Cries and whispers
Andrew Taylor
REVELATION by C. J. Sansom Macmillan, £17.99, pp. 452, ISBN 9781405092722 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake series concerns the activities of a hunchback lawyer struggling to make a living in the increasingly dangerous setting of Henry VIII’s reign. The first three novels have been deservedly successful, not least because of Matthew Shardlake himself, a man of intelligence and integrity who has managed to survive with his essential decency intact. He had a particularly harrowing time in the previous book in the series, Sovereign, when he narrowly averted a rebellion, survived torture in the Tower and was publicly humiliated by the bloated and paranoid tyrant on the throne of England.
Now, 18 months later, things are about to get even worse. It’s 1543, and the King, having disposed of his previous wife, is sizing up the recently widowed Catherine Parr for his sixth queen. Archbishop Cranmer and other leading Protestants are broadly in favour, since she is known to support their Reformist ideas but adherents to the old religion are still numerous, and they have other views.
Shardlake, a serjeant at the Court of Requests, is in the Cranmer camp, though his own religious beliefs are looking distinctly threadbare. On Easter morning he is horrified to find the mutilated corpse of his friend and colleague, Roger Elliard, lying in a fountain of his own blood in Lincoln’s Inn. His widow, Dorothy, for whom Shardlake himself has carried a candle for 20 years, reveals that the previous evening he was lured away to a meeting with an unknown client. Shardlake’s doctor, Guy Malton, discloses that Elliard was drugged with an unusual opiated compound before his throat was cut.
As soon as the inquest is convened, Shardlake realises that the Crown is taking an ominous interest in this murder. It transpires that a multiple killer is on the rampage, targeting former Protestant radicals. The murders share another characteristic — their carefully crafted circumstances echo some of the tortures prophesied in the Book of Revelation. The city is rife with poisonous and superstitious rumours. Even the King’s projected marriage may be threatened.
There are other strands to the plot. Tamsin, wife of Shardlake’s clerk and ally Barak, has given birth to a stillborn son; and Barak is now behaving wildly and putting his marriage at risk. Shardlake’s current caseload includes a youth in Bedlam who has a rampant case of salvation mania and who, if released, runs the risk of being burned as a dangerous heretic. Guy is doubly vulnerable as an ex-monk of Moorish extraction, but now he’s also showing a dangerous curiosity about the heretical medical discoveries of Vesalius and the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus. And he’s growing strangely close to Piers, his handsome new apprentice.
Revelation is head and shoulders above most historical crime novels. It’s a tribute to Sansom’s ability to plot that he not only controls his long and complex narrative but keeps the reader galloping through it, desperate to reach the climax (which does not disappoint). His knowledge of the period is another of the book’s pleasures. As he escorts us from the palace to the brothel, from Bedlam to Lincoln’s Inn, he acts as an authoritative guide to the confused political, social and religious currents of the 1540s — some of which have disturbing modern parallels.
In one sense there are no surprises: Sansom has found a formula that works and here he uses it again. Why not, when the result is as well-crafted and absorbing as this?
Previous page
