The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard

First Published: Harper Collins, 2006
Edition Read: Harper Collins, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-06-073397-7
*** Random Book ***

The opening of this book is fun, well written, tongue in cheek, intriguing. The middle of this book is dull, slow, uneventful, frustrating. The end of this book – the very end – is fantastic. Also, it’s the second book to get my “Awesome First Sentence” Award.

Here’s the first sentence: “In two or three hours . . . well, it’s hard to tell . . . in three hours, surely, or at the very outside, four hours . . . within four hours, let us say, I’ll be dead.” (p. 3) The awesomeness of this first sentence speaks for itself, but, just to be plain, it’s the self-conscious playing with a cliche that I like. I especially like that the purpose of the cliche is to create drama for a writer too word-poor to create it on his own and that Bayard completely and purposefully undercuts all the possible tension and yet, somehow, keeps a dramatic punch.

Anyway, this is a murder mystery book set at West Point Academy in the 1830s. It is narrated by the detective, Gus Landor, a retired police detective from NYC with a sad personal history, a drinking problem, and a dry wit. He is assisted in his investigation into the murder and ritualistic disfiguring of the cadets by one of the cadets, a Mr. Edgar A. Poe.

And that’s my first problem – though it’s not a big one. I tend to feel that when an author descends to using a real life person as a major character in one of their novels, they’re doing it to cover up for an inadequacy with their own writing. There are exceptions, and this is probably one of them as Bayard does an excellent job of creating a likeable and enjoyable Poe, but even for those exceptions I’m forced to ask why the author felt the need to include a real person rather than simply giving a different name to the character they had created. The only thing it adds, as  far as I can tell, is borrowed lustre — it is a borrowed cloak too small for a good author and too large for a bad one.

The opening, as I said, is really well written. It’s playful and intriguing. You care about the administrative backdrop of West Point because you feel that they really care about the cadets. You care about and like Landor. You laugh at and smile for Poe. The middle drags horribly. Landor seems to do no detection at all — he sits around drinking and occasionally references how he did do some detection at some point. Poe is in love like an idiot and with an idiot. The villain seems clear though how and why are not. And the ……… plot …………. advances ………………… very ………………………………. slowly. Or not at all.

Then comes the end, but I can’t talk about that without this warning: SPOILERS BELOW!

So, the mystery is all solved in a predictable and hum-ho fashion, even if the dramatic last scene is well written and I’m sitting there thinking “that sucked,” when we start the story of Mattie – lovingly written – and the interview with Poe – perfectly odd. Mattie, Landor’s raped daughter who committed suicide, turns out to be the driving force behind the whole book because Landor was the murderer – yes, an unreliable narrator – and he was avenging his daughter on her rapists. The ritualistic disfigurement was done – at least in the first instance – by the people who we thought committed the murders.

And it was all there to see. Why was Landor not investigating? What happened to the other heart? Why the ritualistically damaged animals _after_ the first murder? Landor leaves things out of his story to us, yes, but he doesn’t lie to us and looking back over his behaviour you see how he found out everything he needed to and how he accomplished his crimes. And it’s brilliant. You’ll never see it coming.

But hold on a second. Why will you never see it coming? Because you’re too bloody bored to be looking. The middle drags so much that I stopped caring about the clues or the occurrences. In an absorbing mystery I’m trying to make the pieces fit even as I read the novel. In this one, I barely kept them in mind any more. On the other hand, the dragging middle is perfect because that’s exactly how Landor gets away with it. He makes himself so dull — so uneventful — that your eyes gloss over him. He’s a thousand times smarter than anyone else in the book, and you know it, but his talents seem so drowned in alcohol and so wasted that you’re content to accept his cultivated uncertainty about what happened and who did it. Which is perfect as a character sketch but a little irksome to read.

I can see people thinking that the end – which I loved – justifies the middle and makes the book. I can see people thinking that the end is not enough and being disappointed by the book. I’m somewhere in the middle.

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