Peter May's Lewis Trilogy
Nov. 13th, 2013 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAnn Cleeves has been recommending Peter May's The Blackhouse, a murder mystery set on the Hebridean island of Lewis. Ann is someone who knows what she's talking about when it comes to crime fiction set on Scottish islands, so I rounded up the entire trilogy and plunged in. This may or may not have been a good idea. You could certainly read any of the books independently - each book introduces and solves its own mystery - but the story of the central character develops through the three books. The returns diminish, though: I loved The Blackhouse passionately, I found The Lewis Man a very creditable and enjoyable sequel, and The Chessmen had me wondering what had gone wrong. On the whole, I'm glad I read straight through: when I reached the end of The Blackhouse, I couldn't believe that a sequel could be as enthralling and as powerful - but I couldn't have walked away from the narrative at that point (though maybe I should have). And I would have been awfully disappointed if I'd spent any time looking forward to reading The Chessmen. It isn't terrible, exactly, but it isn't in the same league as its predecessors, and because I wasn't as caught up in it I became aware of things which actually had been problematic all along. So the short version is, read The Blackhouse, and then if you are desperate for more, read The Lewis Man. I haven't read any of Peter May's other books, and I'd be happy to do so (there's one set in the Gaillac, in which an influential wine critic is murdered...) but I almost wish I hadn't read The Chessmen.
Each of the three books presents Fin Macleod with a dead body and a mystery to be solved; so far, so conventional. There are moments when the author seems to be following an assemble-a-mystery checklist: hero returns to his hometown at a time when his life is in crisis, check, gruesome scene early on, check (two lingering post mortem examinations, one very decomposed body), sex scene, check, exciting action finale, check. The reader is confronted with something macabre early in each book and then, honour satisfied, the ordeal is not repeated. Similarly, the sex scenes feel dutiful rather than compelling, lyrical enough but without the constant sensual awareness May brings to bear on the weather. Reading The Blackhouse I was constantly thinking that, as Elizabeth Bear says, "authors are read, beloved, and remembered not for what they don’t do wrong, but for what they do right." The framework may be routine, but the story May builds on it is exceptional.
The main attraction, inevitably, is the portrait of Lewis itself: the beautiful scenery, the constantly changing weather, the narrow - in all senses - society, the traditions and history. At the heart of The Blackhouse is the guga hunt, a practice that is local and extraordinary even within the island of Lewis, the departure of a small group of men from the northern village of Ness to a small rocky island to harvest the gannet chicks. What was once a feature of a starvation diet has become a delicacy sanctioned by tradition (and recognised by an exception in the 1954 Protection of Birds Act). This would be a gift to any novelist, and May makes good use of it: he describes the expedition vividly, and makes it an atmospheric setting for the action climax of the book, while at the same time revealing some subtle and unexpected character traits.
I enjoyed, too, the dual stranded narrative, braiding together the murder investigation with Fin's memories of his childhood on Lewis, though I did spend a certain amount of time wondering just when that childhood was. I'm sure the mixture of freedom and repression are authentic, but I wonder whether the two aspects have been heightened to serve the plot: on the one hand, a child in the early years of primary school roams freely around the island, on the other, he arrives at school to be informed that although he has hitherto spoken nothing but Gaelic (his classmates appear to be bilingual), classes are conducted in English only. The grip of a particularly dour church is absolute. Once, certainly, this was the image of the Western Isles (there is a reason why, when![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler and I set off to discover Scotland, we headed for the Northern Isles, not the Western), but I would have placed Fin's childhood more recently.
For once I am trying to write without spoilers, which makes it difficult to discuss the resolution of the story. In any case, while it may seem perverse to say that I don't regard the who-done-it as the main interest of a mystery story, that is nonetheless the case. Actually, it's even more the case than usual in The Blackhouse: the unmasking of the murderer carries less emotional weight than the unveiling of another mystery, which provides the motive - or what passes for one, because I'm not entirely convinced by the ending. The revelation, too, is of a kind which ought to have more impact than it does. To be fair, I could tease out hints that it has had that impact, but without being certain whether I am reading into the text more than the author has put there (it doesn't seem to carry through to the subsequent books). Either way, my reservations about the ending did not prevent me enjoying The Blackhouse enormously.
