Nothing Rising out of These Ashes
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Author: Peter Bowen
Title: Ash Child Genre: mystery It can be an unnerving experience to show up late for a party. The room is packed with people, half of them total strangers, and a swirl of strange voices buffets you with snippets of unfamiliar conversation about subjects beyond your ken. Given sufficient extroversion and a friendly face or two, you can usually insinuate yourself into the flow and have a good time, but what happens if neither is available? More often than not, you’d probably slink away, your departure barely making a ripple on the surface of the merriment. I got to Peter Bowen’s party titled Ash Child late, and I’ll be moving on soon… A Season On the Brink An axe-murderer – oh, all right, a hatchet-murderer – is on the loose in the tiny Central Montana community of Toussaint. What’s worse, the Northern Rockies are in the midst of the worst fire season in almost a century, and this killer is a pyromaniac who sets fires to hide his crimes. The first to die is old Maddy Collins, an octogenarian widow who’d never harmed a soul. Locals Gabriel Du Pré and Madelaine Placquemine take on the case, bringing completely different styles to their investigations. Both are of the Métis – with mixed French-Canadian and Native American blood – but while Du Pré follows a European methodology, Madelaine chooses a mystical, shamanist approach to her search for answers. The trail leads first to a delinquent teenager, and then to a running buddy just released from the regional correctional facility. It detours through a methamphetamine lab built by a down-on-their-luck ranching family, and finally peters out on the slopes of the Wolf Mountains, where the fires have begun to ravage the tinder-dry forests. As Gabriel sifts through the ashes for clues, Madelaine follows the ancient shaman Benetsee on a quest for answers in the spirit world. Her answer is a name: Ash Child. As windblown fires ravage the Wolfs, Du Pré and Madelaine make a last-ditch effort to save their forests and bring the Ash Child to justice. Late to the Party It’s not surprising that the party metaphor came to me: the culture and even more the language of the Métis remind me of the people who apparently invented the concept of partying, the Cajuns of southern Louisiana. In fact, were it not for reference to mountains and a dry climate, this book could easily be set in Dave Robicheaux’s haunts among the Atchafalaya Basin’s swampland. The singsong cadence and strange tenses of the Cajun argot are echoed in the dialog of Du Pré and his neighbors, even 2000 miles from Mulate’s Dance Hall in Breaux Bridge. It’s not a celebration, though, it’s the sensation of not knowing anyone and of being completely outside of the action that struck me most as I read. The ninth in a series of Du Pré mystery novels, Ash Child has been written as if the reader were already acquainted with Du Pré and the isolated hamlet of Toussaint, Montana. Unlike Sue Grafton, who has resolutely slogged through a rote introduction to Kinsey Milhone for more than half the letters of the alphabet, Peter Bowen gives the reader absolutely no back story for Du Pré; in fact never even explains the place of the Métis in Montana society (I had to look it up in the dictionary). A reader who hasn’t been following the series from the beginning is left to ponder such questions as, who are Du Pré and Madelaine? How does Du Pré make a living (he drives a “cruiser,” but for whom?) and why is he involved in a murder investigation? Where did that FBI agent Pidgeon come from and who are those people he talks about? How did Susan Klein hurt her legs? Can grownups live entirely on a diet of pink fizzy wine (Cold Duck?) and ditch cocktails (bourbon and soda?)? By induction we learn that Du Pré is a musician of some sort, that he has grown children, that he and Madelaine aren’t married but live together, and that he’s done this before. Frankly, I’d rather have spent the time puzzling out the mystery, instead. Native Tongue It’s impossible to separate the Métis of Toussaint from their odd brand of English. Like the Acadians of southern Louisiana, their speech is sprinkled with mixed tenses and nominative pronouns used reflexively. The Métis accent differs, however, in a paucity of prepositions (they’re replaced by pauses) and an absence of contractions. A writer for one of the blurb-mills called it “richly-nuanced”; to me, the written form looks as though it might be tonal, like Vietnamese or Mandarin: “Let me talk, Madelaine,” said Maria. “She is gone, Minnesota,” said Du Pré. “She is looking for this person kill poor Maddy Collins.” “Oh,” said Maria. “Benetsee tell her to,” said Du Pré. “Oh,” said Maria. “Maybe you help,” said Du Pré. “I tell Madelaine you think she need, my help,” said Maria, laughing. Yes, those odd commas are there in the original. Bowen’s depiction of the Métis and their language is the greatest strength of the book; a glimpse into the culture of a people few knew existed before the series (including me). A Sense of Style Bowen’s writing takes getting used to. Not only are the Métis people of Toussaint undeniably taciturn, Bowen himself has a style that is terse, laconic, bordering on simplistic. Whole pages are filled by skeins of three- and four-word paragraphs, as if Bowen were padding the manuscript at every opportunity. The hardback version is only 214 pages long, and can easily be read in an evening, especially sections like this: She put a piece of paper in front of Du Pré. “77,” it said. “That’s the number of drinks people have bought you,” said Susan. “I doubt you want them all at once.” Du Pré laughed. He got up. Madelaine looked at him. “Non,” she said. “I talk to him,” said Du Pré. Madelaine shook her head. While it's amusing once or twice, this return to Dick and Jane gets old after thirty or forty pages of the same . Overall Ash Child is a simple little mystery, one that basically solves itself – it has too; the character Du Pré seems incapable of finding his own shoes in an otherwise empty closet. It veers into an exploration of methamphetamine’s incursion into rural America, apparently for no other reason than to provide a point source for a fire. Bowen trots out Native American mysticism to aid in the solution, but that’s been done before – and both Tony Hillerman and Rodolfo Anaya did it better. He writes the beauty of the Rockies, but that’s been done before, too – and John McPhee did it better. Then, too, Bowen expends precisous energy on preaching the gospel of James Watt’s “sagebrush rebellion” – that locals are far better equipped to husband the resources of the west than a shadowy “eastern” government personified by the Forest Service and the BLM – when he should have been fleshing out his characters. It’s a tradeoff he truly shouldn’t have made. all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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