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feather_ghyll) wrote2024-12-30 01:26 pm
feather_ghyll) wrote2024-12-30 01:26 pm
REVIEW: Speaking From Among the Bones
Speaking From Among the Bones: Alan Bradley. Orion, 2014
It’s been a while (I checked, and it’s been over seven years), but I have returned to the Flavia de Luce murder mystery series. My motivation was that I'd bought other books from later on in the series second hand, so I thought I’d better get and read this. This, the fifth book is set during Easter (fun to read just after Christmas.) Our heroine is still eleven years old, a whizz at chemistry and a very good amateur sleuth. As Inspector Hewitt has cause to know, she has largely solved four murders at or around the village of Bishop Lacey over the last year. The year is 1951. (You’d think it had achieved some notoriety and people would stop going anywhere near there.)
As Flavia accompanied her oldest sister Ophelia (‘Feely’ to Flavia), who was practicing the organ at St Tancred’s church, because the regular organist had disappeared a few weeks ago, I did think, ‘hmm.’ And lo and behold, a little later, Flavia is the first to discover his dead body in a very dramatic setting. She is determined to solve the murder, but so, it turns out, are the short-sighted Miss Tandy, in charge of flowers for the altar, and ‘flora-archaeologist’ Adam Sowersby, who was in the village because the remains of the local saint were about to be disinterred for archaeological reasons.
Flavia seems to get distracted from this task, though, by notions of revenge – little do patronising adults know that Flavia knows quite a lot about poisons. She’s also increasingly interested in her big sister’s future – Flavia, Daphne (Daffy) and Feely have a longstanding war going, while being able to communicate in sister-only signals. And it looks as if their home, Buckshaw, may not be their home for very long. Their father, Colonel de Luce, has been hounded for taxation since the girls’ mother Harriet died. She owned Buckshaw and left no will. She left behind a very repressed, Roman Catholic family, with a grieving widow keeping her boudoir a shrine and three motherless daughters. The Colonel and his factotum, Flavia’s faithful Dogger, were further damaged by the events of the second world war. But Flavia may be growing up, becoming more attuned and responsive to emotional undercurrents. She finds herself recieving unexpected compliments from Feely, and even a conversation with her father where he mentions her mother.
She finds out more about her mother after a very interesting conversation with a recluse who used to know her. He sees a physical likeness between Flavia and Harriet. We are led to believe that there is a likeness in their abilities, too. And every time she visits St Tancred, she gets more clues about Mr Collicutt’s death. These clues, all that she learns from local gossip, observation and titbits her fellow sleuths let drop, do eventually lead her to solving the mystery – a most ingenious, macabre solution – even if Inspector Hewitt can’t quite bring himself to admit as much.
I rather enjoyed my return to this series. Flavia is a singular creation, still trying to cling to a poisoner’s ruthlessness, but, as I said, growing up, even if most adults mostly see the child and not the brilliance. Her loneliness is most apparent in how she anthopomorphosises and talks to her bike Gladys. Her relationships with various characters, Feely, her father and the vicar’s wife, Cynthia Richardson, shift in this book. Loyal Dogger has perhaps the most affecting relationship with her, but the local vicar never condescends to her and, in this book, reveals a tragic part of his past. Flavia’s relationship with Adam Sowerby, who puts on a bit of a show as an ‘ass’, but starts to see Flavia’s intellect for what it is, is interesting.
And Flavia has a refreshing perspective. She loathes any trace of sentiment, although grief and affection creep up on her. Chemistry is her lodestar, her way of understanding the world. Bradley comes up with distinctive turns of phrases that I very much enjoyed to convey this way of seeing the world. On Buckshaw, it’s
‘How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me gooseflesh.’
The third chapter opens with ‘It was one of those glorious days in March when the air was so fresh that you worshipped every whiff of it’. And then there’s ‘I was torn between revulsion and pleasure—like tasting vinegar and sugar at the same time.’
There’s also a sense of the macabre throughout, from the Biblical tableau on the stained glass panes of the church to the crypts and blood that preoccupy Flavia. It all comes together satisfyingly (apart from one thing that bothered me), and the book ends with another twist in the family mystery that has persisted throughout the series.
