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rebeccacider's review against another edition
4.0
Fan sequels or continuations have a reputation for being awful, but Walsh really did almost get it right in this book. To my (contemporary American) ear, she gets Sayers' voice spot on, and delivers just the right combination of fun character drama and tangled mystery.
There are a few self-indulgent moments that feel more like homages or metatextual commentary on the series, and every scene dealing with current events makes me wonder if Our Heroes would really have had the perfectly-correct-from-hindsight opinions that Walsh paints them with (not that I really see Peter and Harriet being pro-appeasement or anything - but Walsh is still very careful to let us know that they're not). And while I'm glad she solved the Problem Of Bunter without
killing the bromance, I can't decide if I'm satisfied with the way she managed it.
Finally, the mystery was simply a little bit weaker than Sayer's original efforts, no question. Mostly it was very compelling, but there were a couple moments at which the characters had to be stupider than the reader, and a whole lot of coincidence to make things work (like seven different people randomly wandering around the bungalow that night? Really?)
But I really enjoyed it, and there was lots of Peter and Harriet being adorable. What more do I really need? :)
There are a few self-indulgent moments that feel more like homages or metatextual commentary on the series, and every scene dealing with current events makes me wonder if Our Heroes would really have had the perfectly-correct-from-hindsight opinions that Walsh paints them with (not that I really see Peter and Harriet being pro-appeasement or anything - but Walsh is still very careful to let us know that they're not). And while I'm glad she solved the Problem Of Bunter without
killing the bromance, I can't decide if I'm satisfied with the way she managed it.
Finally, the mystery was simply a little bit weaker than Sayer's original efforts, no question. Mostly it was very compelling, but there were a couple moments at which the characters had to be stupider than the reader, and a whole lot of coincidence to make things work (like seven different people randomly wandering around the bungalow that night? Really?)
But I really enjoyed it, and there was lots of Peter and Harriet being adorable. What more do I really need? :)
tracey_stewart's review against another edition
3.0
This is going to be long. I read Thrones, Dominations not too long after it first came out; this is a second reading, and first review.
Of Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers "had written six rough chapters, and devised a plot diagram in coloured inks. When sixty years later a brown paper parcel containing a copy of the manuscript turned up in her agent's safe in London, her literary trustees commissioned Jill Paton Walsh to complete it."
I don't know.
No, that's not true – I do. This is not what fans of Lord Peter wanted or needed. It's not terrible, but I have seen it referred to – often – as fan-fic. I'm not sure the label exactly fits Thrones, Dominations, but it is like a great many Star Trek novels I read when I was a teenager. In so many of those, it seemed very much as if the writer had a generic science fiction manuscript sitting unsold in his drawer, realized Star Trek novels were big at that time, and changed the names and a handful of other details and got it published as part of the franchise despite barely a hint of knowledge of or similarity to Star Trek as aired on television.
I have little background knowledge of Jill Paton Walsh; I'm not saying that she doesn't know and love the Lord Peter books as much as any of us.
But I'm tempted to.
Because there are times when Thrones, Dominations feels like it ought to. The characters strike the right chord for a paragraph, a line of narrative just feels good … and then it goes back to the feeling of the alignment being somewhat off. It's distracting to be wondering throughout the book "was that genuine Sayers or counterfeit?" – hoping in some ways that some of the good lines were JPW, because that would mean she was capable, while knowing given the sheer weight of not-Sayers that it was unlikely. The metaphor that came to me about halfway through (because I do love me a metaphor) was: it's like meeting with an old friend you haven't seen in a long time, and they've changed. Now and then as you talk there's a glimpse of the person you used to be so close to, a spark of what used to be, a connection like the old warmth - and then a minute later you're sitting with a stranger again. A mostly likeable enough stranger, in a way, but ...
A complaint I've read about the book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that JPW seems to have gone back through the existing novels and gathered up minor characters – from Bill Rumm to Uncle Paul (and someone on the late Yahoo Lord Peter Group is right – he would not have called him Uncle Pandarus in front of everyone) to Harriet's friends Sylvia and Eiluned to Gerry and Freddy Arbuthnot, along with references to canon books (far more than I remember Sayers ever using), and tossed it all like fairy dust into the reader's eyes, hoping for a façade of credibility and/or distraction from the book's deficiencies. I kept waiting for Miss Climpson. Oh, there she is, and Reggie Pomfret too for heaven's sake. JPW tried so hard to cram everything into this book that she didn't spend enough time on anything – including the major characters.
