Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. SayersMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not a mystery reader, I jumped into Gaudy Night as an introduction to Sayers, in part because a description or summary I read intrigued me, in part because several friends highly recommended it, and ultimately because the price was right for the Kindle version for a short period of time. My main complaint was that it was very, very slow-moving. A lesser complaint, because I do like smart books, is that it did rather beat me over the head with its smart-ness. It's wearying to have to look up Latin quote after Latin quote, particularly when they do lend meaning to the text and are not simply window-dressing. A friend supplied an excellent online article that provided a footnote to the text, but I only read it after-the-fact.
Most of the action of the book takes place in Oxford leading up to the Second World War. By contrast with novels simply "set" in a time period--that is, "historical" fiction--this novel was written with the assumption that readers were also living in this time. Lost British slang and social contexts abound--and especially social contexts of English university life, and women in academic spheres--that make this much more foreign than, say, Dickens, whose context is much better known. The action is slow, in part, because the protagonist Harriet, a fascinating character, has a lot of baggage that she's working through from previous books. This backstory is easily recoverable from the information given in the novel, but the social context--the norms of sexual relationships and the behavioral expectations of academic women--is less so. I believe that these contexts as well as the dilemma of whether a person could love with "both heart and head," or whether an intellectual woman could truly hope to enter into an equal marriage, or whether the vocation of marriage was incompatible with an intellectual vocation were some of the reasons I felt compelled to read the book. But though I am very familiar with early Twentieth-century British social history, the strangeness--for example, of female students being considered sloppy for picnicking on a lawn--was sometimes so inaccessible as to pull the reader right out of the text, and the dilemmas that the reader was expected to take as given are no longer "givens," which gave the book the feel of a historical artifact rather than a novel to be enjoyed. The "mystery" was bound up with these questions of the proper role of women, and because of the historical distance, was much less compelling and scandalous than it should have been. I admit that the solution gave me a bit of an eyeroll. Can we have a murder, please?
The characters made me stick through to the end--though I must say: if you read this novel, especially in eBook format, keep a list of who's who. The names are similar and the titles are used interchangeably with the names so I was often not sure if Miss So-and-so was the Bursar or the Dean or what. The characters I stayed for were Harriet Vane, the protagonist, and Lord Peter Wimsey, the title character of the series (and also his nephew, who makes a dramatic appearance). These two main characters have a long-standing friendship of sorts that began when Lord Peter managed to get Harriet acquitted of murder in a previous book, putting her at a disadvantage that she has struggled with ever since. Lord Peter only appears in the second half of the book, and while this improves the novel and provides a catalyst to the actual action, this in itself is rather dissatisfying in a book that is purportedly about female intellectuals. He provides something that Harriet lacks. He completes her. This is both nice and a bit irritating--as it has been to Harriet herself. But the reader, like Harriet, simply needs to come to terms with it. Had things not resolved as they did between Lord Peter and Harriet, I might have thrown my Kindle across the room.
Having written this, the novel, while not the most readable text, is worth reading. More so, it is worth following up. Busman's Honeymoon, the next in the series (was that a spoiler? not if the book is a mystery, methinks) is everything that Gaudy Night was not (for me) precisely (but not exclusively) because it develops the relationship between Lord Peter and Harriet that is set up so painfully in Gaudy Night.
I should add that the book is very quotable. Sayers sprinkles little intellectual gems throughout that are compelling even if you're a bit bored by what is (or isn't) happening in the moment. It is worth reading for those little gems alone.
