Book Review Louise Penny A World of Curiosities

From one critic “Her eeriest novel yet.” 

 

Someone at our Grand Living reading group knew a person who claimed to read the last couple chapters of a book before deciding to read it. I don’t recommend that method, but there is no arguing that classic books and plays are re-experienced even when we know how they come out.  In the case of Louise Penny’s 18^th Inspector Gamache book, I know of no harm that can come from looking at the author’s acknowledgements at the end. They say simply that she can’t put a finger on exactly where or when the ‘the major theme of ‘forgiveness’ emerged” in the book, but it did.  

The narrative begins with celebration and a party for two young female graduates of a Montreal engineering school. One of them was an abused child in one of Gamache’s early cases. The horrible sin that haunts both Gamache and his son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is that the mother had abused her children by selling their bodies as well as hers. How this early sin persists into the present and to a violent conclusion is the journey Penny takes you on.

The central nemesis in the story is thought to be locked in a prison, but has escaped to plan his revenge. Chief Inspector Gamache has his own dark doubts that he keeps in a locked basement storeroom containing his personal files of old cases. Penny extrapolates from this that everyone has secrets and they are kept in locked rooms. “Either in their home, or their head, or their heart.”  These secrets are deep, often dark, and not easily revealed to others. The irony is they fester as much in a psychotic killer as they do in a heroic detective and for each, some kind of forgiveness or at least understanding is seemingly out of reach.

All of the secrets are exposed to light, though in code, when a bricked-up room is found in the former psychologist and now bookstore owner’s old Three Pines house. Inside that room is a huge painting that contains “A World of Curiosities” or a set of clues to the mystery. Each little element or brick contains a piece of the whole. Penny, through Gamache, continues to remind the reader of the “folly of expectations” When there are multiple trails, it is easy to go down a wrong path or follow the deceptive hint put out by an enemy.

Most of the familiar Three Pines denizens who have appeared in the previous books return for brief stints, including Ruth and her duck Rosa, Gabri, the owner of the B and B, and Myrna the former psychologist and book store owner. Food, as always, is an important part of the book. It contains joy, comfort, and togetherness as it unifies all humanity.

This isn’t an easy read; it is just a good one. It is beautifully constructed and thematically complex. It digs into deeply held doubts and obsessions that in turn have fostered  unspeakable evils and dark arts. As Gamache comments toward the end of the book, he has met both good and evil and “had the scars to prove it.”