Whatever Common Wednesdays Do

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

A Great Deliverance is an odd book with an oddly unmemorable title - I put it in the donate box after I'd finished it and I kept having to get it out again because I couldn't remember what the hell it was called, even though the tie-in with the murder is obvious long before the detectives figure it out. It's recorded as "A Something Something by E. George" in my book journal because I didn't feel like getting up just then.

It's a wild jumble of tropes and tragedies, and if it were just a little better written, I would say that's just how life is sometimes. It lost me in the end, though. The author is, as far as I can tell, an American who thinks Britain's most pressing social problem is poor people jumping to unkind conclusions about rich people - and honestly, even as an inveterate and shameless consumer of gent. sleuths, I found the degree to which all the posh characters were presented as self-possessed, intelligent, and saintly here to be a little hard to take. There are several of them and they're always gliding in and out of rooms with sad but benevolent smiles on their chiseled faces.

There is a certain amount of protesting too much about Lynley in particular. Barbara Havers, Lynley's working-class partner, is forever being firehosed by heavy-handed internal monologues about how wrong she's been to judge Lynley and how shocking it is that he and his friends are nice to her and have complicated inner lives! Her assumptions have been shaken to the core! At one point she reflects that "Lynley's was turning out to be such a multifaceted character, like a diamond cut by a master jeweler, that in every situation a new surface glittered that she had never seen before." This is such an extravagant overstatement of the case that I laughed out loud. For reference, the glittering facets to date: rich dude with title, shockingly not a complete asshole about everything 100% of the time, unexpectedly good at his job after all, bearer of several boring and goopy romantic subplots.

All of this might have been more tolerable in a cozier crimescape, if the Big Reveal and background crimes hadn't been so grimly "realistic" and soul-killing. Scroll over the white text if you might read this book and would like to see a content warning! This book contains [two full chapters of child sexual abuse], described at length and in great detail in a borderline exploitative style that was probably considered chilling and effective in 1988. It's accompanied by some graphically described self-harm, with an internal monologue from the self-harming character. This is the human-evil-spelunking portion of the ride, and I don't think it's particularly well done. For the rest - I don't know; it's ok. I read it all. It boils where it should simmer - not just in the lengthy reveal, but in Barbara's embarrassing outbursts and Lynley's unrequited love nonsense, and all the weirdly earnest PSAs about how Earls Are People Too, and the wonderfully inappropriate and pointless Comedy Americans, who have nothing at all to do with anything except to annoy British people of all classes and foil the comparative sophistication of the author, who would totally rise to the occasion if invited to stay at a castle in Yorkshire.

I feel that if a book is going to take a lot of perfectly good detective tropes and spoil them with unmitigated horror and misery, it had better make it worth my time. Ruth Rendell can pull it off, but Elizabeth George hasn't yet. Maybe in the sequel! My hopes aren't high, but they aren't totally nonexistent yet.

What I'm Reading Now

Monstrous Regiment is pretty good! Polly Perks chops off her hair and joins the army in an attempt to find her brother, who joined up and vanished into one of Borogrovia's endless wars. Things clearly aren't going as well as everyone says. Polly's regiment is a rag-tag collection of beardless boys and maligned fantasy creatures. Bit by bit, Polly finds out that she's not the only soldier with a couple of socks down her trousers. Are we going to find out that all the men have been maimed or killed and the women are the only ones left? I don't know, but I'm sure it'll be funny and probably sad.

What I Plan to Read Next

Another Lynley book whose unmemorable name I don't feel like checking just now - Paid in Blood? Something about blood? - and the other books I brought with me (Sylvester, A Game of Thrones, and The Dollmaker).

Comments

[osprey_archer]

"Lynley's was turning out to be such a multifaceted character, like a diamond cut by a master jeweler, that in every situation a new surface glittered that she had never seen before."

Oh dear LORD. I almost feel bad for the author: don't set yourself up with a simile like that! What character could possibly live up to it? (Although I suppose it might work if it were meant to show that the character making the comparison was rather prone to melodramatic idealization? It might be hard to get readers to make that distinction, though.)

Oh, I love Monstrous Regiment! Probably one of my favorite Pratchetts. Just the right balance of funny-but-rather-sad, given the subject manner.

[evelyn_b]

There's no shortage of surprising depth-diamonds in fiction, but authors who have any sense don't go around calling it in the middle of the first book in a series when the guy hasn't done a thing except wear suits and have a couple of run-of-the-mill feelings. This is one of those cases where "show, don't tell" is good basic advice.

