This was the perfect winter read. Set on hot humid days (and nights) in New Orleans, the novel perfectly captures the dreamy, hazy, insubstantial quality of that place.
The characters are charming, funny, doomed. The scale of the story is small, but the emotions and consequences are epic. The novel was published in 1997 but seems to come from decades earlier than that. A time when a man was forgiven his sins if he was charming, and a woman forgiven hers if beautifully dressed. It is funny and heartbreaking (again, like the city) and a great dose of the South.
This is a great read for any day of the year – a ribald frilly-knickered book with danger and hope in equal measure. There are lost children, doughty spinsters, gangsters, cocktails and beautiful (and tawdry) frocks. Everyone travels on from where they started and the author is ever-present, intervening and working as hard as the characters to ensure things come out well. There are scenes you’ll swear you’ve seen in movies; the brilliantined hair, the shiny shoes, the supercilious doorman, and there’s darkness and sadness too. There’s no happy-ever-after, Atkinson’s too good for that, but the sourness of some of the story gets burned off, ships come into harbour, some of the lost are found.
I’d heard this in adaptation on the radio but never read it, so when I found a copy in a charity shop I snapped it up. I’ve been bellringing for a year now, and I knew that hobby figured largely in the story (and the title) and was keen to read in full.
I wasn’t prepared for how much detail there is – in fact the whole thing is structured around a peal and Sayers needs you to understand a great deal about ringing. I was struck by how much space she was allowed to give to this and reminded of Das Boot by Lothar Gunther Buchheim. For that novel to be a satisfying read you need to understand how a submarine rises and sinks, so the author puts a journalist on board, in order for that character to do the learning on our behalf.
Sayers just speaks directly to the reader, with some helpful bellringing hints provided by one character to another along the way. I wondered if modern readers are tempted to skip all that? You could, I suppose, and there’s enough melancholy and mystery to keep you satisfied. As always, Peter Wimsey is patrician though kind and would now be called “entitled” in a different way.
A good detective story, unconventional, atmospheric and satisfying – more so for bellringers.
I read this between Christmas and New Year and it was perfect for that dark, dreamy, unfocussed time.
There was a lot of discussion (around the time the novel won the Booker Prize) about the modest length of the book. For me, the speed with which I was able to read it was part of the momentum of the writing and I welcomed the modest proportion.
Time repeats constantly in the novel, with the residents of the International Space Station (ISS) experiencing sunrise after sunrise, but those dawns don’t all mark a new day. There’s a strict pattern of eating, sleeping, working and thinking. The daily grind in weightless conditions is brilliantly evoked with tiny details – the velcroed toothbrushes, the faces puffy without gravity to hold them in shape. The thinking was the best part, though sometimes heartbreaking. The image of the sleeping cosmonauts, hanging tethered silently in their sleeping bags like larvae, continues to haunt me. Below them always, the earth, constantly drawing them to look out at their home, their only vessel and the grave of all they love.
There’s been a little flurry of activity on various book sites with reviews suspended for a while after review-bombing because Harvey included a Russian character. (There are Russians on the ISS.) On a more positive note, this is one of the best-selling Booker Prize winners and has apparently (certainly in my case) driven thousands of people to the website and YouTube channels of the ISS.
I’d recommend you read the book. Join the cosmonauts above the fray, circling the earth, watching the sun rise, again and again.
Suzy D Harris 