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Reading: Tombland
Mar. 7th, 2020 11:46 amI read the first of C.J. Sansom's detective novels set in Tudor England, Dissolution, several years ago, and while I quite enjoyed it I didn't feel any great urge to read the subsequent books in the series. However, a couple of weeks ago my mother mentioned that she was reading the seventh and latest, Tombland, which is set in the area of Norfolk where my parents live; I was between books and the time and realised it sounded like exactly what I wanted to read, so I downloaded a copy and started reading it as soon as I got off the phone to her.
Tombland is set in 1549, and takes Sansom's detective, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake, to Norwich where he has been charged with investigating the case of a distant relative of the future Queen Elizabeth I who is accused of murdering his wife. However, tensions in the country are running high and Shardlake and his friends find themselves caught up in Kett's Rebellion, one of a number of uprisings that took place across English in the summer of 1549, protesting against the enclosure of common land for sheep-farming. It is a long book, though not quite as long as it appears as the last 60 or so of the 866 pages are given over to an essay by the author on Kett's Rebellion. It's clear that Sansom has done a huge amount of historical research, and for me the biggest flaw of the novel is that, especially towards the start, it often feels shoehorned into the narrative, generally by means of conversations where the characters explain current events to each other. The frequent pauses for chunks of historical background made the story feel very slow, almost ponderous, though I did find it sped up towards the end. The detective story, in this case, also feels rather underdeveloped, and mostly seems to be the McGuffin needed to get Shardlake to Norwich so Sansom can tell the story of the rebellion (which, to be fair, was interesting and thought-provoking).
In fact, my feelings about Tombland were much the same as my feelings about Dissolution: I quite enjoyed it, but I still don't feel any great urge to read books 2-6 in the series, or any subsequent ones, and my enjoyment of this one was definitely increased by the familiarity of the setting.
Tombland is set in 1549, and takes Sansom's detective, the lawyer Matthew Shardlake, to Norwich where he has been charged with investigating the case of a distant relative of the future Queen Elizabeth I who is accused of murdering his wife. However, tensions in the country are running high and Shardlake and his friends find themselves caught up in Kett's Rebellion, one of a number of uprisings that took place across English in the summer of 1549, protesting against the enclosure of common land for sheep-farming. It is a long book, though not quite as long as it appears as the last 60 or so of the 866 pages are given over to an essay by the author on Kett's Rebellion. It's clear that Sansom has done a huge amount of historical research, and for me the biggest flaw of the novel is that, especially towards the start, it often feels shoehorned into the narrative, generally by means of conversations where the characters explain current events to each other. The frequent pauses for chunks of historical background made the story feel very slow, almost ponderous, though I did find it sped up towards the end. The detective story, in this case, also feels rather underdeveloped, and mostly seems to be the McGuffin needed to get Shardlake to Norwich so Sansom can tell the story of the rebellion (which, to be fair, was interesting and thought-provoking).
In fact, my feelings about Tombland were much the same as my feelings about Dissolution: I quite enjoyed it, but I still don't feel any great urge to read books 2-6 in the series, or any subsequent ones, and my enjoyment of this one was definitely increased by the familiarity of the setting.
