Review: A Presumption of Death

A Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Continuation novels - continuing a classic series, but written by someone other than the original author - are always controversial. Some fans will always find something that strikes them as a jarring note, that marks this upstart thing as inferior to the genuine product, that doesn't ring true to them for the characters. And Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are complex characters, too, both highly intelligent, determined to respect one another in a way most couples of the time did not, and with by now a complicated pair of backstories to be reckoned with, not to mention their habit of quoting widely from English literature.

All that as preface to saying that for me, this did work as a continuation of the series, and that's a big compliment to the author. It draws in part on the "Wimsey Papers," a series of epistolary pieces that Dorothy Sayers published in 1939 in the Spectator, so Jill Paton Walsh did have a foundation to build on of events in the characters' lives and their thoughts about the war.

If anything, I felt that there were moments when it seemed a little too carefully researched, or expressed thoughts which make sense to us in hindsight but which might not have occurred to people at the time, like the reference to Quisling ("may his name be cursed for centuries" - his name is, indeed, a synonym for "collaborationist traitor" now in English and several other languages, but at this point he was in many ways an obscure figure who was not obviously going to have such a fate). I did wonder, too, whether there was going to be too much intertextuality, a common failing of continuation novels, when the topic of advertising people came up; but there wasn't, in the end, a reference to Lord Peter's undercover stint at an advertising agency. (There was in the previous volume, briefly.)

Generally, though, to me it read smoothly, and the characters felt continuous with their earlier appearances. We even got Miss Climpson, with her distinctive rambling and opinionated but still insightful style of communication, and Miss Climpson is my personal favourite.

The plot is not quite like any of the previous books, and this, too, helps it to resemble the previous books, no two of which are quite like each other. In fact, I could make a stronger case, on purely internal textual grounds, for The Five Red Herrings not belonging to the canon than I could for this one, without cheating any more than the average textual critic.

Speaking of the plot, it's one that is particular to its time and place, rural England in early World War II, and both time and place are strongly evoked. It has resonance for me, because it involves youthful members of the RAF, and just five years later than this book is set, my father went to England with the RNZAF and had a lot of the same experiences as those young men (he was then 22) - I'm sure including hiding his actual feelings in order to be able to carry on. There are also a couple of references to servicemen snatching what might be the last opportunity to be intimate with their girlfriends before going off to fight; the mother of my oldest friend was the result of just such a liaison. The reality of an entire population not having enough food or sleep and yet somehow carrying on comes through strongly, and it's made clear how the government was out of touch with the population and often poorly organized, and how some of their measures were resented and even circumvented, even while people in general were fully committed to the goal of winning the war.

Peter spends much of the book off on a secret mission somewhere with Bunter, with Harriet left to happily take care of not only her own but her sister-in-law Mary's children at their country house, to participate in village life (much changed by the war), to do the initial spadework on the murder of a land girl during an air raid practice, and to overthink everything, particularly her own feelings about the war (which is classic Harriet).

The ultimate resolution of the mystery is very much in tune with the feel of the times that the whole book has created: a messy, uncomfortable, improvised, best-efforts thing that's not at all how it would have been done in peacetime, but that tries its best to live up to at least some ideals in non-ideal circumstances. Because the rest of the book's emotional beats come to a satisfactory conclusion, this works.

I'm looking forward to reading the next book in the series, where Jill Paton Walsh had even less of Dorothy L. Sayers to work from and had to create it largely out of whole cloth. Will it still feel organic with the rest of the series? I think it's likely.

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