My library book group had a really interesting conversation about The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood. One member said it was such a disturbing and angry book, she thought it shouldn’t have been published at all. I think she meant it, too. Another said she wasn’t going to waste her valuable time reading something like that. Some people only got 50 or so pages in, and gave up (disturbing, confronting, challenging were some of the words used). A very few of us made it all the way through, and found it a worthwhile winner of the first Stella, disturbing, challenging, confronting and angry though it was.
We talked about what we read for comfort, and I admitted that I turn to a nice, happy murder story to cheer me up. Which got a laugh, as it was meant to, but in fact they knew what I meant. To quote Oscar Wilde, ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.’
Come Away, Death was not quite what I had in mind. I’m coming to realise that Mitchell often played with or completely disregarded the conventions of crime fiction. This one is like a fever dream, with the characters caught up in a pilgrimage from Athens to various sites – Mycenae, Ephesus, Eleusis – nearby. Under the direction of a British archaeologist, Sir Rudri Hopkinson, they are attempting to stir the dead gods to life by recreating the ancient religious rites and rituals.
Two pairs of young lovers, a handsome but cruel photographer, three little boys, a rival archaeologist, a stalwart servant, a Greek guide and Mrs Bradley journey by car, bus, foot and boat in a travelogue of beautiful descriptive writing and much discomfort involving a boxful of adders, a horribly mutilated sacrificial cow, the appearance of the goddess Artemis and a decapitated head.
Mrs Bradley is one the one hand a witchy and uncanny figure, untangling over the web of events like one of the Fates, and on the other a sympathetic friend, skilled psychiatrist and – a lovely, funny surprise – expert wrangler of small boys.
It might help to know a little more about ancient Greece than I do, but a few trips to see Professor Google soon sorted me out.
She stood before the Stele of Aristion, contemplating, not only the greaved and kilted warrior with his curled locks and long, straight feet, but the imaginary spectacle of Sir Rudri walking with torches in the dusk of the Greek evening, chanting strange hymns and sorrowful litanies to the Eleusinian gods Iacchus and Dionysus, and to the god-king Triptolemus. She could see him, dogged idealist and romancer, proceeding ploddingly the while along the petrol-haunted, dusty Sacred Way which now led, in the age of progress, the world no longer young, from one Greek slum to another.