It’s felt like the last few days of summer
here in South Manchester. One day I’m at the Beach House reading Jo Baker’s
‘Longbourn’ and seeking shelter from the sun, and I’m in Kro café in Heaton
Moor and the windows are open for a cooling breeze… and then the very next day
I’m sitting indoors with my coffee at Café Rouge and ‘Penguin Science Fiction’
from 1961. It’s turned quite chilly and very Back-to-Schoolish overnight.
But I’ve always enjoyed that Autumnal
feeling, and new books and stationery and sharpened pencils. I’ve been thinking
quite carefully for a few days now, about which projects I’ll be working on
through these milder months, and which books I’ll be spending my down-time in.
But first there’s the last books of summer
to mull over.
I’d been waiting for Jo Baker’s ‘Longbourn’
for a while, since I knew it was on its way in August. It really doesn’t
disappoint. It is sure to be talked about as a mixture of ‘Pride and Prejudice’
and ‘Downton Abbey’, and as a kind of highly commercial mash-up of any number
of popular costume dramas. And that’s how it starts. We are very much
downstairs, with the principal characters of Austen’s novel shunted off to the
wings. We feel the buffeting force of their whims and silly dramas, but our
concern is very much with the serving staff at Longbourn: with Mr and Mrs Hill,
with our heroine Sarah, with Polly and James, the new, mysterious footman.
We’re further from the twee commonplace
tropes associated with Austen, Darcy and the usual Regency shenanigans and
instead, we’re closer to the raw stuff of life in this version of Austen’s
world. We hear about the stained underclothes brewing in boiling water, and the
headless hares bleeding into bowls and the making of lavender soap from fat
scraped from split pigs. Life is about the gradual eradication of muck and hundreds
of hours labouring over the things upstairs takes for granted.
But it’s also a world with a wider view.
These are characters much more aware of the world beyond the petty concerns of
their masters. The servants know why there are soldiers in the vicinity. Sarah
and her adoptive family are keen to understand and learn about the wider world.
James turns up in their lives and he brings with him all kinds of knowledge
from beyond.
The Bennets come to seem callous in their
trivial obsessions. Even the ones we love in the original book start to distort
and shift their shapes. Mr Bennet is a neurotic fool, shamefully hiding his
past. Unloved, unlovely Mrs Bennet, comes to seem braver. Mr Collins is a misunderstood child, of whom the Bennets made easy fun. Wickham and Darcy are well-nigh vampires. And
Elizabeth starts to seem spoiled and almost cruel in her self-centredness.
It’s not just a simple upturned world. It’s
about a shifting of genres. Everything is more serious because, for the poorer characters, more is at stake, every day. The tone is darker, and it’s a sexier
book, too. When we dig into James’ backstory there are startling revelations –
when we start to understand what he has been through in Spain, and where he
came from in the first place.
There are some wounding shocks in store for
us as we tack along the outlines of the previous book. This isn’t at all a
heritage-industry revisitation of a fondly-loved classic and I was so glad to
discover that. It’s a book all about danger and hard-won homecomings and not as
frou-frou as it might at first appear.
And after all of that time in Georgian
England – I decided that, for a complete change of pace, a bit of Golden Age
Science Fiction might be just the ticket…
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