Book Report: The Long Way Home (13)

26. Louise Penny, The Long Way Home (2014) (11/18/22)

This is Penny's tenth book (and my fourth this year), and a bit of a departure in that the only dead body does not appear until the final pages. The plot involves a search for the artist Peter Morrow, one of the regular Three Pines characters and the husband of Clara Morrow, also an artist—who in a previous book eclipsed Peter in her artistic fame. Their marriage got rocky, and she suggested they separate, to come together again after a year. Only he doesn't show up. Meanwhile, Chief Inspector Gamache has retired as head of homicide (as of book #9) and moved to Three Pines, and he gets drawn into the mystery, along with his sidekick, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. They start to trace Peter's whereabouts, which takes them, and various other characters, hither and yon: Québec City, Toronto, the tiny St. Lawrence River town of Baie-Saint-Jean, and ultimately the wild far east of the province on a wild boat ride. Jealousy is also a character. As is love.

It was a fine book, though I would not have found it as engaging were it not for Penny's exposition on topics outside the plot proper. To wit: Canadian art and a wacky garden in Dumfries, Scotland, which Peter visits on his travels as he tries to find himself. In an earlier book, Penny introduced Emily Carr, whom I'd never heard of, and who has since become a favorite of mine. In The Long Way Home I learned about Clarence Gagnon and Tom Thomson, whose work is beautiful and evocative—full of grace as one character puts it with regard to Gagnon. I also enjoyed learning about the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, and if I can remember (which I will probably not), one day I'd love to find myself near Dumfries in early May so I can visit on its one open day of the year.

Here's a passage from the book:

The mind, [Gamache] knew, really was its own place. Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
     Gamache was pretty sure that's what Peter Morrow had done. He'd turned heaven into hell. And as a result, he'd been kicked out. Paradise Lost.
     But Peter Morrow wasn't Lucifer, the fallen angel. He was just a troubled man who lived in his head, not realizing that Paradise was only ever found in the heart. Unfortunately for Peter, feelings lived there too. And they were almost always messy. Peter Morrow did not like messes.
     Armand laughed as he remembered the conversation from the night before.
     It was how Clara had described her first attempt at painting. No, not a mess, it was something else. A dog's breakfast. Ruth had called it that and Clara had agreed. Ruth tried to capture feelings in her poetry. Clara tried with color and subject to give form to feelings.
     It was messy. Unruly. Risky. Scary. So much could go wrong. Failure was always close at hand. But so was brilliance.
     Peter Morrow took no risks. He neither failed nor succeeded. There were no valleys, but neither were there mountains. Peter's landscape was flat. An endless, predictable desert.
     How shattering it must have been, then, to have played it safe all his life and been expelled anyway. From home. From his career.
     What would a person do when the tried-and-true was no longer true?