Death Comes to Pemberly: So, apparently, does boredom (#11)

I don't generally read mysteries or crime novels. There's so much death, destruction and terror in the world that I generally avoid these genres in my reading choices -- and frankly, I've never really understood it as a form of entertainment. So, not surprisingly, I haven't read much by P.D. James, just one book whose name I can't remember. But I was pretty excited when I heard she'd written a mystery incorporating the characters from Pride and Prejudice -- I'm not a raving Jane Austen fan, but there's a reason that book's a classic.

Unfortunately, P.D. James' attempt to recapture the magic of Pride and Prejudice in her mystery Death Comes to Pemberly falls short. While all of the main Pride and Prejudice characters appear -- Darcy and Elizabeth, Georgiana, Wickham and Lydia, Jane and Bingley -- the relationships between them are very wooden. It appears that James was attempting to imitate Austen's style, and in that, I suppose, she succeed -- it's just that she succeeed at imitating the aloof style of Persuasion rather than the sparkling wit of Pride and Prejudice. The tone of Death Comes to Pemberly is pretty lifeless, and there's almost no development of the characters' inner lives -- Darcy and Elizabeth, for example, are happy because the text says so, not because you see any true warmth between them on the page.

Six years after the close of Pride and Prejudice, Dary and Elizabeth are living happily on their estate, Pemberly, with their two young sons. Life is apparently perfect. Elizabeth is preparing to throw a huge ball the next evening when her headstrong younger sister Lydia unexpectedly arrives, absolutely hysterical. She had been traveling with her husband, the ever-disgraced Wickham, and his friend, Captain Denny, preparing to crash the ball. But Wickham and Denny had gotten into an argument, and Denny had exited the carriage and headed into the dark woods. Wickham followed and then...gunshots. When Darcy and the members of his search party locate them, Wickham is standing over his friend's lifeless body, seemingly confessing to the murder. But, of course, it's never that simple in a mystery, and Darcy spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out who the real culprit is.

This quest involves a number of people that weren't in Pride and Prejudice, but James doesn't develop them enough for the reader to care, which makes the mystery pretty dull. We don't learn anything about Captain Denny so there's no emotional attachment to the crime; at the same time, Wickham (along with everyone else) has apparently not changed in the slightest in six years, so it's hard to care all that much about whether an unreformed scoundrel gets saved from the hangman's noose.

If you don't care about a novel's characters or plot, there's really not a lot to hang your hat on. In this case, you're probably just better off re-reading Pride and Prejudice. And then making up your own fan-fiction version about what happened after the happily-ever-after.

Painted Ladies: Alas, not Robert B. Parker's best (#31)

I've always enjoyed dipping into Robert B. Parker's crime novels - it's not usually my genre but I enjoy his humor, and over the years I've let the books find me. (Although I haven't read one since 2006; apparently the path can be long and twisty.) I noticed this one of the library's website and checked it out on a whim, intrigued by the premise - yet again - of an art mystery. It was kind of amazing how much this one mirrored Daniel Silva's The Rembrandt Affair, which I had read only two months before.

But I wasn't a big fan of Painted Ladies unfortunately - which seems disrespectful, considering that he died in January 2010 before this novel was published. (His last book, however, appears to be Sixkill.) Publishers Weekly called it "lackluster," which is an apt description. Painted Ladies was missing both Parker's usual zing and a complex and/or thrilling plot.

The plot centers around the death of art historian and professor Ashton Prince who Spenser agrees to protect during the recovery of a fictitious Dutch painting called "Lady with a Finch." But things go awry and Prince dies and the painting gets incinerated - which Spenser won't tolerate under his watch. So Spenser decides to figure it out, making it his own personal mission. And like the painting in The Rembrandt Affair, "Lady with a Finch" turns out to have a sordid history, having also been confiscated from a wealthy Dutch family during the Holocaust. (Even the families have similar names: Herzberg here and Herzfeld there.) In the present day, Spenser tries to charm - both successfully and unsuccessfully - a mother, daughter, and a mysterious art foundation.

But it never felt suspenseful; the links were just too easy. There was also one major inconsistency, which I was really surprised that the editor or copyeditor didn't catch: On p. 177, Winifred goes from being a certain someone's ex-girlfriend to being his ex-wife for the rest of the book. And while that seems minor, about 20 pages before, another character made a huge deal of the fact that they were never married, saying, "Fact is, for crissake, she was shacking up with some guy who had no intention of marrying her, and when she got knocked up, he left" (p. 152). It really stuck out to me.

So all in all, not my favorite of the four Robert B. Parker books that I've read. But as I was perusing the Amazon reviews (most people seemed to like Painted Ladies for sentimental reasons), I saw many mentions of his highly praised first novel The Godwulf Manuscript which I will add to my booklist for next year.

#16: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I ended up picking this book up by chance. I was traveling and had finished the two books I brought with me - The Sex Lives of Cannibals and Air Babylon - and wanted to trade them in for something else. But I just couldn't find anything decent, until I discovered The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in a spirituality focused used-book store in a small beach town. I only picked it up, actually, because a guy at Borders had just told me it was one of the best books he'd recently read. The point is, I hadn't intended to read it, but it came into my life anyway.

For the most part, I liked it, although not enough to read the next book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, in the trilogy. On the one hand, I was pretty into the book until the last 100 pages or so, and couldn't wait to dive back into it; on the other hand, I was absolutely shocked by the sexual violence in the book, which the jacket doesn't mention.

The book seems to be about disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who's both trying to solve the mystery of what happened to 16-year-old Harriet Vanger in 1966 and get revenge on industralist Hans-Erik Wennerstrom. But I think the book, on a deeper level, is really about violence perpetrated against women. (Each section starts with some kind of statistic, after all.) And it's fine as a topic, but I wish I'd known beforehand that that's what the book is really about, because I'm not sure I would have picked it.

But otherwise, the book is pretty well-written, although I think Larsson (in the form of Blomkvist) took a few unbelievable leaps in solving the mystery. The writing is a little stiff - though that may be about the translation - and, as a side note, has a surprising amount of techy details (like an exhausted list of Mac laptop specs) which I found amusing for some reason. I would argue that the last 100 pages - which resolve the Wennerstrom thread after the Harriet mystery has been solved - could have been eliminated, but that's personal preference.

So, all in all, I liked it but I didn't love it. :)