Jill Paton Walsh: A School for Lovers (1989)

Edition: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 783

Cosi Fan Tutti is an opera which has generated an immense amount of discussion over the years, particularly once it made its way back into the repertoire (after years of neglect because it was considered disreputable). Walsh has structured her novel to reflect on several aspects of the opera, with twin story lines about a couple of students studying it and an attempt to recreate its plot for a bet.

The plot of Cosi Fan Tutti is simple. Two young men boast of the fidelity of their betrothed. An older man laughs at them, and eventually they agree to test their boasts. Pretending to have been called up for military service, the two men disguise themselves as Albanian pirates and woo each other's girlfriends. This becomes awkward when, after a while, the two women show signs of succumbing (though they may have just seen through the disguises and be looking to get their own back).

There are a variety of interesting issues about the opera, which are discussed in one plot strand and (sometimes) illustrated by the other. These include the accusations of immorality and (more recently) of misogyny. There is the implausibility - how do the women fail to recognise their lovers in their disguises? There is tension between the libretto and the music, Mozart being more positive about the emotions of the characters than da Ponte requires him to be. There is also the deeper question of whether love can ever be permanent - perhaps more relevant now in an age where so many marriages end in divorce.

The novel is not wholly successful, though interesting. This is because the device to tell the reader the themes of the opera through the studies of Thomas and Anna (including quite long extracts from their essays) is overly didactic, not suited to fiction.

Dorothy Sayers & Jill Paton Walsh: Thrones, Dominations (1998)

Edition: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998
Review number: 366

I would normally avoid sequels to stories by dead authors like the plague; they are frequently written in a way which shows the new writer too lacking in imagination to have ideas of their own, and involve implausible plots when they attempt to continue a story which was concluded by the author (not leaving loose ends easily unravelled). There are exceptions. Peter Tremayne's Raffles stories are one, George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels another - though they are off at a tangent from rather than being straight continuations of Tom Brown's Schooldays. There are several reasons for expecting this novel to be another exception: it was started by Dorothy Sayers herself, fills in a gap in her series rather than continuing it, and is completed by an author who has a good reputation in her own right (and one whose work I like).

These expectations are to a large extent fulfilled. No indication is given as to the stage at which Thrones, Dominations was left by Sayers, or what information there was as to her plans for the remainder of the story. (She abandoned the novel to work on the translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, also uncompleted at her death.) The novel itself is about the early months of Peter and Harriet's marriage, following on from Busman's Honeymoon, and in structure and style it is a close relation of that novel.

In both novels, the first half is concerned with the relationship between Peter and Harriet and the way that those around them react to it. (The difference between their positions in society would have been far more important in the late thirties than now.) These chapters in both books contain extensive quotations from the diary of Peter's mother, the dowager Duchess of Denver. Then, in the second half, we have a mystery, less difficult here than in most of Sayers' own books.

The quality of the job that Walsh has done is shown by the fact that she has produced a novel in which it is virtually impossible to detect her hand at all. It is perhaps more similar to Busman's Honeymoon than I suspect that Sayers herself would have left it, the prose is perhaps a little more smooth, and the puzzle not so dependent on complex mechanical details (like the radio in Busman's Honeymoon, the haemophilia in Have His Carcase, for example). The strong characters of Peter and Harriet are as central as ever - the hero worship of Lord Peter maybe toned down a bit, perhaps to better suit modern readers - and are just as convincingly portrayed. The flattering expectation of literary knowledge in the reader is still present, though restricted to English more than in the novels by Sayers alone.

I would be interested to know what relationship this finished product bears to the material left by Sayers, but the very least that can be said is that Walsh has produced an excellent and convincing Lord Peter novel.

Jill Paton Walsh: Knowledge of Angels (1994)

Edition: Green Bay, 1994
Review number: 278

Knowledge of Angels is not exactly a historical novel; though the island of Grandinsula is based on medieval Mallorca, it really exists only in the imagination of Walsh; there is no such country as Aclar. Yet the medieval atmosphere is pervasive; perhaps that is to be expected in a novel whose theme is the conflict between the modern and medieval worldviews.

Medieval Christendom was a society which was very inward looking, where foreigners were generally strange, hardly human creatures (as in the continental superstition that Englishmen had tails). Such outsiders as were permitted - and it was rare to find a large town without a Jewish community, for example - were carefully segregated, kept apart from the local population. The sense of community was incredibly strong, but a xenophobic distrust of foreigners was the heavy price paid for this.

