23 Jul 2012 10:42:32
Val McDermid is to bring a "frisson of fear" to Jane Austen's least-read book, Northanger Abbey, after being signed to write a contemporary reworking of the gothic novel parody.
McDermid is the third author to have been asked by HarperCollins to reimagine Austen for a modern audience: Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility is out next autumn, and Curtis Sittenfeld's Pride and Prejudice the following year. "I was genuinely gobsmacked when I got the call," said the award-winning Scottish crime writer. "I thought, me and Jane Austen? That's such a fucking natural pairing. But I'm absolutely delighted by the idea."
Northanger Abbey is the story of the gothic novel-obsessed 17-year-old Catherine Morland, a girl who "read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives". Leaving her home for the sophisticated world of Bath, she falls in love with Henry Tilney, only for a host of romantic entanglements to occur, particularly when she visits his home of Northanger Abbey – where, far from her imaginings "the breeze had not seemed to waft the sighs of the murdered to her; it had wafted nothing worse than a thick mizzling rain", and where she goes on to suppose Henry's father to have murdered his mother.
"At its heart it's a teen novel, and a satire – that's something which fits really well with contemporary fiction," said McDermid. "And you can really feel a shiver of fear moving through it. I will be keeping the suspense – I know how to keep the reader on the edge of their seat. I think Jane Austen builds suspense well in a couple of places, but she squanders it, and she gets to the endgame too quickly. So I will be working on those things."
McDermid said it was "terrifying" to take on an author of Austen's stature, however. "She's a genius – I'm not a genius, but I hope I can still bring something to it. One of the reasons we all still read Jane Austen is because her books are about universal things which still matter today – love, money, family. They haven't gone out of fashion, so it's not throwing the baby out with the bathwater to rework her in a contemporary style," she said. "It's a very big mountain to climb, but I've always relished challenges and I enjoy experimenting with the genre. I won't be attempting to write Jane Austen-style prose – that would be suicidal. But I will attempt to bring the highest level of my own prose, and to make it sparkle."
The novel will be out in spring 2014. HarperCollins crime and thriller publisher Julia Wisdom called it a "mouth-watering prospect, not least because we can expect the unexpected from Val, a genius at creating suspense, a plotter par excellence and a crime writer whose creative imagination and versatility are second to none".
