Pride, prejudice and murder

P D James almost manages to pull off her sequel to the Jane Austen classic.

Writing a sequel to a classic authored by another writer is always a venture fraught with high risk. Recall, for instance, Scarlett, the officially sanctioned and highly publicised sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which sank almost without a trace.

To be sure, P D James is not Alexandra Ripley. As creator of the attractive, cerebral poet-detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, she has long enjoyed a prominent place in the pantheon of classic crime fiction writers in her own right.

Still, it is a tribute to her courage that she has chosen to create a sequel to a work as widely read as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that too as a crime novel. At age 92 and a lifelong admirer of Jane Austen’s work, no one will grudge her a last hurrah. The more remarkable point is that James has mostly been able to pull it off.

In a self-deprecating Author’s Note, James says had Austen wished to dwell on “such odious subjects” as murder “she would have written this story herself, and done it better”. Possibly, but the task couldn’t have been such a huge challenge for James either.

Both writers share a shrewdly observant and gently ironic writing style — though 20th-century James’s is, expectedly, the more spare of the two and her prose intrudes once the plot thickens.

Like Austen’s, James’s novels thrive on atmospherics. And in Darcy and Elizabeth she works with personalities that roughly resemble the protagonists who people her novels — the resemblance to the brooding Dalgliesh and his intelligent and sensitive second wife Emma Lavenham is easy to spot.

So James is able to take up effortlessly where Austen left off. She begins with a deft and elegant recap of the Pride and Prejudice story and its main characters and sub-plots as a means of setting the scene for the story to come.

The familiar bustling Austen narrative is well replicated. “It was generally agreed by the female residents of Meryton that Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn had been fortunate in the disposal in marriage of four of their five daughters,” the opening sentence goes.

The scene is one of golden domestic bliss. Elizabeth and Darcy are now comfortably ensconced in the splendours of Pemberley, there are two healthy sons in the nursery and Jane, Elizabeth’s sister and confidante, in a neighbouring manor, married to Darcy’s close friend from Oxford.

The action opens the day before the annual Pemberley Ball, over which Elizabeth, as chatelaine of Darcy’s extensive estates, must preside. It was undoubtedly an Event, the 18th-century equivalent, perhaps, of a modern-day Page 3 bash. Or, as James writes, “The entertainments and seasonal diversions of country living are neither as numerous nor enticing to make the social obligations of a great house a matter of indifference to those neighbours qualified to benefit from them…”

Into this scene of arcadian perfection comes Lydia Wickham, Elizabeth’s wayward younger sister who had contracted a runaway marriage to the feckless George Wickham, tumbling from a carriage to declare that her husband has been murdered.

The investigation and inquest that follow underline other kinds of pride and prejudice in pre-Regency society, as the spotlight turns on Darcy. James has created in an appropriately thrilling and fiendishly tortuous plot that could easily have unravelled in the hands of a less skilled author.

Death Comes to Pemberley works both as a novel in its own right and as a credible and authentic sequel to the Austen opus. And for those who would have hankered for more at the end of Pride and Prejudice, James has, at the very least, provided satisfactory closure.

DEATH COMES TO PEMBERLEY
Author: P D James
Publisher: Faber
Pages: 320
Price: Rs 499