Review of Louise Penny's The Long Way Home

The Long Way Home by Louise Penny

The Long Way Home (Minotaur Books, August 26, 2014) is Louise Penny's tenth Armand Gamache/Three Pines novel and, at this point, regular readers can mentally categorize them. No, it's not that they fit neatly into slots, but along a continuum, where some are weighted more toward the crime-solving end, and others more toward the examination of the soul. The Long Way Home, like The Beautiful Mystery, for example, is one of the latter.

After all the intensity and heart-thumping tension and action of the last novel, How the Light Gets In, everyone's due for a little recovery and reflection. And that's just what the newly-retired Armand Gamache is doing, now living with Reine-Marie and the German shepherd, Henri, in a cottage on the green in Three Pines.

Gamache has a lot to process, and every morning he sits on a bench on a hillside looking down at the town, reading a slim, leather-bound book. But, each morning, he begins at the beginning and stops at a bookmark before the end. Longtime readers of the series will suspect where that book came from and why Gamache doesn't move on past the bookmark.

Gamache's contemplation and retirement are interrupted when Clara Morrow asks for his help. Clara and her husband, Peter, fellow artists, had reached a crisis in their marriage the previous year. They agreed that Peter would leave, but return to their home in Three Pines exactly one year later, to see if their marriage could be saved. But Peter is now weeks late in returning, and Clara has no idea where he is or if he is well.

The bonds of friendship compel Gamache to help Clara, teaming up with her, Clara's friend, Myrna, and Gamache's longtime protégé, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. They track Peter along what seems to be a kind of quest, maybe a search for the mythical Tenth Muse, but something that will purge the artistic jealousy that has poisoned his soul and his marriage.

The trail finally leads to the Charlevoix region, a place of powerful, but sometimes savage beauty, along the St. Lawrence river, east of Québec City. And what the searchers find will change them all. (By the way, this is another Louise Penny book that makes me think the Canadian tourism bureau should be paying her. She makes me want to visit every place she describes, and right away.)

I'm making the book sound like it's ultra-serious, but of course it isn't. This is Louise Penny, after all. That means foul-mouthed Ruth and her one-note cursing duck, Rosa. It means a lot of affectionate ribbing, as here:

"Ergo, he painted them on his return to Canada," said Clara.
"Ergo?" asked Myrna.
"Don't tell me you've never wanted to use it," said Clara.
"Not now that I hear how it really sounds."

C'est encore Charlevoix, by Gerard Lapointe

So, yes, along with the serious business of tracking down Peter and dealing with some deep emotional damage, we have the usual pleasure of spending time with the people of Three Pines, who by now seem so real that it's hard for me to believe I can't just drive a few hours to southern Québec, just over the Vermont border, and drop into the Bistro in time to have a glass of wine and some of Mr. Béliveau's cheese with them all.

This feels like a transitional novel; one that moves Gamache into a new kind of life. So far, Jean-Guy is still part of it, which is good news for longtime readers. Maybe in future books we'll get to see much more of Reine-Marie, something I think many of us have long hoped for.

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance reviewing copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Louise Penny's How the Light Gets In

How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny

It may be summer for us, but it's December in Québec as How the Light Gets In begins. The story in this ninth in the Armand Gamache/Three Pines series picks up shortly after the predecessor book, The Beautiful Mystery, ended, and things are just as grim as you would imagine for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, if you read that book.

Gamache's longtime enemies at the Sûrété du Québec are circling like sharks, taking bites out of his Homicide team. All of his team members have been moved to other departments, except for Isabelle Lacoste, and the officers moved to his team in their place are slackers, insubordinate and obviously playing for Gamache's saturnine enemy, Chief Superintendent Francoeur.

Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache's second-in-command and closest colleague to both him and Lacoste, is now with Francoeur. Jean-Guy is a mess. Hooked on painkillers again, completely alienated from Gamache and broken up with Gamache's daughter Annie. Of course, all of this has been orchestrated by Francoeur and his compatriots. The sharks have isolated their prey and are coming in for the kill.

The Dionne Quintuplets

Considering what his office has become, it's almost a relief to Gamache when Myrna Landers, Three Pines's flamboyant bookseller, asks for his help to find a missing friend. This seemingly simple case unexpectedly becomes a last chapter in the story of Québec's most famous baby boomers, the first quintuplets to survive their birth. This part of the plot is obviously based on the Dionne quintuplets, whom the baby boomers among us will remember very well.

