Duty And Desire (A Novel Of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman #2), by Pamela Aidan

I have to admit that I didn’t like this novel quite as much as I liked the previous one, although I have to say that it is an immensely ambitious novel in terms of its scope, showing Darcy involved with very serious matters of criminal injustice and scandal.  This particular novel demonstrates the challenges a writer has when seeking to perform two goals that are fundamentally in tension with each other, namely being true to Jane Austen’s novel and the direction she points while also seeking to pave new ground and express something that was deliberately kept silent and mysterious in Pride & Prejudice.  Interestingly enough, this novel keeps the mystery up as well, pointing out that Darcy’s friend Dy is clearly more than meets the eye, and that he has nearly gotten in over his head with the mysterious Lady Sylvanie and her equally mysterious “servant” in a host of husband hunting women from a particularly ne’er do well set.  It would make sense, therefore, that a novel that seeks to puzzle out a mystery within Austen’s novel should itself end up being a mystery novel of a sort, and it is a solid one.

Again, the story of this novel is somewhat more complex in terms of its plot than that of Pride & Prejudice, but a big part of that has to do with the contrast between Jane Austen’s characters, who generally are somewhat cut off from the hustle and bustle of the world at large and exist in rather confined social spaces, and a character like Darcy who can mix and mingle with a wide variety of people given his complex roles.  And Darcy’s role in this novel is certainly complex.  He struggles to deal with his sister’s passionate religious beliefs that have been encouraged by her governess, a cleric’s widow herself, beliefs that he is concerned will embarrass them in the eyes of other elevated people.  In addition to this, he finds himself caught up with a group of people that he clearly considers part of the bad crowd, and is trying to put Elizabeth out of his mind even as he sees that he does not know anyone with the same level of attractiveness or moral quality as Elizabeth has, which makes him all the more tortured by bad dreams and by questions of his own decency, especially given the subterfuge he feels forced to play to keep Bingley and Jane apart during her time in London.

All of this creates a novel that is tense when it comes to its twin themes of duty and desire.  Darcy is under a lot of pressure here, and his flaws of class pride lead him to put himself in dangerous situations that he would be better off avoiding, as he nearly learns to his horror when he finds out that his cousin’s fiance has been a bit of a hoebag (okay, more than a bit).  If the author is a bit less classy than Austen was in general, it is not because Austen did not have some idea of what went on in the salons and homes of the elite, because some very shady business went on, but because as a lady of limited personal experience she simply did not wish to comment on realms that she did not know.  As contemporary readers and writers we are far less restrained than was the case in the early 19th century.  This disconnect means that even our novels about the past often involve our own concerns with dark matters of sadistic rituals and high degrees of sexuality that were only enjoyed in the past by the most corrupt of elites.