Home »
Belinda Bauer is a consummate writer
Book Review
By Derryll White
Bauer, Belinda (2016). The Beautiful Dead
So let her worry her morals like Catholic beads.
Let her demand a finger in the side of her master.
Let her doubt.
I will convince her.
Belinda Bauer is a strong, perceptive writer. She sees things in everyday life that pass most people by, and pulls them onto the page. She makes Alzheimer’s disease a present in the reader’s mind when she describes TV reporter Eve Singer’s dad. She makes illness a fact, one that strong family members stand up to and work with no matter what the personal cost. People don’t run from responsibility in Belinda Bauer’s universe.
The author convincingly blends the past with the present, art with philosophy and yes, insanity. Her killer creates his own form of art out of murder, reaching past the painting of the Mona Lisa for his own inner justification. Eve Singer, crime reporter and TV journalist, is caught in a moral crisis of huge proportions. Shall she assume a position with the inside story or be an accomplice.
Eve’s dad, Duncan Singer, rips at my senses as he is caught in a disease that stills all reason. “Where was the beginning?” he thinks in a moment of lucidity, caught at the edge of the rabbit hole that will again plunge him into a world of huge loss. Does Alzheimer’s hurt? Bauer believes so – both the afflicted and the family. It is perhaps the most frightful part of the novel. Reading Doug’s story one cannot help but think: “Is this my future?”
Belinda Bauer is a consummate writer. She thinks, she tells the story, and she surprises with beautiful perceptive phrases that ring in the chaos of the fear she creates. The story takes many delightful twists and turns. Some of it is very sad, some very sick when entering the realm of a serial murderer. Above all, though, Belinda Bauer maintains a rainbow of beautiful writing – thoughts, images and phrases crafted with the art and skill of a Pablo Picasso or Jackson Pollock.
I sincerely recommend ‘The Beautiful Dead’ and will look for more of Belinda Bauer’s novels.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
NEW WORLD – She and Charlotte laughed in the face of 30. Laughed at the inevitability of it, and laughed at the women who were pumped so full of Botox by the time they hit that that mark that if they ever stopped, they’d look like disappointed scrotums.
GLASS CEILING – Apparently, men grew wiser with every grey hair, while women just grew invisible.
BEAUTY OF ANYTHING – The killer watched the dust dance in the shards of sunlight that sliced between the heavy velvet curtains. Each speck had once been part of something else. The eye of a wood worm, a shaving off the leg of a Chippendale chest, a flake of his own pale skin. Each fragment was fallen from a whole and reduced and reduced and reduced, until it was anonymous and uniform, and so tiny that it could be supported by the thickness of air, as it sought the light that would lend its existence beauty beyond the darkness.
TEA – The tea was marginally better, but only because tea was less interesting to start with, so there was commensurately less distance between expectation and disappointment.
WOMEN – Activity in the house stopped, and the three men exchanged nervous glances, as if they all secretly knew that a woman was made of sugar and spice and all things nitro-glycerine.
ART – And a thumbprint.
A single accidental print in the thick paint.
The realization struck her like lightning.
She was standing where the artist had stood. Vincent Van Gogh had stood right here – right here – and watched these creamy pink clouds roll in, watched these cypresses sway in the breeze, travelled every muddy inch of these furrows – first with his boots and then with his brush.
And then he had reached out and touched the sky.
CONNECTION – This was immortality.
This was what the beautiful dead left behind when they moved out of the corporeal and into the hearts and minds of all humankind. This connection, this sense of sharing something wonderful, something beyond mere life, something that had endured and would endure. The painting was worth millions, but the thumbprint was priceless – a mark made on history, a trilobite, a hieroglyph, a footprint on the moon. Eve’s heart broke for anyone who had not experienced such beauty. Her throat ached so hard that she thought she would weep.
– 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.
