Minette Walters
The Last Hours by Minette Walters is the first book in a historical trilogy that takes place in Dorsetshire in 1348 when the area was first afflicted with the Black Death. It focuses on Lady Anne of Develish and her struggle to save the serfs and others under her care when her husband dies of the plague.
Lady Anne is an anomaly among women of the period. Educated by nuns, intelligent, and politically astute, she is married to the licentious and brutal Sir Richard. She treats serfs with compassion and humility, teaching them literacy and the importance of maintaining strict personal and public hygiene. When news reaches of her husband’s death, she welcomes the serfs to the moat surrounding the Manor House to protect them from the pestilence, denying entry and exit to all others to prevent the spread of the disease. She has the support and loyalty of the serfs but must contend with hostility and aggression from her daughter, Eleanor. Her husband’s Norman steward distrusts her actions due to her insistence on empowering the serfs. Anxiety, food shortages, and the suspicious death of a young boy add to the problems facing this isolated community.
The historical research for the novel is impressive. Walters drives home the inequality of the period in which serfs are treated as chattel while their masters grow fat by exploiting their labor. The social hierarchies and class discrepancies are omnipresent and especially evident in the contrasting views of the serfs expressed by Lady Anne and Eleanor. Walters immerses the reader in the sights, sounds, and smells of the plague. She shows how the pestilence spreads suspicion and shatters the established norms of society by destroying lives, eliminating status, and modifying codes of behavior.
The novel’s strength lies in generating the atmosphere of isolation and fear pervading the communities suffering from the plague in 14thC England. But the character portrayals were weak. The characters were one-dimensional—either too good to be true or too wicked to have a single redeeming quality. They lacked subtlety and nuance. Lady Anne was so far ahead of her time in attitudes and beliefs that she stretched plausibility to the limit. The excessive amounts of telling and too little showing slowed the pace, dragging the narrative down unnecessarily. This was very evident in Thaddues’ ramble through the countryside in search of food and supplies. Many of the redundancies and repetitions could have been edited out, making for a much tighter construction and shorter novel. The novel lacks a satisfactory resolution as it ends with an abrupt cliffhanger in preparation for the next book in the series.
Recommended with reservations.