Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the market is oversaturated with Jane Austen pastiches. Toss some zombies or a murder mystery into Austen's elegant accounts of the travails of the landed gentry, and you've got something that lots of people will buy, out of embarrassed curiosity if nothing else. I imagine the marketing of Jo Baker's LONGBOURN will target that audience, but those expecting a lighthearted parody or a return to beloved characters will be disappointed. This is less a companion to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE than a distant cousin, one that interacts with its relative rarely and in unrevealing ways. Fortunately, the story it tells is interesting enough in its own right to make a rewarding experience, albeit one that won't surprise readers who have more than a superficial knowledge of the period. Where PRIDE AND PREJUDICE left the Bennet servants as faceless ciphers, in LONGBOURN they are the central characters. There are Mr and Mrs Hill, butler and cook; teenage maid Polly; and the heroine, Sarah. To this small, thinly-stretched team is added James Smith, the new footman. At first Sarah is suspicious of James, whose arrival in the household was the subject of a mysterious argument between Mrs Hill and Mr Bennet. As suspicion hardens into dislike, Sarah finds herself drawn toward the charming footman at neighboring Netherfield, who is also the first black man Sarah has ever seen. As she learns more about these two strange and fascinating arrivals, Sarah takes steps that will change her life forever. The true subject of LONGBOURN is not, however, Sarah's romantic life, which mirrors Elizabeth's from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and is equally predictable. Baker is concerned instead with the life of the lower classes in Regency England, the deprivation and suffering that produced the gilded world through which Austen's characters moved. This is a worthy topic, though not a new one; attempts to give servants equal time in period pieces go back at least as far as the 1970s TV series UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS. But Austen's novels, with their glittering surfaces and unexpressed but forceful themes beneath, are ideal for that purpose, and Baker does a more than satisfactory job of it. At times she emphasizes the parallels between masters and servants too plainly; I got rather tired of reading descriptions of the Bennets' idle melancholy followed by some variation on "Sarah didn't have the luxury of that." But given how glaring the disparities are, it's hard to describe them at all without sounding unsubtle. With one brief, charming exception, Baker makes no attempt to imitate Austen's prose, opting instead for a more modern and immediate tone that captures the grim fatalism of the servants' day-to-day existence. Apart from a few instances of distractingly contemporary diction, it works quite well, conjuring for the reader the pain of constant labor, the loneliness of lives confined to a radius of a few miles, and the small pleasures that are all servants can hope for. A late section in which one character's backstory moves the scene away from the English countryside is especially intense; Baker has a real gift for spare, bleak descriptions of physical and emotional devastation. As noted, lovers of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE won't find much new here, though minor characters like Mr Collins and Mary Bennet are shown in a more sympathetic light, and George Wickham manages to be even worse. There is one major twist to a key character late in the narrative. I can't describe it without spoilers, but I don't think it really works, either in terms of the characters as Austen presented them or as drama in its own right. It has the stink of class-conflict melodrama, which the novel has otherwise avoided. But Baker handles this element as well as it can be handled, and the overall resolution echoes Austen without abandoning LONGBOURN's own distinctive voice. It's surprisingly moving: the characters may not be that complex, but they're human enough to engage our sympathy all the same. This is a fine historical novel, especially recommended to thoughtful readers of Austen and those interested in the darker side of the opulent English past.