Shardlake’s World

We can journey through Matthew Shardlake’s worldAs strangers, feeling our way through the fogOf dogma enveloping a peopleStruggling to thrive and survive, but beginTo feel at home amongst the finery and filth.Conrad offers: Truth stripped of its cloak of timeAs Marlow’s vision of Black Africa.But C J Sansom presents us with truthHidden beneath the cloak of time.This world is as rich as our own sad world:Here once again is surely ‘God’s Plenty’.The frightened lonely child who soils himself,Punched by a bullying fool, and Henry,A cruel king who lives the solipsist dreamRepresent, perhaps, the frightening extremesOf timeless human experience.And we meet so many men and womenUgly and beautiful, sharp and clever,So many endowed with a natural goodness,A few perverted, with ice-cold cruelty -And for most of them truth is just a trap.But as Shardlake, a sensitive sad soul,Moves through his so cruel and violent world,A world dominated by King and Church,His inner life changes and developsAs his outer misshapen form remains.He changes as his intellect whispersTo him as Satan once whispered to Eve –Forbidden possibilities, truths whichSuggest another world in the making.But not even Shardlake can imagineA world where a child might not deny himIn shame, or men accuse nature not GodFor shapes created without censure or judgment.