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Penny a master of character and emotion
Book Review
By Derryll White
Penny, Louise (2016). A Great Reckoning.
Our life is what our thoughts make it – Louise Penny
Don’t believe everything you think – Pema Chödrön
It has been a considerable time since I read Louise Penny’s first novel, ‘Still Life.’ I like it a lot but somehow I drifted to other works and authors. Now I have her twelfth Chief Inspector Armond Gamache novel in my hands. Time and the river do flow.
Louise Penny is a master of character. This story blossoms through the swell of knowledge the reader receives about Armand Gamache and those associated with him. Many of the characters I remember from the first novel, and assume they have accompanied Gamache through his growth and decline to now Commander Gamache, of the Sureté’s Academy. I appreciate the emphasis Penny places on learning and training for the future. We need more thinkers to focus on and analyze just what our institutions of higher learning are producing.
There is little action as we normally know it in this novel. All movement occurs between what Armand holds dear and the dark unknown that threatens it. Family and self-worth come to the fore. Penny’s prolific use of poetry in the text builds on this, moving the reader from what is presumed to be true to something else entirely.
Being an historian myself, I truly appreciated the author’s focus on research. The cadets of the Academy move from dusty basements to church windows to abandoned cemeteries, and their research rang true in an age where everyone believes all answers can be Googled. Penny has a richness of language and depth of thought not common in the mystery genre.
What is emotion? What is that thing that swells in one’s heart and head, makes the eyes flow and the nose run? Louise Penny knows how to play with this force, produce it and use it to direct the reader. She left me tearful; and drained. Not many writers do that for me. She carefully exposes, in Gamache and others, those human traits that make life light and dark, full and empty, happy and sad – worth living in other words. And love! Louise Penny infuses the whole with the love that comes when one opens him or her self to others. ‘A Great Reckoning’ is truly a book worth reading.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. – Marcus Aurelius
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Excerpts from the novel:
A MAN – While he’d sometimes had a moustache and sometimes a beard, he was now clean-shaven, the lines of his face visible for all to see. It was a case-worn face. But most of the lines, if followed back like a trail, would lead to happiness. To the faces a face made when laughing or smiling, or sitting quietly enjoying the day.
Though some of those lines led elsewhere. Into a wilderness, into the wild. Where terrible things had happened. Some of the lines of his face led to events inhuman and abominable. To horrific sights. To unspeakable acts.
Some of them his.
The lines of his face were the longitude and latitude of his life.
ROOTS – “He [Turcotte] was a giant. He recognized the connection a people have to where they live. That it isn’t just land. Our history, our cuisine, our stories and songs spring from where we live. He wanted to capture that. He gave les habitants their patrimoine.”
WW I – …none of them had really thought about what those boxes, forgotten in the basement of the Legion, actually contained.
The remains of so many young men. The Great War had destroyed the flower of Europe and had taken with it the wildflowers of Canada. A generation of young men gone. And all that was left of them sat forgotten in dusty old boxes in a basement.
– 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.
