The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie: a novel by Alan Bradley (
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The books I like the best are the books where I find myself relating to the main character, where for a time I find myself, as it were, inside the character's own skin. This was very true with
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. This is what it says in our catalog: "In his wickedly brilliant first novel, Debut Dagger Award winner Alan Bradley introduces one of the most singular and engaging heroines in recent fiction: eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, an aspiring chemist with a passion for poison. It is the summer of 1950 and a series of inexplicable events has struck Buckshaw, the decaying English mansion that Flavia's family calls home. A dead bird is found on the doorstep, a postage stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak. Hours later, Flavia finds a man lying in the cucumber patch and watches him as he takes his dying breath. For Flavia, who is both appalled and delighted, life begins in earnest when murder comes to Buckshaw."
Perhaps I was able to relate to Flavia because she is eleven years old in 1950, a girl trying to have adventures in a cotton frock. She is constantly getting her dress filthy and ripping the soles half off her shoes. I grew up in the fifties in England and remember painfully how hard it was to ride a bike fast and yet modestly in a dress. I thought the author's depiction of the era was right on. Flavia is feisty, brave and resourceful, and yet everything conspires against her success, including the weight and age of her bike, her distant father, and her bullying older sisters. Flavia is the classic child on her own against the world much beloved of children's authors. She is Harry Potter, she is the Little Princess, and she suffers A Series of Unfortunate Events.
And yet this is a book for adults. It will remind you of books you read as a child; and yet you will admire the sophisticated wit, the understatement and the irony. Flavia is a brilliant child and adroitly manipulates all the people she meets to her own ends. She is quite cynical and understands people's motives only too well. The reader enjoys Alan Bradley's larger-than-life and yet somehow authentic characters, especially as they are revealed by Flavia in her own snippy voice.
I liked the wit and I enjoyed the gothic style mystery and the bizarre details such as the decaying Rolls Royce in the barn and the decaying auto repair shed at the village library. All is decay, but no detail is unimportant: the reader needs to keep awake.
The pacing is very appealing. You are drawn in straight away by the opening: "It was as black in the closet as old blood. They had shoved me in and locked the door." You know straight away that you are in for an embattled protagonist, dark secrets, violence and domestic misery.
Sure enough, Flavia's father is soon arrested for the murder and Flavia takes it upon herself to prove he did not do it. Her quest brings her face to face with some very adult issues involving love, loyalty, guilt, revenge, despair, vanity, and misunderstanding. At one time I thought I understood what the sweetness at the bottom of the pie was, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps when you have read the book you will understand.
Labels: 1950s, England - fiction, Murder mysteries, stamps, village mysteries