I Read Books: Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night

I covered almost everything I had to say about Gaudy Night last time I read it and reviewed it on the blog, even touching on why I come back to it. But only almost everything and Sayer’s novel about a women’s college turned upside down and inside out by a malevolent force in a country only too aware of how the fragile peace in Europe might be overturned is as timely as ever, if not more so.

If there’s something else to say, other than it is a rich and heady novel, and that the crime is not separate to day to day concerns, both mundane and rarefied, then it’s that people would resolve a lot of problems if only they would be sensible. But people aren’t sensible, they never are, Harriet spends the entire novel trying to figure out the sensible solution to her problems and at the end comes to a sensible compromise that, explicitly, isn’t available to other people.

Sayer doesn’t have the answers for us, solving the crime doesn’t resolve the true problems. But without the crime hanging over us, maybe we can hang together, put aside our differences long enough to get something worthwhile done.

Read This: For a detective novel that does much, much more
Don’t Read This: You just want an old-fashioned murder to solve, not someone’s entire manifesto