2024/128: Bury Your Dead — Louise Penny

That was the danger. Not that betrayals happened, not that cruel things happened, but that they could outweigh all the good. That we could forget the good and only remember the bad. [loc. 5220]

Bury Your Dead is the most complex and the most compelling of the Gamache novels that I've read to date. There are three strands, at least, to the story. Gamache is staying with his old mentor in Quebec, recovering (physically, mentally and emotionally) from an operation that ended tragically. Insomniac and tormented by memories, it's with a sense of relief that he finds himself involved in a murder, a body buried in the cellar of 'the Literary and Historical Society, that bastion of Anglo Quebéc'. The dead man, Augustin Renaud, had been obsessed with finding the grave of Samuel de Champlain, founder of Quebéc and focus of the separatist movement. 

In parallel to this are Gamache's memories of a shoot-out in an abandoned factory, and those who died under his command: but not until the very end of the novel does everything about that operation become clear. And meanwhile, in Three Pines, Jean Guy Beauvoir is continuing investigation of the murder case that was the focus of The Brutal Telling, talking to the villagers, being assailed by Ruth Zardo's poetry, and discovering the truth -- or something closer to it -- about who murdered an elderly man deep in the woods.

That Penny keeps all these plots balanced, clear and engaging is laudable in itself: that she also shows us Gamache's guilt and sorrow over his failure to save his colleagues, and evokes wintry Quebec and the close-knit community of the Lit and His, is virtuosic. It was good to see Gamache's second-in-command, Beauvoir, out of Gamache's shadow: and to see sullen Agent Nichols saving the day.

I am very tempted to read my way through the whole series now (especially as I've accidentally encountered some spoilers for future novels): but it's not as though I have nothing else to read...

2024/127: A Rule Against Murder — Louise Penny

“Not everything needed to be brought into the light, he knew. Not every truth needed to be told.”

Reading The Cruellest Month (third in the series) reminded me that (a) I enjoy Penny's 'Three Pines' series very much (b) I found The Brutal Telling (fifth in the series) an uncomfortable read, and attributed this to reading it out of sequence. When I discovered that I could borrow the fourth novel, A Rule Against Murder (under its US title, The Murder Stone) from Internet Archive, I decided it was time to fill in the gaps.

Inspector Gamache and his wife, the fragrant Reine-Marie, are celebrating their wedding anniversary at Manoir Bellechasse, a beautiful and secluded inn not far from the village of Three Pines. Most of the rooms at the inn have been taken by members of the Finney family, rich and entitled, who are using their reunion to make one another miserable. There are surprise guests, a tremendous storm, an ungendered child named Bean, and an impossible murder.

Which is, of course, Gamache's milieu (though the Finneys think he is a shopkeeper). Lacoste and Beauvoir arrive on the scene, and Gamache's steely resolution and profound understanding of humanity are focussed on the murder -- though there are subplots and layers: fathers and sons, wealth and ruin...

I felt there were some weaknesses in the plot, but overall this was a good read, and kept me guessing until the eventual revelation of the murderer's identity and motivation. And it was interesting to see a little more of Gamache's personal life, and his relationship with his own son. I did miss the ambience and characters of Three Pines, though.

After this I reread The Brutal Telling in preparation for the sixth book in the series...

Fulfils the ‘set during a holiday you don't celebrate’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. The action occurs around Canada Day, 1st July.

2024/126: The Cruellest Month — Louise Penny

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper. [opening line]

It's spring in the cosy Canadian village of Three Pines, and a famous psychic has come to stay at the B&B. Well, not that famous; not actually a psychic; and not that willing to parade her skills for the villagers. Nevertheless, they decide to hold a seance in the old Hadley House, a nexus of nastiness in the first novel and generally not a cheerful place. What could possibly go wrong? One of the participants is literally scared to death: or is she?

Chief Inspector Gamache and his team become involved in the investigation, turning up some old secrets, some new friends and an undercurrent of treachery. Nothing is quite what it seems, and Myrna's explication of 'near enemies' -- emotions and their almost-indistinguishable opposites, such as attachment / love, pity / compassion, indifference / equanimity -- provides one route towards solving the crimes. (I use the plural because besides murder, there is corruption, slander and deceit. Jealousy is not a crime, but there's a lot of that here too.)

