A brief update.

It's been a while since Molly stopped by to stare at you with her soulful eyes and whine at you until you feed her, and so: an update.

Molly has been keeping busy this winter, in spite of the fact that I, her terrible owner, have refused to put out a space heater for her to hog and she honestly feels like giving up on life every second except when a pillow falls off my bed. For reasons that REMAIN UNCLEAR every human pillow is more comfortable for a dog to lie on than a dog bed made for a dog. But I digress.

She has lately taken up a sport, or so she tells me. The rules of dog sports are a little obscure (run, run, RUN, stop, RUN), but she did make it clear that the prize was "MOR FUD, U GIV." When I said that no food would be made available after a recent win, she replied with a cryptic "NO WORRYS, MEATSTICK."

Here she is, being escorted to her podium by two men who are not imbuing this moment with the dignity and quiet admiration it deserves:

Meanwhile, I am reading Tana French's latest murder mystery, as well as the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, and someday soon I will write a post about these things.  

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'Broken Harbour' by Tana French

Broken Harbor by Tana French

Two Josephine Tey Mysteries

A little while ago, I read a few Josephine Tey mysteries, one after the other after the other. Tey is pretty original, even now; sixty odd years after they were written, these little novels still seem fresh. As you probably know by now, I have never met a mystery I didn't like, but I have to admit that I usually know going in what I can expect.

First I read "The Daughter of Time" (the title is part of a Francis Bacon aphorism: truth is the daughter of time, not of authority). It's about a bedridden Scotland Yard detective who sets out to solve the centuries-old mystery of who killed the two sons (the heir and the spare) of Edward the IV. The prime suspect has always been their uncle, Richard the III, the last of the Plantagenets and the man who became king in their stead. Listen, do you like those old-school documentaries that they used to have on the History Channel? Where they were like "Who killed King Tut?" or "What was this Atlantis place everyone* goes on about, really?" If you do, then you'll like this book. It's a fascinating period in history, and if the stakes seem low in summary, they never do when you're reading the book. It was a page-turner for me. It reminded me a little of Rear Window in its set-up. It sounds sort of boring and constrained in concept, but in both cases, the characters' limitations (on the one hand, and inability to leave one's apartment, on the other, an extreme distance from the crime) are exploited to great effect.

Brat Farrar was actually the most traditional of Tey's mysteries that I read, and also the most melancholy. I get the sense that Tey sort of regrets that someone has to die (even a fictional someone) in order for us to have our entertainment. This is an odd story: there's a family by the name of Ashby, owners of an important English estate. The family was once composed of Aunt Bee and the five children of her late brother and his (also late) wife. After their parents' death, the oldest child, Patrick, committed suicide, leaving his brother Simon the heir to the estate.  The story opens on the eve of Simon's coming of age, when a young man appears claiming to be Patrick, thereby challenging Simon's claim to estate. Patrick is of course Brat Farrar, and the meat of the story is concerned with what happens next. This was probably my least favorite of the mysteries; it was very "Rebecca." By Daphne Du Maurier? The story is haunted by Patrick's violent and inexplicable death, and there's an encroaching darkness about the whole thing. It's the only one of Tey's mysteries that really has about it a sense of menace.

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In unrelated news, I have been listening to this during workouts at the gym:

I just really feel like it encompasses all the feelings I feel at the gym: euphoria, frustration, boredom, and the one where I'm about to die of a heart-attack.

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Also, do you remember how good that first Coldplay album was? I mean, I was fifteen, so who knows, but remember how we felt? The second was not as good, but I heard this today, and oh, memories.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEoHFzEmld0?fs=1&feature=oembed] 

This was also the first video where I didn't think Chris Martin looked like an attractive alien life form. (The unattractive alien lifeforms all look like Jabba the Hutt and the things you find in tap water when you look through a microscope.)

*The conclusion is always that Plato is one of these. 

CBR III Week 8: In the Woods by Tana French

This book left me feeling, I don't know, maybe bereft is the word? Having read Faithful Place and Even Stevens's review of In the Woods, I knew I wasn't going to have a run-of-the-mill mystery on my hands, and In the Woods did not disappoint. The story has lingered in my head even weeks after I finished reading it.

As I've written before, one of the reasons I find mysteries so lovely and fun to read is because much of the time, the character I'm most attached to is fundamentally separate from the central drama of the story. Even when the detective or whatever is in danger, you sort of know that for the story to continue he or she needs to be ok, right? At the end of the story there's usually a putting-everything-in-its-placeness that makes me feel like a little kid picking up my toys at the end of an afternoon of play. French takes our assumptions of safety and just totally crushes them. To great effect! To survive is not necessarily to be alright and to look for answers is not necessarily to find them.

Let me tell you what the book is about, before I continue to make vague, mysterious pronouncements: a young girl's body is found at an archeological site outside the village of Knocknaree, which itself is a detached suburb of Dublin built in the seventies in some sort of developers-gone-wild frenzy. Two detectives from Dublin's elite murder squad are assigned to the case: Cassie Maddox (a fantastically realized female character, can I just mention that? no wonder she's the star of French's second novel) and Rob Ryan. As it turns out, Ryan himself grew up in Knocknaree, and was probably the only survivor of three children who went missing there in the eighties. He was known as Adam Ryan then, and after his two friends disappeared (never to be seen again), he was found clinging to a tree in the woods outside Knocknaree, his shoes soaked in blood and his memory wiped utterly clean of whatever horror he may have witnessed. Rob keeps his past a secret, even when he becomes involved in the investigation of the newer murder. He's drawn to the new case (inevitably, one feels) and for the first time in his life, he is forced to come to terms with how his childhood experience shaped him.

