Book Report: Bury Your Dead

2/30. Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead (2010) (2/16/2020)

This book is unusual in Penny’s series in that it takes up two mysteries—one begun in the preceding book, the other a new one, involving the old town of Quebec City and the ongoing strife between the Francophones and les Anglais. It also involves the search for the founder of Québec, Samuel de Champlain, and Chief Inspector Gamache’s recovery from an incident that begins the present volume. We meet a few new characters, including Gamache’s own chief from when he started his career, the now retired Émile Comeau, with whom Gamache and his dog, Henri, are spending a couple of weeks. We meet the board members of Quebec City’s Literary and Historical Society, an Anglophone enclave that most Québecois don’t realize exists, so “underground” are all things English in this strongly separatist city and province. Gamache is conducting some research at the “Lit and His,” as it’s called—the basement of which is where this book’s fresh corpse turns up, one Augustin Renaud, a fanatic who has spent his life searching for Champlain’s grave. Was he close? too close? to solving the mystery?

In the parallel story, Gamache’s right-hand man, Inspector Jean-Guy Beauvoir, returns to the bucolic town of Three Pines to open a new line of questioning on the murder that occurred in The Brutal Telling, for which beloved B&B proprietor Olivier was convicted. Perhaps, Gamache suggests to Jean-Guy, they should review the evidence from a different perspective. In the process, as he works solo, Jean-Guy learns a thing or two about witnesses, about facts, about relationships, about keeping eyes and mind open.

All through this, the story kicked off by the opening-scene incident gets replayed as well. The result is a complicated, but perfectly comprehensible, plot (or set of plots), which helps to deepen the humanity of all concerned. It is a good, rich book, and feels like a fine place to take a break from Penny for a little bit, and perhaps try some other mystery series for a change.

Here is a passage where Gamache and Émile talk about the murdered man, whose diary they have been studying:

Finally Émile lowered the diary and removed his reading glasses.
  “Poor man.”
  Gamache nodded. “Not many friends.”
  “None, as far as I can tell. The price of greatness.”
  “Greatness? You’d consider Augustin Renaud that? I was under the impression you and the other members of the Champlain Society considered him a kook.”
  “Aren’t most great people? In fact, I think most of them are both brilliant and demented and almost certainly unfit for polite society. Unlike us.”
  Gamache stirred his coffee and watched his mentor.
  He considered him a great man, one of the few he’d met. Great not in his singularity of purpose but in his multiplicity. He’d taught his young protégé how to be a homicide investigator, but he’d taught him more besides.
Gamache remembered being shown into Chief Inspector Comeau’s office his first week on the job, certain he was about to be fired for some mysterious transgression. Instead the wiry, self-contained man had stared at him for a few seconds then invited him to sit and told him the four sentences that lead to wisdom. He’d said them only once, never repeating them. But once had been enough for Gamache.
  I’m sorry. I was wrong. I need help. I don’t know.
  . . . Those four statements had changed Armand Gamache’s life. Émile Comeau had changed his life.
  . . . “I respect people who have such passion,” Émile was saying. “I don’t. I have a lot of interests, some I’m passionate about, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I sometimes wonder if that’s necessary for geniuses to accomplish what they must, a singularity of purpose. We mere mortals just get in the way. Relationships are messy, distracting.”
  “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” quoted Gamache.
  “You sound as though you don’t believe it.”
  “It depends where you’re going, but no, I don’t. I think you might go far fast, but eventually you’ll stall. We need other people.”
  “What for?”
  “Help. Isn’t that what Champlain found? All other explorers failed to create a colony but he succeeded. Why? What was the difference? Père Sébastien told me. Champlain had help. The reason his colony thrived, the reason we’re sitting here today, was exactly because he wasn’t alone. He asked the natives for help and he succeeded.”
  “Don’t think they don’t regret it.”
  Gamache nodded. It was a terrible loss, a lapse in judgment. Too late the Huron and Algonquin and Cree realized Champlain’s New World was their old one.
  “Yes,” said Émile, nodding slowly, his slender fingers toying with the salt and pepper shakers. “We all need help.”