Review: He’s a commoner but he could be a British king in ‘The Pretender’

Rare’s the author who invents her own literary language, but Jo Harkin has accomplished just that.

Her dazzling, jocular novel “The Pretender” recounts the journey of one John Collan, from his anonymous boyhood in a rural village to a claim, as Edward Plantagenet, on the English monarchy. Never has a peasant risen so far, so fast.

Set in the 1480s, as Henry VII (father of baddie Henry VIII) ascends to the throne following the War of the Roses, “The Pretender” opens with John rooted in bucolic bliss, a dreamy 10-year-old whose japes and scrapes make up all the world he’ll ever need.

He’s intoxicated by tales of battlefield valor, imagining a duel with the local billy goat, yet he’s also tender-hearted, a devout Christian who has “an excessively soft face. Like a new cheese.”

His country life is disrupted when a gentleman sweeps him to Oxford; a priest attempts to winnow out the commoner from the child, tutoring him in Latin, the code of conduct for a proper earl. We learn his true father, the scheming late Duke of Clarence, had swapped him with another, protecting his neck from the ax.

John, now called Lambert, learns his lessons in solitude until a grisly upheaval transports him to the safekeeping of his aunt, Margaret, duchess of Burgundy. (During the channel crossing the sailors give him yet another name: “Simnel,” after a fruitcake.)

Margaret mentors him in “sensible governance,” as she describes it. He grows into a polished persona, the Yorkists’ final ploy to quell the Tudor threat. Harkin tinkers with her young lord’s identity like a kaleidoscope, but Edward remains the sweet-tempered, empathic boy from a farm in Oxfordshire.

“The Pretender” celebrates and subverts the conventions of historical fiction. The influences are there in plain sight — Hilary Mantel (“Wolf Hall”), Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Arthurian legends, Sally Rooney, sex comedies — yet the novel moves with its own zany energy.

Harkin blends Latinate and Gallic vocabulary/spelling and present-day slang. As she writes of Edward’s “gentil” older cousin and idol: “His swordsmanship is a technical marvel. And of course the ladies are, how do you say, hot for him.” I half-expected Harkin to sneak in an emoji or LOLOL.

As the plot springs forward, Edward ships off to the Pale of Ireland, ruled by the charismatic Earl of Kildare, his regal lady, and their brood of six daughters and infant son. The sisters are unruly and potty-mouthed, right down to 4-year-old Eustacia. Now 13, Edward is drawn to precocious, beautiful Joan, who uses her wiles to kill people (literally).

She’s a dangerous and beguiling creation, a Middle Ages mean girl; you won’t meet anyone like her on the page. Edward doesn’t want to be king and Joan doesn’t want to marry. He distrusts her but falls in love, moping about the Kildares’ castle where Harkin shows off her lyrical gifts: “He’s alone in the cloister. A fine rain is coming down, drifting through the arches, velveting his face.”

Edward and Joan join forces as Harkin escalates the action, twirling and teasing her prose much as Roger Federer wielded a tennis racket. Percussive sentences; parenthetical interruptions; modernist stream-of-consciousness; a section transcribed like a play. All add up to an irresistible voice.

“The Pretender” is a stylish, profane, hilarious read, and Harkin is the proverbial writer to watch.

Hamilton Cain, who also reviews for the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post, lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Pretender

By: Jo Harkin.

Publisher: Knopf, 476 pages.