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A review by aethelgifu
Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid
3.0
This was a jolly romp set in Edinburgh during the Festival and in an Abbotsford-type house in the Borders. It's part of 'The Austen Project' - 're-tellings' of Austen's six finished novels by established contemporary writers. Now I'm still not sure why we need this, when Austen is so good, and after failing to finish Joanna Trollope's cringeworthy, beyond bad, 'version' of 'Sense and Sensibility' I wasn't sure about this one....but Val McDermid is Scottish, it's set in places I know and I picked it up for nothing in the library so it was worth a whirl.
McDermid's twist on Northanger Abbey is a well written, well constructed but light and frothy whirl through Austen's major plot points: girl meets boy, girl meets wrong boy, girl meets friend, girl meets wrong friend, girl has head turned by Gothic fiction which leads her to make disastrous assumptions and then they [mostly] all live happily ever after.
There were the occasional jarring elements - the 'yoof speak' didn't read like McDermid was convinced by it, and he was also constrained by the lack of social media in the 18th C which led to crucial plot points in Austen but didn't ring true for 21st C Scotland. No mobile phone mast on my land? Ever heard of a CPO? Ex-soldier working for the MoD who switches his wifi off for 'security'? hmmmm.
McDermid gets round the Gothic novels element by making her Catherine a fan of paranormal YA novels, especially 'Twilight'. And instead of a Bluebeard fantasy at Northanger, McDermid's Catherine comes to believe she's fallen into a nest of Cullen type vamps. I can't work out if the 'Twilight' thing is McDermid being lazy and using it as an easily understood teenage girl obsession or if she's skewering Meyer's use of Bella Swan as a 'Mary Sue'.
McDermid's twist on Northanger Abbey is a well written, well constructed but light and frothy whirl through Austen's major plot points: girl meets boy, girl meets wrong boy, girl meets friend, girl meets wrong friend, girl has head turned by Gothic fiction which leads her to make disastrous assumptions and then they [mostly] all live happily ever after.
There were the occasional jarring elements - the 'yoof speak' didn't read like McDermid was convinced by it, and he was also constrained by the lack of social media in the 18th C which led to crucial plot points in Austen but didn't ring true for 21st C Scotland. No mobile phone mast on my land? Ever heard of a CPO? Ex-soldier working for the MoD who switches his wifi off for 'security'? hmmmm.
McDermid gets round the Gothic novels element by making her Catherine a fan of paranormal YA novels, especially 'Twilight'. And instead of a Bluebeard fantasy at Northanger, McDermid's Catherine comes to believe she's fallen into a nest of Cullen type vamps. I can't work out if the 'Twilight' thing is McDermid being lazy and using it as an easily understood teenage girl obsession or if she's skewering Meyer's use of Bella Swan as a 'Mary Sue'.