Hearing Voices

I had the odd experience of having the experience of listening to one audiobook affect how I felt about another last week when I discovered Gourmet Rhapsody, by Muriel Barbery, at the library and found that the voice of the gourmet was performed by the same old man who had narrated The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. That voice predisposed me to dislike the gourmet.

But I would have disliked the character eventually, anyway. He's a man who was never pleasant to his wife or children and who spends the last two days of his life going through remembered experiences of eating to find an elusive taste that he wants again. Although I'm usually a sucker for descriptions of meals, the ones in this book left me cold, for the most part. It's Barbery's first novel, and I'd say her ability to create voices for her characters improved a lot between this one and The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

The voice of Mary Russell, in Laurie R. King's latest, The God of the Hive, is as good as ever, despite the addition of a small child to her adventures with (or in this novel, in parallel to) Sherlock Holmes. There are some different kinds of secrets in this one, which ties up the loose ends left at the cliffhanger ending of the previous one, The Language of Bees.

Although Sherlock and Mycroft act in ways that would seem foreign to anyone who had just finished reading the Conan Doyle stories, their characters continue to develop consistently in King's novels, and even though Mycroft, in particular, has left his traditional depiction very far behind, his voice is still believable; I particularly enjoy his wish
"that he had been gifted with his younger brother's knack of using hunger to stoke the mental processes. Under present circumstances, Sherlock's mental processes would be fired to a white-hot pitch that would melt the walls.
Personally, Mycroft found a growling stomach a distraction."

Boy, so do I. Do you, or are you more of a Sherlock Holmes type? Or a gourmet type, whose palate is so refined that ordinary foods don't excite much response anymore?

The Language of Bees

The Language of Bees, by Laurie R. King, is the mystery novel I've been passing up other things to finish this week. As has been widely noted, it ends with a cliff-hanger, but that doesn't diminish the shape of the narrative, as the plot is resolved satisfactorily, if not permanently. The experience of reading this novel, which for me took place largely outside, was disconcerting because of the appearance of a small drawing of a bee at the top of every numbered page. I kept putting down my glass of iced tea and shaking the book to get the bug off.

Even if you're new to the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series, you can probably enjoy this novel on its own. But if you haven't read the previous ones, reading this one will make you want to go back and start from the beginning, with The Beekeeper's Apprentice. One of the things I like best about the relationship between Sherlock and Mary is the way he knows her strengths and relies on her with what seems to be complete trust. That's a more romantic story than I've found in many a romance novel.

There are other idiosyncratic things that I love about this novel. One is that at the beginning of the story, when Holmes and Russell are traveling home to Sussex, he gets the same feeling I often get when we approach central Ohio at the end of a trip elsewhere in the wide world: "Holmes shifted and reached for his cigarette case, and the abrupt motion, coming when it did, suddenly brought the answer to Holmes' mood as clearly as if he had spoken aloud: He felt Sussex closing in over his head....it had become small, dull, tedious, and claustrophobic." Except, of course, that I'm more likely to stop at a convenience store and buy something terribly sweet at that point, since I don't smoke.

Another thing I love is that when Mary, a theological scholar, discusses her suspicions with an old teacher, they conclude that what they're dealing with must be...necromancy:
"'...when there were objects that resemble quill trimmings at the murder sites, stained by what appears to be dried blood, and bits of black candle-wax as well, we had to wonder.'
'Necromancy,' she pronounced, her old voice quivering with distaste. "From nekros and manteid: 'dead divination.' Blood spells and invocations. Sealing a covenant. The darkest of the dark arts.'"

And finally, I love the part where a character went to "Gare de Lyon, and boarded a train for Marseilles" because I'm not enough of a seasoned traveler to take it in stride when a fictional character does the same thing I just did a month before, especially when that character is in a novel set in the early part of the 20th century!

