Guilty by Definition
I read a review on this book in the NY times and thought it worth checking out. The authoress is apparently some famous etymological person, but I’ve never heard of her, but etymology and a mystery book seems right up my alley, so I went why not. I think the bulk of my books this year has been via listening, and this one is no different. The narrator uses a nice british voice, but I think i probably would have preferred just reading for this one.
You’re introduced to the Clarendon English Dictionary staff right at the beginning. With Martha, Alex, and Sofia (safie as she’s named most of the time in the book) as the principal voices of the book. There’s a fourth person, Simon, but he plays a fairly minor role in the investigation. The mystery? 10 years or so ago, Marth’s sister, Charlie (or charlotte) who also worked at the dictionary, disappeared. Did she run away, elope? or was it foul play? Nobody knows and the mystery kind of tore the family apart in a ways, with Martha going to Germany for a while and the mother withering away.
Now finally, some new leads have opened up in the mystery, in the form of mysterious post cards that link and hint at Charlie’s disappearance. The whole dictionary staff then gets engaged in this and the game is then afoot.
First off, as mysteries goes, its not terrible. Each chapter starts off with an esoteric word that might or might not be related to the chapter at hand, and each chapter is relatively self contained.
The problem of the book is mostly one of pace, and given this is the authoress’s first time doing mysteries, its not really a wonder that she had a problem with pace. Too many times the mystery slows down for the characters to do some soul searching, or pondering of what a phrase might have meant, and that meant less investigating and more exposition. A lot of the chatter is mostly about….of all things….liteary life. How such and such shakespeare authority wrote a book, or how little money folks make at the dictionary, or what life is actually like inside a dictionary….
I understand thats the authoress’ life and she’s simply writing about what she knows, but holy christ its boring. =). The whole book, I had a hard time coming to terms with the self-importance of the characters given that they’re working in a field that’s vastly under appreciated and hardly has any money in it. As the mystery gets underway and more gets uncovered, I just had a hard time believing there’s any justification for anything that might have happened in the book. Granted, many times people have been killed for far less than money or the such, but the events that happened and the order that it happened was just so far out of left field that i had to suspend my disbelief quite a number of times.
i don’t want to spoil the story, so i won’t go into what i found unbelievable, but i’ll just reiterate that the field of literature just isn’t a very lucrative one. =). Nowadays, anyone who writes a book has to understand that its mostly a passion and ego driven endeavor and for every one harry potter you’re going to have a billion nobodies.
in any case, i think this is one of those books where you better really like the etymological portions of the book rather than the mystery, because the mystery part is woefully written. I think this whole book would have been better served if there was not mystery at all, and instead the topic of the mcguffin was expanded upon. That was more interesting.
Still, the book was relatively focused and tidied up at the end. I didn’t feel cheated, and I enjoyed a bit of the oxford descriptions.
All in all, not bad for a freshman effort. But it remains a freshman effort.