Vacation Reading
Before the Gotham office goes on its annual Rejuvenative Leave, the editorial staff would like to indulge in our own little desire to emulate her Oprahcity and form a Book Club of Our Own. This startlingly original idea came to us last night as we were finishing up a re-read of Dorothy Sayers' best mystery novel, Gaudy Night (it's fortunate for the editorial staff that we all read at precisely the same rate, so that there was no argument over how quickly to turn the pages).
Gaudy Night, the penultimate novel in the Sayers collection of mysteries featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, is an astonishing demonstration of the ability of genre-fiction's possibilities. It's a love story, a social-issue novel (about the prejudice against intellectual women), a costume drama (not so much for Sayers, but definitely for its present readers), and a well-plotted mystery story with the unusual appeal of having no murder ever committed.
Sayers carries the whole thing off with the trappings of an old-fashioned liberal erudition that could sink a less lighthearted writer, and her habit of quotation and allusion don't come off as pretensions -- rather, they're invitations to the world of reference which her characters inhabit. Of course, this is a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, built around an obnoxiously masterful aristocrat whose superhuman qualities give him the air of cariacature; the fact that Sayers teases out of this chattering demigod a character one can feel for is a feat worth marveling over.
This is partially accomplished through the occlusion of Wimsey in this book by the main character, Harriet Vane, a figure who appears late in the Wimsey series and is given prominence for the first and only time in this book. A more troubled and human-scale figure, she's the focus of the plot until very late in the book. There's some back story about her and Lord Peter in the less-distinguished Strong Poison, but don't go reading that one first: you'll pick it up as you go along.
We don't have a clever way to wrap this up; no kicker; nothing to tie this old mystery-classic to any current memes. But since we had this soapbox, we just couldn't help but jump up on it and yelp "Gaudy Night! Gaudy Night!"
Posted by B T at August 21, 2001 06:07 PM