King does the language and the time period well, as far as I can tell. Certainly her writing is good enough to get me past any minor lapses. She uses her chosen time period and first-person narrator (Russell) for occasional humor: "Some day, I reflected, we should have to invent a means of actually locating a person based on a finger-print, as photographs were circulated to police departments now." And King's ear for early-century and Holmesian diction is occasionally a conscious pleasure for her reader, as here:
"'The author's diction offends you?'
'The author's arrogance and assumptions offend me. His dedication to the idea that all happenstance is fate offends me. His imprecision offends me. His images are both pretentious and disturbing. The sense of underlying threat and purpose are...' I heard myself speaking in the erudite shorthand the Holmes brothers used, and I cut it short. 'He scares me silly.'"

For me, at least, the pleasure of reading the further adventures of Sherlock Holmes counts for a lot:
"'I hope you know what you're doing, Holmes.'
One grey eye came open. 'My dear Russell,' he said lightly. 'I have been deceiving the official police since before you were born. At that art, I am the expert.'"

Most of all, though, King's characters are so alive and so appealing that reading her novel is like being with immensely clever people whose company you enjoy. I long to know someone like Mary's theology teacher who "delivered a wickedly perceptive and academically precise flaying of the rector's homily" after church one Sunday. It's like getting in on the conversation at the Algonquin Round Table. Do you know people that clever? Do they have time to meet and talk anymore, or are their most of their witticisms weighed in the moments we all have before we click on "publish"?

Loving Laurie

I love most books written by Laurie King. Her wife-of-Sherlock-Holmes (Mary Russell) books are good enough to make me buy them as soon as they come out, because I know I'll want to reread them. And her Kate Martinelli mysteries have always been absorbing and well-written. So when her new novel, Touchstone, came out this winter, I ordered it from Amazon on my bed, waited anxiously for it to come, and began reading it as soon as my son brought it in to me. I was disappointed in it, and decided to take some time before I thought about why. Part of it is that it's a fairly gloomy book, and since I was recovering from a knee replacement and it was the dark month of February in Ohio, I was not in the mood for much more gloom.

Looking at it again, though, I find it weighted down by the enforced gravitas of the subject matter, the uneasy balance of international affairs in the time between the two world wars (after the War to End All Wars). Somehow this translates to the writing, which is as heavy and ponderous as the subject. Here's a sample, picked by opening the book to a random page:

"The following ten months had been fraught with the knowledge that time was short, that life would never be the same, that their friends and family were being swallowed up in the carnage across the Channel. And finally, in July 1915, Bennett had come to her house, wearing his uniform and an expression of manly apprehension. She had wept; he had laid his hand across her shoulders and pulled her to his woolen chest, then given her a clean handkerchief and vowed that he would come back to her."

I mean, really. You have to wonder if Laurie decided it was time for her to write a "serious" book after all those frivolous mysteries. Maybe getting the Lambda prize for the latest Kate Martinelli stirred it up in her. I don't know. But she needs to get back in the entertainment business, because this kind of writing does not become her.

I want the Laurie I love back. The Laurie who writes like this (the following is from the random page I opened to when I opened up the Mary Russell book The Moor):

"'Come along, Russell. You mustn't avoid your host simply because he is a rude old man. Besides which, he has quite taken to you.'
'I'd hate to see how he expresses real dislike, then.'
'He becomes very polite but rather inattentive,' he said, holding the door open for me. 'Precisely as you do, as a matter of fact.'"

Michael Chabon points out in his essay "Fan Fictions on Sherlock Holmes" (included in Maps and Legends), that "fans and nonbelievers alike seem to feel compelled to try to explain Sherlock Holmes' lasting appeal" and after his own (quite satisfactory) effort to explain it, he concludes that "all novels are sequels; influence is bliss."

That's what I'm missing from you, Laurie. Take yourself less seriously. Let me love you again.

Laurie King's Mary Russell books:

• The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994)
  
• A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995)
  
• A Letter of Mary (1997)
  
• The Moor (1998)
  
• O Jerusalem (1999)
  
• Justice Hall (2002)
  
• The Game (2004)
  
• Locked Rooms (2005)
  

Kate Martinelli mysteries

• A Grave Talent (1993)
  
• To Play the Fool (1995)
  
• With Child (1996)
  
• Night Work (2000)
  
• The Art of Detection (2006)