A Cure for All Diseases
Despite the title, which alludes to Religio Medici, Reginald Hill's newest Dalziel and Pascoe novel revisits prior Hill territory: Jane Austen [1]. In the delightful Pictures of Perfection, Hill neatly parodies all of Austen, with an emphasis on Pride & Prejudice: readers are treated to the intriguing (terrifying?) spectacle of the beyond-Gothic grotesque--and quite butch--Sergeant Wield as Elizabeth Bennet and the snippy--and very non-Colin Firthesque--bookdealer Edwin Digweed as Mr. Darcy. This plot, as well as other subplots and characters, works by alluding to Austen and Austen-related trivia; part of the fun lies in noticing details like the village's name (Enscombe) and watching everyone get appropriately married off at the end, in good romantic fashion. A Cure for All Diseases, by contrast, spends its first 173 pages or so closely reworking Jane Austen's incomplete Sanditon. Many names are identical, situations repeat themselves in more modern versions (e.g., an automobile accident instead of a coach accident), some of the dialogue is paraphrased, and the characters, while exaggerated in one direction or another, are rooted recognizably in Austen's original. (One of the clues, in fact, derives from a peculiarity of Austen's spelling.) Needless to say, the murder--which finally crops up on page 173--is not in Austen, but the novel's critical approach to modern health resorts most certainly is. I do not recommend loaning A Cure for All Diseases to fans of alternative medicine.
Hill has said more than once that his novels are written to resist adaptation. (They have also resisted being taken over by the apparently now-dead television series; Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novels, by contrast, accomodated themselves to their televised counterparts, much to the detriment of the former.) Although Sanditon is not an epistolary novel, Hill constructs A Cure for All Diseases out of e-mails, recordings--Dalziel with an iPod!--and a third-person narrator. The contrast between twenty-first century technology and the novel's source material repeats itself in one of Hill's running themes, also featured in Pictures of Perfection and Death's Jest-Book: the tension between answering to modern economic exigencies and maintaining a "deeper" sense of the Yorkshire landscape. Moreover, all of these ultra-modern methods for communication and information management, so taken for granted, actually prove deeply vulnerable. Privacy breaks down; so too do official secrets. The police read private e-mails, but the police themselves might want to check their firewalls...
"Charley" Heywood's e-mails form the bulk of the Sanditon material. Charley, who is planning a thesis on the psychology of alternative medicine, shows an amusing lack of psychological insight when it comes to her own romantic needs and, as she herself admits, a "penchant for Gothic excitements" (437--shades of Northanger Abbey). Nevertheless, while much talkier than Austen's Charlotte Heywood, who is a near-silent observer, Charley has her namesake's sharp eyes and ears for silliness. Because Charley bears the burden of nearly all the exposition, however, Hill frequently gives in to the temptation to use her to infodump. (As Mike Ripley notes, these are "the longest, most rambling e-mails in internet history...") Dalziel's iPod recordings, besides being shorter, prove surprisingly engaging and, more predictably, salty. An American doctor has a mouth "like looking down an old-fashioned bog [toilet], all vitreous china gleaming white" (27); a sexual proposition is a "bit of Platonic dialogue" (156); and so forth, some of it considerably more scatalogical. While Dalziel has always struck me as a Sherlock Holmes-type character, desperately in need of a more human buffer to be palatable, he turns out to be an effective voice in short doses.
Speaking of character, the most interesting subplot involves Peter Pascoe's behavior sans Dalziel. In 1996, Hill published a flash-forward SF short story, "One Small Step," which posits a Pascoe who, far from emulating his mentor's anti-establishment mentality, winds up warped by authority. While readers could plausibly dismiss that as an alternate-universe scenario, A Cure for All Diseases suggests that this mutation is already under way [2]. As Sergeant Wield unhappily muses, "[p]erhaps his brief period working with the Combined Anti-Terrorist Unit had blurred too many edges for Pascoe" (375). Hill, like John Mortimer, has always made a point of privileging political action over political identification, so it's not surprising that self-consciously liberal Pascoe would slowly morph into something more authoritarian.
Alas, character-wise, not all is gleaming sunshine. When I saw the name "Franny Roote," I discovered that the most appropriate way of expressing my feelings was to quote that renowned philosopher, Charles Brown:
AAUGH!
Roote first cropped up in a very early D&P, An Advancement of Learning, then returned in Arms and the Women. Then returned again in Dialogues of the Dead. And yet again in Death's Jest-Book. After the last two Roote-free novels, I devoutly hoped that we were shot of him. Hill, though, has apparently decided that Roote ought to be a Moriarty-figure of sorts, an ongoing villain like Ian Rankin's Morris Cafferty. Now, this would work if Hill could write him as a consistently interesting character. So far, that's not happening. For most of A Cure for All Diseases, Roote talks like Edwin Digweed without the healthy helping of acid, and since it's precisely the acid that makes Digweed entertaining, Roote's non-acidic, rather pedantic formality does not for enjoyable reading make. (Incidentally, where is Digweed? I'm going to file a missing persons report if this keeps going on.) By the end of the novel, when Roote drops much of the faux academic performance, he's easier to take. But please, Mr. Hill--uproot this Roote.
[1] There's also a non-D&P Austen short story, "Poor Emma," collected in There Are No Ghosts in the Soviet Union and Other Stories (1987).
[2] Sharon Wheeler observes that "it's interesting to note that it's Dalziel, never backward about coming forward, who often exercises restraint while Pascoe continues his progression into a far more abrasive character (much like the portrayal in the TV version)," but as "One Small Step" suggests, Hill was already thinking about this possibility in the 1990s.