It’s a bold claim: “Wolf Hall meets Demon Copperhead”. Comparisons can be tricky. Publishers make them, of course, to place a book for potential readers, to whet their appetites. But the danger of overreach and disappointed expectations is always there. The blurb of Vikram Seth’s desperately overlong novel A Suitable Boy likened it to Middlemarch. Not so much.
Yes, Jo Harkin’s second novel, The Pretender, is set not many years before Hilary Mantel’s masterpiece – the time of Henry VII rather than Henry VIII – and it’s inspired by a real person. Yes, like Barbara Kingsolver’s extraordinary contemporary nod to David Copperfield, it’s the story of a boy struggling through chaos and danger. But there any similarities end.
A quick history lesson. When Edward IV died in 1483, he was succeeded by his 12-year-old son, also Edward, one of the two princes (the other was his younger brother) put in the Tower of London by their uncle Richard, who then seized the throne. The boys were never seen again. Richard III’s reign was short: he was killed in 1485 by Henry Tudor, the progenitor of a lasting dynasty. The pretender of Harkin’s title was a boy known as Lambert Simnel who, thanks to his resemblance to the previous royal family, was claimed to be the Earl of Warwick and the legitimate heir. He was “crowned” in 1487 but the whole charade fell apart and Henry VII crushed the rebellion organised in Simnel’s name.
It’s a promising foundation for a novel and Harkin dives into her tale, mostly based on what is known about Simnel, with vigour and confidence. She weaves a reasonably good narrative and has a genuine talent for describing places, scenes and weather.
When we first meet John Collan, possibly Simnel’s original name, he’s a lad of humble origins, clever, sensitive and likeable. Harkin introduces him interestingly and does her best to make him inhabit the reader’s consciousness, but John/Lambert/Edward never succeeds in being compelling. There’s an odd archness in Harkin’s approach – she’s inclined to go for the joke – that makes it hard to identify with Lambert, to care about him, as so many of Kingsolver’s and Mantel’s readers have about the quick-witted, appealing Demon, or the politically adroit and strangely charming Thomas Cromwell. Especially in a large novel – and this one, unlike Demon Copperhead or Wolf Hall, is much too long for its own good – the reader must want nothing more than to keep turning the pages. The Pretender, though, is often quite hard work, not least because of the complicated history of factions and subterfuge. The welter of names becomes tiring.
Unlike Mantel, who holds her reader firmly in an immediately credible world without using any overtly Tudor language, Harkin goes to town on the cod medieval: “waxed wonderly wroth”, “nodding pensily”, “inquiet”, “puissant”, “intermeddle”, “witting”, “distroubled”, “beskift”. But then she throws in completely modern idiom: “what the fuck”, “Oh, please”, “unmarried sex”. This approach could work, at a pinch, but it would require more commitment, control and authorial maturity. As it is, the two co-exist uncomfortably and jerk the reader in and out of period.
Historical fiction doesn’t have to obey any rules, but it does have to imaginatively convince. Joan, Lambert’s sparky and amoral love interest, would make a great character in a 21st-century novel, but her determinedly out-of-time language and attitudes make it difficult to believe in her.
The Pretender is a gutsy and original attempt that will probably please many readers, but it isn’t good enough to be compared to the work of two of contemporary literature’s finest authors, and it shouldn’t be made to bear that weight.
The Pretender, by Jo Harkin (Bloomsbury, $36.99), is out now.
