By Kohinoor Dasgupta
Who has been enjoying the Three Pines series (2022) on Amazon Prime? Alfred Molina stars as Chief Inspector Armand Gamache in the new TV adaptation.
Here's a review of Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light that I published on September 29, 2011 in my weblog Draupadiarjun
“It is the five miles of country which makes the danger”
- Sherlock Holmes (in The Copper Beeches by Arthur Conan Doyle
CANADIAN WRITER Louise Penny’s seventh Chief Inspector Gamache novel, A Trick of the Light was published on August 30, 2011.
We all have our reasons for waiting for her books. Penny’s a writer who seems cozy till she wakes you up with a single perceptive sentence. What I admire is her originality. She’s obviously in a great creative place where her village and villagers grow in her mind like a garden may under the careful tending of a pair of gnarled hands or as our children grow in the sun of our love.
Her first book, Still Life, invented the picture-perfect quebecois village south of Montréal, Three Pines (by the river Bella Bella), named after the mascot trees by the village green. Rural though the setting is, it’s a hideaway for a bunch of cultured, clever, and eccentric people. The village is off the tourist map, so you find it serendipitously, or not at all. Of course, officers of the Sûreté du Québec are obliged to come by pretty regularly and probably have directions on their GPS by now.
There’s a core group of Three Piners who appear in all the books, though all the murders haven’t taken place at Three Pines. People wander in and out of Gabri and Olivier’s bistro for all kinds of reasons, not necessarily for croissant and coffee. Then there’s Myrna’s bookshop and Clara’s studio and old poet Ruth sitting on a certain park bench waiting for something at particular times of the year. And there’s Peter, Clara’s handsome husband, also an artist, whose family we meet at the Manoir Bellechasse in A Rule Against Murder. A recent addition to the gallery of familiars is Dominique Gilbert, co-owner of the new country inn and spa on the hill overlooking the village. There were others we met, before the house on the hill was sold and turned into an inn.
Outsiders bring in their own energies, and some even decide to stay on at Three Pines. The main investigators are Chief Inspector Gamache and his deputy, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Gamache and Clara are the heart and soul of the Three Pines mysteries. Gamache reminds me of Ruth Rendell’s Chief Inspector Wexford of Kingsmarkham because of his gravitas, the way he takes charge. The Canadian, however, is a charming and polished man who makes of policing a civilized and high-brow profession.
A Trick of the Light, Penny writes in her Acknowledgements, “took several lifetimes to write”. There’s a personal story behind this particular plot, perhaps that’s why the mood of this book isn’t at all cozy. After the length to which Penny pushed the envelope in my favorite book of the series, A Brutal Telling, I was rather shrinking from the dénouement. She has the skill to turn everyone into a suspect and the courage to go where we are loath to follow.
The series began with the killing of the septuagenarian artist Jane Neal. A Trick of the Light begins on the night of Clara’s vernissage at the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montréal. Art, artists, critics and businessmen scaffold the plot; interiors are shadowy with addictions and inadequacies. Laughter there is, but muted and rueful and even Ruth ties a red ribbon to a prayer stick.
Five miles are country are dangerous. Both at Three Pines and in our hearts.
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