9 Ramadhan, 1441
Finished C. J. Sansom's Sovereign today, the third in his Shardlake series - and most definitely not the final one for me. I enjoyed the sprawling, unhurried quality of the narrative, which matched the unhurried pace at which I took the novel. I started it back in mid-April and there were a few days when I read only 15 pages or so, yet it remained compelling.
Some critic quoted in the blurb on the Penguin edition says it rates with Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd as a murder mystery, but that didn't seem its strength to me at all. The mystery was fine, don't get me wrong, but not exactly startling in its working out. Sansom's power lies in his convincing evocation of a dark Tudor world, especially in his forensic grasp of how real wickedness works - that, and his balancing sense of genuine flawed decency manifested in Shardlake himself.
The sequence of the king humiliating the hapless lawyer outside York, essentially for the cruel enjoyment of doing so, made for excruciating reading of the best kind.
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