A Tale of Two Louises
when a sub-plot becomes a distraction
First off, a disclaimer: I rarely read crime fiction/thrillers. I do, however, occasionally make an exception for Michael Connolly’s Harry Bosch series. Partly I started to make that exception because I realised in writing my last novel that I am not good at plot. Where better to learn the sleight of pen that keeps a reader hooked than from one of the masters? Not that I lay claim to having mastered that skill but maybe I picked up a few small tricks from my excursion into crime fiction.
I was struck in reading the Bosch stories by how actual events are central to the development of the plot (Bosch’s service in Vietnam, trouble on the American-Mexican border in Black Ice, his portrait of the ‘other’ Hollywood). This anchors the novels in the known world and increases their tension.
The question of why so many of us enjoy reading (and watching) gruesome violence is a separate one but worthy of discussion too.
Canadian author Louise Penny
Last autumn, a friend praised Louise Penny’s novels to me. Her boss had recommended them to her as a means to beguile the hours on a long-haul flight, and she was hooked. Shortly afterwards I heard an interview with Penny on the radio and liked the sound of her. Listen here
She was so articulate, open and frank about the ups and downs of her life that I made a point of hunting up her books at our neighbourhood second-hand book sale. This monthly sale raises money for the local community service for older people and is a treasure trove of books in every genre. I bring and buy there regularly which may be an investment in the future. Back home, I leafed through the book I had bought and was surprised to see that it was set in Dublin. Looking again at the cover I realised that I had got a novel (They All Lied ) by another Louise, Phillips, not Penny. Out I went again, this time to a bookstore, where I found The Brutal Telling by Ms Penny.
The two Louises are worlds apart: one Canadian, one Irish; Penny builds a series around a fictional village, Three Pines, and a detective, Armand Gamache; Phillips sets her novel in contemporary Dublin, alternating the narrative voice between a detective called Wren, and the victim of the lies, Nadine. (Phillips does also write a series featuring a criminal psychologist, Kate Pearson.) And yet, and yet, there are parallels in their narrative procedures. Both novels start with a murder and the detective work uncovers the origin of these deaths in the past lives of the characters. Not so extraordinary in the genre to be sure. The coincidence lies in the way the unravelling of the stories leads back to a similar starting point, one that in many ways does not belong in the novels.
The victim in Penny’s book is a hermit holed up in a cabin in the forest, which is surprisingly cammed with various antiques, and references to the children’s story Charlotte’s Web. As is the convention in such stories various suspects are fingered, some with possible financial motives, some with familial motives. Gamache, a surprisingly gentle man for one in his business, based on Penny’s late husband, digs assiduously until he uncovers a link to the Canadian artist Emily Carr and travels to the Charlotte Islands off the coast of Canada. The novel’s title is taken from a reference in a letter by Carr to a terrible falling out with her father. The nature of the event remains a mystery but it embittered her and changed the course of her life. All of this we learn towards the end of the novel and it is the only time that the fictional enclave established by Penny is breached by fact. The story has little to do with the final revelation of the murderer and his motive.
For the record, and in a nod to my last newsletter, Gamache has a dog whose ears resemble satellite dishes. Another character has a pet duck that she dresses up like a child. Go figure!
Irish author Louise Phillips
In Phillips’ novel the characters are closely intertwined in a way that surpasses even the typical Celtic knot of connections, all linked to the disappearance of a teenage girl eighteen years previously. Behind the psychological games played on the central character, Nadine, lies a desire on the one hand for revenge and on the other for concealment. Characters appear and disappear like ghosts until the final reveal. The back story involves a girl who has been abused by her father.
On her acknowledgements page Phillips attributes the inspiration for the novel to the conjunction of young man’s involvement in the active Dublin gangland scene and the growth of the #metoo movement. The protagonists are women who have each in different ways been abused by men. When the mystery had been teased out I couldn’t help feeling that the central plot line concerning the missing girl would have made a compelling story on its own, one told from the beginning rather than gradually unpacked through the police procedural.
Both Phillips and Penny pinned their stories to historical events (Emily Carr’s ‘brutal telling’ and the #metoo movement), both connected with some form of abuse by fathers of their daughters. Both mix those with more ‘traditional’ forms of crime, financial fraud and gangland thuggery. While I can understand their wish as women authors to introduce the topic of abuse of women it does not feel integral to the stories, instead, it seems to undermine the effect of the detective story and the central mystery.
So my question is premised less as a criticism than as a conundrum: how effective is it really to introduce such a current and emotive topic as an underdeveloped sub-plot in a novel, or any other work?
Let me know what you think.