Reply To: The Grey Wolf flaws
“Flaws” is a big word, and I think my comments are more in the category of “I wish that…”
One point is about substance, one about style. Substance first.
There are three central female characters in the inner circle: Isabelle, Reine Marie, and Annie. I want to know more about them. They mostly appear as team players and emotional support persons. And yet, it is clear that all three are, in their own right, fiercely intelligent and very capable. Reine Marie was featured more in The World of Curiosities, and Isabelle is stepping out of the shadows in The Grey Wolf. I hope this trend continues. I hope they get more agency.
Style: reading The Grey Wolf for the first time, I felt oddly stressed because I could not follow the plot line. I blamed it on being too tired when I was reading. I am now on my second read-through, and I noticed something that seems different from previous books and has me wondering if LP has a new editor. You know how young people, who have grown up with texts containing hyperlinks, tend to construct narratives differently? They read the main text, then click on the link, read a completely different though related bit of information, and then go back to the main text. Reading The Grey Wolf felt to me like the narrative contained hyperlinks. Example: Gamache gets on the plane, they fly into bad weather, and he recalls the meeting with his RCMP friend (that story of this important meeting being the hyperlink) and then we are back in the plane. The stylistic choice of inserting important information into the narrative as a retrospective made me feel like I was inside a mind that was literally losing the plot: slightly chaotic, disjointed, confused. Maybe that’s the desired effect. Gamache is struggling. I hope not. But I personally would want my editor to smooth out the plot a bit. Especially since it was, as noted by others, very complex.
