Book review: The Madness of Crowds, by Louise Penny

The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

*****Spoilers*****


I love Penny's fictional village of Three Pines, tucked in a valley in the woods somewhere between Montreal, Quebec and the US border. I love her characters, from Chief Inspector Gamache to Ruth the irascible poet laureate to all the other denizens of Three Pines and Gamache's fellow LEOs. What I don't love is how socio-political topics are becoming more and more prominent in her stories. Although not unexpetcted, it's getting to be a bit much.

It's not like she hasn't telegraphed this tendency. Since the first novels in this series, I've been a bit dubious about her giving Gamache an aversion to firearms: a veteran LEO, who's very capable of using a weapon...but won't carry one unless he has to (how does one determine that unless you're pre-cognizant). In this installment even Jean Guy decides not to pull the trigger in the story's climax, because, per the author, of "love". He feels he'd be a terrible father if he were capable of taking a shot at a person threatening another person with a shotgun. I think a man incabable of lethally defending an innocent person is not a "good man". What if it were his child being threatened? If he can't step up, he's useless.

The most onerous facet of this novel is the fantasy "post Covid" world she has constructed. Obviously this novel was written during the worst of the "pandemic", and Penny has drunk all of the government and media Kool-Aid regarding this crime against humanity. This novel takes place a few months "after the pandemic". The vaccines have solved the crisis, there is no more Covid, and everything is back to normal. Yay! Needless to say, this story will not age well in coming months and years. Firstly, things are NOT back to "normal" anywhere. Depending on your location in the world, you may have a free and open society again, or you may be facing restricted travel and economic ruin if you don't have a "vax passport". There are people, as I write this, who are so traumatized by all the fear porn from the government and their media lackeys, that the mere sight of an unmasked person makes them flinch. Secondly, as we deal with increasing cases of vaccine injury and death, coupled with the monumental ineffectiveness of the experimental mRNA drugs (they are not vaccines), this novel, unlike her others in the series, won't be "evergreen". 

Also "post covid" in this novel is a crackpot academic (reduntant?) who has posited that, post covid, the world's resources are limited and that forced euthanasia is the answer. What the actual heck? I have no problem with writing a character like that, but having half of Canada think she's right?! Sorry, not plausible. There is never a reasonable presentation of this character's arguments in the novel, such that a moral, reasonable human being would go along with her proposal. It's literally absurd.

Here's hoping the next novel sticks to a solid murder mystery and leaves the wacky sociopolitical fantasy out.

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