[PREV - METHOD_ACT]    [TOP]

NINE_TAYLORS

                                             August 9, 2010

  Dorothy Sayers "Nine Taylors" (1934)

  A mystery novel whose primary focus
  is a church out in the East Anglican
  countryside.

  Much of it is taken up with minutiae
  about the British art of bell ringing.          "Bell ringing", if you'd
  And as one might expect of a "mystery           never thought about
  novel", this minutiae is worked into            it, is a *really*
  a plot about stolen jewels, secret              peculiar form of
  codes, violent death...                         music, obsessed with
                                                  playing different
      But the obsession goes far beyond           permutations,
      that, with quotations from medieval         ringing the bells
      bell ringing literature scattered           in different orders
      through-out the book.                       ("ringing changes").

      And the obession goes beyond                In other words, they
      bell ringing: at one point the              try to play very long
      characters literally spend                  melodic lines without
      pages discussing floral                     repetition.
      arrangements.  And no, there
      are no herrings concealed                      But that isn't the
      amongst the lilacs.                            only musical value
                                                     involved, there are
      This degree of self-indulgence                 many schemes for
      is too extreme to complain about,              ordering these
      it's almost awe-inspiring.  How                permutations...
      was this book ever published?
      Could it ever get passed an editor
      in today's world?                     I can only infer that
                                            Dorothy Sayers was
        And complaining about it            well-established
        misses the point: this is           before writing this
        a classic example of                book... but it's not
        foreground/background               one of the late
        inversion.                          period ones (those
                                            are easily spotted,
        This is a phenomena                 because she she
        often observed in                   started writing
        science fiction,                    herself into them,
        but clearly not                     under the name of
        confined to it.                     "Vane").


                             As the Toadkeeper put it:
                             "The things that make a story
                             work are not always what the
                             story is about."




                 A nit to pick: the main
                 characters are strangely
                 ignorant of details of their
                 world that would surely be on
                 their minds.  Rather than
                 bringing the readers into the
                 world of the novel, the
                 characters have been pushed out
                 slightly into the world of the
                 readers, so that along with us,
                 they can be surprised by a
                 discovery that would've been
                 relatively obvious to them.




--------
[NEXT - QUIET]