Pratchett is much better at throwing a nice picnic in the no-man's land between funny and sad than Elizabeth George (though they are very different all around, so maybe not a fair comparison).

[osprey_archer]

If Harriet Vane and Peter Wimsey started describing each other as multi-faceted diamonds, I might take it with a grain of salt because they are so very in love each other, but at the same time there would be an essential truth to it. But it definitely wouldn't have worked in the first couple of Wimsey books! Peter in particular needed time to build up to it.

[evelyn_b]

I just did a quick check on the history of diamond marketing to see if Peter and Harriet would be more likely to compliment each other extensively on never stooping to use vulgar and commercialized diamond metaphors in their compliments - but the big diamonds-for-fidelity marketing push didn't start until post-WWII, so you're probably right.

Elizabeth George has namedropped Sayers twice so far. I think she's really hoping you'll notice the influence and maybe stop by for a cup of tea and a chat about excessively blonde inner-life-having aristos, her favorite kind.

[taelle]

Is that the book where we learn all about Barbara's brother and the related trauma?

heavy-handed internal monologues about how wrong she's been to judge Lynley
... except where she was kind of right - I mean, in one of the later books, IIRC, Barbara is running around saying "this dude is kind of suspicious, let's look at his movements in detail/interrogate him", and Lynley's all "nonsense, he's a nice chap, he went to a good school".

[evelyn_b]

I don't know if it's the book where we learn all about it, but there's definitely some trauma relating to Barbara's brother, a large part of which comes out in a burst of emotion after the Big Reveal.

Lynley is often wrong and Barbara's observations about him are often factually correct, as far as I can tell, but Barbara is still made to agonize a lot about having misjudged him. I like Barbara and her issues with her parents are more interesting (to me, so far) than Lynley's issues with accidentally maiming a guy in a motor accident and being in love with various women, but I'm not sure yet if I trust the narrative to give her a fair shake. We'll see! I hope I'll soon be subjected to my own heavy-handed monologues about how much I've misjudged Elizabeth George.

[thisbluespirit]

Maybe in the sequel! My hopes aren't high, but they aren't totally nonexistent yet.

No, no, I read a couple, and my memories were too vague to crystallise into anything other than not that good and depressing, but that's pretty much it, and I honestly wouldn't bother, because, yeah. That is her schtick. Life is too short!

Have you found any Carter Dickson/John Dickson Carr yet because they are way more entertaining? Or probably half a dozen others I could think of if I could remember anything.

I'm glad you have Pratchett to keep you going!

[evelyn_b]

It's too late! I've already started reading the second one. There is a lot of the same sort of thing but there are also a bunch of actors in a country house, so how bad can it be?

I've read one book by John Dickson Carr and really liked it, so I've been on the lookout for others. But a sad thing happened a few months ago - I bought a different John Dickson Carr book, and was completely unable to get through it. I think my head was just foggy due to circumstances, and if I were to try it again, I would have no trouble.

Pratchett is always a good resource!

[thisbluespirit]

Good luck with the country house, and let's hope the "how bad can it be?" question doesn't backfire on you. ;-)

I've read one book by John Dickson Carr and really liked it

Oh, yay! I can't get hold of them easily either (so I shouldn't say that so blithely to you) so I'm interested to know which are the good ones if I'm going to put them on b'day lists and the like. I'm glad you did enjoy him, though, even if the other not so much. I missed him entirely in my first golden age reding spree (I was prejudiced against the men!) and am now regretting it, because our library def. had several of his at the time. What could have been, alas... (As they say.)

[liadt]

I think when something sets itself up as being cozy it should avoid springing traumatic graphic on the reader as most of the time it's too jarring. Still, the series has done well so what do I know?

[evelyn_b]

This one was too jarring. I don't think it was deliberately setting itself up as being cozy to trick the reader, or anything like that. I think it was setting itself up as a deep dive into the drippy limestone caverns of human evil - there's even a background serial killer case that has nothing to do with the core case, just to signal that we've arrived in Grimsville. But Lynley and Havers are so exaggerated and so frequently one-note that my expectations kept getting steered toward "goofy cozy nonsense" and then disappointed. They're not strong enough characters to carry all that traumatic graphic, and I don't think Barbara George is a strong enough writer yet.

But take that with a grain of salt, because I am very, very picky about how I get my traumatic graphic.