I know these people are imaginary, but I like them: their friendly rudeness, their long-held secrets, their idiosyncrasies, and especially Gamache's determination to be, and do, good. Louise Penny's prose occasionally jolts me, especially when her viewpoint character changes abruptly, but on the whole it's well-written and evocative. I can see myself becoming addicted to these novels...

2024/125: The Power — Naomi Alderman

When he walked past a group of women on the road – laughing and joking and making arcs against the sky – Tunde said to himself, I’m not here, I’m nothing, don’t notice me, you can’t see me, there’s nothing here to see. [loc. 3846]

Some time soon, teenaged girls everywhere begin to develop the ability to zap other people with electricity -- anything from a minor shock to a lethal one. A new organ, the 'skein', is identified as the organ of electricity. The girls can awaken the power in older women, too. And within months women all over the world are rising up, targetting oppressors, fighting back.

Alderman's four protagonists experience this change in different ways. Allie, whose Christian foster parents have abused her, begins to hear a guiding voice, convincing her to found an all-female community. Roxy, a London gangster's daughter, avenges her mother and stands up to her father. Margot, a middle-aged American politician, acquires the power from her troubled daughter Jos, and uses it to clear her path to power. And Tunde, a young Nigerian man who's training as a journalist, becomes a chronicler of this unforeseen revolution, travelling the world and meeting formerly-enslaved sex workers, female soldiers, and the redoubtable Tatiana, the wife of Moldova's president.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that power corrupts: that women are capable of being just as violent and cruel as men. There are some deeply unsettling scenes in the latter part of the novel, and Alderman evokes the Bacchae at one point to remind us that there's a long history of female violence. And though at first it's amusing to see the microaggressions, the nervousness, the imbalances turned upside down, it quickly becomes sobering, even depressing.

Though I've owned this novel for some years, I'd never got around to it before. I didn't know about the framing narrative, which is set far in our future (though I don't wholly accept the implicit history of how we might get there from here) and I didn't know just how unpleasant some scenes would be. I'm glad I've read it, despite those scenes, despite the bleakness: it's well-written and inventive, with interesting viewpoint characters, and it examines its central conceit with care and nuance. I wonder if the novel would be more intersectional if Alderman were writing it now.

Fulfils the ‘self-insert by author’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. The framing narrative features letters by 'Neil Adam Armon' to a 'Naomi', who is a successful author and probably a former lover...

2024/124: The Perfect Golden Circle — Benjamin Myers

...the call of the cuckoo, the sonorous song of it, sung from little lungs, a sweet thrum freed from the funnel of its throat. It is a call down the centuries, shaped by deep time and desire. Desire to spread the message that summer is coming in on the breeze and all the sins of winter shall be forgiven and forgotten. Forgotten as the new scents and notes stir senses nullified by dead seasons past. [loc. 506]

The setting is somewhere in the west of England, in 1989. Calvert (ex-SAS, Falklands veteran, lives in the second smallest house in England) and Redbone (crusty new age traveller type, no fixed abode) are spending the summer creating corn circles. Their friendship is a quiet one, full of things left unsaid and questions never asked or answered. They are the fixed points in one another's lives: Redbone has a series of girlfriends, who all eventually give up on him, and Calvert does not do relationships. Their shared passion is to 'fuel the myth and strive for beauty', and perhaps also to get people to learn to love the land. Also, of course, to mess with the straights, cause chaos, and instil a sense of wonder in those who flock to see their art.

There's one chapter per 'crop circle' (most of which aren't circles) and several involve nocturnal encounters with other people: fly-tippers, hare-coursers, an elderly woman calling for the dog who ran away many years before, a coked-up aristocrat who thinks Redbone is his gamekeeper... Redbone creates the designs, Calvert scouts for locations, and they relish both the anonymity and the appreciation. The two men are profoundly rooted in the land, its histories, its stories.

I suppose that this is technically historical fiction: but 1989 feels realler to me, in many ways, than 2024. I remember the media reporting of corn circles, and the various myths that sprung up about them (even after Doug Bower and Dave Chorley went public with their admission that they'd made many circles in Wiltshire and the surrounding counties). Myers has the benefit of a vantage point in the novel's future, and hindsight is 20:20. Calvert's speech about the 'island mentality' is especially sobering from a post-Brexit era: "The sea is a border, a boundary, and living on an island like this makes us think we’re something special. But we’re not. We’re just scared, that’s all. We’re scared of the world. And that breeds arrogance and ignorance, and ignorance signals the death of decency." [loc. 869] 

The two are also both wondering if humanity will even make it to the third millennium. The heatwave of summer 1989 was unusual for that decade ('I've never known it this hot for this long,' says Redbone, stripped to the waist at 4am), but relatively normal for the 2020s, though climate change is only mentioned towards the end of The Perfect Golden Circle.

