Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel

Interesting setting, but otherwise very average - i.e. full of red herrings & unnecessary/constructed plot twists. Funny how often one reads variations of "I don't believe in coincidences" wenn mayor story lines hinge on them. Also, told from the perspective of half a dozen characters - some not very credible - which I always find a very cheap way to extend the word count and advance the plot.

Read on a recommendation - and I owe that person a big thank you. This novel is one of my new favorites. The author's skill at combining dialogue, thoughts, subtle humor. We are constantly exposed to shifting perspectives and thoughts and feelings, one person to the next, sometimes three in a paragraph... and yet it all flows so nicely. There are so. many. characters... and each of them is sympathetic, aggravating, believable, just... human. I think my French even improved. Wonderful, simply magnifique.

“A rare treat”, says People Magazine on the cover. It is certainly clever and entertaining. Still Life – the title riffs on painting, which is central, and alludes to the fact that the novel serves as a kind of portrait of a small Canadian town, and the lives of the inhabitants. Still Life also describes a psychological state considered in the inner life of the characters. Indeed, there are some great moments of empathy and insight; about relationship, and grief, and how the world works on each of us in its own private ways. As first novels go this is not prodigy, however, and while the detective is appealing, and the murder quirky and inscrutable, there are plenty of bare spots and flat notes as well. Sometimes as a reader you encounter moments when an author has relied too heavily on their imagination and not their knowledge: I knew a teacher of creative writing who put down a celebrated novel because the author had someone growing cotton one state too far north. Not everyone would get that, of course, and there is always the need with any creative act to suspend disbelief; this is not a real person, but an actor on a stage, etc. Otherwise we would miss too much great work – Superman, science fiction, magical realism, the Lord of the Rings. The trick is to keep the reader distracted, to maintain the curtain between the wizard and the world, to distract from the strings. An aspect of a good still life is that it studies the shadings of everyday objects so well that we see them anew, keenly, each item distinct, even alive. There are some things here which I wish had been subject to an editor’s knife: the gay couple are overdone, circus-y as they pronounce their bitchy retorts on cue; the young ingénue detective is set up and knocked down without making much of an impression; we are invited to sympathy, given a kind of punching bag of pride and hung out to dry along with the young detective, leaving the impression that the author changed her mind midstream. And then there is my own cotton-too-far-north moment. If you can find a way to paint a room with oil paints including the wooden floor hot pink without leaving a strong odor behind for weeks, good for you. You might fool someone into thinking you can, but not a detective trying to figure out what is wrong with the picture. I also wish there had been a little bit more nasty here – being bitchy is not just a pose, but has a raison d’être all its own, a certain joy in mean spirited observation. Louise Penny painted the tender human aspects better than she captured the dark shadings that accompany them. Here’s hoping she will use more black in her next effort. Review by The Book is Always Better Than the Film