I must admit that this book was nothing like I imagined it would be. From the front cover (yes, I know don’t judge etc etc) I assumed that it would be a historical fiction but instead found that it was a detective story, and a not terribly satisfying one at that.
We meet the victim in the opening pages of the novel as a young woman’s body is being examined in the presence of the Inspector (who is never named) who, steeped in the methodology of crime investigation and influenced by the ideas of psychoanalysis swirling around early 20th century Vienna, calls in his wife, the Hungarian artist Erszébet to make a painting of the 18 year old Dora’s body in the morgue for later reference. Erszébet and her young friend, British governess Wally, embark on their own investigation, separate from and deliberately kept from the Inspector. The two investigations run in parallel, the Inspector’s being dominated by his theories of investigation and the role of the investigator, and Erszébet’s drawing on Hungarian folk tales and tropes. The ending seems to go off on a frolic of its own, straining credulity and it seemed to be an abrupt way of bringing the story to the end.
The book is set in Vienna in 1910 and the book has a detailed map at the start of the book. The text makes specific reference to particular places in Vienna, which can be seen on the map, although without an index, locating the buildings and parks was rather tedious, and I eventually realized that locations were rather incidental to the plot. Despite the care with which Shields has delineated the city, the Vienna location itself does not play an important role in the plot, unlike for example Patrick Süskind’s Perfume. There are many details in the book about figs, folklore and photography, and I began to suspect that the author was unable to let go of the research she had undertaken, and was going to put it in the book regardless of whether it actually added anything.
It was only when reading the notes that came along with the book (it was a bookgroup choice) that I realized the resonances between the victim Dora, and Sigmund Freud’s patient, Dora, on whom he based much of his theory of psychoanalysis. This clever resonance was clearly intended by the author, and yet she left it implicit in what is otherwise a very didactic book.
The relationship between the Inspector and Erszébet is a complex one, and I was pleased that she didn’t overlay the young Wally’s infatuation with Erszébet with a lot of anachronistic gender ideology. She had a light touch here, which could have been highlighted by a more overt interweaving of Freud’s theories, and their destabilizing of ‘reality’ and relationships.
The book was only 352 pages in length, but it felt much longer than that. All in all, not a particularly satisfying read.
My rating: 6/10
Sourced from: a former CAE bookgroup book. To liquidate their stock, they sent boxes of books to the disbanding bookgroups and we’re reading our way through them.
Read because: a bookgroup read.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 