Last year the Costa
First Novel Award went to Eleanor
Oliphant is Completely Fine; this year, it went to The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. These two books are so very different that about
the only thing they have in common is the use of a woman’s name in the title.
This is a time-travel
detective story with a locked room mystery.
The narrator, later identified as Aiden Bishop, is attending a
masquerade party at Blackheath House; the Hardcastles’ youngest son was
murdered 19 years earlier and for some reason they “have decided to mark the
occasion by reopening the house where it happened and invite back the very same
guests who were here that day” (48). At
this party, another murder takes place and Bishop must identify the killer in
order to escape from Blackheath.
Of course, Bishop
cannot solve the murder in the usual way.
A masked figure, the Plague Doctor, tells Bishop that he will relive the
same day 8 times; each morning he will wake up in the body of a different
person present at the party. In other
words, his 8 hosts allow him to see the same event from 8 different
perspectives. If he doesn’t succeed in
identifying the killer, his memory will be wiped clean and he’ll have to start
the process all over again, as he apparently already has perhaps hundreds of
times. Two other people at the party are
also trying to unmask the murderer.
Since only one person can be freed from the time loop, Bishop is
motivated to succeed, especially because a knife-wielding footman is hunting
down Bishop’s hosts and killing them.
Though the events
occur in the 1920s, the book often feels like a Victorian Gothic novel. It certainly has many elements of Gothic
literature. There’s a remote, crumbling
manor house with dark, creepy corridors and gloomy chambers; it’s surrounded by
mysterious forests and has an old graveyard nearby. There are touches of the supernatural and more
than one damsel in distress. Torture,
murder, suicide and insanity all make an appearance.
In many ways, the book
is an intellectual puzzle. The reader
must be willing to invest time and become actively involved while reading this
book. A passive reader will give up in
frustration, especially because almost everyone is unreliable and untrustworthy. At one point, Bishop thinks, “Too little information and you’re blind, too
much and you’re blinded” (378). The
reader will find him/herself in the latter position because the number of
details becomes almost overwhelming. The
author has stated that he used a wall of Post-it Notes and an Excel spreadsheet
to keep track of all the plot pieces, characters, and perspectives, and the
reader must almost resort to similar tactics to avoid total bafflement.
Characterization is
interesting. We never see Bishop outside
of a host’s body, and he has no memory of the type of person he was: “I have no idea who I am beyond Blackheath,
or how I think when I’m not wedged inside somebody else’s mind” (236). We get only snippets of his personality as
traits emerge while he occupies a host’s body.
The problem is that Bishop finds he is losing any sense of self as the
personalities of his hosts intrude and often overwhelm him. The Plague Doctor tells him that he is
allowed only eight hosts because, “Any more than that and your personality
wouldn’t be able to rise above theirs.” Bishop
agrees, “My hosts are getting stronger, and I’m getting weaker” (269). At first Bishop tends to be very judgmental and
his constant deriding of one man’s obesity and another man’s cowardice do not initially
endear him to the reader. Later,
however, he acknowledges the coward’s compassion and the fat man’s
intelligence. A positive trait is his
desire to prevent the murder because if it does not happen, he cannot gain his
freedom which has been promised only if he identifies the murderer. For me, much of the interest was in trying to
determine what kind of person Aiden Bishop really is.
This novel is very
intricately crafted and the writer has justifiably earned praise for his
cleverness. Of course, I couldn’t be
bothered to determine if there were any plot holes! I appreciate the cleverness, but I think a
great book is more than just an intellectual puzzle, and for me, this book is
not much more than that.
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