Review: Gaudy Night

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It was clear from reading Murder Must Advertise that Sayers hated her time working in advertising; it's equally clear from reading this book that she loved her time at Oxford. In it, Harriet Vane, Lord Peter's love interest, returns to her old college and becomes involved in solving a mystery (not a murder mystery; there's someone sending unhinged and abusive notes and committing minor vandalism), at the same time wrestling with her own existential questions. Could she, even part-time, be a scholar as well as or instead of a mystery writer? Could she, can anyone, balance being a female academic and a wife, or is it one or the other? How does she feel about, and what should she do about, the fact that Lord Peter Wimsey loves her and has asked her several times a year for the past five years to marry him? Can a man and a woman be equal partners, or would she inevitably have to give up part of herself? Is the pursuit of truth the highest value, even above humane considerations? What is the responsibility of someone who unknowingly does harm with good intentions? The answers are complicated, and at least some of the questions seem to have been questions the author had as well; she is now known not only for her mystery novels but for her translation of Dante, for example.

Harriet Vane has an odd place in the Wimsey novels. She was introduced in Strong Poison , in which she was on trial for murdering her lover and in which Peter fell in love with her (for, as far as I'm concerned, inadequately justified reasons, though they receive some shoring up in this book), and also cleared her by discovering the actual murderer. In Have His Carcase , she discovers a murder (that may not even be a murder, but a suicide) by chance, and Peter takes advantage of the fact that she calls him in to help investigate by asking her repeatedly to marry him, which she repeatedly refuses to do. She's not mentioned at all in The Five Red Herrings (which comes between Strong Poison and Have His Carcase); she's mentioned only briefly, indirectly, and not by name in Murder Must Advertise , next after Carcase, and not at all again in The Nine Tailors , which comes between Advertise and this book. But here she's the viewpoint character most of the time.

The introduction to the edition I read was by the actress who played her in a TV series originally to be titled Harriet Vane, and covering Strong Poison, Have His Carcase and Gaudy Night, which became the inaccurately titled A Dorothy L. Sayers Mystery and then, for American broadcast, was renamed Lord Peter Wimsey, ironically in view of its original working title. So this adaptation of books by a woman, with a woman as a key unifying character, in which the man goes out of his way to give her independence and dignity, still ends up being named after him.

The book itself is complex, more of a true novel than a detective story, though it has both the good old standby subplots of mystery and romance going on (albeit not in a conventional way in either case). There's a lot of jargon and reference to features of life in academic Oxford, and English and Latin literature of the kind that one is presumably introduced to at Oxford, or was in the 1930s, at least, all of which requires annotations to make complete sense of; this site does a good job of providing such annotations, particularly necessary for the final scene, which contains a good deal of nuance that is lost if you don't know the background (and what the Latin means that Peter and Harriet speak in it). For me, it was a bit too much inside its milieu, like the earlier Murder Must Advertise with advertising and The Nine Tailors with campanology, awash in jargon that someone from outside that milieu would just find incomprehensible, even though it was never key to following the plot. Like both of those books and The Five Red Herrings, it also had a few too many minor characters who weren't adequately distinguished from one another and were hard to keep straight, in the absence of a dramatis personae page giving both their name and their role or occupation; this was especially the case in Gaudy Night, since sometimes a character would be referred to as "the Dean" or "the Warden" or "the Bursar" and sometimes by their name. These two factors (the overabundance of jargon and the large and inadequately distinguishable chorus) kept it out of the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list, despite the fact that it has exactly the kind of depth and reflection on the human condition that would normally put it there; it sits in Silver, with works that are solid but not brilliant, because the way in which it's brilliant wasn't particularly accessible to me and, therefore, not as enjoyable as it might have been. It's a failing in me as much as in the book.

I was also highly annoyed to be teased not once but twice with the possibility of Miss Climpson, my favourite character from the series, becoming involved, only to have her turn out to be unavailable to assist and so never seen on the page. (I would read the juice out of a book in which Miss Climpson and Bunter, my second-favourite character, team up to rescue Lord Peter, or to do anything else, for that matter.)

The Hodders edition I read shows telltale signs of having been set using a scan and OCR and then not proofread adequately; there are double commas, missing commas, inserted commas, commas that should be stops and vice versa, and typos (increasing towards the end, which suggests a rushed deadline), including several words that a simple spellcheck would have caught. A typical sloppy Hodders job. Get a different edition if you can manage it.

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