Where there is a plethora of cameo appearances, there is a disturbing dearth of Bunter. He has had a handful of lines of dialogue and one scene in which he sits down for a drink and a debriefing with Peter. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I hate it.
For that matter, there's surprisingly little Parker, and what there is comes off as … priggish. Despite Harriet, he is primly made to state "I don't read detective novels" in an affronted tone. His working with Peter feels off; his marriage to Mary didn't change the way they worked together, why should Peter's marriage? I don't like this Charles, what little we see of him. A line from Charles: "It's like trying to overawe a brick wall". For the sake of my sanity I have to believe DLS would have come up with something sharper than that.
The Dowager Duchess has always been one of my very favorite people in any book, and … I don't think this does her justice. She needs to witter away and still under it all be perfectly sensible. She doesn't witter nearly enough here; there isn't enough fluff.
Harriet is much too deferential to Peter. When she is with him, she seems to walk on eggshells. When she is not with him, she references him or quotes him in nearly every other sentence. She sounds more like a June Cleaveresque 50's housewife than an independent woman who very much has her own opinions, thank you very much. And why is she supposed to have hired a secretary (Miss Bracy)? She's written for years without one, quite efficiently. Was she expecting such massive output that she would not be able to keep up with her own typing? It seems in fact to have had a dampening effect … Yes, yes, the marriage, and she's safe now and doesn't need to write. The incapacitation brought by happiness, along with the surprising leaning toward tragedy for the new book, is nicely done – unfortunately both are beaten to death.
Also beaten to a pulp is the idea that this is a New Thing for Peter and Harriet. Peter has to adjust to having the woman he has sought after so long, to living with her in a new expansive home and the changes that entails. Harriet has all that to cope with, with the added wrinkle that she is going from one income bracket to very much another, from a flat by herself to a stately home with not only Peter but a staff. From dressing as she pleased and going out when she liked with friends to patronizing a pseudo-French dressmaker and attending Wimsey family affairs. It's all new to her, every waking moment.
I wonder if this is why JPW chose to stick so much to Harriet's point of view? We the loyal readers are too familiar with Peter-and-Bunter, and never had much chance to become too familiar with married-Peter-and-Harriet, even less chance than they've had themselves. She might have felt safer using eyes we haven't seen through as much, in a setting which is alien to the character, thereby accounting for any unusual behavior.
Most important of all, Peter ... I don't know. There are brief flashes, as I said. Otherwise, I miss him, even though he's puportedly right there. I've been reading about writing dialogue lately, and that shed light on the problem here. I think that if you take any of the canon books (yes, I do subtract the JPW books from canon, whatever the Sayers estate might say) and strip the dialogue of all the tags ("Peter said" and "said Harriet" and "replied Parker" and so on), it would not be very hard to pick out the lines spoken by Peter (or Harriet or Parker or Bunter, for that matter). Here … Peter's dialogue is very generic, and where it's not it is very similar to lines spoken by Harriet and Parker. There are several Parker lines which I would have attributed to Peter. And Peter … Peter sounds like just anyone. That should not be.)
The "scissors moment" of the book was depressingly clearly telegraphed. I saw it coming so far off. ("Scissors moment" is what it was always called in that Lord Peter Group, the "Aha!" moment, when all the disparate facts of a case rearrange themselves to show the answer. In the first novel, Whose Body, it is illustrated by looking at the letters "COSSSSRI" and finding no meaning until the letters just jump around in the brain and it becomes obvious that the letters give you "SCISSORS".)
The quotes and allusions made by characters are even more aggressively obscure to … well, to me at least, than any Dorothy L. Sayers ever used. I like that classically educated Peter and Harriet are able to volley them comfortably back and forth – they always did. But I don't remember the tags ever putting my nose out of joint quite like this before. (Which could be because I've read the books so many times – but I don't think so.) (I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is meant by "Peter dislikes women with green fingernails" – perhaps a reference to Picasso?)
This is a spoiler, of sorts, but not if you've read the canon stories:
One huge complaint, loud and irritated: Oh, come on, really? Harriet is vomiting randomly and someone actually tells her "You're looking well … Positively glowing"? Oh – spare me. Isn't there some way of hinting a woman's pregnant without using clichés that have been used ad nauseum in every cheesy novel and tv show since time began? Even if I didn't know about Bredon and young Peter and company that very first scene of Harriet sprinting off to be sick – and then feeling just fine shortly after – would have pinged the radar. It couldn't be more obvious without a stork flapping through the scene.
