Wimsey is a fun lovable character. He's traumatised by the horrors of WW1 and it has brought out his sense of the absurd - or whimsey, which is also the family motto. It's how he seems to deal with everything, he's rarely serious and this often drives people to throttling him. I'm not sure it would be a Wimsey book if someone hadn't had a go at him, but he isn't bothered by it. Wimsey seems to accept it as just their way of dealing with his absurdity and the upsetting situations they're all currently in - being that he's generally throttled by one of the people suspected of murder, so far none of them have been the murderer. Just ordinary men at the end of their tether. I think it's how he finds the murderer too. Wimsey expects the murderer to be calm and to put up with more than average, so they're not suspected.
These novels are very much stuck in the era they were written in and it would probably make it difficult for a person without any knowledge of the 1920/30s to read them. Locations, attitudes, products, poetry, plays, stage actresses - they stop the books from having a timeless quality (like Agatha Christie's novels) and give them so much else. The way the stories make me look up words that the dictionary now tells me are archaic or names of people long forgotten is so much part of the allure of the novel. I feel involved in Wimsey's mysteries, much deeper than I would if I was reading a contemporary novel with nothing that I really needed to think about or explore.
Truly worth reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment