The Devil's Feather
About three years ago or so, I gave up on the British mystery novelist Minette Walters. After slogging through too many repetitions of a single plot device and excessive heapings of some rather lazy moralizing, I decided that there were better ways of relaxing the little grey cells between my bouts with Victorian sermons. (If I want moralizing, I might as well just read the sermons.) Hope springs eternal, though, and since I needed a quick break from the trials and travails of a sixteenth-century archbishop, I picked up The Devil's Feather.
There are really only two events in the narrative, and both take place offstage: the abduction and captivity of our protagonist, Connie Burns, just as she's about to leave Baghdad, and the mysterious disappearance of her kidnapper, MacKenzie, some time later. Connie narrates the entire novel in retrospect, with her voice occasionally supplemented by e-mails, text messages, and fragmentary notes; although she eventually supplies an impressionistic but relatively clear account of what MacKenzie did to her, she claims to know nothing about how he disappeared. The alert reader, however, may suspect otherwise--making Connie's story somewhat reminiscent of one of Walters' better novels, The Sculptress. Meanwhile, in the novel's subplot, Connie uncovers an attempt to murder the elderly, Alzheimer's-ridden woman whose house Connie is renting.
In many ways, Connie's shift from kidnapping victim to detective in the subplot (and, perhaps, from victim to avenging angel in the main plot) is the novel's real interest: is it possible to recover from absolute debasement, and if so, how? To what extent does Connie become "no better than MacKenzie" (349), or does she successfully channel her desire for vengeance? Walters has explored these questions in other novels--especially in relation to strong, nonconformist women, who frequently find themselves victimized in the act of trying not to be victims. Her novels tend to be suspicious of the elaborately "feminine" woman--what one might describe as "effeminate," in fact--who snakily uses her sexual wiles to obtain power; the plots reserve real power for women who are intellectually and physically aggressive, even as they frequently reward such women with romantic happy endings.
Given its plot structure, it's perhaps not surprising that The Devil's Feather is a peculiarly talky novel. Characters analyze themselves; they analyze other people. In fact, the novel's chief weakness lies in the amount of time characters spend explaining one person's actions to another. I've complained about over-explication in novels before, and Walters succumbs to the siren song of this flaw with a vengeance. It's as though she feels the need to compensate for the final mystery (where's MacKenzie?) by putting all the characters through the talking cure. Can't the reader be trusted to make any judgments for herself?