Saturday Review #3
Aug. 21st, 2010 08:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaI was originally planning to review this last week, but I was in kind of a RAR HUMAN RACE RAR sort of mood, and it's a bad idea to write this sort of review when you're in that sort of mood.
What sort of review? I'm glad you asked.
THE TALE OF BRIAR BANK, by Susan Wittig Albert.
Cover copy: Beatrix Potter's tales have bewitched readers for a century. Now, fans of all ages cherish Susan Wittig Albert's Cottage Tales Mysteries, starring Miss Potter herself...
Snow has draped a woolly shawl over Near Sawrey, where Miss Beatrix Potter has retreated to her country house. But the quiet, snow-covered setting belies the buzz below the surface, where Mr. Wickstead has met his death under a tree limb. The villagers are certain his death had to do with a treasure he had dug up last spring. But why was he in the woods on a frigid night? And what of the claw marks on the limb? And what was that treasure?
As often happens, the town's animals know more than the Big Folk. Actually, Wickstead was not alone; Pickles, his fox terrier, stood by his side. Only Pickles knows what happened, although Bailey Badger, the animals in the Brockery, and the local dragon know important bits too.
Meanwhile, Miss Potter is unsure what to do about her nagging parents. She also wonders: Can she acknowledge her fondness for Mr. Heelis and remain loyal to the memory of her fiance? She has no time to muse about her personal affairs, what with helping the denizens of Sawrey, human and animal - and the little matter of this murder. Although she's enlisted the help of her furry friends, Miss Potter still wonders if she'll ever make heads or tails of it all...
This is the second book in this particular series that I've read. The first was rather on the cutesy side of things: it's inherent in the concept of talking animals, even if -- perhaps especially if -- the humans around them don't understand them. Further, it followed the conceit found in Beatrix Potter's books that, when humans aren't around to see them, animals are dressed and civilized and, well, basically exactly like Victorian society, except furry. (Insert your own cheap shot here.) But in the end, it followed its own rules: for all the talking animals, this was a real village in the early twentieth century, and real people (except for the ones the author had already confessed to making up).
This one doesn't.
There are Rules for mysteries, and one of the foremost of them is the concept of playing fair with the reader. You needn't follow Dorothy Sayer's example and outright break the fourth wall to inform the reader that, somewhere on the previous page, is the Key Clue to the entire mystery, but she shan't tell you what it is, instead leaving it for you to puzzle over. But at the very least you need to follow Holmes' dictum: "When you have eliminated the impossible, then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth." If this is the sort of world where the impossible is possible, excellent. Say so to begin with. But you can't expect to get away with 'it was a dragon!' unless you've firmly established that this is a world where dragons exist. All protests in authorial afterwords about how she likes dragons, and this is so a world where dragons could exist, won't wash - not when you've spent multiple books in the same series writing about a world where, despite the talking animals, dragons did not exist.
Sadly, I am not joking about the author's protestations. "With all my fussing about reality and factuality, you may think the talking animals and the dragon -- oh, yes, the dragon - a bit odd," Ms. Albert writes in the afterword, and goes on to explain that the talking animals "offer dimensions of story that are simply not possible" when she confines herself to humans, and that, based on a story that Beatrix Potter wrote which includes a magical/intelligent owl (but no dragons), Miss Potter could maybe possibly have believed in dragons too. Inasmuch as Miss Potter never even finds out about the dragon, I'm really not sure where she thought she was going with this.
I'm also not surprised, unfortunately. The entire book smacks of the author being self-indulgent to the point of laziness. Not only does she jump points of view as if she thinks it's a game of hopscotch, she pulls back and breaks the fourth wall and makes comments on the characters' behavior in the most fondly condescending way. The effect isn't so much Victorian as it is profoundly irritating: it comes across as assuming that we are here for her and will put up with anything because her writing is so wonderful. She breaks off key explanations of events and tells you she is doing so, because another bit of story is advancing, and honest we'll come back! The first time is merely teeth-grinding: by the third, only sheer determination had me finishing the book. It's not cute, it's not amusing, and it's not good writing. It's the sort of thing one writes if one has read far too many Victorian children's novels and was writing by the seat of one's pants, and then didn't revise the self-consciously twee drivel out again. I expect that sort of thing in NaNoWriMo, not in a published novel by a bestselling author.
Even as a mystery it fails. The death isn't a murder: it's mere accident, even if a dragon was involved. Not that this comes out properly until nearly the end of the book, not so much because there weren't witnesses (there were) as because of the aforementioned cutting back and forth between storylines. The humans never even find out anything about the details of the death: that's left to the animals. The humans are all concentrated on small village melodrama, and a far more minor case of personal fraud which is only tangentially related to the death. By the end of the book, I was left wanting to shake everyone, especially the author, for wasting my time.
