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Being in a generous mood I offer two reviews for the price of one. First let us suppose that you have never heard of Jane Austen, that you have never read MANSFIELD PARK, or seen one of its screen adaptations: let us, in fact, treat MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK as a straight-forward historical mystery. How does it fare? The plain answer is not very well. Mystery readers would certainly consider the lead-in to the murder - 160 pages - over-long. The plotting is below average and the final revelation of the murderer unsurprising. Characterisation is semi-amusing in places, but never rises above the two-dimensional. There is little of any real historical interest and the romance hardly catches fire. On the positive side the book is readable in a passing-the-time manner. There is one (one!) reasonable anachronistic joke. The one jarring note, the detective's brutality, is interesting but seems to be morally condoned, or at least is avoided, by happening 'off-page'. A critical verdict on the book viewed in this light (as a historical mystery with no reference to anything else) would be that it has little to make it stand out in a very crowded market-place. Of course my first review is so much nonsense. This book is sold and packaged on the back of the Jane Austen industry. We have had Austen and vampires, why not Austen and murder? In fact it is an absolutely prime example of the use of 'marquee' names (and Austen is the 'marquee name' supreme) to sell books. Shepherd's method is not to use Austen as a detective, but to re-write one of her books and turn it into a historical mystery. In doing so she completely alters the characters and story-lines of the original novel. The question is how should the reviewer treat this endeavour? My own answer is that if a writer embarks on such a book, then it is perfectly fair that they be judged in comparison with the original, and the question be asked as to whether their book is mere exploitation or whether it offers something interesting in terms of comment, development or observation? And let me say at once that this can be done within the mystery genre. Reginald Hill did so in a brilliant manner with SANDITON in A CURE FOR ALL DISEASES. That however was an extremely clever updating of a novel of which only a fragment survives. MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK is a rewriting of one of Austen's mature masterpieces. As such the comparison becomes direct. But before I embark on an examination of how the book fares under these criteria let me state my own position in respect of Austen, because I believe it is proper that any critic should do so in such a situation. I am an admirer of Austen's fiction, I see her as a great novelist, but I do not have a close personal relationship with her work (which may be a matter of gender but that's another issue!). I am not therefore going to be emotionally upset by this rewriting because I do not have that great an emotional investiture in the original. Having made all these points let me try and answer the question as to how MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK works as a re-writing of, as a commentary upon, the original? The simple answer is that is a travesty. In terms of comparing the prose, the characterisation, the social and philosophical depth of the novel, this imitation is so negligible that it makes it almost impossible discuss. Let me pick the major example (which will also be the most jarring to anyone who does have an emotional investment in the original). Shepherd transforms Fanny Price into a mean, nasty and vicious snob. In a postscript she justifies this by a reference to something that Kingsley Amis (third-rate writer and obnoxious bully) wrote of the character. The effect of this is to make any comparison with the original almost meaningless. Does such a conception add anything to our understanding of Austen? In my view absolutely nothing. As a historical mystery MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK is second-rate, but my willingness to assess it on such a basis is generous. Because as an attempt to cash in on Austen's marquee name it is something much worse. This is cheap commercialism, and if you are in any way an admirer of Austen then you would be well-advised to stay as far away as possible. If this is a harsh review then I believe that the book invites it by setting itself in direct competition with a classic piece of literature. And literature this is not. § Nick Hay lives in Birmingham, UK where he spends a lot of his time reading mysteries (and trying to write about them).
Reviewed by Nick Hay, October 2010
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