{"id":721,"date":"2012-08-29T22:57:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-30T04:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=721"},"modified":"2012-08-29T22:57:48","modified_gmt":"2012-08-30T04:57:48","slug":"louise-penny-bury-your-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/louise-penny-bury-your-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Louise Penny: Bury Your Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>As with many gifted writers, Louise Penny has certain themes she tends to come back to and examine, and one of her major themes, through all the books, is the danger of being paralyzed by the past and refusing to change.\u00a0 Other writers who share this trait, off the top of my head, would be Thomas Cook (family relationships), S.J. Bolton (mysterious dark forces), William Kent Krueger (loyalty) and Elizabeth George (communication). They all have essential issues that concern them, and one way or another, that\u2019s what all their books are about.\u00a0 It also makes their books more interesting.<\/p>\n

This latest novel feels the most Canadian of all of them.\u00a0 While most of the books are set in Three Pines \u2013 or in one case, at an isolated resort \u2013 this one is set almost completely in Quebec, and Penny makes excellent use of her lovely setting and it\u2019s history, which is a key part of the story. However, it has a different feel to it.\u00a0 While Three Pines is sort of its own country \u2013 a part of Penny\u2019s and her reader\u2019s imaginations \u2013 Quebec is, of course, a very real place.\u00a0 Three Pines, make no mistake, is still the heart of this novel, but the action is elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The main setting is the Literary and Historical Society Library, run by the English segment of the Quebec population.\u00a0 When one of the more controversial Quebec citizens is found dead in their basement, all sorts of issues are raised and begin to boil to the surface.\u00a0 The dead man had one passion: finding the body of Samuel de Champlain, the explorer and the founder of Quebec.\u00a0 Little is actually known about Champlain \u2013 his date of birth, or what he even looked like (the one known portrait of him is apparently a false one), and one of the bigger questions is where he was buried.\u00a0 For Americans, this would be like not knowing where Washington or Lincoln ended up – a more that disconcerting loose end.<\/p>\n

While Champlain and the men who study him form a central part of the story, from a pure mystery standpoint, he\u2019s a McGuffin.\u00a0 Just like inRaiders of the Lost Ark,<\/em> it\u2019s hard to fictionally discover where a precious object might be.\u00a0 Positing a likely theory is good enough, and the main point is to give the characters a narrative impetus, which this does, while at the same time providing the book with texture and background.<\/p>\n

Champlain\u2019s is the main story,\u00a0 but there are several overlapping story arcs.\u00a0 One of them, naturally, concerns the series hero, Armand Gamache, who is suffering and recovering from an injury, both mental and physical.\u00a0 He has come to Quebec to stay with his old mentor,\u00a0 Emile Comreau, now retired and giving Gamache a non-judgmental safe haven in which to recover.\u00a0 Gamache is mostly communicating with his dog, however, so when he\u2019s drawn into the case at the Library, where he\u2019d been spending his days, it\u2019s almost a welcome diversion from the other thoughts crowding his brain.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Gamache sends the similarly damaged Inspector Beauvoir back to Three Pines to look into another case.\u00a0 It\u2019s fascinating how Beauvoir selects the acerbic Ruth Zardo as his eventual ally and confidante, but that thread I will leave for readers to discover on their own.<\/p>\n

The unraveling of the incident that left both Gamache and Beauvoir injured is the third thread of the book, and it really becomes the central part.\u00a0 Both Gamache and Beauvoir are held captive by bad memories; just as the volunteers at the Literary and Historical Society Library are held captive by their own past, trying to hold the advancing present at bay.\u00a0\u00a0 Life in Three Pines remains the ideal: the citizens there accept change, but life moves slowly.\u00a0 They can perhaps adapt more easily than most of us who have to live in the faster pace of the real world, and I think it\u2019s part of what makes Three Pines so appealing to so many readers.<\/p>\n

By the end of the novel, as Penny has balanced her love of Quebec\u2019s beauty, her classic mystery setting in a beautiful library, and her exploration of the theories about where Champlain\u2019s corpse might lie, her essential story comes back, as it always does, to Gamache.\u00a0 He\u2019s imprisoned by his recent past; her question is, can he escape it?\u00a0 This many installments in, there won\u2019t be a reader who doesn\u2019t want an answer to that question, and I finished the book, as I do many of this author\u2019s, in a flood of tears.\u00a0 This is another beautiful, well written book from one of the most gifted novelists at work in our genre today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As with many gifted writers, Louise Penny has certain themes she tends to come back to and examine, and one of her major themes, through all the books, is the danger of being paralyzed by the past and refusing to change.\u00a0 Other writers who share this trait, off the top of my head, would be … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8],"class_list":["post-721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-police"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721","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=721"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":723,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721\/revisions\/723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}