Dissolution (The Shardlake series, 1)

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Thomas Cromwell – principal counsellor to Henry VIII and holder of a number of high state offices 1533–1540.

Brought up in the city of Edinburgh, Soctland, C.J. Sansom was born in 1952, an upbringing which helped inspire much his career that was to come. Gaining strong academic credentials over the years as well, he’s also managed to make a name for himself with his keen penchant for accuracy within his work. Not only that but he’s also benefited from a number of other previous positions in the past as well. Graduating from the University of Birmingham, he managed to gain both a B.A. and a P.H.D. in the subject of history. Over the years this has also helped to give his material a level of research unsurpassed by other writers throughout his career. After graduating though, he went on to do a number of other jobs before settling down as a full-time writer. Branagh's return to television drama - the medium in which he first made his mark playing a young Northern Ireland boy, Billy Martin, in a landmark Play For Today trilogy in the early Eighties - marks a significant change of direction for the actor and film-maker, who has recently released screen versions of Mozart's The Magic Flute and Peter Shaffer's play Sleuth What he says “I find the free-market ideology that has dominated the world for the past 30 years, and brought us to our present ruin, a dogma that has failed repeatedly and disastrously, but politics based on national identity is even more dangerous; anti-rational, demagogic, assuming individuals should be defined by their nationality, and, always, against an enemy.”Those fans who hope to see Shardlake on screen will have to wait a while longer, however. Dissolution was originally optioned as a film with Kenneth Branagh attached to the project. The BBC later optioned the series and the most recent update is that a television project is still in development, although there is no date set and it is no longer with the BBC. Cromwell sends a commissioner to begin the process of dissolving the monastery of Scarnsea on the southern coast of England, but shortly after arriving at Scarnsea the commissioner is murdered. Cromwell now sends one of his protégés, a lawyer named Matthew Shardlake to investigate the murder and to conclude the dissolution of the monastery. Best of times His first novel, Dissolution (2003), was shortlisted for two Crime Writers’ Association awards; its follow-up, Dark Fire, won the 2005 CWA Ellis Peters historical dagger award. Dominion (2012), a re-imagining of 50s Britain, won a Sideways award for alternate history.

Originally published in April, 2003, this was to be the book that began the Matthew Shardlake series. Setting up the environment for this collection of historical mystery novels, it helped establish the tone and the period. In 2012 it also saw a radio dramatization on BBC4, as it was adapted for a well received radio-play.

Sansom explained his reasons for making his protagonist a barrister, in an interview with The Guardian. As one character says, “Uncovering complicated truths is never easy.”, and in “Dissolution” Mr. Sansom makes such uncovering an enjoyable experience. I will continue on with reading the series.

This was a time of uneasy alliances with Catholics swearing allegiance to the new church not because they necessary believed, but because they wished to keep their property and to keep their heads attached to the rest of their bodies. People used the new laws to settle old grievances, turning their enemies in for Catholic devotion that reminds me of neighbors turning on neighbors in Germany under the Third Reich.

Dissolution

Though Sansom has said that a novel by definition cannot offer “the accuracy you’d get in an academic article”, the academic historian in him is clearly reluctant to hand over the material entirely; his research for the third Shardlake novel, Sovereign, led to a discovery that he published in an academic paper and he ends every novel with an extensive bibliography and a scrupulous historical note in which he explains exactly how he has interpreted the facts to serve the interests of the story. In Dominion, he used this author’s note to condemn the kind of nationalism he saw as contributing to the Second World war.