The first irritated and provoked word to come to mind regarding the mystery's solution is, I'm afraid just … dumb. I have an image of Dorothy L. watching aghast from the afterlife, shouting "No! That's why I abandoned the silly story! I put it aside until I thought of a solution that wasn't that moronic!" I didn't figure it out even in this reread, because if I'd thought of it I would have dismissed the idea as too damn stupid.
I go on at great (even greater, that is) spoilerific length about this and quite a bit else on my blog.
Of Thrones, Dominations, Dorothy L. Sayers "had written six rough chapters, and devised a plot diagram in coloured inks. When sixty years later a brown paper parcel containing a copy of the manuscript turned up in her agent's safe in London, her literary trustees commissioned Jill Paton Walsh to complete it."
I don't know.
No, that's not true – I do. This is not what fans of Lord Peter wanted or needed. It's not terrible, but I have seen it referred to – often – as fan-fic. I'm not sure the label exactly fits Thrones, Dominations, but it is like a great many Star Trek novels I read when I was a teenager. In so many of those, it seemed very much as if the writer had a generic science fiction manuscript sitting unsold in his drawer, realized Star Trek novels were big at that time, and changed the names and a handful of other details and got it published as part of the franchise despite barely a hint of knowledge of or similarity to Star Trek as aired on television.
I have little background knowledge of Jill Paton Walsh; I'm not saying that she doesn't know and love the Lord Peter books as much as any of us.
But I'm tempted to.
Because there are times when Thrones, Dominations feels like it ought to. The characters strike the right chord for a paragraph, a line of narrative just feels good … and then it goes back to the feeling of the alignment being somewhat off. It's distracting to be wondering throughout the book "was that genuine Sayers or counterfeit?" – hoping in some ways that some of the good lines were JPW, because that would mean she was capable, while knowing given the sheer weight of not-Sayers that it was unlikely. The metaphor that came to me about halfway through (because I do love me a metaphor) was: it's like meeting with an old friend you haven't seen in a long time, and they've changed. Now and then as you talk there's a glimpse of the person you used to be so close to, a spark of what used to be, a connection like the old warmth - and then a minute later you're sitting with a stranger again. A mostly likeable enough stranger, in a way, but ...
A complaint I've read about the book, with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that JPW seems to have gone back through the existing novels and gathered up minor characters – from Bill Rumm to Uncle Paul (and someone on the late Yahoo Lord Peter Group is right – he would not have called him Uncle Pandarus in front of everyone) to Harriet's friends Sylvia and Eiluned to Gerry and Freddy Arbuthnot, along with references to canon books (far more than I remember Sayers ever using), and tossed it all like fairy dust into the reader's eyes, hoping for a façade of credibility and/or distraction from the book's deficiencies. I kept waiting for Miss Climpson. Oh, there she is, and Reggie Pomfret too for heaven's sake. JPW tried so hard to cram everything into this book that she didn't spend enough time on anything – including the major characters.
Where there is a plethora of cameo appearances, there is a disturbing dearth of Bunter. He has had a handful of lines of dialogue and one scene in which he sits down for a drink and a debriefing with Peter. Not enough. Not nearly enough. I hate it.
For that matter, there's surprisingly little Parker, and what there is comes off as … priggish. Despite Harriet, he is primly made to state "I don't read detective novels" in an affronted tone. His working with Peter feels off; his marriage to Mary didn't change the way they worked together, why should Peter's marriage? I don't like this Charles, what little we see of him. A line from Charles: "It's like trying to overawe a brick wall". For the sake of my sanity I have to believe DLS would have come up with something sharper than that.
The Dowager Duchess has always been one of my very favorite people in any book, and … I don't think this does her justice. She needs to witter away and still under it all be perfectly sensible. She doesn't witter nearly enough here; there isn't enough fluff.
Harriet is much too deferential to Peter. When she is with him, she seems to walk on eggshells. When she is not with him, she references him or quotes him in nearly every other sentence. She sounds more like a June Cleaveresque 50's housewife than an independent woman who very much has her own opinions, thank you very much. And why is she supposed to have hired a secretary (Miss Bracy)? She's written for years without one, quite efficiently. Was she expecting such massive output that she would not be able to keep up with her own typing? It seems in fact to have had a dampening effect … Yes, yes, the marriage, and she's safe now and doesn't need to write. The incapacitation brought by happiness, along with the surprising leaning toward tragedy for the new book, is nicely done – unfortunately both are beaten to death.
