The Grave Tattoo by Val McDermid
Feb. 16th, 2008 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
A 200-year-old secret is now a matter of life and death. And it could be worth a fortune ...
It's summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Could it be linked to the old rumour that Fletcher Christian, mutinous First Mate on the Bounty has secretly returned to England?
Scholar Jane Gresham wants to find out. She believes that the Lakeland poet William Wordsworth, a friend of Christian's, may have sheltered the fugitive and turned his tale into an epic poem - which has since disappeared. But as she follows each lead, death is hard on her heels. The centuries-old mystery is putting lives at risk. And it isn't just the truth that is waiting to be discovered, but a bounty worth millions ...
As someone who enjoys McDermid's well plotted and deftly executed thrillers, I found this to be well below her usual standards.
A large part of the problem is that the book requires you to buy into a preposterous premise, i.e. that Fletcher Christian was not a villainous mutineer, but rather an honourable man forced to confront Bligh and who later used an attempt on his life to fake his death and return to England, where he sought William Wordsworth's help in rehabilitating his image by telling the true story in an epic poem. For me, this was very difficult to take seriously, made harder by McDermid's surprisingly poor argument (essentially a mixture of local Cumbrian legend, which she fleshes out with a fictional account of Christian's story) and execution. Had she done more to expand Christian's story beyond interspersing one or two pages of his tale into the main narrative, I might have been able to overcome my issues, but as it was, I felt there was too little of Christian on the page for me to believe in.
The main plot of the story revolves around Wordsworth scholar Jane's attempts to track down Wordsworth's poem based on Christian's account. Aided by fellow Wordsworth scholar, Dan, she seeks to track down descendents of Wordsworth's maid, Dorcas, who she believes took the manuscript. Interspersed with this are the misadventures of Jane's 13 year old neighbour, Tenille, a council estate girl who grasps the essence of poetry and who is fleeing the police after the murder of her aunt's boyfriend and forensic anthopologist River's attempts to work out the identity of a mysterious 'bog body' that's emerged near Jane's home village.
For me, the Tenille plot strand was easily the weakest - I simply didn't buy into the idea of a 13 year old girl loving poetry and Wordsworth as she is supposed to, especially given that she skips school. I felt that McDermid strained to give her relevance, evidenced by the cliches she brings out on council estate life incuding the skeezy boyfriend of Tenille's aunt and her gangland boss father. It was particularly disappointing that Tenille's supposed intelligence and practicality leaves her when McDermid has to use her to move the plot along (e.g. burglarising houses to try and find the poem, not removing her fingerprints from a gun).
Jane herself is a bland character, defined by her exposition of the plot and her blinkered view of the world around her. I found it difficult to believe in her contrived naivety, particularly in her dealings with the Hammer, although thankfully McDermid doesn't have her fall into cliche in her dealings with ex-boyfriend, Jake.
The ending to the book felt very rushed, particularly in the denouement as to the murderer's identity. I really wish that I'd caught more of a sense of the murderer's motivation earlier on, which may have helped me buy into why they did it.
Where McDermid does do well is with her ability to pace the story so that it gallops along at a breakneck speed. Indeed, this was its only redeemable feature.
Whilst McDermid's worst is still better than what many other thriller writers produce, this really isn't her best work and I would steer people towards her Wire in the Blood series before reading this.
The Verdict:
For me, the central premise was just too preposterous for me to buy into the story and I don't think it helped that McDermid tells it in a surprisingly trite (allbeit, fast-paced) way. I definitely wanted to know more about the motivation of the killer than what we get given and I think it really needs more depth to it to be interesting. Whilst I think that McDermid is a good thriller writer, this is definitely not one of her best.
A 200-year-old secret is now a matter of life and death. And it could be worth a fortune ...
It's summer in the Lake District and heavy rain over the fells has uncovered a bizarrely tattooed body. Could it be linked to the old rumour that Fletcher Christian, mutinous First Mate on the Bounty has secretly returned to England?
Scholar Jane Gresham wants to find out. She believes that the Lakeland poet William Wordsworth, a friend of Christian's, may have sheltered the fugitive and turned his tale into an epic poem - which has since disappeared. But as she follows each lead, death is hard on her heels. The centuries-old mystery is putting lives at risk. And it isn't just the truth that is waiting to be discovered, but a bounty worth millions ...
As someone who enjoys McDermid's well plotted and deftly executed thrillers, I found this to be well below her usual standards.
A large part of the problem is that the book requires you to buy into a preposterous premise, i.e. that Fletcher Christian was not a villainous mutineer, but rather an honourable man forced to confront Bligh and who later used an attempt on his life to fake his death and return to England, where he sought William Wordsworth's help in rehabilitating his image by telling the true story in an epic poem. For me, this was very difficult to take seriously, made harder by McDermid's surprisingly poor argument (essentially a mixture of local Cumbrian legend, which she fleshes out with a fictional account of Christian's story) and execution. Had she done more to expand Christian's story beyond interspersing one or two pages of his tale into the main narrative, I might have been able to overcome my issues, but as it was, I felt there was too little of Christian on the page for me to believe in.
The main plot of the story revolves around Wordsworth scholar Jane's attempts to track down Wordsworth's poem based on Christian's account. Aided by fellow Wordsworth scholar, Dan, she seeks to track down descendents of Wordsworth's maid, Dorcas, who she believes took the manuscript. Interspersed with this are the misadventures of Jane's 13 year old neighbour, Tenille, a council estate girl who grasps the essence of poetry and who is fleeing the police after the murder of her aunt's boyfriend and forensic anthopologist River's attempts to work out the identity of a mysterious 'bog body' that's emerged near Jane's home village.
For me, the Tenille plot strand was easily the weakest - I simply didn't buy into the idea of a 13 year old girl loving poetry and Wordsworth as she is supposed to, especially given that she skips school. I felt that McDermid strained to give her relevance, evidenced by the cliches she brings out on council estate life incuding the skeezy boyfriend of Tenille's aunt and her gangland boss father. It was particularly disappointing that Tenille's supposed intelligence and practicality leaves her when McDermid has to use her to move the plot along (e.g. burglarising houses to try and find the poem, not removing her fingerprints from a gun).
Jane herself is a bland character, defined by her exposition of the plot and her blinkered view of the world around her. I found it difficult to believe in her contrived naivety, particularly in her dealings with the Hammer, although thankfully McDermid doesn't have her fall into cliche in her dealings with ex-boyfriend, Jake.
The ending to the book felt very rushed, particularly in the denouement as to the murderer's identity. I really wish that I'd caught more of a sense of the murderer's motivation earlier on, which may have helped me buy into why they did it.
Where McDermid does do well is with her ability to pace the story so that it gallops along at a breakneck speed. Indeed, this was its only redeemable feature.
Whilst McDermid's worst is still better than what many other thriller writers produce, this really isn't her best work and I would steer people towards her Wire in the Blood series before reading this.
The Verdict:
For me, the central premise was just too preposterous for me to buy into the story and I don't think it helped that McDermid tells it in a surprisingly trite (allbeit, fast-paced) way. I definitely wanted to know more about the motivation of the killer than what we get given and I think it really needs more depth to it to be interesting. Whilst I think that McDermid is a good thriller writer, this is definitely not one of her best.