One thing I like to do when I really enjoy a book is to go on Amazon and read people's reviews of it, so I can feel vindication and contempt for other readers, in turn, depending on whether they agree with me or not. Obviously! So without going into details that will spoil this book for you, I will say that there's controversy all up in the ratings, but that's because French doesn't treat her characters like toys. Like any really good writer, she's willing to make her characters face the one un-faceable thing in their lives (and isn't that why we read good books?); she doesn't seem content with low stakes or facile endings.

My one little quibble: at times, this book was maybe a little over-written, especially when compared to Faithful Place. French is such a sensuous writer that it's probably inevitable that her prose occasionally gets a little overwrought. It's interesting to see how French is evolving, and I for one am looking forward to reading more of her stuff.

CBR III Week 7: Death in Holy Orders by PD James

Lately, I sit down to write things and before I can put a single word down, I look to my left and see my new nail polish and decide to paint all my nails jade green, because why not? I love jade green!

Anyway, my goal is to post a review every day this week and clear my backlog of books I've been meaning to write about.

I read PD James’s Death in Holy Orders so many weeks ago that it was still snowing then or something, probably. It’s a mystery, or did you get that from the d-word in the title? Specifically, it’s a mystery set in a remote Anglican theological college called St. Anselm’s. When I say remote, what I mean is that this place is like ten years from falling into the sea off East Anglia and when that happens exactly no one will notice. Adam Dalgliesh, James’s great poet/detective, visits St. Anselm’s one weekend to unofficially look into the mysterious death of one of the ordinands, at the request of his wealthy father. Dalgliesh’s weekend visit throws him together with a number of characters that are both temporary and permanent fixtures at the college, several of whom may have had motives for murder. Shortly after Dalgliesh’s arrival, another murder occurs, and Scotland Yard launches an official investigation into the people at St. Anselm’s.

There’s something so workmanlike about PD James’s writing. I can’t call to mind many writers who are quite so clear or self-effacing; she writes with so little ego. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I prefer this kind of writing to something highly stylized—there’s a wonderfully honest plainness to it: an understandability and accessibility that are possible, I think, only when a writer has great confidence in herself and her skills. So quietly authoritative is her voice that it allows her to insert any number of unlikely coincidences and subplots into the story without stretching believability. So, Adam Dalgliesh spent several summers in the seminary as a boy. So, one of the characters just happened to write down the thing that gets her killed in a diary (not a spoiler, actually!). Well, of course. In James’s hands it all seems sort of inevitable.

This is very much in the tradition of a British pre-war country house mystery, in that there’s a limited number of suspects, and the murderer must be found among them. It’s an interesting update on that concept actually, as it is profoundly concerned with elitism and tradition, and the cultural upending England has undergone since WWII, which has endangered both, for better and worse. 

James had me right up to the very end. I had only one real problem with this book, but it’s a bit of a doozy. Without giving anything away, I had a hard time buying the murderer’s motivations for what he had done. I’ve recently finished another of James’s books (A Certain Justice), and in both the motive for murder is quite similar, and the murderers are characters that remain rather hazy to us, but the difference in believability is enormous. In the case of Death in Holy Orders, it feels as if, at the end, James had to fit the character to the plot, rather than the plot to the characters, which gives the whole story an unfortunate mechanical quality: it fails to convince us that it’s more than a cleverly constructed puzzle, and so lacks the power to move us.

200 Word Review: Andrea Camilleri’s The Terracotta Dog (audiobook)

I listened to this on my way down to Florida, the sunshine-induced-headache state. Chandler thought it was just ok, but that’s because he reads mysteries for the suspense and surprise, while I read them for food and place descriptions. I mean, I love a puzzle and some DANGER, but the ambiance is what really makes it or breaks it. The setting was $money$, even if you could see the ending coming from, basically, page 3. I’ve been to Sicily, where I stepped in dog poop 134,986 times, and I kind of disliked it, but this book makes me want to give it a second shot. Right in the head!

Sorry, the book was full of that kind of humor. Something happened when I heard this book read out loud: the dialogue became super-embarrassing. I don’t know why it didn’t bother me in print; it’s all either corny or melodramatic. After a little while you get used to it, though, like living with someone who farts in public. It’s kind of catching, actually. I mean the language, not the farting. I think at one point I was like “We’re low on gas. What has become of us? We’re the empty shells of the people who left Charlotte. GET IT? IT IS A PUN. I AM PULLING INTO A SHELL STATION.”

P.D. James at 90

I love P.D.James, the British mystery writer. I know Adam Dalgliesh is everyone's favorite, but I wish she'd written more than just the two Cordelia Gray mysteries (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin). Cordelia Gray is like Nancy Drew, with sordid sex crimes. That sounds unpleasant, but it's actually a really good combination.

P.D. James solved the mystery of living a full life.