Your Humble Blogger is now five behind in the Book Reports. I’m going to have to pound through them if I’m going to catch up before taking what I’m guessing will be a week-long blogging break for Thanksgiving. I may drop a note in, but I’ll be traveling and with any luck engaged in entertaining non-blogging-related activity. Which is good. I’m getting—not burnt out, but less compelled to put effort into blogging lately. And, judging from the paucity of comments over the last stretch, my Gentle Readers are feeling much the same. Perhaps a nice break will be the thing we all need to get back to having entertaining and provocative discussions, as we used to do.
Anyway, Book Reports. I’ve read six of the Mary Russell novels by Laurie R. King over the last couple of years, as well as her pseudonymous specfic novel. Oddly enough, I haven’t (evidently) re-read any of Ms. King’s Kate Martinelli books in that time. I started reading Ms. King’s stuff with To Play the Fool, and I sort of considered it my favorite of her books. Given how much re-reading YHB does, that makes it surprising that I haven’t picked it up for a while. Perhaps I’m not taking enough baths.
I found it really hard to get into the book this time. It was more obvious that nobody really cares who committed the book’s central crime, and the later Martinelli books (and the drift of Ms. King’s other later work) cast a retroactive shadow over the character stuff. It took forever to get to Brother Erasmus, who is the marvelous thing about the book, and even then I found him less magnificent than previously.
Brother Erasmus is a more-or-less homeless guy who speaks entirely in quotes from Scripture and a handful of other high-lit sources. He’s also an improbably wonderful juggler, ventriloquist and close magician, a significant academic theologian, and has a serene charisma that captivates everybody he meets. He’s not a Mary Sue, not really, but he isn’t very plausible, either, and he is so terribly good at everything he does. He is also the only one who knows the truth about the central crime. Solving the crime, therefore, is a matter of getting that information from Erasmus, and Inspector Martinelli spends most of her effort investigating him. There’s a lot of talk about how difficult it is to understand his references, and how his conversation is impossible to follow without a reference shelf and a theologian at hand. There’s a lot of talk about the impenetrable interrogation, and how little they learned. Inspector Martinelli gets a panel of people to go over the tapes to interpret them, and they learn, um, nothing.
Finally, the murderer commits another murder, and they impress upon Erasmus his guilt, because, you know, if he told what he knew, they’d have caught the guy and he wouldn’t have killed again. Erasmus breaks down and tells them everything. Huzzah! But it’s totally unsatisfying. The don’t solve Erasmus, they just break him. And, frankly, none of Erasmus’ conversation in the book seems particularly difficult to figure out; he doesn’t actually leave a lot of clues that could usefully be followed up. Yes, there’s one instance where he playfully hints at his breakfast preference to the Dean of one of the GTU schools, but there’s no indication that he is doing anything like that with the police, on any serious topic. It’s frustrating.
It’s particularly frustrating because Erasmus is such a magnificent character. I want to be charmed by him totally, I want to be satisfied by the ending, I want to be convinced that I could only really understand him with a reference shelf and a panel of experts. But this time around I wasn’t convinced.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.