Kingdom of the Blind

By Louise Penny, 2018

Some things about this novel are well done, but if Louise Penny were not someone whose writing is recommended by people I respect, I might not have read further than the first chapter.

To give Penny her due, this is a well crafted, suspenseful novel that holds a reader’s interest and moves propulsively from one plot point to another. New events and storylines introduce different angles that engage a reader’s intrigue. The details of the police procedures seem plausible. And Penny doesn’t gloss over the psychological impacts of a life trying to understand murders and crime. (If anything, she overdoes the psychology, musing on the implications of each line of dialogue. In a Henry James novel, I like this slow-paced, considered story-telling, but it does slow down the suspense of a story driven by events.)

The detailed description of rural Quebec life in the depths of winter is engaging. The cold, the challenges of driving in snow, the camaraderie of the village friends are nice details. I might have been aware of these lifestyle details in a vague sense, but Penny shows it in a way that goes beyond the romanticized postcard view. She makes sure that, while admiring the beauty and the human warmth, a reader also sees how it can be miserable and life-threatening.

But in spite of Penny’s strengths, I found the writing annoying and contrived. Some things I didn’t like: Penny’s portentous language seems intended to set a suspenseful tone but it becomes tiresome. The repeated structure of half-sentences feels like an overworked device to create a fast-moving pace, a beginner technique from a suspense-writing class. The frequent authorial asides don’t add to the characters or the plot; they often seem obvious and unnecessary. Many of the characters are clumsy stereotypes (the prickly poet, the charming gay couple, the understanding partner), with no depth. And throwing in the odd French expression to remind us that we are in Quebec feels patronizing rather than authentic.

Some of the language I found extreme and oversimplified. The repeated references to fentanyl as a gateway to hellish and fatal existence, while grounded in reality, doesn’t reflect the fact that the fatal issue is the contamination of the drug, not the drug use itself. It plays into drug-war rhetoric to describe fentanyl as a categorical evil, as Penny does here. And her formulaic references to “junkies, trannies and whores” doesn’t help when it reduces drug users to empty stereotypes. This language makes Penny sound like a moralistic anti-drug preacher.

Also, I did find both of the storylines a bit ridiculous. The set up of the mysterious will seems so implausible that I kept asking myself why these supposedly rational people would go along with it. The second storyline of the drugs on the street and the strategy to recover them seem equally implausible. While I’m sure there is a lot of backbiting and bureaucracy in the Quebec police forces, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t work to recover the drugs if the threat were as serious as Penny describes it.

With all of this, the tidy wrap up feels constructed and contrived. The bad guys are taken out, society is safe, warm feelings return to the village. Ho hum.

I know that many people like Penny’s writing, and I see from other comments that this may not be her best writing. My response to the book is, of course, idiosyncratic. If I had to find a book to read in an airport with a tiny selection, I might well pick up another of her novels, but she is not to my taste, and I won’t be searching for another.