Like many (should I perhaps say 'many women'?), I've read Pride and Prejudice a good four or five times, and have seen the two modern adaptations frequently enough to have a pretty thorough knowledge of the plot and characters. So when I heard about James's genre-shifting homage to Austen, I was intrigued. I had never read any of James's work, but I knew her name through contacts I've had with Faber and Faber, her publishers. It also made me think of EL James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy, which started out as a Twilight-based fanfiction, but had to be rewritten for publication for copyright reasons. PD James, of course, didn't have this problem, what with Austen having been dead for nearly 200 years.
PD did, however, have a different difficulty, one which, to my mind, stuck out a mile. Amateur fanfiction writers -- whether they're basing their stories on Harry Potter, Twilight, or, slightly amusingly, Fifty Shades -- can pretty safely assume that their readers know the 'canon', the original texts they're writing from. Thus a Harry Potter fanfiction beginning with Severus Snape storming into his classroom will probably not follow with "Snape was the Potions Master at Hogwarts, but was rumoured to desperately want the Defence Against the Dark Arts post." Readers will almost always know all this. They've come to this category because they've already read, and liked, the canon, and they want to understand or imagine more about this world, these characters.
PD James can't make this assumption. There may be readers who are huge fan of crime writing in general and PD James in particular who have never read or seen Pride and Prejudice. They might have a general idea of the plot in a 'common knowledge' way, have read Bridget Jones' Diary, or even found the clip of Colin Firth in his wet shirt on YouTube. But PD James needs more from her readers than this. She needs them to have a detailed understanding of the plot, characters, and even back story to be able to follow what happens.
She therefore begins the novel with a rather long synopsis of the events of Pride and Prejudice, from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. Sample sentence: "It was hardly unexpected; Mr Bingley's admiration for Jane had been apparent from their first meeting at an assembly ball." Put it in the present tense and it practically becomes a paragraph from SparkNotes, albeit rather better written. If James's editor/publisher had been slightly conversant with the conventions of fanfiction, s/he might have been sensible enough to suggest that this synopsis be included as a prologue explicitly aimed at people who hadn't read Pride and Prejudice. As prologues, especially of crime novels, I was emphatically not hooked.
Whilst we're mentioning the genre again, it would be unfair of me to ignore it as a work of crime fiction. But even here, I wasn't satisfied. I'd worked out much of the solution quite early on, and then when the big 'reveal' did happen, it was too soon, leaving a lot of explanation to fill the last fifty or so pages, which was not only obvious but frequently repetitious. There were no really 'thrilling' moments, and too much imparting of information was done through quite clunky dialogue.
I also, unexpectedly, found the characters very two-dimensional. I wondered whether this was because they were not PD James's own characters, and thus she had not thought to develop them: Bingley, Jane, Darcy and Elizabeth all seem to rest on the characterisation Austen herself did in P&P, and little is added. (In fairness, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Wickham are more interesting, though they are not the protagonists.) Even the new characters seem to be little more than mouthpieces with one or two broad adjectives. Whether this is typical of PD James I don't know, but for someone who claims that "the greatest writing pleasure for me is in the creation of original characters" (in the afterword to the book, no less), she doesn't exactly back up that claim here.
The book ends with a sickening epilogue in which Darcy suddenly decides to explain his motives for doing a bunch of things back in the old days when Austen was deciding who did what. This is implausible (they've been married SIX years now), unnecessary and, frankly, poorly written. Sample sentence: "How could I have been so unfeeling, so presumptuous, as to seek to separate Bingley from Jane?" This is meant to be Darcy speaking. He drones on, repeating stretches of plot just in case we'd forgotten AGAIN about how much Elizabeth used to hate him, and how justified she was -- and it just doesn't sound like the way Darcy, or indeed anyone, would really speak. The epilogue to the last Harry Potter book was better, and those who've read it will know that's saying a lot.
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| A P&P-based 'fangirl' creation ... |
The last scene, and indeed quite a few chunks of the book, read like 'fangirl' fanfiction: aiming mainly to flag up the writer's love and knowledge of the canon text. I actually found this sentence which apparently runs through Elizabeth's thoughts towards the beginning: "If this were fiction, could even the most brilliant novelist contrive to make credible so short a period in which pride had been subdued and prejudice overcome?" YAWN-VOMIT-YAWN. We get it, PD. You think Jane Austen's a brilliant novelist. Why don't you just write "Elizabeth thought again about how complex a character she used to be, and how comparatively uninteresting she was now"?
There is a lot of fanfiction out there on the internet -- I've written a few pieces myself -- and the best of it aims to go far beyond the canon texts, bringing a couple of minor characters together, unpicking strange moments or gaps in the plot, and often dispensing with original time-frames altogether. I've read stories where a relatively two-dimensional character (for instance, Professor McGonagall) suddenly gains secrets desires, a dark past, a building tension with another character. This then enriches the original texts by forcing you to ask certain questions, to consider how much deeper the world can go, when you reread them. Why would the Death Eaters, who apparently love torturing people, only have one torture spell? Wouldn't this get boring for everyone? Wouldn't they employ some sadistic spell-writer to create a specialist repertoire for them? You can end up so far from the canon that it becomes merely a speck in the distance, the place you've travelled from. This should be the joy of writing and reading fanfiction.
There are one or two moments when PD James does this in DCTP -- she gives us a plausible and wryly-described marriage for Mary Bennet, for example -- but most of her time is spent hammering through the plot, rather than exploring quirks and idioms of characters. I rarely say this, but it could have done with being a hundred or so pages longer, with the extra wordage spent on giving texture to the characters, making them actually seem real. The book made me long to go and read Pride and Prejudice, for the detail, the minute dramas of the conversations, the vivid sense that these are concrete lives being lived. I can forgive PD James -- she has a long and distinguished career, and is over 90 -- but I find it hard to forgive the reviewers who gush praise on the book jacket. They should go and have a good long look on fanfiction.net and marvel at the ingenuity and resourcefulness of some of its members. As should you, my dear readers.
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