Book review: Gaudy night

Wiki says: Gaudy Night (1935) is a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, the tenth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and the third including Harriet Vane and I have no reason to disbelieve it. I enjoyed it; it is a good book to read in Oxford.

For me, who comes back to Oxford every now and again, the most interesting part was the coming-back-to-Oxford thread. It is well handled and suited my mood, on a weekend when I was back to watch Eights. There are two or three other threads, which is nice in itself, as a multi-thread novel is more complex. But it has to be well-handled; they have to be threads woven together; unlike say Eversion where the threads are largely unlinked.

Wiki quotes Orwell saying "her slickness in writing has blinded many readers to the fact that her stories, considered as detective stories, are very bad ones. They lack the minimum of probability that even a detective story ought to have, and the crime is always committed in a way that is incredibly tortuous and quite uninteresting" and there is a good deal of truth in his words. In this case, about 2/3 of the way through and I was wondering whodunnit, and was struggling to think of any of the characters being interesting enough; in the sense that any of them could have, but it would have been arbitrary. It doesn't help that all of the dons are thinly sketched and rather blur together. In the end (faint spoiler) the guilty party emerges as somewhat distinct from the rest, linked by another thread, but it all turns out to be not really the main point of the book at all; which in another sense is nice.

Other threads - and you can take your pick as to which are the real point - are Women's rights, doubtless exciting at the time and not completely extinguished as a topic even now; the balance between work and life; and the balance between man and women in a relationship.

The latter, though, is examined mostly through the HV-LPW nexus, and since LPW is an idealisation of a caricature little is learnt there.

Perhaps the book would have been better with the crime thread removed entirely.

Refs

* Book review: The Documents in the Case

* Book review: Whose Body?