A World of Curiosities: A Novel (Chief Inspector Gamache Novel, 18)

Still Life から、毎回、社会性、舞台、題材、人物がよく書けていて夢中で読んできましたが、今回は少々マンネリです。

Come ogni volta Louise Penny ci incuriosisce con riferimenti reali e ci sprona ad ampliare le nostre conoscenze mentre ci intrattiene con i suoi personaggi e le loro storie.

les aventures de l'inspector Gamache sont nous tiennent toujours en haleine

First, I want to start with a list of WTF‘s from this book. Bear in mind, I’m a person who has read Penny’s books and given them all five star ratings until “A Better Man”. Generally, I feel the books have gotten significantly worse since ABM, but with this book, Penny and Gamache finally “jumped the shark” (or Steak Frites with seasoned fries, if you don’t care for fish). We are asked to believe that Gamache and his wife have had a convicted murderer living with them for 10 years. Ten years that span throughout the previous books. This person, Fiona, was arrested by Gamache then paroled; now she’s living with them and being raised like family. And this is the first we’ve heard of it? And Myrna…Penny had managed to make her a legitimate character, but here Myrna is stripped of everything from personality to physical description. We’ve always known Myrna as being a big woman. In fact, she’s very big. The first 12 books, Myrna’s physical make up was just as comforting as her intellect and ability to love and care for others. But after ABM, Myrna loses all of that depth because Penny can’t stop mentioning Myrna’s “round, ample bottom”, and manages to turn Myrna into a caricature. For the first time in the series, Penny decides to not mention anything about Myrna’s physical presence, but instead blesses her with a niece named Harriet, with whom she’s supposedly close, Penny tries her hardest to make Harriet mysterious and suspicious. But It’s so poorly executed that readers are left feeling betrayed. How could we not know this about Gamache and Myrna? What in the world was Penny thinking? The next mind blowing antic from Penny is the character of Myrna’s boyfriend, Billy Williams. Billy has gone from some type of town caretaker whose one (very funny, in prior books) quality is that no one can understand what he saying. In fact, his general incoherency was used as a plot device in an earlier novel! Here, he speaks in full sentences and he even touches on philosophy. No explanation for this. It just happened. Next , how many times can you use a plot device that involves a look-alike who has (voluntarily! ) been incarcerated in place of the perpetrator? She used it once, many books ago, and then we’re asked to believe it happens again, this time, with a serial killer. I have no affiliation with, nor any particular affection for Canada, but if I were Canadian, I’d be a little peeved and a bit offended. Are Canadians so dense that a corrupt cop, and then a serial killer, could pull the same switcheroo? Penny seems to think (then tries to convince the reader) if you pay enough money, a maximum security prison housing the worst and most dangerous offenders IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY, will turn a blind eye to the understudies of a corrupt cop and the nation’s worst serial killer. Not that I can totally blame Penny for thinking that e...

I must admit that the incident in this book that struck me the most strongly was not a big part of the plot. It took place in a flashback from when Gamache first entered the Surete. It's December 6, and he's about to go to Paris for Christmas when word come in that there's been and "incident" at the Ecole Polytechnique. He speculates it's drunken students, but the narrator says, no. That's now what it was. As soon as I read that, I knew. I actually didn't recognize the date but I did recognize the horror. The "incident" was the Montreal Massacre. A gunman walked into a mechanical engineering classrroom, separated the men from the women, told the men to leave, and gunned down the women for having the temerity to think they could be engineers. On Dec. 6, 1989, I was teaching at General Motors Institute, an engineering school in Michigan. I can't tell you how personally i was shaken by this event. Young agent Gamache sees it unfold in real time. He sees the men fleeing the building. He waits until word comes that the gunman is dead. But it isn't until Gamache and his supervisor have found several wounded people that they realize the victims are all women. The rest of the book is fine. We are shown how Gamache and Beauvoir first came to work together. I liked that. There's an art piece (World of Curiosities) that's central to the story and that was interesting. The book introduces multiple young women characters whom I struggled to keep straight. One of them has the last name "Provost" which left me terribly confused during scenes at a university graduation. I kept thinking she must be a university official rather than a massacre survivor. Another is Myrna's niece (new to us) who was reluctant to come to graduation for reasons I never figured out. I will admit I had COVID at the time, so I probably wasn't at my sharpest. The plot is somewhat convoluted, as shown by the way the characters have to explain it to one another at the end. Still the book is engaging, as Penny always is. But the impact of the massacre was what really struck me. I've never seen another novel about it, though there must surely be some. I'm not sure I could stand to read them.