100 Books to Read Poster No 18

 

Dissolution by C J Sansom. I've read this before, more or less when it first came out, and I must have enjoyed it because I went on to read the next four or five in the series before I got fed up with how formulaic the books were and stopped. From friends who carried on reading them I gather there was recently a very bad one that read as though it had been phoned in, followed by a return to form. I have to say that after re-reading, or rather listening to this, I feel no urge to get up to date with the series again. 

Apart from being very long it's also very bleak. I a understand that the time period and the subject matter sort of make those a given; there wasn't much to laugh about in Henry V111's England, especially if you were a monk.  It was overall a very very sad book and the ending in particular was heart breaking. Not the loss of the two young characters who get lost in the marsh, good riddance to them both as far as I was concerned; but the melancholy scenes in the Epilogue where the narrator re-visits the monastery where he carried out the murder investigation which is the subject of the book,  and details the destruction of first the community and then the fabric of the place. I hold no particular brief for the monastic life, but the greed of those who used religious reform as a way of enriching themselves at the expense of anyone weaker, or less morally flexible,  hardly makes for an edifying spectacle. Very true to life, of course, we only have to look at those who have  money or power or both in our own times to realise that it was ever thus and will presumably go on being for ever thus until humanity becomes extinct, but it's not a happy thought. And rally, just at the moment I coud have done with something a bit more uplifting.

That said I'll mark it as a hit rather than a miss because although I would never read it again, it's not a bad book in itself.