What do You think about A Traitor To Memory (2002)?
I do enjoy Elizabeth George's prose, and this installment in her Lynley/Havers series had an unusually rich cast of secondary characters, compassionately evoked. The whodunit kept me happily, breathlessly speculating for most of the novel... but I found that its resolution felt incomplete and unsatisfying. Maybe that's just my craving for order and method. Barbara Havers (wearer of slogan t-shirts, consumer of chocolate croissants, relentless pursuer of justice) continues to be delightful, and the more visible Lynley's flaws become, the more compelling I find him as a character.
—Lucy Barnhouse
I think ‘A Traitor to Memory’ was an interesting book to read. It dissects a dysfunctional family which rotates around two human suns made important by family dynamics, a son and an obsessive father. First is the musical prodigy, Gideon Davies, who is a minor sensation in classical music circles, a favored child and now adult whose career everyone in the Davies’ world must support. The father, Richard Davies, forces the entire family into a supplementary role behind Gideon’s talent in every way. Every capable adult in the house lives there only to support Gideon financially and emotionally in his (actually, mostly his father’s) quest for Gideon to be a violin virtuoso. Raphael Robson, a music instructor, is made to give up his apartment and he moves into the family house in order to instruct the tot when he shows (according to family legend) musical interest. Eugenie Davies must work at two jobs despite being the mother of two children, one being the ‘prodigy’, but the other being a handicapped girl, Sonia, with tremendous medical issues and fragility. An unqualified nanny, eastern Germany refugee Katja Wolff, is given an upstairs room to be available for Sonia’s care. A teacher, Sarah-Jane Beckett, is hired as an in-house governess to tutor Gideon when it becomes apparent going to a school is taking away too much of Gideon’s time from practice. Various lodgers are installed at different times in another available bedroom for their rent money. The crowded house also includes Jack Davies and his wife, grandparents to the prodigy and Richard’s parents. Jack is a damaged war hero, suffering from PTSD. He cannot tolerate anyone with disabilities, particularly Sonia, and he constantly berates Richard for her existence while she lived. Early in the book, Gideon, now a young adult, is suffering from an emotional crisis. During a concert, he has forgotten how to play music. He walks off the stage after three minutes of humiliation. The family sends him to a psychiatrist, who urges him to begin a journal. As he writes down his thoughts, it becomes clear to him he has trouble remembering parts of his childhood. He realizes that somehow he has completely forgotten he had a sister. He vaguely remembers, eventually, Sonia drowned, and that is why his mother Eugenia left Richard to begin another life without ever contacting him again. Also, inexplicably to himself, he asks an uneducated delivery girl, Libby Neale, who has expressed dissatisfaction with her estranged husband and her living arrangements, to move into a downstairs flat in his house. They have almost nothing in common, but soon Libby is imagining she is needed by Gideon to fulfill him. Gideon is struggling with his career and his family and his memory, so he has reached out to Libby for companionship, but he is in no shape for a girlfriend. Then, Eugenia is murdered. Constable Barbara Havers and his lordship, Thomas Lynley, are on it, and gentle reader, so are we.Meanwhile, Detective Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Havers and Lynley’s boss, and his wife Francis and their daughter Miranda, are having some major issues of their own. Francis has severe agoraphobia. Webberly has moved on with his job and his life, but he loyally comes home to Francis despite her inability to leave the house, which has crippled their marriage as well as her life. Lynley and Havers wonder at Webberly’s intense interest in Eugenia’s murder - until Lynley discovers love letters from Webberly in Eugenia’s dresser.This is a MASSIVE murder mystery, heavy with character analysis as much as with red herrings. However, I floundered about, a bit disconcerted, when the book’s construction was revealed to be on two timelines which did not coincide. The timeline difference was not made conceptionally clear that that is what is happening until very late in the book when one of the timelines was discussing identifiable events which had occurred a LOT earlier. It seemed like a very rough welding of story progression. I also found the essential plot events too disparate and separated without linkage for too long. If you put this story off too long between readings, it would have been hard to keep up. All in all, I was unhappy with the book’s architecture.I read other reviews, and as usual, some were discomfited by the changing points of view. Usually, I have no sympathy or understanding with this complaint, and it isn’t the first time I have seen people upset with this, to me, normal process available to an author in writing a book. However, in this particular story, since the soldering of scenes was poor, IMHO, the changing viewpoints added to my confusion occasionally. The development of motivation and the impact of childhood, education, and family on character viewpoint was of the usual high-quality perspicacity I expect from this author. George explored each character from behind their eyes, and I loved it. This has always been my favorite aspect of George’s books, so while I’m a bit unhappy about how the book was put together, the tone-perfect explorations of character keep me a fan.
—aPriL does feral sometimes
The writing is really good, as I've come to expect from George, but this is not one of my favorites in this series. The characterizations were as well done as usual, although I was a little disappointed that the lady in the opening chapter, a morbidly obese anorgasmic sex therapist, was not a main character. I didn't care much about the characters that were the focus of the mystery (I got thoroughly sick of Gideon's diary) and the denouement was less satisfying than usual. The author continues to "cheat" by letting you inside the mind of the killer without revealing his or her guilt.We spend relatively little time with the personal lives of Lynley and Havers, but there's some nice stuff with Nkata. The author continues with her terribly cynical view of marriage, profiling more miserable couples.
—Jamie
