First and most controversial (most unlikeable really!) of all: Miss Mary Russell, aged fifteen, future wife to Sherlock Holmes (at least in the imagination of Laurie R. King, and in the imagination of her thousands of followers); brilliant with a “mind like a diamond” as the Great Detective himself would describe her; tall, blonde, and beautiful; a highly strong and accurate throwing arm; with myopic eyes nonetheless well-trained in the Science of Deduction, and a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of Judaism, theology, chemistry, and the various marks and signs that will distinguish individuals of various occupations across the countryside. She speaks manifold languages and can easily learn new ones, and studies in Oxford, where she is reading (if I remember correctly) both theology and chemistry. Her greatest accomplishment of all, nonetheless, may be to have won the heart of the Beekeeper himself; at the tender age of fifteen and with an IQ that’s off the charts, she was in the perfect position to be groomed, and later to be fallen in love with, a la Professor Higgins with his guttersnipe. She’s caustic, generally irritable, and much too aware of her intellectual superiority.
Second, perhaps less prestigious but no less astute: enter Blue van Meer of Special Topics in Calamity Physics fame, daughter of Gareth van Meer, all-around genius, fond of quoting and annotating. It’s hard to describe her as being particularly interested in anything, when she seems to be fascinated by all things and to know, well, pretty much everything. In her teens she manages to uncover the existence of a secret society, long thought to be a myth; solve the murder of her teacher, Hannah Schneider (or at least I think she did solve it); and give every single reader of Marisha Pessl’s debut novel a headache, given her penchant for writing stupid, awkward-sounding metaphors and inserting the title, author, publisher and year of random books and publications into the text of the story.
Third, and most recently: Flavia de Luce, third daughter of Colonel de Luce of the once-grand Buckshaw manor; eleven years old (it is 1950), accomplished and extensively-read chemistry student, now the star of two mysteries by Alan Bradley. Unfortunately for Mary Russell and Blue van Meer—and I say this as one of Laurie R. King’s most dedicated fans, and as someone who’s written Mary Russell fanfiction—Flavia de Luce is the best of them all, the most likeable, the most genuine, the most believable.
All three are: geniuses, motherless, moneyed, unaccountably clever, and with a complicated relationship with their fathers. Best of all, all of them, at very young ages, can compete with the very best minds of their time, and possess the guts and drive to see a mystery to its conclusion. But for me, Flavia de Luce, heroine and narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, is just the most entrancing of them all, and the most sympathetic. Of course no eleven year old can be that precocious, but given that the other two have leveled the playing field (ie if you can suspend disbelief for Mary Russell or Blue van Meer, you can do the same for Flavia), perhaps we can leave that criticism aside.
What to say about Flavia? Where the other two are, quite frankly, Mary Sues, Flavia is nowhere near one; in fact in all things except her intelligence, she is just like any other eleven year old, curious and energetic and sometimes acerbic. Despite herself she bursts into tears when afraid, and despite her best efforts she still would like even the scraps of affection from her distant father. She argues with her sisters Daphne and Ophelia (Daffy and Feely for short) and plays the nastiest tricks on them; she rides a bicycle and yodels songs with childlike glee; she gets dirty often enough to earn a reputation for being generally grotty (as she says to Ophelia in the opening pages, “If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene isn’t up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes”); she’s self-sufficient like most neglected children learn to be, and finds her fun in strange places, like in the abandoned chemistry laboratory (belonging to an old de Luce) or with the gardener, Dogger.
She’s named her bicycle Gladys and is conducting an experiment on her sister Ophelia, into whose lipstick Flavia has mixed a quantity of poison ivy. Her knowledge is by no means encyclopedic—all she knows is the stuff in the old textbooks upstairs; she knows bugger-all about stamps (her Father’s passion and the theme of the book), cooking, most literature, and music. She’s not at all a smooth operator—more than once she’s interrupted by authority while she tracks down clues, even being captured by the police while she’s trespassing. She’s no Mary Sue, and I hate to confess this, but she’s just lovely.
All the while, as I was finishing the book—and it’s a terribly quick read, much too quick really!—I kept thinking, I have to write this down, or what a beautiful description (Marisha Pessl’s clumsy metaphors suddenly seem like so much rubbish). I kept my book dog-eared and kept marked some gems like this one:
Leaving Gladys to graze in a bicycle stand that was more than half-full of official-looking black Raleighs, I went up the worn steps and in the front door.
Leaving Gladys! The bicycle! To graze, like you would a horse! Brilliant, and so simple and commonplace, I likely wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t taken a liking to the bicycle, that faithful companion.
I’m so excited to find the next book—and excited to think that the book’s Inspector (because every British detective novel has to have one, whether or not he actually does any detectorin’), Inspector Hewitt, might appear again, the one true audience to Flavia’s brilliance, courage, and adorably ham-handed way of sleuthing. It struck me, as the book was winding down, that I might like to read a story where Flavia grows into a young lady that, say, an inspector might come to love, to court and to marry; two sentences later Hewitt throws out an anecdote about his wife, the implausibly-named Antigone. Oh, well! I’m sure that even without a romantic counterpart, Flavia will keep me glued to the next book, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag.
As is repeated so often throughout the book… Vale!
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