cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2008-06-08 06:33 pm
cyphomandra) wrote2008-06-08 06:33 pm
Entry tags:
Irk. Irk. Irk.
The concept behind this grabbed me straight away - Josephine Tey, the writer, as a detective - and the Guardian review where I came across it was relatively approving, so I picked it up. And regretted it, as it annoyed me so rapidly that I started taking notes while still reading. This did mean that I had to take back an aggrieved note about "means of death described not remotely consistent with pattern of injury" when the Scotland Yard pathologist showed up and said exactly the same thing (he would have been my favourite character for this if, alas, he'd actually had a personality) but, on the other hand, it kept me going through the unlikely, grinding plot. I do not get the feeling that the author is at all comfortable with the sort of plotting required for successful detective stories, and I say this as someone who spent last week extracting a nonfunctioning crime plot from a friend's novella and attempting to put a slightly more coherent one back in - it's not an uncommon flaw, but it helps if there are other strengths to camouflage it (pace, character, setting, another plotline, humour, anything...) and there weren't here for me. And this is supposed to be the first in a series.
Snippy and fairly specific comments beyond the cut. No actual plot spoilers, largely because I don't think the plot makes sense.
I admit to getting off to a somewhat pedantic bad start – there’s a misused double negative on the first page (well, first page of the book proper – there’s one of those one page unnamed protagonist-does-meaningful-things-in-italics just beforehand). I am still baffled as to who else is in Tey’s carriage – or is it a compartment? – or why she feels it necessary to talk to a complete stranger who’s recognised her without any discomfort; the murder scene is blocked so appallingly that I couldn’t tell what was actually happening, and the murderee suddenly becomes weirdly (and conveniently) passive.
The supporting cast are all madly irksome - fluttery racy upper classes, a grumpy housekeeper with a family member of choice "to whom she was devoted", and the dialogue is impossible to attribute except to conveniently “th” dropping lower classes. There's the usual smug moment of superiority over how horrible it was to send all those men off to their deaths in war (what seems to define Lord Peter, in contrast, is not his belief that war was flawed so much as his belief that he failed) and a madly annoying bit where Tey denies that she believes in face-reading “only ever use that when I’ve got myself into a bit of a hole with the plot and need to move things along”, which, I suppose, is possibly based on letters or a diary or something, but which I find difficult to believe and more of a cover-up for this author’s own inabilities with description. Face-reading never really sorts out holes in Tey’s plots – it’s useful for suspicions, as seen in The Franchise Affair, but no-one, surely, could read Miss Pym Disposes and think that she uses faces to replace plots? Argh. And surely the whole point of Brat Farrar is how different people with the same face can be?
The irksome supporting cast do include a number of gay and lesbian characters, but by this stage I was being annoyed by everything and none of them seemed particularly realistic (even the one who, given who he's strongly based on, should have been). And Tey herself may be the centre of the book, but never its heart - she's there, and far less annoyingly so than many of the others, but she's also so self-possessed that you never feel that anyone (reader or author) actually knows her. This may, in fact, be the thing Upson gets most right, but it only unbalances the story itself.
Snippy and fairly specific comments beyond the cut. No actual plot spoilers, largely because I don't think the plot makes sense.
I admit to getting off to a somewhat pedantic bad start – there’s a misused double negative on the first page (well, first page of the book proper – there’s one of those one page unnamed protagonist-does-meaningful-things-in-italics just beforehand). I am still baffled as to who else is in Tey’s carriage – or is it a compartment? – or why she feels it necessary to talk to a complete stranger who’s recognised her without any discomfort; the murder scene is blocked so appallingly that I couldn’t tell what was actually happening, and the murderee suddenly becomes weirdly (and conveniently) passive.
The supporting cast are all madly irksome - fluttery racy upper classes, a grumpy housekeeper with a family member of choice "to whom she was devoted", and the dialogue is impossible to attribute except to conveniently “th” dropping lower classes. There's the usual smug moment of superiority over how horrible it was to send all those men off to their deaths in war (what seems to define Lord Peter, in contrast, is not his belief that war was flawed so much as his belief that he failed) and a madly annoying bit where Tey denies that she believes in face-reading “only ever use that when I’ve got myself into a bit of a hole with the plot and need to move things along”, which, I suppose, is possibly based on letters or a diary or something, but which I find difficult to believe and more of a cover-up for this author’s own inabilities with description. Face-reading never really sorts out holes in Tey’s plots – it’s useful for suspicions, as seen in The Franchise Affair, but no-one, surely, could read Miss Pym Disposes and think that she uses faces to replace plots? Argh. And surely the whole point of Brat Farrar is how different people with the same face can be?
The irksome supporting cast do include a number of gay and lesbian characters, but by this stage I was being annoyed by everything and none of them seemed particularly realistic (even the one who, given who he's strongly based on, should have been). And Tey herself may be the centre of the book, but never its heart - she's there, and far less annoyingly so than many of the others, but she's also so self-possessed that you never feel that anyone (reader or author) actually knows her. This may, in fact, be the thing Upson gets most right, but it only unbalances the story itself.