{"id":1455,"date":"2014-09-30T14:17:41","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1455"},"modified":"2014-09-30T14:17:41","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T20:17:41","slug":"tana-french-the-secret-place-josephine-tey-miss-pym-disposes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/tana-french-the-secret-place-josephine-tey-miss-pym-disposes\/","title":{"rendered":"Tana French: The Secret Place & Josephine Tey: Miss Pym Disposes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"thesecretplace\"<\/a>Both Tana French and Josephine Tey have books that are among my favorites as well as books I can\u2019t slog my way through (confession: I can\u2019t read Tey\u2019s The Singing Sands<\/i>).\u00a0 I love Tana French\u2019s Broken Harbor<\/i> so much it\u2019s one of my favorite contemporary mysteries; but there are other times when her books are a tad too long and a tad too over determined.\u00a0 This is one of those times.<\/p>\n

French\u2019s prose skills are among the most beautiful of all contemporary mystery writers.\u00a0 She catches an atmosphere, she has an ability to make you feel<\/i> a place in your bones, like no other writer.\u00a0 That\u2019s no small skill, and in her new book the place she is out to capture is a Catholic girl\u2019s school in Ireland.\u00a0 French has always been interested in the otherworldly nature of the woods, or the forest, the ones that you might encounter in a fairy tale.\u00a0 The woods in fairy tales may hold enchantment or danger; in this novel, the woods surround the school and supply both elements.<\/p>\n

As Detective Stephen Moran arrives on the campus of St. Kilda\u2019s all he can say is \u201cit\u2019s beautiful.\u201d\u00a0 But as with all beautiful places there\u2019s another side, and Moran is there to see if he can catch a ride on the murder squad after he hands over a clue to the lead detective, Antoinette Conway, on a year old case, the murder of a boarding school boy on St. Kilda\u2019s campus.\u00a0 The detectives, working class, are the outsiders among the privileged girls who board there.\u00a0 One of them, the one who has brought Moran his clue, is a boarder whose father is a detective, higher ranked than both Moran and Conway.\u00a0 Treading lightly is on their minds; to them the school is a beautiful minefield.<\/p>\n

What French is very, very good at is explicating relationships.\u00a0 She\u2019s like a writing microscope, examining her subjects delicately and completely,\u00a0 So her portrayal of two sets of friends \u2013 Julia, Holly, Selena and Becca \u2013 and their counterpart, \u201cmean girl\u201d set headed by the dastardly Joanna, is the best thing about this novel.\u00a0 Holly is the detective\u2019s daughter and it\u2019s she who has brought Stephen the clue, a photo of the dead boy with cut out letters saying \u201cI know who killed him.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, Holly is also the one who brings intruders into their particular Eden.<\/p>\n

As a graduate of a girl\u2019s boarding school myself I can attest that the friendships I made there were the most intense of my life, friendships that have now become lifelong. It\u2019s an intense time and that may be what makes the bonds so strong.\u00a0 Even today, more than 30 years on (almost 40 now) at class reunions we all feel as though we met up five minutes ago.\u00a0 The relationships still hold, though now changed by time and the events of long lives.\u00a0 French has that part of her story absolutely right.<\/p>\n

French\u2019s concern is the moment when the girls realize that their friendships are about to change, even end, as they prepare to graduate from school and enter the big, real world.\u00a0 Delicately, she goes back in time to when the murder victim, Chris Harper, was still alive and traces his connections to the girls in the story forward, interspersing her backward look with the questioning of the Detectives, who are eager to solve a high profile case but are often flummoxed by the girls who are misleading, who lie, and whose loyalty is mostly to one another.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all well and good.\u00a0 Her portrait is absolutely complete, to the point where she made me wonder why I kept reading and why the book was so, so long.\u00a0 As with many of her novels I felt it could have benefitted by trimming a hundred or more pages.\u00a0 And while she\u2019s writing a novel that involves police and let\u2019s face it, a brutal and baffling murder, she often lets go of her actual plot to meander through the girls\u2019 psyches.\u00a0 And their psyches are <\/i>the point but I felt the balance was off, and I didn\u2019t completely buy her resolution.<\/p>\n

\"Miss-Pym-Disposes\"<\/a>Tey\u2019s examination, in Miss Pym,<\/i> of a girl\u2019s school is also intense and memorable but told in a much briefer space.\u00a0 Perhaps it\u2019s the difference between the efficient Scot \u2013 Tey \u2013 and the romantic Irish woman \u2013 French.\u00a0 In any case, while the reasons for the behavior of the girls are similar, Tey gets to it much faster.\u00a0 She says a lot in a sentence as brief and to the point as \u201cThe only difference was that Desterro saw the insult, and Beau the injury.\u201d\u00a0 And Tey, with her conciseness, actually makes the crime, when it occurs, very shocking.\u00a0 I\u2019m even shocked on a re-read, and I\u2019ve read Miss Pym<\/i> five or six times.\u00a0 French belabors her crime in a way, making it almost a part of the landscape and therefore without as much impact to the reader.<\/p>\n

Can a mystery be \u201cliterary\u201d?\u00a0 Absolutely, and French has worn this appellation since the publication of her first novel, because of her spectacular prose and characterization.\u00a0 In that way they are literary.\u00a0 But she is also writing a mystery; in this novel, the plot goes a bit by the wayside, but more importantly, the emotional \u201ctruth\u201d at the heart of her crime isn\u2019t quite right.\u00a0 In Tey\u2019s novel, maybe it\u2019s not authentic, but it feels right in relation to the story, and moreover, the ending of Pym<\/i> still makes me think.\u00a0 Tey leaves space between her words for the reader to consider, to figure things out; French leaves no such space, and it\u2019s a little exhausting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Both Tana French and Josephine Tey have books that are among my favorites as well as books I can\u2019t slog my way through (confession: I can\u2019t read Tey\u2019s The Singing Sands).\u00a0 I love Tana French\u2019s Broken Harbor so much it\u2019s one of my favorite contemporary mysteries; but there are other times when her books are … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6,8],"class_list":["post-1455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-british","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1455"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1458,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1455\/revisions\/1458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}