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Flavia de Luce is an eleven-year-old girl living in a decaying country home in England in 1950. She nourishes twin passions - one for chemistry, the other, related, for poisons. Her family is similarly peculiar. Her father is cast as a disengaged father in the classic mode of the great English children's stories. She has two sisters, from Flavia's perspective, both dreadful. One reads Bulwer-Lytton for fun, the other plays piano beautifully and otherwise spends her time admiring herself in various reflecting surfaces. Her mother, known as Harriet to her daughters, disappeared years ago and is presumed dead in a mountaineering accident. Perhaps because she has never been forced to submit to the routine demands of institutional conformity (like the Mitford sisters, the de Luce girls appear never to have been at school), Flavia is utterly fearless. So when she comes across a dying man in the cucumber patch in the garden in the middle of the night, her response is alert curiosity and a desire to find out what his dying word, "vale" might mean. And when her father is arrested for murder, she redoubles her efforts to solve the crime. If all this sounds unbearably twee, be reassured, it is anything but. The story is narrated by Flavia herself, whose extraordinary vocabulary is only to be expected in one whose elder sister believes that Jacobean revenge tragedies are suitable bedtime stories. But while Flavia may have the vocabulary of a Victorian novelist, she has the touching innocence of childhood, and an oddly sheltered one at that. In company with most young children, she cannot believe that she is mortal nor can she understand that what she does might endanger herself or others. She is thus at once wholly infuriating and thoroughly touching. Winner of the CWA Debut Dagger in 2007, SWEETNESS is something of a publishing phenomenon. Its 70-year-old Canadian author signed a contract for the first two books on the basis of his five-page submission to the competition, which has now grown into a commitment for six books. First published in Britain and only now seeing the light of day in the author's home country (announced for the US at the end of April), it has been very warmly received despite the fact that the author has never set foot in Flavia's own country. This last fact is, I think, a clue to its considerable attraction. Anyone complaining that SWEETNESS lacks the satisfying grit of a Glasgow crime novel is quite correct but hardly relevant. Alan Bradley draws on more than a century of children's literature to construct not a memoir of past times but an homage to past books. Just as bright forty-year-olds might read JK Rowling with pleasure, a bright ten-year-old might fall in love with Flavia (though not, one hopes, with her passion for poisons), but the real audience here is not children, but the child that lies within the adult reader and needs, especially in hard times, to be released.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, February 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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