I have been living a ‘small town life’ of late but very definitely that of a town in the US or Canada. There are of course plenty of small towns in England but they are never as remote as those on the other side of the Atlantic and that makes a difference; there is less sense of isolation.
At a U3A group recently we did a play reading of Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town’. It was fun reading it but I was very ignorant about both play and playwright. Looking him up I realised he was actually very famous and respected. Thinking about which other American dramatists I knew, I found my list was embarrassingly short: Harper Lee: ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, Arthur Miller: ‘The Crucible’ and ‘The Death of a Salesman’ and Tennessee Williams: ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.’ Anyway, that is a digression but it did fit in nicely with my small town reading.
I have limited experience of two such towns in America, one in upstate New York where I did a 6 week exchange programme in the lower sixth and one in the north of Pennsylvania where one of my children studied at the university for a time. They both felt very foreign: the drugstore, signs saying ‘Buy your guns here’ and pumpkin and scarecrow displays mixed up with the Stars and Stripes flags.
The small town in both of these Louise Penney books is called Three Pines and is situated just over the US border, south east of Montreal, where there are indeed many quite remote communities. I have only taken a few steps into Canada, walking over The Rainbow Bridge from Buffalo into Niagara to get an attractive stamp in my passport and to see the Falls, which were partly frozen. Do they still freeze I wonder or has climate change put an end to that?
So, here we are with another detective series, he is Armand Gamache by name, and there is the inevitable series of malevolent happenings. When my friend lent me Fatal Grace, it was with the accompanying words: ‘This is not great literature!’ Not possibly the most auspicious start but I have read and enjoyed many books that could be labelled thus. After the first 50 pages I took stock. Some of the writing was decidedly clunky and had what a tutor of mine long ago would have called a feeling of being over written; rather amateurish.
The writing reminded me of a summer when I was about 13 and was on a Cornish holiday with several children younger than me. I was decidedly unsociable and retreated to a deckchair with several copies of Woman and Woman’s Own, interested only in the fiction, usually romantic and very second rate.
However, despite all that I persevered and the book did improve (or did I just get used to it?) to such a point that I actually bought Still Life, the prequel to Fatal Grace, as there were several things that kept being referred to that I wanted to understand.
I could be very critical of the plotting and of the characterisation here; unconvincing and lacking in subtlety but I only have praise for the sense of place that Louise Penney conjures in her story. I love to know where I am and in these novels that was made very clear to me. I could feel the cold, sense the isolation but also the claustrophobia of living in a tight knit community where privacy is prized but scarce.
I did find the comments about Montreal very interesting and sometimes surprising. I’m not sure I was truly aware of the continuing problems and distrust between the French speaking community and the English, the ‘Anglos.’ At one point the author has a character explain it like this: ‘ the English set great store on individual freedoms whilst the French are more concerned about the collective French culture and language.’ I thought about that for a long time and can see the truth of it.
Although Armand Gamache is a sympathetic figure, likeable and with a pleasing personality, I won’t be reading anymore of this series. To give Louise Penney her due and to give you a fair picture, you should know that these books are best sellers in the US and Canada, as well as selling well here, so there are obviously very many people who have a different view. Like so many things in life, we don’t all have the same taste in reading matter. Maybe these stories are right up your street…a street in some small town a long drive from here.