Ponder: The Cruelest Month

My timing is excellent. The Halloween season with its ghosts is so appropriate for reading the murder mystery The Cruelest Month ©2007 by Louise Penny. The victim is frightened to death at a seance while summoning the spirits from another world. Can that really happen... the frightening to death ... or even the arrival of spirits, for that matter? It is also not immediately obvious who exactly died at the seance.

 

Paradoxically the novel is set at Easter, an unlikely time for a seance. The entire text of Chapter 1 of The Cruelest Month is on  Louise Penny's official website giving a representative  sample of the book and the author's style. The following is an excerpt from that first chapter. 

Kneeling in the fragrant moist grass of the village green Clara Morrow carefully hid the Easter egg and thought about raising the dead, which she planned to do right after supper. Wiping a strand of hair from her face, she smeared bits of grass, mud and some other brown stuff that might not be mud into her tangled hair. All around, villagers wandered with their baskets of brightly colored eggs, looking for the perfect hiding places. Ruth Zardo sat on the bench in the middle of the green tossing the eggs at random, though occasionally she'd haul off and peg someone in the back of the head or on the bottom. She had disconcertingly good aim for someone so old and so nuts, thought Clara.

'You going tonight?' Clara asked, trying to distract the old poet from taking aim at Monsieur Béliveau.

'Are you kidding? Live people are bad enough; why would I want to bring one back from the dead?'

I am familiar with this author since I have read and enjoyed Penny's first two novels in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache detective series, Still Life ©2005 (2/28/20) and A Fatal Grace ©2006 (8/30/20). The characters are well developed and are humorously described in large part by behavioral examples. I already had a vivid mental image of the quirky characters Clara Morrow, Ruth Zardo, and Monsieur Béliveau residents of the Canadian village of Three Pines. I was looking forward to their next adventure and was not disappointed. Ruth Zardo, the ornery character clobbering people with Easter eggs in the opening, revealed a soft side later on in the story.

Gamache remained endearing as well. His mannerisms and attitudes are key in drawing me back to the next book in this series. His style of detective work is unique. From Chapter 14:

He listened to people, took notes, gathered evidence like all his colleagues. But he did one thing more.
He gathered feelings. He collected emotions. Because murder was deeply human. It wasn't about what people did. No, it was about how they felt, because that's where it all started. Some feeling that had once been human and natural had twisted. Become grotesque. Had turned sour and corrosive until its very container had been eaten away. Until the human barely existed.

One of his assistants was also described in an intriguing way. From Chapter 17:

Agent Yvette Nichol like secrets. She like gathering other people's secrets and she liked having her own.

As clues are revealed, Louise Penny still manages to keep the murderer concealed until the final pages. All the puzzle pieces are there but it takes the finesse of Armand Gamache to fit them all together. There is also a back story throughout this book giving two mysteries in one.

I was very fond of the TV series Castle, not only for the cases that were solved weekly, but also for the ongoing saga of a more involved, slowly revealed background life challenges of the main characters. Most successful TV series are like that. In Grey's Anatomy, tuning in weekly allowed the viewers to see who was in a growing relationship with whom. In Bones, the lives of the members of the forensic team were every bit as engaging as the gruesome murders they solved.  The trusting relationship between Gamache and his second in command, Jean Guy Beauvoir, always strong between the two men, strengthens in this third book. The reader learns more about Armand Gamache in a subplot. The backstory is full of plot twists and betrayals, making The Cruelest Month my favorite book in the series thus far. 

In my reading I usually try to figure out why the author chose the title for the book. In Chapter 37 an allusion to the title is given in a conversation between Gamache and Peter, a Three Pines villager.

'Sunny and warm one day then snow the next,' agreed Gamache. 'Shakespeare called  it the uncertain glory of an April day.'
'I prefer T.S. Eliot. The cruelest month.'
'Why do you say that?'
'All those spring flowers slaughtered. Happens almost every year. They're tricked into blooming, into coming out. Opening up. And not just the spring bulbs, but the buds on the trees. The rose bushes, everything. All out and happy. And then boom, a freak snowstorm kills them all.'

I googled the lyrics to the T.S. Eliot poem, The Wasteland. It is a long, long, poem, way beyond the length of my attention span. Still curious, though, but not wanting to exert gargantuan effort, I also looked up the T.S. Eliot reference to April as being the cruelest month and found the article, Why is April “the Cruelest Month”? T.S. Eliot’s Masterpiece of Pandemic Poetry. That I should happen to read this book now, with this reference is uncanny. A few sentences from the article explain the poem's relevance to our present day pandemic. 

As we enter the month of April in what amounts to a global quarantine, expect to hear a lot of people quoting TS Eliot’s poem The Waste Land....
Eliot wrote his famous poem in the aftermath of the last global pandemic to shut down the world. He and is wife caught the Spanish Flu in December of 1918, and he wrote much of the poem during his recovery...
In The Waste Land, nothing can be crueler than hope, since it can only lead to disappointment. It always leads to disappointment. In the Waste Land, hope hurts, and April hurts most of all by mocking us with possibilities that can never be realized. And not just in the Waste Land, either. The more I have read the opening lines of Eliot’s great poem, the more I have realized just what a dangerous emotion the great theological virtue of hope can be. Cynicism and irony are safe. To hope, one must open the door to disappointment, rejection, and disbelief.

In today's environment with social distancing and masks, I found this view of hope as food for thought. But enough going down the rabbit hole of current relevancy. Perhaps this cruelest month allusion has something to do with Gamache's back story... ?  I believe it does. Read The Cruelest Month and decide for yourself. I may be biased toward this author's novels, but I give this book five stars ★★★★★ which translates in my rating system to Great! Read it! Perhaps you may need to deduct one star if you have not read the first two in the series and struggle to familiarize yourself with the recurring characters. By way of comparison, Amazon's rating for the book is 4.6 out of 5 stars.