His political naïvety aside, Shardlake is a thinking man, with good instincts about people and a total commitment to enforcing the law. Shardlake is a Reformer who genuinely believes that he is playing a part in reshaping England and the Church for the benefit of all and who is only now starting to think about the ruthless brutality that the Reformers have brought to their task. He’s a man whose hunched back has made him an outsider and a target for derision, even keeping him from following his vocation into the priesthood, but who has still managed to become a wealthy man, working as a lawyer in London, largely doing the bidding of Thomas Cromwell. Secondly, Matthew Shardlake, Sansom’s main character is unusual and credible.
He also shows how the monasteries had decayed into places that benefitted only the monks who live in them and who lived dissolute lives of indulgence that were far from the Rules of the Orders they were in. He mercilessly displays the thuggery and corruption of Thomas Cromwell and his Commissioners.
Sansom makes it easy to visualise London as the pit it was in 1537. This isn’t a nostalgia trip to jolly Olde England, it’s a journey through a time of immense social turmoil when many of our current aristocracy and landed gentry established their wealth through the ruthless pursuit of land being taken from the monasteries by the King. Worse than that, this book has been on my shelves for NINE YEARS (that’s the curse of keeping a book database, you know stuff like this and can’t hide behind I’ve had this for a while.)Īnyway, my wife and I finally listened to ‘Dissolution’ on a long drive and now I have to buy the other six books.įirstly, Sansom is completely comfortable with both the day-to-day life and the power politics of the Tudor period and he doesn’t sugar-coat either.
The book is now nineteen-years-old and the series is seven books strong.
I’ve come rather late to this popular series.
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