The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

[sawyl]

A couple of weeks ago I decided to read Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie on the strength of R's recommendation. It was a bit of risk — had I hated it, it might have marked the end of a beautiful friendship — but in the end my gamble more than paid off: it was exactly what I needed, I loved it to bits, and promptly read my way through all six sequels.

Set in the 1950s in the village of Bishop's Lacey, it follows young and extremely precocious narrator, Flavia de Luce, as she tries to discover who left a corpse lying in the shrubbery of Buckshaw, the de Luces' decaying stately home. At 11, Flavia is the youngest of three sisters. Her mother, Harriet, died in a mountaineering accident when Flavia was a year old. Her father, damaged by his wife's death and his war service, has retreated from the world into an obsession with stamps. The household is completed by Mrs Mullet, their gossiping daily whose food is a byword for inedibility, and by Dogger, the Colonel's Man, whose abilities and knowledge wax and wane with the post-tramatic stress that has left him with fragmented memories of his life before the war and a tendency to take excursions from reality.

With no parental figures around — the Colonel is present in body but absent in spirit — the de Luce sisters have been forced to make their own way in the world. Flavia, fuelled by the discover of her great uncle Tarquin's well-appointed laboratory, has become a brilliant chemist with a special interest in poisons; her 13 year-old sister Daphne, determined to become a writer, is never without a book; while 17 year-old Ophelia, vain and shallow, is a particularly accomplished musician. Needless to say, the sisters do not exactly get on. The book opens with Flavia bound, gagged, and locked in a cupboard, while at other points Feely and Daffy do their best to undermine their sister's confidence by telling her that she's a changeling and that her arrival was the cause of their mother's disappearance.

Into this happy family comes an interloper, a tall stranger with red hair, whom Flavia promptly finds dying in the garden. Realising that there is no way Inspector Hewitt will solve the case without her help, Flavia hops onto her trusty bicycle — a BSA Keep Fit called Gladys — and starts digging into the archives of the local newspaper in order to uncover the meaning of the dead man's last words. Soon she realises that the man is directly connected to a damaging event in the history of Greyminister School, her father's alma mater, which is in turn connected with lives of number of villages in Bishop's Lacey.

As mentioned, I adored the The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. I liked the idyllic version of the 1950s that Bradley conjures up, although it's not yet clear to me whether the idealism is Bradley's or whether Flavia's limited experience of life means that she simply doesn't see the nastier bits of life. The crime plot, which is cozy in the sense that you know that Flavia will survive despite the occasional dark moment along the way, works well and from the little nods to Christie, Marsh, and Tey, Bradley clearly knows his story's antecedents and isn't afraid to let them show through.

Flavia's narrative voice is particularly well done. She alternates between being very knowing and precocious, especially when it comes to chemistry, and moments where, when thwarted or offended by someone, she immediately decide to poison them although events usually prevent her from carrying out her scheme. As the story unfolds there are suggestions that Flavia's account of events can't entirely be taken at face value; not because she distorts the facts but rather because her emotional immaturity means that she doesn't always ascribe the right motives to the behaviours of those around her.

But what I particularly liked about the story and what drove me on to the sequences was the dysfunctional de Luces and their difficult but affectionate relationships. Because for all that Flavia and her don't often get along, it's very clear that they really do care for one another and, it's heavily implied, that Feely and Daffy make have good reasons for behaving as they do. There's the difficult paternal relationship between Flavia and her father, who clearly sees so many echoes of his late wife in his daughter that he finds it almost impossible to deal with her, and her surrogate parental relationship with Dogger who is always there when she needs him and who is always there for him when he needs her.

Utterly delightful stuff.