It’s been a while (I checked, and it’s been over seven years), but I have returned to the Flavia de Luce murder mystery series. My motivation was that I'd bought other books from later on in the series second hand, so I thought I’d better get and read this. This, the fifth book is set during Easter (fun to read just after Christmas.) Our heroine is still eleven years old, a whizz at chemistry and a very good amateur sleuth. As Inspector Hewitt has cause to know, she has largely solved four murders at or around the village of Bishop Lacey over the last year. The year is 1951. (You’d think it had achieved some notoriety and people would stop going anywhere near there.)
As Flavia accompanied her oldest sister Ophelia (‘Feely’ to Flavia), who was practicing the organ at St Tancred’s church, because the regular organist had disappeared a few weeks ago, I did think, ‘hmm.’ And lo and behold, a little later, Flavia is the first to discover his dead body in a very dramatic setting. She is determined to solve the murder, but so, it turns out, are the short-sighted Miss Tandy, in charge of flowers for the altar, and ‘flora-archaeologist’ Adam Sowersby, who was in the village because the remains of the local saint were about to be disinterred for archaeological reasons.
Flavia seems to get distracted from this task, though, by notions of revenge – little do patronising adults know that Flavia knows quite a lot about poisons. She’s also increasingly interested in her big sister’s future – Flavia, Daphne (Daffy) and Feely have a longstanding war going, while being able to communicate in sister-only signals. And it looks as if their home, Buckshaw, may not be their home for very long. Their father, Colonel de Luce, has been hounded for taxation since the girls’ mother Harriet died. She owned Buckshaw and left no will. She left behind a very repressed, Roman Catholic family, with a grieving widow keeping her boudoir a shrine and three motherless daughters. The Colonel and his factotum, Flavia’s faithful Dogger, were further damaged by the events of the second world war. But Flavia may be growing up, becoming more attuned and responsive to emotional undercurrents. She finds herself recieving unexpected compliments from Feely, and even a conversation with her father where he mentions her mother.
She finds out more about her mother after a very interesting conversation with a recluse who used to know her. He sees a physical likeness between Flavia and Harriet. We are led to believe that there is a likeness in their abilities, too. And every time she visits St Tancred, she gets more clues about Mr Collicutt’s death. These clues, all that she learns from local gossip, observation and titbits her fellow sleuths let drop, do eventually lead her to solving the mystery – a most ingenious, macabre solution – even if Inspector Hewitt can’t quite bring himself to admit as much.
I rather enjoyed my return to this series. Flavia is a singular creation, still trying to cling to a poisoner’s ruthlessness, but, as I said, growing up, even if most adults mostly see the child and not the brilliance. Her loneliness is most apparent in how she anthopomorphosises and talks to her bike Gladys. Her relationships with various characters, Feely, her father and the vicar’s wife, Cynthia Richardson, shift in this book. Loyal Dogger has perhaps the most affecting relationship with her, but the local vicar never condescends to her and, in this book, reveals a tragic part of his past. Flavia’s relationship with Adam Sowerby, who puts on a bit of a show as an ‘ass’, but starts to see Flavia’s intellect for what it is, is interesting.
And Flavia has a refreshing perspective. She loathes any trace of sentiment, although grief and affection creep up on her. Chemistry is her lodestar, her way of understanding the world. Bradley comes up with distinctive turns of phrases that I very much enjoyed to convey this way of seeing the world. On Buckshaw, it’s
‘How I loved the dear old place! The very thought of its wilting wallpaper and crumbling carpets was enough to give me gooseflesh.’
The third chapter opens with ‘It was one of those glorious days in March when the air was so fresh that you worshipped every whiff of it’. And then there’s ‘I was torn between revulsion and pleasure—like tasting vinegar and sugar at the same time.’
There’s also a sense of the macabre throughout, from the Biblical tableau on the stained glass panes of the church to the crypts and blood that preoccupy Flavia. It all comes together satisfyingly (apart from one thing that bothered me), and the book ends with another twist in the family mystery that has persisted throughout the series.