Who's deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed

Spectator

3 days ago

In this age of lies and delusions, the trickster may seem to be a peculiarly modern creature, but he or she is almost as old as literature itself. Long before phishing or fake news, stories about cunning foxes, Loki, Anansi the Spider-Man and Odysseus brought delight; Puck, Tom Ripley and Sarah Waters's fingersmith Sue Trinder are some of their descendants. Encountering such a figure is always a joy, and in Laura Shepherd-Robinson's latest novel, The Art of a Lie, there are two.
Hannah Cole is a shopkeeper in 18th-century London, struggling to keep her confectionary business open. Her husband Jonas has been murdered, and we soon learn that not only is the celebrated author and magistrate Henry Fielding investigating Mr Cole's death but that Hannah is, in fact, his killer.
What may save her fortunes, and possibly her neck, is William Devereux, a friend of her late husband. He suggests that she try her luck at making a new delicacy for the gentry: 'iced cream'. And he is enlisted by Hannah to try to misdirect Fielding as to her husband's killer. Only William, too, is not what he seems. A serial confidence trickster, he seduces rich widows and leaves them broken-hearted and empty-pursed.
The stage is set for a novel of suspense whose artfulness echoes the elegance, imagination, wit and ruthlessness that Georgian craftsmen (and women) excelled in. Each of Shepherd-Robinson's previous novels, beginning with Blood & Sugar in 2019, has plumbed the social and criminal depths of an era which many regard as the apogee of British life. She interweaves its beauties and its villainies (the slave trade, prostitution, gambling) in a way that pricks the conscience even as it entertains. The Art of a Lie is about an era in which men and women of every class practised to deceive each other for pecuniary gain, either through marriage or manipulation – something that is less remote from us than we like to think.
The novel is narrated by Hannah and William in turn, each deftly depicted and neither entirely reliable. Hannah has no weapon but her little pastry knife, concealed in her bodice, her wits, her looks and the assumption that a woman must be weak and helpless. She has killed her treacherous husband in self-defence, and is clever enough to make it look like a robbery: but will Fielding's strange mix of reforming zeal, honesty and insight prove her undoing? William seems to be the perfect gentleman of means, and he does indeed help Hannah turn her business around with a recipe for peach ice cream before bedazzling her with his supposed fortune.
His true character is shockingly different. 'Did you ever see a bigger cunt than Henry Fielding?' is how he introduces himself to us; and believing the novelist and tenacious inquisitor to be his only problem is the first of many mistakes. With a crew of criminals to back up his deceptions, he also has his own demons, in the shape of a violent crook to whom he owes a lot of money. But he is confident that his four-part technique with widows (which he calls the Mirror, the Dance, the Rope and the Drop) will carry him through to another success.
This is a pleasingly sophisticated and twisty novel. Hannah is intelligent, brave and sharply observant about human psychology, but insufficiently wary about what she is being led to believe. William's insouciant voice, misogyny, lies and self-delusion are skewered in a way that 21st-century readers may find sadly contemporary, even as you also feel his charm.
'Contrary to what you might think, I don't hate women. I couldn't do this job if I did,' he says. He claims he's not 'the worst kind of villain' – because he refrains from taking everything, leaving his victims 'with their pride intact and their fortunes only somewhat diminished'. For guiding widows out of grieving for their husbands and lost youth into a new world, he argues that he deserves payment – and only one furious, broken former conquest from Bath is hot on his trail, seeking vengeance. He has more feelings than he likes to admit, just as Hannah has more sense and resilience. Falling genuinely in love with your victim is fatal for the trickster, but who will be the less deceived?
Unusually, The Art of a Lie is also a celebration of the early days of trade, with the dawn of businesses– such as Fortnum & Mason, Floris and Berry Bros – which still carry lustre to this day. The author tells us in an afterword that there were a surprising number of businesses owned by women in this period, and Hannah stands for those who did not need rescuing by a Mr Darcy or, for that matter, Fielding's Tom Jones. She is an intriguing character, and I hope we meet her again.
Too much literary fiction falls into a softened version of the past, but the best historical crime novels are sharply corrective of this. Like C.J. Sansom, Abir Mukherjee, Tim Pears and S.J. Parris, Laura Shepherd-Robinson has taken a moral microscope to her chosen period and shown us the truth about its lies – and our own.