Sunday, November 6, 2016

NEW STUFF: Flavia de Luce Transformed

The good news: a new Flavia de Luce book is out. The bad news: she’s aged two decades in a single year.

Alan Bradley originally envisioned this series featuring his precocious girl sleuth and genius chemist to be a homage to the lost culture of Britain and Canada. He wrote intriguing mysteries laced with nostalgic paeans to stamp collecting, a touring puppet troupe, gypsy nomads, and other long gone pastimes and cultural dinosaurs. He said all this in countless interviews when the series first appeared with his award-winning debut The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. But as the series progressed he was forced to reckon with the overwhelming popularity of the character herself and her family. The intriguing cultural aspects did not vanish altogether but they have been pushed aside, sad to say, to make way for the De Luce Family saga. Now in this eighth installment a full year has passed. How do I know? Because Bradley has already written one book about Christmas and this one Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d (2016) also takes place just before that holiday. Ergo: a new year. Flavia was supposedly eleven years old in the first book and now she’s twelve. But she resembles more a snarky post-college graduate armed with a bad attitude and a trunk full of verbal assaults than she does the quick-witted, irreverent, little girl of previous books.

The mystery element tends to improve as Bradley has progressed with Flavia’s adventures. As the title suggests, which quotes the well known conjuring sequence in Macbeth, there are hints of witchcraft in the plot. The murder victim appears to have been crucified upside down in his bedroom on a bizarre handmade wooden contraption. The plot uncovers double identities, family secrets, and a villain reminiscent of an old Saturday morning cartoon program rather than an adult murder mystery. The detective work is middling, the mystery not too mysterious, and the finale in which Flavia does battle with the killer ridiculously over the top. Without an intriguing mystery plot that leaves us with characters and our intrepid little heroine, but Flavia just doesn’t seem like herself at all this time around.

Here are some of the several hard to swallow scenes that make it hard to believe that Flavia is still a pre-adolescent girl.
  1. In order to gain personal information on the former wife of the victim Flavia pretends to be a professional biographer researching the woman's colorful life. The publisher plays along and we can only suspect that he is either completely bored in his work day or utterly senile to accept the idea that a little girl can be a professional writer of anything let alone a biography of an obscure quasi celebrity.
  2. The non-stop insult humor is disheartening. One of the characters is dumped on by everybody in the book. She's a poor singer who thinks highly of herself and lacks insight into her unskilled musicianship. Of course she's not at all attractive either making her an easy target for cruel quips and "paper bullets of the brain" as ol' Benedick used to say. Example: "Carla could not help it that she was nauseating: the kind of person who makes your pores snap shut and your gullet lower the drawbridge." This is the mindset of a child? Flavia sounds like a 67 year-old curmudgeon. I understand she's supposed to be precocious, very book smart, willing to make obscure literary allusions at the drop of a hat, and ever hip to irony, but she is increasingly presented as an adult in miniature and not a child.
  3. How can you have a little girl spouting forth very adult lines like "And who is your in-house liaison now?" and then ask us to believe she only knows the word privy as slang for a toilet? Such a dumb cheap joke, too.
  4. "Dancing round a bunch of moldy stones in a wet and windy field, naked, in the dark, was not exactly my idea of ecstasy." What eleven year old...excuse me, twelve year old .. ever contemplates the concept of ecstasy?

There's more, but I'll stop there.

Her travel to Canada and short-lived attendance at the private girls' school in As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (now there was a good mystery plot!) has somehow transmogrified Flavia from smart aleck kid into mean spirited harpy. That this adventure is obviously meant to be her most painful growing experience to date is no secret either. The not so surprising ending is telegraphed several times throughout the narrative as she constantly reminds herself that she should not be investigating a strange death, but rather visiting her father in the hospital where he is languishing from pneumonia.

But along the way Flavia turns into a misanthrope of the worst sort. With the exception of Dogger, the indefatigable servant and Haviland de Luce’s stalwart friend, she can’t stand anyone in this book and lets us know it repeatedly. In all honesty the only reason I continue to read the books is for the scenes between Dogger and Flavia which happen to have the best of Bradley’s writing and reveal him to be a humane and compassionate writer capable of capturing profound moments of much needed gravitas. Thank heaven we get a glimpse of the original Flavia in these scenes.

13 comments:

  1. Aaah, hell, this is disappointing to hear -- I've been quietly enjoying the first four of these and was excited by the prospect of reading a continuing series by an author who shares some of their publishing lifetime with me...and you're telling me he's gone and squiffed it up?

    I figured there had to be a point where Flavia started to get perceptibly older, and the things she is experiencing and exposed to have an effect on her at some stage, but it sounds like this hasn't really manifested in the way I'd hoped. Dammit! Thanks for the forewarning, John -- I'll get to Chimney Sweepers and reassess...

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  2. I've only tried reading one of the Flavia books after seeing recommendations - the second one maybe? - and I didn't buy any of it even early on in the series. Ergo I'm not surprised it's gotten worse. ;) In my opinion every character rang false. So I put it aside, muttering something about men trying to write in a girl's voice and utterly failing ...

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  3. Nonetheless, I'll continue to read and enjoy the series. Watered down Flavia is better than no Flavia. Actually, she's now reached the age where many young girls become awkwardly obnoxious (young boys hit that point a years years later). Flavia still remains a bright child who wants to be an adult but still has no clear idea of what adulting means. I think your comments are valid, John, but they don't prevent me from enjoying the series as it continues.

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  4. Good points John and I agree with them, but I still enjoyed the book as I love going to Buckshaw. Dogger is my favorite character and I love him and Flavia together. I was quite disappointed in the end of this book. That is my biggest complaint and I can't tell what or it would ruin it for others. Bradley said 10 books in the series. Supposedly there is a TV series on its way for this series too. If it ever gets here...

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    1. Dogger is the best part of the series. Occasionally, one of the supporting characters shines through. I particularly liked Adam Sowerby, the oddball flora-archeologist, and the spinster who fancied herself Miss Marple in The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches which for me is the book to surpass in the series -- for me it was the best plotted and most interesting overall.

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  5. Rats! Just a few hours ago I ordered the book on Audibles. If it's as bad as you say, I'm returning it.

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    1. Please don't let my nitpicking put you off the book completely, Elizabeth. Like Bani above I've had a problem with believing that Flavia *ever* was a little girl and I guess I "looked the other way" for the previous seven books. Thank heaven for Dogger who helps make Flavia more human and less obnoxious each time they are together.

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  6. Be starting at the beginning, then - gotcha :)

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  7. Thanks for this review, John. I hadn't really planned on reading any more Flavia books and this review doesn't really change my mind. Unlike you, I didn't like the book in which Flavia is sent to Canada. The series should have ended on that preposterous note. As much as I like Flavia, it was her father who began to intrigue me as the series moved on. I would have loved a book told from his point of view.

    Dogger too is a great character, yes.

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    1. If Haviland de Luce is your favorite character I strongly advise you not to read this book. The last one about the Canadian girls' school was OK, but the sixth book is still my favorite. I doubt he will surpass it.

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  8. Oh, Buckshaw. YES! The house. The house. How could I have forgotten the house.

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  9. I have read the most recent Flavia de Luce book and found it every bit as delightful as the rest. And so I must put J.F. Norris' review in the "Bah humbug" category.

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    1. You look so young, Debra! Are you also twelve? No wonder you were so delighted with it. We've never met and yet you know me so well. One year I gave everyone in my office instant lottery tickets as gifts and signed the cards, "Grouchily yours, Ebeneezer Scrooge."

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