And more reading

I finished "A Rule Against Murder" (Louise Penny) last night. I highly recommend it, especially if you enjoy mystery novels. But even if you don't - there's as much of a story about family there, and a story about trying to wrench some kind of redemption from what you saw as dysfunctional situations of the past.

There are a lot of themes or allusions in the book - Greek myths, especially the ones of Pandora and Pegasus, poetry (Gamache quotes several poems, most extensively High Flight), John Milton....

Without giving too much of the detail away: Armand Gamache and his wife, Reine-Marie, travel to an inn not too far from their home in Quebec. They are a happy couple, they have two adult children, they are celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary. For them, the inn represents happy times in the past - I believe it is where they spent their honeymoon. They are looking forward to a week of swimming and sleeping late and good food and peace. (Gamache is the head of Homicide in the Montreal police department, so having some peace with his wife is essential)

I LIKE both Gamache and his wife. They are good people, decent people. They're not perfect - Gamache has an argument with his son but eventually reconciles, he is perhaps more protective of Reine-Marie than he needs to be. But Gamache is also a wise man - towards the end of the book, where he is quoting Milton at the assembled family involved with the murder, he makes the point that one's attitude makes any place a Heaven or a Hell - to him and Reine-Marie, the inn is a heaven, because it is where they go to get away from the sadness of his work, and it's somewhere where they have had good times. But to a younger homicide detective from the city, it is a Hell, because he can only see the bugs, the "oppressive" quiet, and the lack of internet or cell phone connectivity.

This is actually kind of a theme throughout - the family involved in the murder, the Morrow/Finneys (Morrow was the "old" father's name; Finney is the name of the matriarch's second husband, married after her first one died). They were tremendously wealthy, but none of the children are very happy - all they can feel is that things they "could have had" were withheld from them because, they believed, their father was afraid of them squandering his fortune ("Fear the third" generation, he often said - that the first generation (his parents) make the money, the second generation benefit from it, but the third generation, because they have always known wealth, will spend it foolishly on themselves. There may be some truth in that....). Instead, he was trying to show them that "things" don't make you happy.

This is something that bears more considering: How many of us, I wonder, have had a situation where we said something meant either innocently or as a joke - or where we DIDN'T say something - and the other person took it as a direct slight against them? I've had one or two people in my life that were just exhausting to work with because to them, it was as if everything that happened was done specifically to hurt or demean them.

I guess I tend more often to take the "naive" viewpoint and assume if someone says something that maybe sounds a little off to me, it's because the person is having an "off day" or they said it awkwardly. Though I admit in the real depths of unhappiness over something I do find myself doing a bit of the "making Hell of Heaven" thing - where I catch myself thinking things like, "The people who are my friends really don't like me that well; they merely tolerate me because they pity me and know I'd have no one without them" Which is really quite unfair to my friends as well as not being true.

The whole "looking to be slighted" characteristic in the book is most pronounced in Sandra - Thomas' wife - who is always looking to see, did she get a smaller slice of cake than anyone else? Did someone get seated in a 'better' spot. Apparently she was also a holy terror to some of the workers at the inn, demanding a bigger nicer room and then hinting that they weren't given a "good" room because of, well....because. (Surely you've known people like that. I have).

There are some other undercurrents, some of those things where patrician-type families that don't share information sometimes lead to a kind of brokenness - the matriarch, it turns out, suffers from a kind of neuralgia, and has all her life, and physical contact is almost excruciatingly painful. But because no one explained to the children, they see her as a cold mother who never held them on her lap or hugged them...

At the end, however, some of the hidden information comes out, and each of the children (Well, maybe not Thomas and his wife) come to somewhat of a reconciliation with their past. And the children maybe get a bit past their childhood competitiveness and meanness to one another. (Marianna had the ugly nickname Magilla - like the cartoon gorilla; they called Peter, who was an artist, Spot because he always had spots of paint on him. These nicknames were designed to be demeaning)

Another thing I was thinking of last night, something I realized: Gamache is good at seeing the brokenness in people and understanding it, and essentially forgiving it and trying to work productively with them. And I realized: that's one of my mother's best characteristics. SHE can do that - she's very, very good at looking at someone who is being difficult and understanding the very specific ways in which they are "broken," and she is able to both forgive them for the difficult way they are behaving, and also figure out some way to track them onto a different train of thought so they shut up about whatever petty slight they believe they have suffered. (And more importantly: so they stop picking at that psychic scab and hurting themselves more.)

When I am at my best, I can do this too - I can see where people are hurting and why they behave in that way when they are - but I'm not nearly as good at is as my mother is and I'm not nearly as consistently able to do it; I am too likely to get mired in my OWN hurt and forget that other people are hurting, too.

Maybe my mother would have made a good homicide detective.

There's a lot more to the novel that I'm skipping over, but that's what struck me.

Another character - Bert Finney - the stepfather of the family - he was a prisoner during WWII in Burma. And he comments, towards the end, to Gamache, that he was "never really" in a prison camp, because he saw men die of despair (not dysentery, not the backbreaking work) and concluded that if he kept a constant, running total of his "blessings" (he called it "doing his sums"), he would be free and he would survive. (And that continues the whole theme of "life is attitude").

There's some interesting French Quebecois vs. British Quebecois interactions there - I knew there was tension between the two cultures but did not realize just how much there had been. And there's Gamache having to reconcile what everyone saw his father as having been (a coward - his father was a conscientious objector during WWII and encouraged many of the French Quebecois to resist signing up to fight) and what he knew of his father later on (his father went with the Red Cross to help after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and his father was *horrified* - and regretted the rest of his life having encouraged people to resist and delay, because he then saw how Canada getting involved earlier might have prevented some of the suffering and death). Only Bert Finney, who had been friends with Gamache's father, was aware of this; the rest of the Morrow/Finneys seemed to like to throw the elder Gamache's "cowardice" in the son's teeth.

One other odd aspect of the book, and I confess I stayed up a little late last night to get to the end because I wanted to see if we'd find out, is that the youngest Morrow daughter (Marianna) has a child (she has never married and does not even say who the father was). She named the child Bean and has refused to reveal the gender of the child to her family. Bean was probably under ten; Bean was obsessed with Greek myths (it is because of the child that the whole Pegasus idea comes into the story). Alas, Bean's gender is never revealed....

it's funny, at first I was figuring Bean had to be a girl, now, at the end of the book, I think maybe Bean was a boy. It doesn't matter, I suppose, but I wanted to find out.