I found this marvellously immersive, evocative, rural without sentimentality, emotional without much being said: I'll keep an eye out for more of Myers' novels.

Anonymous, anti-capitalist and awe-inspiring: were crop circles actually great art? -- article by Myers.

2024/123: Masters of Death — Olivie Blake

Slowly, slowly, she became again what she’d once been—not a being, but a current, a force, a spirit. She dissolved back into foam, heaving a sigh that salted the earth’s shore, driving gracelessly against bigger things; stronger things. With her secrets restored, she became again nothing; became, again, everything... [p. 347]

An estate agent is trying to sell a mansion in an up-market district of Chicago: except the estate agent is a vampire, and the house is haunted, and the ghost would like his murder solved, please. There are plenty of other supernatural beings -- 'creatures' -- around, including a siren, a werewolf, a demon, a reaper (a soldier in Lucifer's army), and a man named Brandt who claims to be a son of Odin. And there is Death's godson, more-or-less-fraudulent medium Fox d'Mora, who's still mourning a lover who left him nearly two centuries ago. That lover's return is tied in with the disappearance of Death himself, and with a game that the immortals play. There's only one rule: don't lose.

One of Blake's earliest novels, Masters of Death was first published in 2018, a couple of years before The Atlas Six. It does read like an early work and I'm surprised that Tor have republished it without any amendments. The prose is arch and melodramatic, which suits the story, but the plot is tangled and murky (I'm still not entirely clear on what the game involves: emotional torture via the evocation of memories?) and, aargh! the saidisms! Characters seldom say anything: they point out, or tell, or mutter, or comment, or agree, or argue, or return, or realize, or add, or judge, or conclude, or... When I find myself paying more attention to synonyms for speech than to the plot, the prose is a distraction.

There are some lovely passages, though, and some very likeable characters. Viola the estate agent, 'not the Dracula kind of vampire', is great: so is her friend, Isis, a demon who works as a personal trainer. And I do wish there was more about Brandt. If I'd read this first, I doubt I'd have gone on to The Atlas Six: but seeing the seeds of Blake's style was interesting.

2024/122: Render Unto Caesar — Gillian Bradshaw

This has never been about the money, Roman. This has been about whether Roman officials can rob, cheat and murder with impunity.

The setting is Rome, 16BC. Cleopatra was defeated fairly recently: many Romans still look down on the Greeks. Hermogenes is a Greek businessman from Alexandria who travels to Rome to seek justice from the man who ruined his family by defaulting on a debt. He's accompanied by two slaves, and he stays with a friend of his father's, Titus Crispus. His initial meeting with Tarius Rufus, who owes him over half a million sestertii, doesn't go well: Rufus spits on Hermogenes, calls him 'Greekling', and generally seems disinclined to pay. When Hermogenes -- who is a Roman citizen, with all the rights that entails -- pursues the matter, he finds himself in mortal peril. He's attacked in a dark alleyway, but rescued by a witness, an ex-gladiator who becomes his bodyguard.

There's a lot packed into this novel: anti-Greek sentiment, citizens' rights, Roman politics (Hermogenes is opposed by a trio of wealthy men, friends of the absent Emperor Augustus, who are manoeuvring for dominance), and the ethics of slavery -- in particular, of sexual relations between slaves and citizens. Hermogenes, whilst definitely a man of his time and perfectly comfortable with slavery as an institution, finds himself considering how to help one of Crispus' slaves, who is not happy at having to sleep with Crispus. And that leads him to recollections of his own youthful relationship with an enslaved woman...

Hermogenes is a delightful character: he is interested in people, and he likes to be liked, but there's an inner strength that not even Hermogenes himself realises is beneath the sunny exterior. His resolution and courage are in sharp contrast to the corrupt Romans he encounters. Render Unto Caesar would be interesting if it consisted solely of his quest for justice and his growing awareness of the inequities of slavery: that it's also an unusual and thoughtful romance, and a vivid evocation of Imperial Rome with its bedbugs and stenches and wealth and squalor, makes it a splendid read.