The Sûrété corruption plot that we've been following for this entire series takes center stage in this book, and it's a nail-biter that puts all of the characters under make-or-break stress. For those who have been wondering about the reach of the corruption and the long-term goals of its principals, this will be a particularly satisfying read.

What does this have to do with the book? Read it and find out.

Penny uses the corruption plot not just for thrills, though, but as a return to one of her perennial themes, good and evil. I remember back in A Trick of the Light, the seventh book in the series, there was a passage explaining the difference between Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache always believed there was good in people, but Beauvoir was the opposite. Beauvoir believed that at bottom, you would always find evil, "without borders, without brakes, without limit."

Now Gamache, at his moment of crisis, wonders if Beauvoir was right, that maybe evil has no limits. He knows that it will be hard to find the impetus for the corruption, because most likely, it "started as something small, invisible to the naked eye. It was often years, decades, old. A slight that rankled and grew and infected the host." And now the infection is overwhelming.

Nathaniel Parker as Armand Gamache in the upcoming film of Still Life

Penny always manages to explore the themes of good and evil, love and hate, and sin and redemption without sounding preachy, because she does it through her particular strength, the character study. After reading all the books, and then going back and listening to the whole series on audio, I've come to know the characters as real people, with histories, strengths and flaws. I know their homes and how they live. Louise Penny writes so that there is no distance between the reader and the characters; their thoughts and emotions, what they eat and drink, how they interact with each other and, most important, how they react when bad things happen.

Penny is such a keen observer that it's all too easy to believe that you can travel to Three Pines, sit down at the Bistro and join in the conversation with all these characters, walk the green with them and watch the village children playing hockey, sit in Clara's messy house and enjoy a meal, browse for books at Myrna's bookshop and head upstairs to sit around the wood stove with a cup of tea and a scone. Hmm, there sure is a lot of eating and drinking that goes on in Three Pines––not that there's anything wrong with that! But there's more to it than that. Penny can also use a small moment to evoke poignant emotion, as when she has Gamache pick up a book at a murder scene, flip it open to the bookmarked page and see what the victim would now never read.

Louise Penny has transformed the police procedural and village mystery genres into not a mash-up, but something unique, original and genuine. Every summer, I look forward to my next visit with these characters, and at the end of the book I regret that my visit was all too short. I hope you'll visit too.

Note: How the Light Gets In will be published on August 27 by St. Martin's Minotaur. I received a free review copy of the book.

Find that village!

Earlier this week, I was reading a feature about the 16 most picturesque villages in the world. Several interested me, including Bilbury, in England's Cotswolds and Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario. I'd like to visit those places, but the feature got me to thinking of some of the villages I've enjoyed spending time in while I read some of my favorite village mysteries.

St. Mary Mead

St. Mary Mead is home to Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple, though only three of the books (The Murder At the Vicarage, The Body In the Library and The Mirror Crack'd) take place there––and, to be fair, some stories. Still, when you think of Miss Marple, you can't help but think of St. Mary Mead.

I decided to see what Agatha Christie had in mind when she dreamed up St. Mary Mead. It turns out that's a bit of a controversial topic. Some devoted fans were outraged when the Granada television's 2004 production of The Murder At the Vicarage showed stationery indicating St. Mary Mead had an Oxfordshire location, which they howled was way too far from the sea. Despite the location on the stationery, this episode was filmed in the village of Hambleden, on the Thames in Buckinghamshire, which has often been used for filming village locations, notably in the Midsomer Murders series based on the Caroline Graham books.

Hambleden Mill

Hampshire, many insist, must be where St. Mary Mead "really" is. There are a lot of location clues in the books. It's supposed to be only 25 miles from London on a rail line that arrives at Paddington Station, on the west side of London, and it's 12 miles from the sea. Fans of Miss Marple suggest that Market Basing, the nearby market town described in the books, could be real-life Basingstoke, and Danemouth, a seaside resort town, could be real-life Bournemouth. There is a village in Hampshire called St. Mary Bourne, but nobody seems to think Christie had it in mind.

