Leave the Grave Green, Etched City

This shabbat I read Deborah Crombie's third book, Leave the Grave Green, and it got me thinking about what separates a competent mystery from a really engaging one. Not that the musing went anywhere... Leave the Grave Green should by all rights have been an excellent novel; the characters are richly drawn, the solution to the mystery isn't annoying, and the setting is well-done.

And yet, something was missing. Maybe it's the chemistry between the two main characters, which I've never quite bought. Maybe it's the way she seems to be reaching for a deep thematic resonance between the prologue and the main events of the story, a resonance that just never really develops. The book starts with an accidental drowning in a river, then jumps forward 20 years to another drowning in a river, but this time it was murder. But, other than the bald fact that we know that the first one happened, its dramatic possibilities are never really exploited -- it could just as easily have been a death by fire or a snakebite. In some ways, it was worse than not having the prologue at all, because then I wouldn't have been waiting for an emotional payoff that never comes.

I also read Bishop's The Etched City. Bishop is writing in the same vein as Jeff Vandermeer in City of Saints and Madmen, about a decadent city where strange and nasty things happen, and where the characters are as likely to be anti-heroes as not. I think Vandermeer is more successful, though, for two reasons. One is that the world of Ambergris is accessed through short stories, not one monolithic novel, which means that the characters don't have time to pall on us.

Secondly, Vandermeer is more audacious. His inexplicable events are on a grand scale -- a whole city disappears, for example. There's a hint that there might be an explanation, but there's also a feeling that strange things just happen. In The Etched City, unexplained things happen, but they're on a smaller scale, so they don't have a sense of cosmic significance. So readers end upwondering what those events mean -- is Bishop trying to point to deeper forces or not?

Overall, it's still a very good book, with a sense of a deep world which we're just catching glimpses of, and Bishop has a flair for using odd words that adds to the feeling of a decadent civilization. It's probably a pity that I read it so close to City of Saints and Madmen -- it might have seemed better if I'd read it at some other time.