The Lewis Man starts with the discovery of a body in a peat bog, the 'Lewis Man' of the title, jocularly named by analogy with such predecessors as Tollund Man (there may be a touch of fancy footwork here, since this is the book which establishes the existence of a 'Lewis Trilogy' rather than the initial standalone, but much of its action takes place in the south of the islands, in Eriskay). A pleasing detail establishes very rapidly that this corpse dates back no further than the 1950s, and it soon emerges that there is a close DNA match with a local man (who happens to be the father of Fin's childhood sweetheart). But the old man is advancing into dementia, and cannot answer the inevitable questions.
The double narrative which worked so well in the first book has an even stronger rationale here: as the murder investigation moves forward in the present day, Tormod lives almost entirely in the past. Incidents and questions spark memories of his early life, revealing to the reader, but not to the detective, the answers to some of those baffling questions.
Again, Peter May has found a powerful historical story about the islands, the 'fostering' of orphaned children from the cities of southern Scotland to the Highlands. This seems to have been a way of accommodating surplus children rather than anything designed for the child's benefit: children were likely to be placed in households who took them on because they needed help with farm labour, and there was no attempt to check on the suitability of the foster homes. Someone already without the ties of family who was uprooted in this way could find themself in a new location, with a new name, even a new language - it's a heartbreaking situation, but I can imagine the glee of the crime novelist who comes across it.
Only the dénouement of The Lewis Man feels a little forced, manipulated to tick that box on the list which requires peril and races against time and maybe even a shoot-out. People go out of their way to tempt danger onto the island, and there is one of those situations which the ubiquity of mobile phones ought to make impossible (Fin simply decides that he's too busy to take a crucial call). But the obligations of plot must be observed, and I thought the book a worthy sequel to The Blackhouse.
There is one respect in which The Chessmen is better than its predecessors: there is a map. I had been wishing I was clearer about the locations, and was grateful for it. But almost as soon as I started reading the book, I felt that something was wrong. I wondered if the schedule had been rushed: there were awkwardnesses in the phrasing that had not been there before - and a couple of copy-editing errors (the use of Fin's name in a piece of first-person narrative, the hyphenation of seagull between seag and ull).
Or perhaps it's just that taking the series out to a trilogy was a book too far. The Blackhouse traces a mystery through Fin's past, and so solves a murder in his present. The Lewis Man allows Fin to play detective again, but the past he must discover is not this time his own - although elements of his history, revealed in the previous book, continue to shape his present. The Chessmen returns to Fin, but now he is given a whole new chunk of history to recall: after his traumatic childhood came an equally stormy adolescence.
Why do I find this so unconvincing? The book opens - and it's a spectacular opening, with a disappearing loch and the discovery of that decomposed body: but who is this Whistler with whom Fin seems to have spent the night sheltering from a storm? He hasn't been mentioned in the previous book, but he turns out to be Fin's best friend, although Fin has taken a job which has placed them on a collision course. An author is entitled to create new history, new characters, new loves, as the plot requires: and I am entitled to say, as I do, that the construction of The Blackhouse felt organic, while that of The Chessmen feels contrived.
Away at secondary school in Stornoway, then, Fin drifted away from the friends of his childhood into a new circle. His best friend Artair has gone to a different school, and been replaced by Whistler; there is a coolness between Fin and Marsaili, who has hitherto been presented as the love of his life, sometimes present, sometimes absent but always a fixed point. Now she fades into the background, and Fin turns out to be irresistible to women. Reading this with a cynical Well, of course! I remember that Marsaili has said that all the girls were crazy about him - but I had previously read this as a sign of her partiality, to be read as a cute recollection of primary school. But no, all the girls are crazy about him...
There are some strong women in these books: I particularly liked Fin's aunt (if she has a name of her own I can't now recall it - that's not a good sign, is it?), and soap star Morag. Wee Anna is a bit of a MacGuffin, but a MacGuffin with attitude. But I don't think any of them passes the Bechdel test, and the women do tend to vanish until required.
