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Perfectly Blunt; Cardinal series grows
Book Review
By Derryll White
Blunt, Giles (2012). Until the Night.
I was pleased to go to work at Lotus Books and find a new Giles Blunt on the New Releases shelf.
I have touted him to many customers. All who have read him tell me he is interesting but a couple have said he is ‘too dark’ with his John Cardinal mysteries. I agree that he has taken on some very heavy subjects, particularly mental illness and suicide in his ‘Forty Words for Sorrow.’
Right off, this volume probably isn’t for everyone. There is quite a bit of sexually explicit language which may bother a few people. It didn’t bother me as Blunt uses it to set character and context and to lead the reader into a much deeper story. But it is there – I’ve done my part.
Blunt employs an interesting device that one doesn’t see in literature any more; a removed third voice in the form of journal entries – the ‘Blue Notebook.’ He interjects short chapters from a notebook kept in 1992 by Karson Durie, an Arctic explorer/scientist. I am not going to say more about this except to say that it is a very effective way of moving the reader backward and forward in both time and emotional context.
One of the things that keeps bringing me back to Giles Blunt is the quality of both his language and storytelling. The man writes very well, sometimes beautifully. He has a sense of women (and men) in relation to unusual situations that brings out their character, stark against the reality of what else is happening in the story. When he deals with abstracts – love or loneliness for example – his language glows with feeling. I believe him because I have felt that way myself and not always possessed the words to sufficiently articulate it. Blunt does, and executes it magnificently.
The characters grow in this volume, and we see more deeply into the soul of Cardinal’s partner, policewoman Delorme. I highly recommend the book, and the series.
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Excerpts from the novel:
WOMEN – ‘That’s the thing about women,’ Delorme said when she met Cardinal at the coffee shop. ‘We have an endless capacity to fool ourselves. To see what we want to see – and nothing else – especially when it comes to men. I do it myself.’
MEN – It sent a chill through Cardinal to hear a man admit to loneliness. He never used the word about himself. But he knew what Ronnie meant. Friendships suddenly matter a lot more when you live alone.
INTUITION – A voice not my own reverberated in my skull and rib cage both: You should not be here, it told me – no one should be here. A friend of mine who is a neurosurgeon had the exact same thought the first time he inserted a gloved finger into the cerebral cortex of a living human being.
HOUR OF RECKONING – There is a night within the night. Even in the temperate latitudes, even in nights of the duration we would consider “normal,” there can be a time, an hour or two, that might be called the night within the night. The hour when a wife discovers she can no longer pretend to love her husband. The hour when a young man judges that the world is not going to hand him the life he yearns for, and it seems preferable to end the one he has.
THE ARCTIC – I do not belong here is an idea that can very rapidly turn crippling. Many an Arctic adventurer has had to make the humiliating call for rescue in a matter of days, undone not by the cold but by looking into the face of what might have been called – before over-use rendered the word useless – the awesome. Air is so preternaturally clear that you can see the curve of the earth. And in all that vista nothing but snow and ice and, in summer, the veins of open water. Even the most thoroughgoing atheist can be destabilized by setting foot where only gods should walk.
MEN – “A woman will have a rage and kill her husband, her child even, but something like this? Only a man would do this – it’s always men brutalizing women, and I just get so sick of it. You see a crime like this, does it ever occur to you that maybe there are just too many men in t this world? Not too many people – too many men?
POLITICS – Cardinal had talked to a few MPs in his time, but never to a senator. In the dark forests of Canadian politics, senators are mythical creatures rarely seen, their powers (if any) uncertain. Cardinal did not know what to expect.
LONELINESS – It occurred to her that she might have entirely misunderstood the word loneliness. She had always thought it just meant wishing there was a friend around to talk to. Especially when you were feeling bad about yourself, your character and your life. She felt like that often enough, but this crushing, nameless weight was new. This awfulness that seemed to fill not just her heart but the entire room.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
