Not over the moon
Ellis Peters, God rest her, has a good deal to answer for. While her Cadfael novels are well researched, agreeably written and prettily plotted, the same cannot be said for some of those who have leapt onto the "medieval mystery" band-wagon. Alys Clare's Fortune Like the Moon is a depressing example of this. It might be unfair to call it a bad book as such, but its thudding mediocrity makes it one of the more soul-destroying novels I have come across.
Fortune Like the Moon is the tale of a young nun's gory murder just after the accession of Richard the Lionheart, and all proceeds just as one would expect from there, with a sprinkling of family secrets, concealed wedding rings, jealous cousins and beauties in wimples. Ms Clare's chosen gimmick is to have her mystery unravelled by an abbess (striking originality in the light of Cadfael) and a minor Aquitainian knight, Josse d'Acquin, with no love for England.
This pairing of detectives results in an unhappy flickering of the narrative voice between their points of view, giving an impression of indecisiveness rather than contrast. This is exacerbated by the rather confusing appearance of observations which seem completely unconnected with the character supposedly making them, such as, "She [Eleanor of Aquitaine] must, Josse thought, be almost seventy, but...the remains of her legendary beauty could be clearly seen; it was not difficult to comprehend how that anonymous German scholar had been moved to write of her, 'if the world were mine from sea to Rhine, I'd renounce it with joy to hold the Queen of England in my arms...'" Perhaps I am simply too ignorant of the details of textual transmission, but it seems somewhat unlikely that Josse would know a "German scholar's" view of the English queen; it all looks suspiciously like an attempt to prove that the author knows more of Carmina Burana than the titular "O Fortuna, velut luna...".
This is compounded by some remarkably uneasy dialogue, which never quite finds a balance between pseudo-medieval idioms and modern plain speaking. This results in such gems as the indignant remark of Sister Euphemia the former midwife: "Sir, I may not know much, but I do know the female genitalia." How reassuring.
The writing never provides any further amusement. The first few chapters have a distracting lack of conjunctions, so we end up with lots of sentences. Short sentences.
And the occasional short paragraph.
An effect which loses all point when so continually over-used.
There is an uncomfortable sense of obligation clinging around the whole thing; the author seems to have put in the set-piece-nasty description of the first corpse, the hint of sexual tension between the sleuths, the mental trauma of the murderer, all because she felt she had to in order to make it a respectable mystery. This is perhaps why it all comes across as so depressingly lifeless (as murders go). There is little impression that the author has any particular fondness for her characters, setting or period; I cannot imagine that any reader will be able to work up much interest either.
5th Oct 2000