Set in 1936 in the midst of the Abdication Crisis and the growing threat from Nazi Germany, Tom Wilde is an Irish-American history don at an unspecified Cambridge college, who becomes involved in investigating the death of a friend of his neighbour and hence drawn into some serious intrigue involving Communists, Fascist sympathisers plotting against the government and so on. It’s an interesting setting which could have worked well, but I never got involved and after a couple of hundred pages decided that I wasn’t sufficiently interested to slog my way through the rest.
It’s well enough written in many ways, but there is an awful lot of ponderous historical detail which was sometimes so basic and clumsily presented that I felt rather patronised. Similarly with the geography of Cambridge; it’s a city which I know and love, but do we really need to be told constantly that characters turned right from this street to that one and then...etc? There’s a lot of extraneous detail which doesn’t add to the atmosphere or setting but really slows down the narrative. Characters tend to be rather thin stereotypes of either extreme communists or odious fascists, whereas most people at the time were neither – the exception, of course, being Wilde who is wise, thoughtful and well-balanced.
Even Wilde’s Great Wisdom is pretty facile at times; for example,two history undergraduates are given a seminar whose message is “Examine the evidence, don’t go on your or other people’s prejudices and preconceptions,” which comes as a profound lesson to them. Seriously? Would history students good enough to have won a place at one of the world’s finest academic institutions really find the most basic principle of being an historian a Great Revelation? It didn’t ring true in the slightest, and I found this in a lot of other places where scenes and dialogue just didn’t convince.
Enough. I’m in a minority here; most people liked Corpus a lot, but it wasn’t for me and I can’t recommend it.
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