'Death Comes to Pemberley'

Everyone has their favorite portrayals. My personal Elizabeth is 1940’s Greer Garson; with 1995’s Colin Firth as Darcy; 2005’s Donald Sutherland as Elizabeth’s father, Mr. Bennet; and Judi Dench as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, although 1940’s Edna May Oliver is probably the most memorable. How well all these actors might play together must be left to the imagination. Your own favorites — or the decision that no onscreen portrayal quite lives up to your imagined Elizabeth and Darcy — are up to you.

Let me also add that I am an avid reader of mysteries, so that when I heard that P.D. James had written a murder mystery set during the post P&P marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy, I could not but run out and read it. The results, for me at least, are mixed.

Catching up

It starts in Austenian fashion, slow-paced and stately. Many pages are devoted to backstory, so that those who were only now encountering (yes, such people do exist!) Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and Bingley and Lydia and Wickham — note that women go by their first names and men by their last, but I digress —can be brought up to speed. Every character has to be accounted for, whether they were critical to this new story or not. In Austen’s leisurely world, this makes sense. The fabric of village life is woven of just such minutiae.

But in the higher classes, where Elizabeth and Jane now reside, such fabric is more loosely constructed. Houses are bigger, set apart, with vast expanses surrounding them, and a quick walk to the village is no longer possible. Instead, the characters stroll along their private stream, well-stocked with fish to be caught for sport, not nourishment, and have their horses hitched to carriages for visiting neighbors who cannot otherwise be reached. Elizabeth and Darcy lead insular lives now, surrounded by their children and servants, with much less of the bustle than the Bennet household.

After the story has established the characters and the setting (preparations for the annual ball to be held at Pemberley), it’s time for a mystery, and a death. Lydia arrives with her unrepentant husband Wickham, and Wickham’s friend, Captain Denny— a minor character in the original book but a critical one here— is murdered. Once this happens, and the search for the murderer commences, the tone changes. It goes from Austen’s study of social manners to a P.D. Jamesian dissection of a crime and how it affects all concerned.

This seems less a true continuation of the original than a conceit of the author, a way of using familiar friends to tell her own story in, for her, an unfamiliar setting. We learn a bit about criminal proceedings and police work of the time, not so much about society and the development of the characters. In fact, the characters, once the details of their lives at this time are established, don’t seem to change at all.

A bridge too far

When the BBC decided to dramatize the new book, I parted company with the experience. While I could imagine Elizabeth and Darcy later on, this seemed a decidedly dark story, and I wished better for the proud couple who had finally unbent enough to find love.

A major problem is the tone. The TV film is neither dark thriller nor comedy of social manners. Even more problematic is the character development and the casting. Elizabeth (Anna Maxwell Martin) and Darcy (Matthew Rhys) don't seem to have grown as a couple; indeed, he is as supercilious as when we first met him at the ball, and she seems worn down by the cares of wife, mother, and mistress of a large house. Where is her wit, her verve, her challenging of conventions? Elizabeth's life seems to have turned out much like her mother’s: caring for the house, tolerated by her husband.

Lydia, played by Jenna Coleman, is well cast, and Wickham (Matthew Goode) is just barely charming enough. The rest of the characters are placeholders for the characters we already know and love. For those who are just meeting them, they are caricatures, easily understood but not terribly interesting.

The mystery plods along, with suspicion falling on both Wickham (of course: he’s virtually confessed) and Colonel Fitzwilliam (Tom Ward), once a suitor for Elizabeth, now pursuing Georgiana (Eleanor Tomlinson), Darcy’s one-time wayward sister. Henry Alveston (James Norton), a new suitor who is, conveniently, a lawyer, helps out as Darcy tries to save face by ordering everyone about, and Elizabeth plays the dutiful wife who refuses to mind her own business although she is constantly told not to interfere.

That Elizabeth ultimately discovers the true murderer and runs onto the gallows at the last minute to save the day seems melodramatic at best, or perhaps just plain ridiculous. And the ultimate conclusion in which James foists annoying sister Lydia and evil Wickham on the unsuspecting Americas is perhaps a comment on how the Brits still feel about those rebel states.

Meanwhile, if you want a good read, pull up a chair and go back to the classics of both authors. It is time better spent.