Knowledge of Angels is about the simultaneous appearance of two outsiders on the island. Neither fits into the understood list of types of foreigners, and so both cause distinct problems. Amara is a wolfchild, one of those periodically attested children brought up by wolves when abandoned or lost by their true parents. The other is Palinor, who swam ashore after falling overboard from a ship of his home country of Aclar, a very different place from a medieval European state (in fact, an eruption of twentieth century society into the medieval world).

The problem with these two outsiders is that neither of them has a clearly defined relationship with the Catholic Church. Amara has, of course, had no opportunity to be educated in the Christian (or, indeed, any) faith. Palinor has exercised the right of religious freedom in Aclar to become a convinced atheist. The churchmen on the island can hardly conceive of such a position. Heresy, paganism, Islam and Judaism; all these have well defined responses to be made to them, but the idea that it is possible to reject the idea of God completely and with knowledge of what you are doing is completely alien.

The charming and intelligent Palinor fascinates Severo, who combines the roles of highest secular and spiritual authority on the island. So he suggests an experiment to determine how he should be treated which will last several years. Severo asks the monk Beneditx, a close friend of his who is considered the most learned man on the island, to abandon his work on the difference between the morning and evening knowledge possessed by angels (based on a phrase in an authoritative writer). He is to undertake the spiritual education of Palinor, to attempt to convince him that God exists, something that seems an obvious fact to him and the other churchmen. Meanwhile, Amara is to be taught how to live in a civilised manner at a remote convent, where she is not to have God mentioned in her presence. The idea of this is to question her once she has learned to talk, to find out whether knowledge of God is innate. (The authorities of the Christian church are not in accord on the issue.) If it is, then Palinor must have deliberately rejected it, so he would be a heretic; otherwise, he is lacking in education and cannot be held culpable himself.

The most glaring non-medievalism in the book is this experiment. Only a small number of thinkers (such as Roger Bacon) took an interest in experimentation as a means to determine the truth; most medieval thinkers preferred to use minutely detailed logical argument based on fundamental principles which were derived from ancient authorities. Severo is rather more a Renaissance prince, like the real life abbot who passed an electric shock along a row of his monks to see what the effect would be. But the experiment is important in terms of how the book works, since it makes apparent to the reader other parts of the difference between our culture and that of the Middle Ages.

Jill Paton Walsh: The Wyndham Case (1994)

Edition: Coronet, 1994
Review number: 218


The fictional St Agatha's College, Cambridge, has two libraries, a normal academic library and the Wyndham Library. This was endowed in the seventeenth century by an eccentric opponent of Newton's scientific ideas, and was stocked with books arguing against him. Not only that, but money was left to provide for the examination of the library stock once a century by someone unknown to the curator, to ensure that the contents would never change. Thus the Wyndham Library contains a large number of dull, outdated, but relatively rare and valuable books, mainly kept in a specially built two-storey tall bookcase, the "Wyndham Case".

Problems begin when a student is discovered lying dead in the locked library, surrounded by a pool of blood. Imogen Quy, the college nurse, quickly becomes involved, and begins to investigate on her own account.

The Wyndham Case is an interesting and well constructed detective novel. It's only jarring note is the rather suspicious attitude the students have towards the police - I don't think that even in these days of the Guildford Four and the Steven Lawrence case it's an attitude that many ex-public school students would share.

Jill Paton Walsh: A Piece of Justice (1995)

Edition: Coronet, 1995
Review number: 171


A Piece of Justice is the second of Walsh's detective novels to feature Imogen Quy, nurse at St Agatha's, a fictional Cambridge college. As you would expect from a Booker shortlisted author, it is well written, though it doesn't have a particularly difficult puzzle.
Imogen has taken a lodger, a postgraduate student named Fran writing a thesis on the nature of biography. To be able to live while working on this, she asks her supervisor if he has any suggestions of paid work she can do. He offers her the chance to ghost a biography he has been asked to write, of a prominent St Agatha's mathematician, Gideon Summerfield, about to (posthumously) receive the Waymark Prize, the (fictional) mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

When Fran receives the papers which have been amassed about this man, she and Imogen discover something rather odd. In the rather dull chronology of his life, there is a month which cannot be accounted for. Not only this, but there have been three previous biographers who have begun to work on the project, all of whom have disappeared when they tried to investigate the missing month.

The major characters are well-drawn, and (unusually for genre fiction) even the minor ones are individualised. Only the standard crime novel problem of unbelievable coincidence mars the plot in places.