In conclusion: the first few books in this series, perhaps, depending on your relative tolerance for talking animals and twee. But for the sake of avoiding dents in your walls, not this one.
What sort of review? I'm glad you asked.
THE TALE OF BRIAR BANK, by Susan Wittig Albert.
Cover copy: Beatrix Potter's tales have bewitched readers for a century. Now, fans of all ages cherish Susan Wittig Albert's Cottage Tales Mysteries, starring Miss Potter herself...
Snow has draped a woolly shawl over Near Sawrey, where Miss Beatrix Potter has retreated to her country house. But the quiet, snow-covered setting belies the buzz below the surface, where Mr. Wickstead has met his death under a tree limb. The villagers are certain his death had to do with a treasure he had dug up last spring. But why was he in the woods on a frigid night? And what of the claw marks on the limb? And what was that treasure?
As often happens, the town's animals know more than the Big Folk. Actually, Wickstead was not alone; Pickles, his fox terrier, stood by his side. Only Pickles knows what happened, although Bailey Badger, the animals in the Brockery, and the local dragon know important bits too.
Meanwhile, Miss Potter is unsure what to do about her nagging parents. She also wonders: Can she acknowledge her fondness for Mr. Heelis and remain loyal to the memory of her fiance? She has no time to muse about her personal affairs, what with helping the denizens of Sawrey, human and animal - and the little matter of this murder. Although she's enlisted the help of her furry friends, Miss Potter still wonders if she'll ever make heads or tails of it all...
This is the second book in this particular series that I've read. The first was rather on the cutesy side of things: it's inherent in the concept of talking animals, even if -- perhaps especially if -- the humans around them don't understand them. Further, it followed the conceit found in Beatrix Potter's books that, when humans aren't around to see them, animals are dressed and civilized and, well, basically exactly like Victorian society, except furry. (Insert your own cheap shot here.) But in the end, it followed its own rules: for all the talking animals, this was a real village in the early twentieth century, and real people (except for the ones the author had already confessed to making up).
This one doesn't.
There are Rules for mysteries, and one of the foremost of them is the concept of playing fair with the reader. You needn't follow Dorothy Sayer's example and outright break the fourth wall to inform the reader that, somewhere on the previous page, is the Key Clue to the entire mystery, but she shan't tell you what it is, instead leaving it for you to puzzle over. But at the very least you need to follow Holmes' dictum: "When you have eliminated the impossible, then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth." If this is the sort of world where the impossible is possible, excellent. Say so to begin with. But you can't expect to get away with 'it was a dragon!' unless you've firmly established that this is a world where dragons exist. All protests in authorial afterwords about how she likes dragons, and this is so a world where dragons could exist, won't wash - not when you've spent multiple books in the same series writing about a world where, despite the talking animals, dragons did not exist.
Sadly, I am not joking about the author's protestations. "With all my fussing about reality and factuality, you may think the talking animals and the dragon -- oh, yes, the dragon - a bit odd," Ms. Albert writes in the afterword, and goes on to explain that the talking animals "offer dimensions of story that are simply not possible" when she confines herself to humans, and that, based on a story that Beatrix Potter wrote which includes a magical/intelligent owl (but no dragons), Miss Potter could maybe possibly have believed in dragons too. Inasmuch as Miss Potter never even finds out about the dragon, I'm really not sure where she thought she was going with this.
I'm also not surprised, unfortunately. The entire book smacks of the author being self-indulgent to the point of laziness. Not only does she jump points of view as if she thinks it's a game of hopscotch, she pulls back and breaks the fourth wall and makes comments on the characters' behavior in the most fondly condescending way. The effect isn't so much Victorian as it is profoundly irritating: it comes across as assuming that we are here for her and will put up with anything because her writing is so wonderful. She breaks off key explanations of events and tells you she is doing so, because another bit of story is advancing, and honest we'll come back! The first time is merely teeth-grinding: by the third, only sheer determination had me finishing the book. It's not cute, it's not amusing, and it's not good writing. It's the sort of thing one writes if one has read far too many Victorian children's novels and was writing by the seat of one's pants, and then didn't revise the self-consciously twee drivel out again. I expect that sort of thing in NaNoWriMo, not in a published novel by a bestselling author.
Even as a mystery it fails. The death isn't a murder: it's mere accident, even if a dragon was involved. Not that this comes out properly until nearly the end of the book, not so much because there weren't witnesses (there were) as because of the aforementioned cutting back and forth between storylines. The humans never even find out anything about the details of the death: that's left to the animals. The humans are all concentrated on small village melodrama, and a far more minor case of personal fraud which is only tangentially related to the death. By the end of the book, I was left wanting to shake everyone, especially the author, for wasting my time.
In conclusion: the first few books in this series, perhaps, depending on your relative tolerance for talking animals and twee. But for the sake of avoiding dents in your walls, not this one.