Also beaten to a pulp is the idea that this is a New Thing for Peter and Harriet. Peter has to adjust to having the woman he has sought after so long, to living with her in a new expansive home and the changes that entails. Harriet has all that to cope with, with the added wrinkle that she is going from one income bracket to very much another, from a flat by herself to a stately home with not only Peter but a staff. From dressing as she pleased and going out when she liked with friends to patronizing a pseudo-French dressmaker and attending Wimsey family affairs. It's all new to her, every waking moment.
I wonder if this is why JPW chose to stick so much to Harriet's point of view? We the loyal readers are too familiar with Peter-and-Bunter, and never had much chance to become too familiar with married-Peter-and-Harriet, even less chance than they've had themselves. She might have felt safer using eyes we haven't seen through as much, in a setting which is alien to the character, thereby accounting for any unusual behavior.
Most important of all, Peter ... I don't know. There are brief flashes, as I said. Otherwise, I miss him, even though he's puportedly right there. I've been reading about writing dialogue lately, and that shed light on the problem here. I think that if you take any of the canon books (yes, I do subtract the JPW books from canon, whatever the Sayers estate might say) and strip the dialogue of all the tags ("Peter said" and "said Harriet" and "replied Parker" and so on), it would not be very hard to pick out the lines spoken by Peter (or Harriet or Parker or Bunter, for that matter). Here … Peter's dialogue is very generic, and where it's not it is very similar to lines spoken by Harriet and Parker. There are several Parker lines which I would have attributed to Peter. And Peter … Peter sounds like just anyone. That should not be.)
The "scissors moment" of the book was depressingly clearly telegraphed. I saw it coming so far off. ("Scissors moment" is what it was always called in that Lord Peter Group, the "Aha!" moment, when all the disparate facts of a case rearrange themselves to show the answer. In the first novel, Whose Body, it is illustrated by looking at the letters "COSSSSRI" and finding no meaning until the letters just jump around in the brain and it becomes obvious that the letters give you "SCISSORS".)
The quotes and allusions made by characters are even more aggressively obscure to … well, to me at least, than any Dorothy L. Sayers ever used. I like that classically educated Peter and Harriet are able to volley them comfortably back and forth – they always did. But I don't remember the tags ever putting my nose out of joint quite like this before. (Which could be because I've read the books so many times – but I don't think so.) (I'm still trying to figure out what exactly is meant by "Peter dislikes women with green fingernails" – perhaps a reference to Picasso?)
This is a spoiler, of sorts, but not if you've read the canon stories:
Spoiler
One huge complaint, loud and irritated: Oh, come on, really? Harriet is vomiting randomly and someone actually tells her "You're looking well … Positively glowing"? Oh – spare me. Isn't there some way of hinting a woman's pregnant without using clichés that have been used ad nauseum in every cheesy novel and tv show since time began? Even if I didn't know about Bredon and young Peter and company that very first scene of Harriet sprinting off to be sick – and then feeling just fine shortly after – would have pinged the radar. It couldn't be more obvious without a stork flapping through the scene.
The first irritated and provoked word to come to mind regarding the mystery's solution is, I'm afraid just … dumb. I have an image of Dorothy L. watching aghast from the afterlife, shouting "No! That's why I abandoned the silly story! I put it aside until I thought of a solution that wasn't that moronic!" I didn't figure it out even in this reread, because if I'd thought of it I would have dismissed the idea as too damn stupid.
I go on at great (even greater, that is) spoilerific length about this and quite a bit else on my blog.
trish33's review against another edition
funny
mysterious
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
coops456's review against another edition
2.0
Not up to Sayers' standards. Very predictable and with some glaring plotting issues.
radella_hardwick's review against another edition
3.0
Very much a howdunit, than a whodunit. There are no convincing red herrings in the who department.
Unfortunately, the whydunit is severely lacking too. I suppose it's more true-to-life for it all to be down to coincidences and accidents but that does make it unsolvable.
I had evolved 2 or 3 neater solutions, including one that would've rhymed with Whose Body? and another with Lord Edgware Dies.
Unfortunately, the whydunit is severely lacking too. I suppose it's more true-to-life for it all to be down to coincidences and accidents but that does make it unsolvable.
I had evolved 2 or 3 neater solutions, including one that would've rhymed with Whose Body? and another with Lord Edgware Dies.
kirstenfindlay's review
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
ungildedlily's review against another edition
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.75
cake_cats_books's review
hopeful
lighthearted
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.25
buzzingbea's review
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
ellenbarker's review against another edition
5.0
I love all the Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, even the ones (like this one) completed by others after her death.