There is fine writing here – fine writing , one may even say, of the sort which one sometimes rightly distrusts in novels; it can so easily become self-indulgent and ornamental, a peacock display, distracting from the matter, the how it is done seeming to matters more than what is being done. A writer of Barry’s gifts walks this tightrope. He keeps his balance beautifully, though. He is sometimes leisurely and may seem at risk of being self-indulgent. There’s a longish scene early on in which Tom goes to the local store, suddenly determined to give his shabby little flat a thorough cleaning. It’s amusing, lightly written, may even have you wondering why it’s there, yet you come to see it’s necessary. You have to listen for the tune echoing beyond his words. There is always music in the background of his writing.
Once again, Jane Harper triumphs with an intelligent, beautifully crafted crime novel, one that is more of a slow-burn mystery than a high-octane thriller, and all the better for it.
The result is an empathetic, vividly realised novel about motherhood and mental illness which pays thoughtful attention to the kinds of small details that can ground us when the larger stuff of life becomes fraught.
By the time revolutionaries took over the infamous French prison four years later, François, better known as the Marquis de Sade, was imprisoned at a nearby mental hospital, but the pages he’d filled — stretching 40 feet when the paper was stitched together — remained behind. A citizen from Provence found the writing, a violently pornographic novel titled “120 Days of Sodom,” hidden at the Bastille and removed it, sparking an overlapping sequence of some of the most notable controversies and scandals in literary history.
“The Curse of the Marquis de Sade,” Joel Warner’s book on the surrounding dramas, is equal parts biography, history and true crime. It tracks not just the story of the novel and its notorious writer but the role it played in a massive French Ponzi scheme.