Read Jacqueline Winspear's A SUNLIT WEAPON

 

Jacqueline Winspear’s A Sunlit Weapon is a fine, but not great, addition to her long series of Maisie Dobbs novels.  Maisie and her familiar entourage are now placed in the middle of WWII. Eleanor Roosevelt is about to tour Britain and dark deeds in the homeland as well as from abroad are afoot. British airplanes being ferried about the country by brave female pilots are being shot at, Maisie’s American husband just happens to be in charge of security for Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit, and a young black American serviceman is found bound and gagged in an old barn. Meanwhile Maisie’s daughter is being bullied at her school and her assistant Billy’s sons are in uniform and exposed to danger. I am amazed at how Winspear manages to weave all these threads together, but the chapters at the end that are devoted to unscrambling things go on too long. 

Certainly, the mysterious traitorous events keep the story line moving, while Winspear works the underlying themes of racial and class differences between England and the United States and the  emancipation of women in the war effort.  Maisie Dobbs continues to be a fictional standard bearer for all women through the years as they juggle professional careers, family responsibilities, and motherhood. For that alone the series continues to worth reading.    

Another more personal area that struck me was the way in which a sense of place infuses depth into the detection aspect of the novel. Maisie relies on her former mentor Maurice for her ability to locate the hidden truths that at first seem to be disconnected. She quotes Maurice, who said years ago, that “Place is a crucial factor in our work—and places leave their mark in the same way that a human being can touch us. We have to make our peace with place, with the locations where we have spent time.  We must consider how we’ve been affected by being present in a certain spot—and how the place itself is changed by what has come to pass.”  

My wife and I are at this very moment readying our long-time family home for sale. We were surrounded by a sense of place as we wandered for the last time through those empty rooms a week ago. They kept reappearing in my mind fully furnished and inhabited with years of memory.  All I can say is I agree with Maurice and Maisie. We must look and pause--listen to the vibrations, soak up their presence, and find their essence. Through that we may know the history in a place and find and feel the truth.