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"Murder at Mansfield Park" - Lynn Shepherd
Having enjoyed "Death Comes to Pemberly", I picked up "Murder at Mansfield Park" out of curiosity.
But after reading a couple of chapters plus the blurb I started to get a nasty aroma of Mary-Sue plus canon-character-bashing: it's well written, but what the author is doing here reminded me uncomfortably of fanfic tendencies. I haven't even read "Mansfield Park", but I do know that meek Fanny Price is said to be Jane Austen's least-liked heroine -- and hey presto, we have a new(?) spunky female character arriving at Mansfield Park, winning all hearts, and busily analysing how sly and conniving this supposedly sweet Miss Price really is...
The books turns out not to be a total waste of paper, because the woman evidently does have talent. She can do the period pastiche convincingly, and once she'd actually got the murder under her belt (about halfway through the book) she managed to come up with a reasonably tense detective plot, where everybody seems to have a sufficient motive and you actually care about whether they are guilty or not.
On the other hand, the first half... I had a look at some reviews on Goodreads, and a number of them said they didn't get more than a quarter of the way in; one can see why. I haven't even read "Mansfield Park", and even I could tell that the author was committing horrors upon the original cast -- I actually assumed the heroine was a Mary-Sue self insert, though I gather she's a minor character in the original novel, because of the way she is made to look so incredibly superior to everyone else and admirable in all ways, while the character of Fanny Price is the subject of such bile as I have only witnessed in the mindless 'bashing' of hated characters on FFnet. Everything she does is subjected to authorial snide remarks: every uncontroversial action is reinterpreted as a sign of vile tendencies, and it's so totally unbalanced as to lack all credibility. Coupled with the blurb, which makes it clear that the explicit purpose of the book is to 'bash' what is apparently Austen's least-favourite protagonist, it left me with a lively desire to condemn this novel as the worst of fanfic: even to one unacquainted with the original it's clearly a travesty of wishful thinking. The author is also clearly trying to cash in on both Austen's name and the merited success of "Death at Pemberley" in order to launch her own cash-in on their coattails, citing P.D.James on the cover and vaunting the book as 'what really should have happened' in the original, and the cynical marketing strategy put my back up.
Lynn Shepherd clearly could have written a 'period detective novel' of her own: she has the ability. She chose to indulge the fans' worst instincts instead, presumably in the hopes of attracting sales. It's not a pretty spectacle. (Frankly, the main result was to make me want to read "Mansfield Park" myself to see what the book was supposed to look like, not something I ever had the slightest interest in doing before!)
But after reading a couple of chapters plus the blurb I started to get a nasty aroma of Mary-Sue plus canon-character-bashing: it's well written, but what the author is doing here reminded me uncomfortably of fanfic tendencies. I haven't even read "Mansfield Park", but I do know that meek Fanny Price is said to be Jane Austen's least-liked heroine -- and hey presto, we have a new(?) spunky female character arriving at Mansfield Park, winning all hearts, and busily analysing how sly and conniving this supposedly sweet Miss Price really is...
The books turns out not to be a total waste of paper, because the woman evidently does have talent. She can do the period pastiche convincingly, and once she'd actually got the murder under her belt (about halfway through the book) she managed to come up with a reasonably tense detective plot, where everybody seems to have a sufficient motive and you actually care about whether they are guilty or not.
On the other hand, the first half... I had a look at some reviews on Goodreads, and a number of them said they didn't get more than a quarter of the way in; one can see why. I haven't even read "Mansfield Park", and even I could tell that the author was committing horrors upon the original cast -- I actually assumed the heroine was a Mary-Sue self insert, though I gather she's a minor character in the original novel, because of the way she is made to look so incredibly superior to everyone else and admirable in all ways, while the character of Fanny Price is the subject of such bile as I have only witnessed in the mindless 'bashing' of hated characters on FFnet. Everything she does is subjected to authorial snide remarks: every uncontroversial action is reinterpreted as a sign of vile tendencies, and it's so totally unbalanced as to lack all credibility. Coupled with the blurb, which makes it clear that the explicit purpose of the book is to 'bash' what is apparently Austen's least-favourite protagonist, it left me with a lively desire to condemn this novel as the worst of fanfic: even to one unacquainted with the original it's clearly a travesty of wishful thinking. The author is also clearly trying to cash in on both Austen's name and the merited success of "Death at Pemberley" in order to launch her own cash-in on their coattails, citing P.D.James on the cover and vaunting the book as 'what really should have happened' in the original, and the cynical marketing strategy put my back up.
Lynn Shepherd clearly could have written a 'period detective novel' of her own: she has the ability. She chose to indulge the fans' worst instincts instead, presumably in the hopes of attracting sales. It's not a pretty spectacle. (Frankly, the main result was to make me want to read "Mansfield Park" myself to see what the book was supposed to look like, not something I ever had the slightest interest in doing before!)