Nearly the end of the year and the start of the next. I love the gap between Christmas and New Year; the week drifts by with no particular plan except to finish the leftovers and relax. Our son and his partner stayed for a few days, but now they’re gone, I am pottering contentedly between the garden, my laptop (my newest interest – family history) and the couch.
Snoozing, of course, and drinking cups of tea – but also reading. I am determined to finish the trio of books I started a week ago. Finished on Saturday was Her Secret Service by Claire Hubbard-Hall, in tandem with Bright Shining by Julia Baird, and now I’m whipping through The Grey Wolf, the latest instalment in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.
Her Secret Service tells the story of women in the British intelligence services, a group who’ve been written out of official histories and described as ‘secretaries’ or ‘clerks’. I’d been waiting for this to be released. So excited! But while it attempts to set the record straight by detailing the work of these trailblazers, it’s actually a pretty pedestrian read. Many of these women were not doing the cloak-and-dagger stuff but sifting and prioritising enormous amounts of information (as Hubbard-Hall notes, information was ammunition), and Hubbard-Hall struggles to make their work seem compelling. And because there is so little known about them (Official Secrets Act!) she often doesn’t have a lot to work with. It’s Hubbard-Hall’s first book; I hope she digs in and continues the research because it’s a fascinating subject.
In comparison, Baird is a skillful and polished writer. Bright Shining is one of those hybrid books, a blend of memoir and personal experience, interviews, observations, history, politics and more. She explores issues like reconciliation, ‘Me Too’ and restorative justice to discover the hard-to-define quality of ‘grace’. While sometimes seemed it like a series of loosely connected musings in search of an organising thesis (what, really, was the point of the anecdote about Napoleon’s penis?), it is beautifully written, never dull, very readable and because I have been enjoying Not Stupid, Baird’s podcast with Jeremy Fernandez, I could hear her voice, talking just to me, as I read.
And The Grey Wolf? Politics, environmental activism, corruption, murder…
After reading the 18 
previous Inspector Gamache novels, the disparate conjoined spheres of Montreal policing and the magical Quebec village of Three Pines are so familiar. Perhaps I should have seen out 2024 with something inspiring or meaningful… but given the year we’ve had in the world, some escapist thrills with – I sincerely hope! – the baddies dealt with and disaster averted seems like a pretty good way to end the year.