A Great Reckoning

I’d give this book 10 stars if I could. Louise Penny is a wonderful writer, and I think this is her masterpiece. It is rich in character and nuance and just mesmerizing. Her novels are my catnip. I don’t so much read her books as submerge myself in them. I can’t explain how she does this except to say that she chooses her words carefully, builds a hypnotic story, and creates in the village of Three Pines a mystic place, not on any map – almost a modern-day Brigadoon.

Several reviewers have noted that this is a stand alone book, and it is in the sense that there is a contained story, but I would argue that reading this book without having read at least some of the previous books is a mistake. Without the background, the echoes of meaning in this book are lost and the reading experience has to suffer. Louise Penny spends almost no time giving background material in her novels – she assumes you know.

I’ve found Penny’s later books to have a strong undercurrent of sadness. In this book, where so much of the story is about memory and memories, the sadness is like a veil through which the whole narrative is seen. One of the lessons of the novel is that life hands us situations, many of which are painful but we decide how they impact our future. Much of the book explores how choices compel other choices, but also how each character has the opportunity to make a new choice, a better choice and change their lives, overcome failure and bitterness and find forgiveness. In the end this is a deeply hopeful book.

Louise Penny is usually considered in the class of traditional mystery writers like P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers. This is only partly true. Her books began as traditional mysteries. Still Life, her first, is a good mystery novel with interesting characters. As time went on however and her power as a novelist grew her books changed. Though they remained in the mystery genre her books have really become studies of character in a crime setting. As a writer of character and mood there is no one to touch her in the mystery field today. It didn’t happen overnight, but today she is a superb novelist who happens to write about a policeman, Armand Gamache. I’ve read many wonderful mysteries in my life, many fine novels, but I have never read anyone in contemporary fiction with the depth and power Louise Penny brings to her best stories. Her books are luminous. Read book one: Still Life, and then read all of her other books – she will take you on a wonderful journey.

I’ve read all her previous novels and was really looking forward to reading this one especially since it had excellent reader reviews. But wow is this book boring. The story line is preposterous, drawn out, repetitive. If I read one more time how someone looked into his “intelligent eyes”, I’ll barf. I found the characters unappealing and unrealistic. Don’t even care how it ends.

I have read every one of Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache novels up to and including this one, and have always considered myself a fan. However, my enthusiasm has been waning in the last few, and even though I have the next one already purchased, which is the last one currently published, I don’t think I’ll be picking it up any time soon. Either Penny’s writing has become more formulaic or I am just wearying of her style, because I found myself almost as often annoyed as intrigued with the style. I understand dramatic tension and hinting at delicious details to be revealed later, and it can make for page-turning delight … or serve to make the reader feel “played”. I have come to love Three Pines and the characters that inhabit it, but they have ceased to be developed beyond the initial characterizations in the first few books of the series. I love the dinner parties and hanging out at Olivier’s bistro, usually the best parts of the novel, but the instances of such in this book felt like repeats of the numerous others of novels past. Each novel has one or two unexpected laugh-out-loud moment, and this one is no exception. (I am chuckling to myself as I think of Ruth and the Thanksgiving turkey.) But the sometimes fantastical plots, wild coincidences, reader manipulation and handy last-page tie-up of loose ends are becoming old. This book managed to throw in a few PC touches just to be “relevant”: a bit of racism, never explained or explored; bullying; plight of women in the last century … Except for Gamache, most positions of power (for the good, at least) are held by women, a bit of sanctimonious social engineering.

I have never read a Louise Penny book I didn’t love until this one. I found the cadets’ behavior appalling and obnoxious- only to be outdone by Gamache’s bizarre response to their outbursts. I also found utterly unbelievable the story line of Leduc’s abuse of the cadets and the “hint” provided by the representative of the manufacturer. Are we really expected to believe anyone could possibly make that connection?
On a positive note, Louise Penny kept me guessing about the perpetrator until the end of the novel- as usual. And her vivid descriptions of the locales were spectacular- again as always.
Finally, I was so very moved by the author’s touching personal disclosure in the acknowledgement section of the book. As a caregiver to a parent who suffered with dementia, I can relate to her overwhelming personal upheaval. The fact that she was able to concentrate and write during her husband’s decline is a miracle, even with a wonderful support system. I applaud her honesty and willingness to share her personal trials with her readers and hope my review was not too unsympathetic of a wonderful accomplishment in the face of adversity.

When I first opened this book I thought I would soon be putting it down again as the staccato style of writing with 3 word ‘sentences’ infuriated. But I don’t like to give up, so I carried on and soon couldn’t put it down. Maybe bits of the plot were somewhat far-fetched but it all held together very well, with innumerable unexpected twists, a long list of possible suspects and an emphasis throughout on the essential goodness of human nature, rather than on the very present evil. The style modified, the plot thickened and I was hooked and will definitely be searching out more books in this series about Armand Gamache. Maybe it would have helped to read the books in sequence as others have suggested but the story did stand alone and I look forward to exploring the history of some of these characters in greater depth, as revealed in the earlier books in the series.

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