Well, Friday night (known in some circles as "date night") has become one of the only nights a week that I actually sit at home. Unless I'm driving. Or going to high school productions of AIDA.
Last night was supposed to be the first Friday 3D date night for me and Shotgun (which will be my boyfriend's new alias on this site. It's one of Michael Vaughn's aliases, duh... It was between this and Boy Scout, which didn't go over so well). At any rate, a stomach bug and general malaise kept us once again relegated to Skype dating, which was just fine for me and the completion of The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.
I adore Flavia de Luce. Adore her with a capital A. Any girl who remolds her sister's lipstick to contain poison ivy (don't worry, it was well deserved), who rides around the countryside on a bicycle named Gladys, and who considers it her personal mission to solve local murders-- if only so she can know about them before the appear in The News of the World-- is my kind of girl. Somehow a middle aged Canadian (that would be award winning writer Alan Bradley) has managed to create and capture perfectly a ten-year-old English schoolgirl. And while Flavia's precociousness is sometimes over the top, she is nothing if not perfectly portrayed.
Having read the critically acclaimed debut of Flavia and the universe surrounding her ancestral home, Buckshaw, last year, I was very excited to hear that the sequel had finally arrived (a consultation with the author's website confirms that there are at least four books planned for the series). Between her truely hideous sisters, her absent minded stamp-collecting father, and the eccentric array of characters that surround her at every turn, I knew that the story would be nothing if not enjoyable.
I believe I wrote about this before with Sweetness, but if you'll indulge me a bit, I want to talk about why it is difficult for me to finish these books once I start them. I like them, and they're mysteries, for goddsakes. There should be a sense of urgency to, at the very least, find out whodunnit.
Hangman's Bag, though, like Sweetness, held no such urgency for me. In fact, I finished the book last night, and I still am not entirely sure I know or care what the central mystery was. Something about a boy found hanging in the woods five years ago, and a dead puppeteer who probably ultimately deserved to die. Or at least, have something really horrible happen to him.
The point of these books, for me, is not to be riveted on a plotline. It is to imagine riding with Flavia through the sunny country lanes, to have tea in the decaying rooms at Buckshaw, to envision what truely horrid concoction Mrs. Mullet has prepared for dinner, and the amount of eye-rolling poor Inspector Hewitt must be doing when he finds himself beset upon, at every turn, by a feisty pre-adolescent (by the way, the introduction of his wife, Antigone, is one of the highlights of the book for me-- I can't wait to see how Flavia worms her way into their garden for tea in the future).
So yes, once again, the character is the thing-- and I have absolutely no problem with that. In fact, I have to wonder if that's not becoming my number one requirement for liking a book. Who cares about the plot? As long as the characters are interesting and dynamic, I'm not sure I do.
No comments:
Post a Comment