The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place
The Grave’s a Fine and Private Place by Alan Bradley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Found it hard to make it through this installment in the series. Flavia, who usually is both charming and intelligent comes across as pretentious rather than precocious. Those who have a familiarity with Adrian Mole will recognize too much in common.
It is nice to see her relationship with Daffy, Feely and Dogger develop, as would be expected with her getting older. The slow realization that each member of her family is grieving the loss of the father creates new facets to the dynamics among the de Luce clan. Daffy and Flavia actually work together on aspects of a mystery and Feely literally coshes someone who dared hurt her sister.
But beyond that, the writing seems flat and the mystery trite and uninteresting. Where is the dash and fervor that accompanied our heroine in the past?
By introducing all the murder victims to the reader AFTER they are each dead, we never get a true sense of any of them.
Readers have come to look forward to Flavia in her lab. By setting the story away from Buckshaw, the family home, we are denied much opportunity to admire her knowledge of the sciences.
The peek into Dogger’s life pre-de Luce’s is interesting, and perhaps a facet of Flavia becoming more aware of others as she approaches her teen years. The very ending of the story is really a beginning for Flavia and Dogger, as a way to present this duo with further investigation possibilities. But the entire book felt as if it was paving the way for this denouement.
As for the plot and mystery: one doesn’t read Flavia books for gritty realism. But the story felt disjointed and without the usual flow of events. The characters were paper thin. And Buckshaw, for all it’s ramshackle and dilapidated existence, brought an ethereal charm to the story and at the same time grounded the lives of the de Luces et.al. in time and place.
We never get a good sense of the small town–which could be any small town in any English mystery–nor of the circus, which one feels our old Flavia would have described with vividness. Instead, we have the “idea” of a circus, and the “idea” of a small town and its inhabitants.
As to the mystery itself–the murderer and the motive, I can only say, “weak, very weak.”