Outdoor scenes in the Miss Marple series starring Joan Hickson (my favorite Jane Marple) were filmed in the delightfully-named Nether Wallop, in Hampshire. This name doesn't refer to a whack on the rear end, despite the way it sounds. "Wallop" is apparently derived from old English words meaning valley and stream. "Nether" means further down. I'd definitely like to visit Nether Wallop, no matter how silly the name sounds or what it might mean.

Nether Wallop, Hampshire

Nether Monkslip

Speaking of Nethers, the new Max Tudor series by G. M. Malliett is set in Nether Monkslip, another fictional English village. Periphera talked about the book back in October, including the fact that the author's website includes a nifty interactive map of the village. Check it out: Interactive Map of Nether Monkslip. Having a map of the village in a village mystery is such a pleasure!

Bishop's Lacey

When precocious 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce has pushed things a little too far at home at her family's country house, Buckshaw, she hops on her bicycle, Gladys, and heads into the village of Bishop's Lacey to see what kind of trouble she can get into there. Since it's the early 1950s, with rationing still in effect, there are real limits to the appeal of this particular village. Still, the countryside is lovely and there is always something entertaining going on in town, like a touring magic show that everyone turns out to watch. It's an electrifying experience, as you'll learn if you read The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag. The whole village also turns up at Buckshaw for a Christmas show put on by a visiting film crew in I Am Half-Sick of Shadows.

St. Denis, France

These English villages are all well and good, but sometimes you might be in the mood for more sun, more wine and good French food. That's when you should head for Martin Walker's St. Denis in the Dordogne, home of Bruno Courrèges, Chief of Police. It seems like the sun shines constantly, and you can relax at a café table with a glass of Ricard and water, watching the old-timers playing petanque.

St. Denis is a small village of fewer than 3,000 residents, but its main street has its wine shop, boulangerie, fromagerie, charcuterie and just about any -erie you could want to live the good life. The weekly open-air market is where you'll stroll around, picking up delicacies and the freshest foods to make your meal a celebration. Bruno is great at warning the stall-keepers when the EU food inspectors are on the prowl, so you'll be able to get the real home-grown thing without interference by the persnickety hygiene squad.

Three Pines, Québec

The village I'm most curious about is Louise Penny's creation in the Eastern Townships region of Québec province, near the Vermont border. When homicide detective Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Québec Sûreté goes there to investigate a murder, he notes that Three Pines doesn't appear on any maps. Most of its residents are Montrealers who found it by accident when they were looking for a place to start a new life––which they expected to find much further away.

And how fortunate Three Pines has been in some of those who found their way there. Myrna, a former psychologist, opens a bookstore. Olivier and Gabri open a B&B and a nearby bistro. Their businesses take their places around the village green with M. Béliveau's depannier (general store) and Sarah's boulangerie. Monks in the nearby countryside provide the rich, runny cheeses and the local farms the fresh produce and meat.

Villagers stroll across the green on a whim for a delicious meal or a drink at the bistro. In the winter, two fireplaces warm the room, and in the summer there's a sunny terrace with cheerful umbrellas where you can enjoy a fresh lemonade, a cold beer or a gin and tonic. So many of Sarah's freshly-baked croissants are eaten in this series that I sometimes want to bang my head in hungry frustration.

Villagers are shopkeepers, innkeepers, painters, poets, woodsmen and cabinetmakers. People with boring jobs seem to do them out of town. Or maybe they don't even live there. Well, wait. There is Billy Williams, who seems to be a jack-of-all-trades. I guess you have to have one of those.

Three Pines is so appealing that I've spent an inordinate amount of time poring over maps trying to figure out what village might be its model. Then I started reading Louise Penny's blog. She lives in a town called Sutton–––in the Eastern Townships. I could drive there in less than five hours. Get a grip, I tell myself. You're one road trip away from being a stalker.

Maybe I could cut the stalking trip short and just stop on the way in a Vermont village, Norwich, to visit another mecca of mine, King Arthur Flour.

At least there I could learn to make my own damn croissants!

* * *

Aside from their unnervingly high murder rate, don't these places sound like they should make a feature's list of most appealing fictional villages? Do you have your own favorite villages from mystery reading? Which fictional villages do you wish you could live in––or at least visit?

By the way, not that it really has anything to do with my theme today (other than general TGIF-ness), but I came across this "map" of funny (mostly sexual and scatalogical) place names in Britain and thought you might enjoy it. I wonder if there's a lot of pressure in Giggleswick to be cheerful all the time.