{"id":1721,"date":"2015-07-18T10:41:37","date_gmt":"2015-07-18T17:41:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1721"},"modified":"2015-07-18T10:41:37","modified_gmt":"2015-07-18T17:41:37","slug":"louise-penny-the-nature-of-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/louise-penny-the-nature-of-the-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Louise Penny: The Nature of the Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"natureofthebeast\"<\/a>Louise Penny\u2019s gift is to take bits of reality and weave it into her setting and characters and make the reader really feel what she is feeling. In this novel, her eleventh in her remarkable Inspector Gamache series, the action starts, as it always does, in tiny Three Pines. The villagers are frequently disturbed or annoyed or even amused by the tall tales of young Laurent Lepage, who is always emerging from the woods with a fantastical story.<\/p>\n

When Laurent claims he\u2019s seen a giant gun in the woods and that it has a monster inscribed on it, no one believes him but when he goes missing and he\u2019s later found dead of an apparent accident things turn more serious. On a hunch, Gamache calls his son in law Jean Guy, who is still with the Surete and tells him he thinks little Laurent\u2019s death was no accident. This is a mystery novel\u2014of course it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The eventual discovery of the real thing\u2014the real giant gun that Laurent had seen in the woods\u2014literally blows everyone\u2019s mind and no one is quite sure what to do about it. It\u2019s a metaphor for the entire novel: when presented with life\u2019s largest problems, how is one to respond?<\/p>\n

Penny seems to be saying the response might be confused or meandering but it\u2019s above all imperfectly human. There is a solution; it may be messy. She refers again and again to Yeats\u2019 poem, \u201cThe Second Coming\u201d, especially:<\/p>\n

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,<\/em>
\n Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?<\/em><\/p>\n

For Laurent\u2019s parents, the rough beast is grief; for the Surete it\u2019s finding his killer; and on a wider, even global scale, it\u2019s discovering why there was a giant gun in the woods in the first place and above all what should be done about it. The gun is the bit that\u2019s reality-based, surprisingly; the emotional truths, as always, are all Penny\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s remarkable, eleven novels in to her beloved series, that Penny can still find a fresh slant for her books. She\u2019s examining life from every angle, and letting the reader in on her examination. While some things are certainly disturbing, her essential optimism is always present, and it keeps her readers wanting more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Louise Penny\u2019s gift is to take bits of reality and weave it into her setting and characters and make the reader really feel what she is feeling. In this novel, her eleventh in her remarkable Inspector Gamache series, the action starts, as it always does, in tiny Three Pines. The villagers are frequently disturbed or … 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":[8],"class_list":["post-1721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721","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=1721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1723,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1721\/revisions\/1723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}