My Weekly Book

Now, this ought to have been right up my street. London, railways and Victoriana, by Jove. Must have a touch of the old Steampunk about it, you would have thought. In fact, jolly close to the kind of stuff I find myself writing in my spare time. (And churning out at great length come November and December, but that’s another story. Literally.) But not a bit of it.

My guilty pleasure this summer seems to be reading obese historical thrillers and crime novels – a genre pairing that seems to get me every time. CJ Sansom, of course, falls into this category, regularly coming in at more than 400 pages in huge editions, and I’ve recently discovered that Phil Rickman, sometime purveyor of supernatural horror, has been at it as well with books such as Bones of Avalon.

You really would have thought, wouldn’t you, that after having been tricked so neatly by Archbishop Cranmer into risking life and limb in the service of a king who despises him, Matthew Shardlake would have had the good sense to stick to his resolution made at the end of Sovereign never to get involved with court politics again.

This is a literary curiosity – a book about an improbable imaginary footrace that draws its inspiration from improbable but actual footraces of the past. It’s a book about running, and also about a range of other sports. It’s a historical saga that encompasses a surprisingly varied cast of characters and there’s about as much off-track action as there is racing detail.

I’d signed up with the understanding that this text was no easy undertaking and felt that receiving it in bite-sized chunks might actually make it a bit more of an achievable project. And the book itself is difficult.

The dominant theme running through the entire length of this fine sequel to CJ Sansom’s first historical whodunnit Dissolution can be summed up in a single word: desperation. In fact, the whole thing reeks of it as we rejoin our lawyerly protagonist Matthew Shardlake some three years after the encounter with Thomas Cromwell that led to the events of the previous book.

I’m one of that annoying breed: a specialist in a particular period of history who tends to get really worked up about how it is portrayed in popular culture. Thus, when the nearest and dearest suggested that the oeuvre of one CJ Sansom would be right up my alley, I was at pains to point out that it would have to be an authentic Tudor alley, identifiable to the correct area of London, with an absolutely unimpeachable historical provenance and no incorrectly-butchered bones visible in the ordure, never mind neologisms in the graffiti.