports a coppery nose as the silver coating wears away to reveal the cheaper metal beneath. Although the country did not fall to a French invasion the previous year, it was still shaken by the sinking of the Mary Rose, a disaster from which Shardlake just barely escaped. The hunchbacked lawyer would prefer to be left alone to look after his legal practice, but he has spent too much time too close to those in high places and made some powerful enemies along the way to be permitted a peaceful obscurity.

Religion, however, is the most immediate threat to a peaceful life. Henry split with Rome fifteen years before, but the final direction of the Church in England is still not fixed. The traditionalists hope to steer a course back to Rome and indeed a papal emissary will secretly arrive to try to negotiate a rapprochement with Henry. The reformers, some radical indeed, others more moderate, will do everything in their power to prevent a return to the old faith. Henry, meanwhile, is tacking between the two sides, making it difficult for those whose religion is more a matter of politics than faith to figure out where to go. The safe position is the repeated avowal, "I worship as the King commands."

LAMENTATION is the sixth in C.J. Sansom's extraordinary series spanning roughly the last ten years in the reign of Henry VIII and featuring Matthew Shardlake, a lawyer with a crooked back and a nose for trouble. In DISSOLUTION, the first of his appearances, he was a religious reformer in the service of Thomas Cromwell, convinced of the rottenness of the old church and hopeful of the new. But even then, even before Cromwell came to grief, he was beginning to doubt not merely the rightness of his cause, but the very possibility of reform. In company with other young reformers, he "had once believed with Erasmus that faith and charity would be enough to settle religious differences between men," but already political advantage, greed, and rebellion were the order of the day. Almost ten years later, he has seen little to restore his faith and much that has undermined his belief in religion and even the existence of God. Not, of course, that he is foolish enough to express his doubts where anyone might hear him.

For this is a time of heresy hunting, of seeking out those who appear to ally themselves with the radical religious reformers who would, it is said, level society, and, in overthrowing the remnants of old Catholic observance and belief, obliterate caste and class and perhaps the monarchy itself. The most dangerous heresy is to question the Mystery of the Mass - the traditionalist belief that the body and blood of Christ is literally present in the consecrated communion host. Sansom provides a stunning description of precisely what fate awaits those who persist in denying the doctrine. Mistress Anne Askew has done just that and is scheduled to burn at the stake in the company of several other like-minded persons. Shardlake is required to attend, though he would very much wish to be elsewhere.

The event Sansom describes is based in fact but it is central to the fiction that follows. Anne was said to have been illegally tortured after her conviction, stretched on a rack that was turned by Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and Shardlake's old enemy Sir Richard Rich themselves. It was not an excess of religious zeal that motivated these two, but a desire to bring down Henry's current wife, Catherine Parr, long rumoured to be a religious reformer. Before she died, Anne Askew had smuggled out an account of her torture, a manuscript now missing but potential political dynamite. Another manuscript, also missing, is one written by Queen Catherine herself, the Lamentation of the title, in which she expresses her shortcomings as a Christian and her desire for salvation. Her deep fear is that her husband will find out that she has written it in secret and, in his present unstable physical and mental condition, decide she is, like others of his previous wives, guilty of treason.

Thus Shardlake is commissioned to find out who has the manuscript and retrieve it, a task which leads him into various back alleys and clandestine meetings. Sansom brilliantly leads us on a tour of the various social layers of London society, from the highest at Whitehall to middle-class lawyers and tradesmen, to early printers, to the depths of the stinking slums. Of all his many strengths as an author of historical fiction, it is this ability to animate the life lived by the ordinary and extraordinary people of the past that puts Sansom at the top of the heap. He never lectures us; he never provides one word more of explanation than we need. He merely transports us back more than five hundred years and allows to believe for a time that we actually share the streets of Tudor London with Shardlake, his allies and his enemies.

As the series has progressed, Sansom's technical mastery has strengthened. Although this book weighs in at over six hundred pages, it never flags, even though there is far less violent action than we might expect from a period in which every gentleman might carry a sword and was quick to defend his honour against any slight, real or perceived. It is the carefully managed pace of the narrative that carries the reader from chapter to chapter, not artificially generated suspense. As a result, when the climax is reached in a burst of horrifying violence that caused me to close my eyes for a moment before going on, it is absolutely devastating.

When I read the previous book, HEARTSTONE, I thought it was both the best and the saddest of the series. LAMENTATION is better and sadder. At the end, Shardlake has lost pretty much everything he had to lose. He will lose even his position as Serjeant at the Court of Requests as one of his oldest enemies is about to become Lord Chancellor and thus the head of the legal profession. Shardlake has silently but faithfully maintained his love for Catherine Parr over the years, knowing all the time that it is a doomed cause. But now with the death of the King, Catherine seems destined for another and he is too much a realist to maintain the illusion of hope. Shardlake believes he has failed his friends and some of them at least feel he is right. He is now only in his mid-forties but he is already playing with the idea of a quiet retirement to the country, turning his back finally on all the intrigue, all the excitement, all of the action that he has both courted and deplored.

Sansom opens up a possible future direction at the very end and I profoundly hope that Shardlake will return to pursue it. At the moment, he is not optimistic as he huddles against the February chill, heading down the river to pledge himself to Elizabeth, "the least important of the King's children." Elizabeth may be only thirteen, far from the throne, and destined for an early marriage, but she is, after all, the daughter of a king. Shardlake may find that his future has not been narrowed to property law after all.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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