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As this, the sixteenth installment of the Joanne Kilbourn series, opens, it would be hard to imagine a sunnier prospect. It is a delightful May morning, Joanne's husband, Zack Shreve, the newly-elected mayor of Regina, Saskatchewan, is embarking on his campaign to pass a referendum on a set of city by-laws that would protect Regina against the worst of unchecked development, and his son, Peter, is about to marry a young woman of whom both Joanne and Zack heartily approve. It is all so sunlit that any reasonably alert reader will know that all will go rapidly downhill.
And so it proves. Peter and Maisie's lakeside wedding is lovely, but there's a shadow cast over it by the offshore presence of Maisie's sister Lee's former boyfriend, recently departed from a mental hospital and determined to reclaim Lee for his own. And the referendum campaign has suddenly turned sour, marred by innuendo and personal attack. Lee, who is a supporter of the campaign, finds her prize collection of heirloom poultry poisoned. And then there is a murder.
Conventionally in a murder mystery it is at this point that attention would be directed to solving the murder. Motive and opportunity come under scrutiny, clues are marshalled, in dire circumstances a train timetable is brought into play. The corpse or corpses tend to be forgotten in the intellectual challenge represented by the crime. A hero emerges - the detective, either from the police or an amateur sleuth - and it is that character's triumph that provides the satisfaction and relief at the end of the book. The murdered party fades into obscurity, having served the purpose providing the occasion for the entertainment.
WHAT'S LEFT BEHIND is not a conventional murder mystery, though it certainly has its share of both murder and mystery. Bowen's title says it all: what's left after the worst happens? How do those who remain behind go on? The book is concerned with the varieties of love - selfless, obsessive, requited, unrequited, marital and extra-marital, parental and familial. And it is especially concerned with the crushing burden of dealing with the loss of one who was deeply loved, with the irreparable vacancy left by that departure.
Cosy readers need not be put off, however. Bowen may have a grave theme at the heart of this novel, but she still remains essentially an optimist, an optimist, moreover, who recognizes the value of a good meal and a nice pair of shoes and is happy to provide the details of either or both. It may take a while, but Joanne does struggle through to a moment of reconciliation and even peace, prompted in part by the wisdom attributed to Sami reindeer herders, but which could equally have come from Wordsworth's line, "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her," and so far, Nature, however battered, still remains.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2016
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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