Book review: Lucy Jago's A Net for Small Fishes

A Net for Small Fishes, by Lucy Jago

A Net for Small Fishes
by Lucy Jago
(Bloomsbury, $33)

Mistress Anne Turner, the wife of a doctor at the Court of King James, is hurried through a great London apartment. Reaching her destination, scores of candles reveal a half-naked young girl on her knees, howling. She is clutching a rope of pearls while a lapdog at her feet whimpers.

This is young Frances Howard, the Countess of Essex, and her back is a mass of whip-marks recently inflicted by her husband.

The "bodice-ripper" was once a popular style of historic novel. Mid-20th century mega-sellers, like Kathleen Winsor's Forever Amber and the French husband/wife team, Sergeanne Golon's Angelique, were breasty, breathy, titillating and sometimes over-wrought examples. Originating in the far earlier Gothic novels of the 1790s, their heroines were frequently the victims of unjust circumstance, threatened, sometimes ravished, and usually triumphant.

Lucy Jago's A Net for Small Fishes is the style updated for the new millennium, thickened with a smidgen of Booker-winner Hilary Mantel's realism, but no less emotionally passionate than its popular precursors. And just like Mantel's Wolf Hall and its successors, Jago's novel is firmly based on real events.

In the early 17th century, the "Overbury Scandal" had revealed the undercurrents at the court of James I, from unsuccessfully arranged marriages to aristocratic impotence, murder, adultery, and homosexuality. A Net for Small Fishes is history replayed as box-office – and, in Jago's hands, it succeeds brilliantly.

Both Anne and Frances are memorable characters. Anne is older but all her experience cannot steer her away from the disaster of the more innocent Frankie's marriage and its dissolution. "You cannot choose a poisoner like you can a maid," one character murmurs to another in a book filled with verbal retorts and tightening traps.

Throughout the novel, Jago creates and maintains the tension where two women, separated by social class and personal history, develop a firm friendship under situations of threat. The tone is sometimes operatic, but the reader is never allowed to forget that the past is another country and they did things differently there.

A Net for Small Fishes seems ready-made for a Netflix series - but one with weight and veracity. Jago's novel is well-researched as one would expect from a writer who has written biography and who has produced arts, history, and social TV documentaries. History itself becomes a plot-twist.

Jago's descriptions of clothing alone are worth the reading. Frankie's dressing early in the novel is a tour-de-force of fabric and feel. But it's the storytelling and its suspense which is the real winner – right up to the final surprises.

Reviewed by David Herkt