The Chessmen also weaves some Hebridean lore into its narrative, but it feels more extraneous, less integral. There is the dreadful story of the Iolaire disaster, produced to explain the sudden bond between the two boys. And there are the chessmen themselves, called into service for the obligatory nail-biting finale, not quite entirely decorative.
All the elements are there, but somehow they fail to convince: unless it's just me, of course, unless it's not that Peter May couldn't stretch to a trilogy but that I couldn't, that I simply succumbed to a fit of indigestion after gulping down three books too fast. I don't think so, but then I wouldn't, would I?
Each of the three books presents Fin Macleod with a dead body and a mystery to be solved; so far, so conventional. There are moments when the author seems to be following an assemble-a-mystery checklist: hero returns to his hometown at a time when his life is in crisis, check, gruesome scene early on, check (two lingering post mortem examinations, one very decomposed body), sex scene, check, exciting action finale, check. The reader is confronted with something macabre early in each book and then, honour satisfied, the ordeal is not repeated. Similarly, the sex scenes feel dutiful rather than compelling, lyrical enough but without the constant sensual awareness May brings to bear on the weather. Reading The Blackhouse I was constantly thinking that, as Elizabeth Bear says, "authors are read, beloved, and remembered not for what they don’t do wrong, but for what they do right." The framework may be routine, but the story May builds on it is exceptional.
The main attraction, inevitably, is the portrait of Lewis itself: the beautiful scenery, the constantly changing weather, the narrow - in all senses - society, the traditions and history. At the heart of The Blackhouse is the guga hunt, a practice that is local and extraordinary even within the island of Lewis, the departure of a small group of men from the northern village of Ness to a small rocky island to harvest the gannet chicks. What was once a feature of a starvation diet has become a delicacy sanctioned by tradition (and recognised by an exception in the 1954 Protection of Birds Act). This would be a gift to any novelist, and May makes good use of it: he describes the expedition vividly, and makes it an atmospheric setting for the action climax of the book, while at the same time revealing some subtle and unexpected character traits.
I enjoyed, too, the dual stranded narrative, braiding together the murder investigation with Fin's memories of his childhood on Lewis, though I did spend a certain amount of time wondering just when that childhood was. I'm sure the mixture of freedom and repression are authentic, but I wonder whether the two aspects have been heightened to serve the plot: on the one hand, a child in the early years of primary school roams freely around the island, on the other, he arrives at school to be informed that although he has hitherto spoken nothing but Gaelic (his classmates appear to be bilingual), classes are conducted in English only. The grip of a particularly dour church is absolute. Once, certainly, this was the image of the Western Isles (there is a reason why, when
durham_rambler and I set off to discover Scotland, we headed for the Northern Isles, not the Western), but I would have placed Fin's childhood more recently.For once I am trying to write without spoilers, which makes it difficult to discuss the resolution of the story. In any case, while it may seem perverse to say that I don't regard the who-done-it as the main interest of a mystery story, that is nonetheless the case. Actually, it's even more the case than usual in The Blackhouse: the unmasking of the murderer carries less emotional weight than the unveiling of another mystery, which provides the motive - or what passes for one, because I'm not entirely convinced by the ending. The revelation, too, is of a kind which ought to have more impact than it does. To be fair, I could tease out hints that it has had that impact, but without being certain whether I am reading into the text more than the author has put there (it doesn't seem to carry through to the subsequent books). Either way, my reservations about the ending did not prevent me enjoying The Blackhouse enormously.
The Lewis Man starts with the discovery of a body in a peat bog, the 'Lewis Man' of the title, jocularly named by analogy with such predecessors as Tollund Man (there may be a touch of fancy footwork here, since this is the book which establishes the existence of a 'Lewis Trilogy' rather than the initial standalone, but much of its action takes place in the south of the islands, in Eriskay). A pleasing detail establishes very rapidly that this corpse dates back no further than the 1950s, and it soon emerges that there is a close DNA match with a local man (who happens to be the father of Fin's childhood sweetheart). But the old man is advancing into dementia, and cannot answer the inevitable questions.
