{"id":3239,"date":"2019-07-10T05:17:41","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T12:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=3239"},"modified":"2019-07-10T05:17:41","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T12:17:41","slug":"louise-penny-a-better-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/louise-penny-a-better-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Louise Penny: A Better Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>This is one of the more stripped down narratives Louise Penny has delivered.\u00a0 Stripped down for Penny, that is.\u00a0 The essential story is a simple one that drives her narrative, but being a complex writer and thinker, she\u2019s made the simple complex.\u00a0 There are two threads.\u00a0 One concerns the disappearance of a woman who happens to be the goddaughter of a Surete officer.\u00a0 Gamache, who has returned to work with a demotion (he\u2019s head of homicide, not the entire Surete) accompanies the officer to the village where the woman lived.<\/p>\n

It quickly becomes clear the missing woman was abused by her husband, and while she called her father saying she\u2019d be home, has not turned up there.\u00a0 There\u2019s no evidence of her presence, living or otherwise, at her home and her husband, frequently drunk and obviously brutal, is not assisting the officers with their enquiries.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Gamache is being relentlessly attacked on social media as he returns to work, being called corrupt and worse.\u00a0 Being Gamache, he is mostly able to rise above it.\u00a0 Clara Morrow, his artist friend in Three Pines, is also being ruthlessly attacked on social media for a recent exhibition of miniature paintings.\u00a0 Being Clara, she cannot rise above it so easily.\u00a0 She is devastated.<\/p>\n

The background of the novel is water.\u00a0 The missing woman may have drowned.\u00a0 Quebec is suffering through a serious flooding situation.\u00a0 The water isn\u2019t cleansing, but a powerful, unstoppable force that mows down everything in its path.\u00a0 Water reveals, conceals, and takes away what\u2019s precious as the officers work both to fend off flooding and find the missing woman.<\/p>\n

As the layers of the woman\u2019s story are peeled away, and to a lesser extent, the layers of Clara\u2019s recent artistic endeavors, it\u2019s clear to me that once again this is a writer concerned with the destructive and obstructional nature of surface appearances.\u00a0 Look closer, she is always inviting the reader.\u00a0 See what\u2019s underneath.\u00a0 Think about what you\u2019re perceiving.<\/p>\n

The other thread concerns Beauvoir, who is leaving the Surete and moving to Paris.\u00a0 The relationship between Beauvoir and Gamache has been one of the cornerstones of the series, and this book feels like a reset in every way.\u00a0 For Gamache, much baggage has been discarded, but as old ties are severed and Beauvoir prepares to leave, another central question of the novel becomes, what\u2019s next for Gamache?<\/p>\n

This is the kind of book that when you\u2019re reading disappears in your hands.\u00a0 The pages to come quickly diminish to far less than the pages already read.\u00a0 In terms of this novel, the flood of reading takes you away.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is one of the more stripped down narratives Louise Penny has delivered.\u00a0 Stripped down for Penny, that is.\u00a0 The essential story is a simple one that drives her narrative, but being a complex writer and thinker, she\u2019s made the simple complex.\u00a0 There are two threads.\u00a0 One concerns the disappearance of a woman who happens … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[180,183,11,184,100,8,181,182,179],"class_list":["post-3239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-flooding","tag-gamache","tag-international","tag-louise-penny","tag-minotaur-books","tag-police","tag-quebec","tag-three-pines","tag-traditional"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3239","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\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3239"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3240,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3239\/revisions\/3240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}