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This tenth book in Penny's Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series finds the inspector happily retired in Three Pines, Penny's version of an English village set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Gamache is recovering from the gunshot he received in the dramatic conclusion of the previous novel which I enjoyed more than this present story. While Penny's series might be described as both a police procedural and a village cozy, the latter category has taken over in THE LONG WAY HOME.
Her cast of characters is now well established and the primary action in this novel centres on the interaction among them. Not a murder but a disappearance marshals the efforts of Gamache with his protégé and son-in law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, in helping Clara, the village artist, search for her missing husband Peter, also an artist. The couple had separated with the understanding that they would meet and decide about their future in a year's time. When Peter fails to show up, Clara fears that something has happened to him.
The search for Peter takes us from Toronto to Quebec's Charlevoix region and further down river to the Lower North Shore, to an area so desolate that the first settlers called it the Land God Gave to Cain. There is also a nod given to the discovery that Peter's search led him to Paris and the Garden of Cosmic Delights, the mathematics-themed garden near Dumfries in Scotland. Clara and her friend Myrna, the local bookstore owner, join Armand and Jean-Guy in reconstructing Peter's steps in what turns out to be his desperate quest to reinvent himself as an artist. Artistic angst or rivalry is at the basis of the couple's separation.
Peter's first stop on his quest was to the Ontario College of Art where both he and Clara obtained their degrees. There they found out that Peter visited a former professor, Paul Massey, asking after the mysterious Professor Norman, a maverick professor long gone from the college. This character is important to the theme of madness and chaos which permeates this novel. The next stop brings them to Peter's sister and there they find some paintings that he has sent his niece. They appear to be incomprehensible scribblings compared to his previous highly controlled and intellectual style. Clara becomes increasingly anxious over this development. They leave Toronto, paintings in hand, to continue their search for both Peter and Professor Norman in Baie- Saint-Paul in the Charlevoix region, an old settlement down river from Quebec City and now famous for its art colony. Here Penny introduces us to another character, the owner of an art gallery specializing in the paintings of Charles Gagnon (1934-2003), a famous Quebec artist. (There is a hint that this character will reappear in a future novel.)
Penny here repeats a formulaic device she has used before. It is this inclusion of a number of icons, such as the Ontario College of Art, the Garden of Cosmic Delights, the Land that God Gave to Cain, Baie-Saint-Paul, the paintings of Charles Gagnon, and the frequent references to the book that comforts Gamache with its familiar line from the hymn "There is a balm in Gilead that heals the sin-sick soul" and which further recalls the Marilynne Robinson novel called simply GILEAD. A few such references to familiar or intriguing places were a pleasant experience in former novels. This time I found they became de trop. The emotional search for Peter becomes overwhelmed by all these destinations.
As is often the case with mysteries, the last hundred pages of this story get back on track and are quite dramatic in wrapping up the mystery and drawing together some of the disparate characters we have met along the way. Still, this would have been a far stronger book had there been fewer touristic digressions and more depth to the exploration of Peter's emotional turmoil and his artistic quest during his year of absence.
§ Ann Pearson is a photographer and retired college Humanities teacher who lives in Montreal
Reviewed by Ann Pearson, September 2014
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