But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note. The style of “Death Comes to Pemberley” is a loose approximation of 19th-century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a painstaking imitation. But is Wickham, although a deadbeat and a serial seducer of young women, really a murderer? Even Darcy can’t quite believe that of him. A search party discovers Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodstained, beside the body of his best friend, Captain Denny, and he babbles what sounds like a confession. Actually he isn’t, though many, including Darcy, for whom Wickham is a constant source of embarrassment and irritation, might wish he were. Inside is Elizabeth’s airhead sister Lydia, the one who eloped with the charming but unreliable George Wickham, screaming that her husband is dead. But their tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected carriage comes rocketing up the drive. They have two young sons now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. The story is set in 1803, six years after “Pride and Prejudice” was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place. James’s surprising new sequel to that novel, it becomes the scene of a murder. Pemberley, Jane Austen fans will recall, is the large Derbyshire estate owned by Fitzwilliam Darcy, who weds Elizabeth Bennet at the end of “Pride and Prejudice,” and in “Death Comes to Pemberley,” P.
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