The double narrative which worked so well in the first book has an even stronger rationale here: as the murder investigation moves forward in the present day, Tormod lives almost entirely in the past. Incidents and questions spark memories of his early life, revealing to the reader, but not to the detective, the answers to some of those baffling questions.
Again, Peter May has found a powerful historical story about the islands, the 'fostering' of orphaned children from the cities of southern Scotland to the Highlands. This seems to have been a way of accommodating surplus children rather than anything designed for the child's benefit: children were likely to be placed in households who took them on because they needed help with farm labour, and there was no attempt to check on the suitability of the foster homes. Someone already without the ties of family who was uprooted in this way could find themself in a new location, with a new name, even a new language - it's a heartbreaking situation, but I can imagine the glee of the crime novelist who comes across it.
Only the dénouement of The Lewis Man feels a little forced, manipulated to tick that box on the list which requires peril and races against time and maybe even a shoot-out. People go out of their way to tempt danger onto the island, and there is one of those situations which the ubiquity of mobile phones ought to make impossible (Fin simply decides that he's too busy to take a crucial call). But the obligations of plot must be observed, and I thought the book a worthy sequel to The Blackhouse.
There is one respect in which The Chessmen is better than its predecessors: there is a map. I had been wishing I was clearer about the locations, and was grateful for it. But almost as soon as I started reading the book, I felt that something was wrong. I wondered if the schedule had been rushed: there were awkwardnesses in the phrasing that had not been there before - and a couple of copy-editing errors (the use of Fin's name in a piece of first-person narrative, the hyphenation of seagull between seag and ull).
Or perhaps it's just that taking the series out to a trilogy was a book too far. The Blackhouse traces a mystery through Fin's past, and so solves a murder in his present. The Lewis Man allows Fin to play detective again, but the past he must discover is not this time his own - although elements of his history, revealed in the previous book, continue to shape his present. The Chessmen returns to Fin, but now he is given a whole new chunk of history to recall: after his traumatic childhood came an equally stormy adolescence.
Why do I find this so unconvincing? The book opens - and it's a spectacular opening, with a disappearing loch and the discovery of that decomposed body: but who is this Whistler with whom Fin seems to have spent the night sheltering from a storm? He hasn't been mentioned in the previous book, but he turns out to be Fin's best friend, although Fin has taken a job which has placed them on a collision course. An author is entitled to create new history, new characters, new loves, as the plot requires: and I am entitled to say, as I do, that the construction of The Blackhouse felt organic, while that of The Chessmen feels contrived.
Away at secondary school in Stornoway, then, Fin drifted away from the friends of his childhood into a new circle. His best friend Artair has gone to a different school, and been replaced by Whistler; there is a coolness between Fin and Marsaili, who has hitherto been presented as the love of his life, sometimes present, sometimes absent but always a fixed point. Now she fades into the background, and Fin turns out to be irresistible to women. Reading this with a cynical Well, of course! I remember that Marsaili has said that all the girls were crazy about him - but I had previously read this as a sign of her partiality, to be read as a cute recollection of primary school. But no, all the girls are crazy about him...
There are some strong women in these books: I particularly liked Fin's aunt (if she has a name of her own I can't now recall it - that's not a good sign, is it?), and soap star Morag. Wee Anna is a bit of a MacGuffin, but a MacGuffin with attitude. But I don't think any of them passes the Bechdel test, and the women do tend to vanish until required.
The Chessmen also weaves some Hebridean lore into its narrative, but it feels more extraneous, less integral. There is the dreadful story of the Iolaire disaster, produced to explain the sudden bond between the two boys. And there are the chessmen themselves, called into service for the obligatory nail-biting finale, not quite entirely decorative.
All the elements are there, but somehow they fail to convince: unless it's just me, of course, unless it's not that Peter May couldn't stretch to a trilogy but that I couldn't, that I simply succumbed to a fit of indigestion after gulping down three books too fast. I don't think so, but then I wouldn't, would I?
