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Read A Traitor To Memory (2002)

A Traitor to Memory (2002)

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Rating
3.94 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0553582364 (ISBN13: 9780553582369)
Language
English
Publisher
bantam

A Traitor To Memory (2002) - Plot & Excerpts

Eleventh in the Inspector Lynley mystery series based in London at Scotland Yard and revolving around policemen. My Take This is a gawd awful depressing story but an essential read if you prefer to follow your characters chronologically. There is so much in here that you need to know. I think.I had a hard time reading this story. It was well-written [I do have a few quibbles about the timeline George followed, see below]; but, its topic was so incredibly tragic. Such a waste. Such an argument for having issues out in the open. We think the story is about Gideon Davies, a brilliant violinist who suddenly freaks out. In truth, the underlying story is about Richard Davies, his father. The desperate need that Gideon's father has to prove his worth to his father, the man who adopted him. So many lives destroyed because of one man's expectations of another. Although the initial impetus is Gideon's inability to play, George uses the topical conflict between Gideon and his father to fuel Gideon's hunt to restore his memories of the crucial night when everything changed for all who lived or worked in the house of Gideon's childhood as well as to demonstrate the "stage mother" that Richard is. Flashbacks are the memories reawakening and providing us with the backstory; it also provides the clues that tell us which character was the initial murderer while the foreshadowing George includes very subtly prepares us for the end. In some ways, Gideon's journey back in time provides him with a realization as to his self-absorption even though he is incapable of relating it to Libby's observations.George splits the story in both perspective and how she presents the flashbacks. I don't object to flashbacks, but it is frustrating when the past itself is broken up into so many different times; it's like she cut the chapters up, threw 'em in the air, and then reassembled the manuscript according to how it ended up on the floor. We read the events of November 20th in a number of different places and then all of a sudden the next chapter is on November 16.So many questions, so much unhappiness. The majority of the story is Gideon's current-day struggle. In between, we get bits and pieces of the regular cast of characters until we get a third of the way through the story when they begin to come into their own again. The only positive in the entire story is Lady Helen. I feel rather desperate to move on to A Place of Hiding to discover what has happened to Webberly. The Story The Archduke is Gideon Davies' Achilles heel and he freaks out at a concert at which he is to play it. In his struggles to find out why he froze and can no longer play his violin, he unearths a 20-year-old family history of repression surrounding the murder of a two-year-old sister he didn't remember. A mother he forgot. An entire family and staff blanked out.Today, we find DCI Eric Leach in charge of the brutal hit-and-run of a middle-aged woman. When he learns the identity of the victim, he quickly alerts his old partner, Webberly. Leach has remembered a past indiscretion of Webberly's, and, luckily for most of the people involved, Webberly assigns Detective Inspector Lynley and Detective Constables Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata to help DCI Leach with this hit-and-run which quickly appears to have a connection to more hit-and-runs, which are all tying back to that 20-year-old murder. It seems obvious that the nanny convicted of the murderer must be behind their deaths as she was recently released from prison. The Characters DI Thomas Lynley and DCs Havers and Nkata are working as a team here. Lady Helen is Tommy's wife with an interesting condition and we get a bit of Deborah and Simon St. James. DCI Eric Leach is in charge of the initial hit-and-run. When he learns the identity of the victim, he quickly alerts his old partner, Webberly. Leach has his own home drama with his about-to-be ex-wife, Bridget, and his daughter, Esmé. Detective Superintendent Malcolm Webberly and his wife, Frances, are celebrating their 25th anniversary. Probably the high point of the story as it goes decidedly downhill from here. Just ask their daughter, Miranda. Assistant Commissioner David Hillier and Lady Hillier are related through the sisters; Hillier is an ass but he seems to appreciate Webberly. Gideon Davies is a world-renowned violinist. A child prodigy. Richard Davies is the adopted son of Jack Davies and Gideon's father. Eager for his father's approval, Richard sacrifices everything and everyone to Gideon's future. All for the sake of his whacked-out dad. Eugenie Davies ran out on her husband and son shortly after the death of their daughter Sonia and has been paying penance ever since. Sister Cecelia is a Catholic nun to whom Eugenie turned for comfort. J. W. Pitchley, a.k.a., James Pitchford, a.k.a., James the Lodger, a.k.a., Jimmy Pytches, the poor sod. His only crime? Reinvention. Jill Foster is the very pregnant, current fiancée of Richard Davies. Ralphael Robson is Gideon's musical instructor and paid companion; a part of Gideon's life since childhood and with his own secrets to hide. Sarah-Jane Beckett was Gideon's teacher with her own bone to grind. Liberty "Libby" Neale is an American struggling to escape her marriage to a drug-dealing jerk while trying to help Gideon through his frustrations.Yasmin Edwards and her son, Daniel, are currently living with Katja Wolff, the nanny who spent 20 years behind bars for Sonia's murder. Yasmin and Katja met in prison where both learned not to trust the law.Dr. Rose is the psychiatrist whom Gideon sees as a last resort and whom Richard insists is a waste of time. Yeah, and we find out the real reason he hates her! I feel so sorry for Major Ted Wiley; I do hope that Havers or Lynley clue him in at the end.Hadiyyah and her father, Azhar, don't appear at all. The Cover The cover is as dark as the story with its dark, paving-stoned, wide walkway with a dark figure hiding behind a huge, black umbrella as he trundles down the hill, the only light coming from the flight of stairs behind him.The title is too, too accurate.

Elizabeth George has written some terrific books in the Inspector Lynley series, but this isn't one of them. The book alternates between long, first-person passages by a protagonist named Gideon Davies, who is writing his thoughts and memories to his therapist, and third-person passages telling of the efforts of others, including Thomas Lynley, Barbara Havers, and Winston Nkata, to solve the murders of people related in some way to Gideon, as well telling of other events and people in Gideon's life. I appreciate the novelist's attempt to try a new format, but this one doesn't work. Good therapy is a boon to humankind, but no one should have to read the hour-by-hour account of someone else's therapy. The blow-by-blow, sometimes redundant accounts of Gideon's struggle to remember and analyze his life are much too long. He and most of the people related to his life are not worth spending so much time with. And by now, the reader of the series is more interested in the continuing characters than in the others around whom the mystery revolves, especially when (a) the non-continuing characters are not well-drawn--what we know about them revolves around the same shallow redundancies, (b) the telling of the mystery is chronologically mixed up without enough signposts to readers to help us orient ourselves--the date in a chapter heading isn't enough, and (c) the transitions where events are occurring more-or-less chronologically, but to different people, are difficult to follow. (Whatever happened to three centered asterisks to mark a minor, not-new-chapter-worthy transition?) To make things more difficult, my Nook edition would change font sizes between the first-person and third-person passages, distracting from the story. I kept waiting (for 700+ pages) for George to pull it all together and explain why the reader had to slog through this painful tale to reap the few gems in the muck, but she never did. The resolution of a 20-year-old murder that relates to the current investigations was one that I saw coming the moment it was described early in the book, but I thought surely the author would come up with something else less obvious than my glib foreshadowing--she didn't. The identity of the present-day murderer--which I didn't quite trust as truth after every red herring had been squeezed desert-dry--happened too fast after all the intricacies of the long tale of Gideon's life and the present-day investigation. The ending--in which two characters suddenly begin behaving in rather uncharacteristic fashion--is most unsatisfactory. I hope George returns to form in the next book in the series.

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

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