Has his kindness gone? Maybe. Each of his selves took something from him as it fell away. He left his confidence on the farm with John Collan. His innocence drowned on the floor of the house in Oxford, as Lambert Simons covered his eyes. His happiness is still locked in Edward, Earl of Warwick’s bedchamber in Dublin. When Simnel quits here, his goodness and his faith will be left in one of Henry’s strongboxes.
What has he got now? His hatred, and his love. That’s all he needs. The rest is chaff. Like Joan said, he’s better off without it. He should have brushed it off sooner.
I’ve never read a Ricardian novel quite like The Pretender. That’s saying a lot, considering I’ve read quite a number of them: there was a time when any Richard III-related fiction was irresistible to me. (I wrote about this preoccupation of mine long ago in Open Letters Monthly and had just so much fun revisiting and rethinking some of my favourites.)
The Pretender isn’t exactly ‘Ricardian’: it’s more accurate to call it ‘Ricardian-adjacent.’ It includes the York and Lancaster family trees I used to be able to reproduce handily on my own without looking them up, but its protagonist is at most a peripheral character in the story of Richard himself. Harkin has chosen Lambert Simnel as her focus, one of the young fellows put forward after Richard’s death claiming to be a lost Yorkist heir: Perkin Warbeck, for instance, purported to be Richard, Duke of York, younger son of Edward IV and one of the two famously vanished ‘Princes in the Tower.’ Lambert Simnel claimed to be Edward, son of George, Duke of Clarence (the ‘drowned in a vat of malmsey’ one)–nephew to Edward IV and Richard III. Both were figureheads for rebellions against Henry VII; Perkin Warbeck was executed, but Lambert Simnel was pardoned and put into service in Henry’s household. Wikipedia helpfully notes “almost no information about his later life is known.”
I’m not sure if it is a spoiler to say that Harkin leaves the question of whether Simnel was or was not actually Clarence’s son unresolved. She opens when the boy who would end up a claimant to the English throne is living an unremarkable life as John Collan, the son of an inexplicably prosperous farmer whose wealth turns out to be due to the service he is doing for the mysterious nobles who show up one day to turn John into ‘Lambert Simons.’ This temporary alias is to shield him from notice or scrutiny while the tutor they have appointed, Richard Simons, polishes him up, a process the boy enjoys only because it broadens the scope of books he can read.
Each section of the book follows him through a new phase as he is groomed and trained and readied for the ultimately unsuccessful rebellion in his name, and then becomes (in Harkin’s version of his life story) not just a servant but a spy for Henry, sussing out treasonous activity, including among those who at least claim to still be working for his own ultimate victory. Why, you might wonder, would a Yorkist serve Henry’s interests in this way? Since much of the fun of The Pretender lies in the convolutions of the plot, including lies, deceptions, betrayals, and revelations, all I’ll say is that like Arya in Game of Thrones, by the time this is John / Edward / Lambert / Simnel’s life, he has a long list of people on whom he would like to take his revenge.
When I say I have not read a book quite like this one before, it’s the style I mean more than the story. Harkin might not appreciate this characterization but one way I found myself thinking about her style, or at least her style here, is ‘Wolf Hall Lite.’ It is in present tense and also in close third person, much like Mantel’s brilliant series. It also adopts an archaic style, especially in the dialogue, though never to the point that Mantel herself warned writers away from–or at any rate it did not put me off, or seem overly mannered. Here’s a small sample from near the beginning that shows how she uses medieval (or pseudo-medieval) words or idioms:
The future, though bright, is also a little frightening. It’s an inquieting thing to pass out of the bounds of the farm, out of sight of the waving Emma and his father. The men beside him terrify him. Even his horse is intimidating, as beautiful as it is. Its hooves are oiled; its mane traps the light in tiny pieces. The only reason it hasn’t bucked John’s grubby body off its elegant back is because it’s too gentil.
One word she uses a lot is “maugre,” meaning something like “ill will” or “quarrel,” as in “he had no maugre with Philip” (looking it up, I see dictionaries trace it to “Old French” and define it as “bad pleasure”). I was able to enjoy this strategy for evoking a long-ago idiom because there is also a lot of crisp, effective, highly evocative writing and the novel as a whole moves briskly along. It’s a violent time and death is often both sudden and arbitrary (as Simnel learns, grimly, early on). Here’s another small sample, from when the army raised in his name is marching towards battle:
The atmosphere is different with no women around. The boozing is harder and wilder. The japes are crueler. Edward sometimes sees common women leaving tents at dawn. Sometimes the women are weeping. When the men aren’t singing ballads and playing dice games, they’re arguing, or fighting. He passes an affray: shouting, pushing, then–unexpectedly–one man sticking his halberd into the other man’s throat. The body is carried away. Then the men go back to the dice, and Edward to let out his shocked tears in his tent.
There’s a metallic tang in the air; he can feel it. Like swords being sharpened.
Like coming war.
That note about his “shocked tears” reminds us that he is still only a boy (he’s fourteen at this point), and also that he was not raised to be a soldier, that he is–initially at least–loving, imaginative, vulnerable. Until late in the novel, none of what is happening to him is by his own choice, or under his control, even when he thinks it is (something else he keeps grimly learning). The family he thought was his turns out (or so he’s told) not to be; his new caretakers are ruthless; his partisans are manipulative and self-interested; those he fears and those he loves prove equally untrustworthy. So there’s an underlying poignancy to this adventure tale. History tells us he fails, labels him a “pretender,” lets him vanish into obscurity, but Harkin makes us root for him, not least because he is himself self-conscious about his likely narrative fate:
[L]ater, when Simnel’s with Beatrice, he returns to his maugre against history.
‘We might know the truth,’ he says. ‘But in a few hundred years, Richard will be a hunchback and I’ll be a scoundrel. Those people won’t know anything else.’
‘Write your own history, then,’ she says.
‘I’d be writing my own head onto the block.’
It is sad but not surprising that he becomes hard, cynical, even murderous himself: so many people “have lied to him, goaded him, gulled him, terrified him, confused him,” and also taken away “anyone ever loved or might have loved–and left him alone, more alone than anyone, because they even parted him from his own self.”
It sounds great, right? So why did I call it “Wolf Hall Lite”? I don’t mean that The Pretender is a cheap imitation or a knock-off, just that Mantel’s books have a darkness to them that The Pretender does not, while Harkin’s has more humour than Mantel’s. The Pretender is perhaps more easily entertaining, but it’s also less engrossing. Nothing in The Pretender thrilled me the way parts of Bring Up the Bodies did. That said, like Wolf Hall when I first read it, The Pretender surprised me, in a good way. It is nothing like the pedestrian or formulaic historical fiction that can give the genre a bad name. It felt adventurous to me as writing, and it tells a lively and complex story. Would it be too complex for someone who had never heard of the Duke of Clarence or the Duke of Buckingham or Stanley or Lovell or Elizabeth Woodville before? Impossible for me to know!
Novel Readings 