Sense and Pseudoscience, or, The Darcys go Daft

Ah, Elizabeth Bennet, the Janeite's favorite character. Witty, acerbic, lively... psychic?

Say it ain't so!

In this first installment of what appears to be (saints spare us!) a series, Carrie A. Bebris takes the pragmatic Mr. Darcy and his darling wife and tosses them straight into a plot that, to this reader, resembles a violent collision between The Castle of Udolpho and Scooby-Doo. The plot smacks far more of Jane Eyre than of Jane Austen, with its heavy emphasis on the supernatural. Bebris even treats the reader to a wandering mad wife lighting fires in the middle of the night, freely borrowing the iconic scene straight from Charlotte Bronte's classic.

SPOILER ALERT: The following description has only slightly veiled references to the ultimate outcome of the mystery.

The story opens post-wedding, with the Darcys and and the Bingleys freshly married. But along comes Caroline Bingley to rob a bit of the attention from the happy couples by announcing her own engagement to a Mr. Parrish, a wealthy American. (I hear the shrieks of honest Janeites already. Caroline Bingley? Engaged to... to... a foreigner? In trade? And well they should. Perhaps they are meant to. Perhaps this is an attempt at a clue to the mystery.)

The first notion that the Darcys have of something afoot is when they must drive through a seedy part of town and they notice, to their amazement, Caroline Parrish wandering all alone and in a daze. They bundle her up and rush her home, where her worried husband takes her in.

There ensues a series of mishaps in which Caroline lapses between a lucid state and somnambulence and her family begins to think that she has gone quite mad. In the meantime, Elizabeth is visited with a series of prescient dreams, and though she voices her concerns to her husband, Mr. Darcy, ever the voice of reason, refuses to believe.

The rising action of the middle is marred not only by the reader's sneaking hunch that perhaps Mr. Darcy's reason is about to be proven wrong, but also by little anachronisms and inattention to detail that sneak in -- from mention of the "illusion" created by a spinning wheel that makes it appear to be going backwards (an illusion created only by the frame rate of film and not observable in an actual carriage), to descriptions of Darcy and his habits that come straight from the A&E film version of Pride and Prejudice, not from the pages of the original book.

Throughout the story, there are repeated references to a certain ring. These are more clues, and in case they should escape the reader's notice, they are repeated frequently. Caroline stares fixedly at the ring. The ring is pointed out on the wearer's hand. Its unusual design is commented upon. After getting smacked over the head with these clues, the alert reader will soon hit upon the idea that the ring is somehow important.

Does it contain a mysterious drug for doping the unfortunate Mrs. Parrish? Is it used for hypnotizing her? The sensible reader maintains hope, but no, even these devices, suitable for the imaginings of Catherine Moreland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey, are too prosaic, too much of this world, too possible for this tome.

No, instead we have a fully improbable magic ring. The villain has been casting spells over Caroline Parrish.

Even Scooby-Doo gives us a real person under the ghost mask. Bebris, however, transplants Jane Austen's practical, pragmatic, real-world, "two inches of ivory" characters into a world where they do not belong -- a world of sorcery, precognition, and magic. It is an uncomfortable fit, as the reader is forced to hear Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth voice lines that would have made them, had they been real, break out into fits of hysterical laughter. Their creator certainly would have. But then, she never intended such lines for their mouths.

The book might have been passable had it starred Bebris' own characters, set in a world where magic is possible. But to begin with Jane Austen's fully practical world, then to force magic upon it, simply does not work.

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