Good heavens, it was hard going. The action focuses on a fictional women’s college based on Somerville, the author’s alma mater, located somewhere off Jowett’s Walk where the modern Balliol housing now stands; and many of the characters, and suspects in the crime, are the college’s academic staff, a parade of virtually-indistinguishable Misses This or That, occasionally and even more confusingly referred to by their title instead of their name. They engage in bouts of verbal sparring of the kind I thought I might encounter myself in Oxford, but never did: perhaps such displays of intellectual prowess had died out long before I arrived, around the time fluency in Latin stopped being an entry exam requirement.
And at the heart of that is Lord Peter Wimsey, quite the
most loathsomely annoying character I have ever read presented as a hero. Any
such person you might meet in real life, whose every other sentence is a
recondite quotation and who politely refrains from making his intellectual
superiority over everyone else around them too apparent except obliquely, would
be an individual you would quickly learn to avoid. The romance between Wimsey
and Harriet Vane is part of the story, and you cannot help feeling she has been
absolutely correct to repel his matrimonial suggestions for five years and
should very much carry on doing so. At one point Harriet has discovered that
the antique chess pieces he has bought for her from an Oxford antiques shop
have been violently smashed by the unknown miscreant causing havoc to the
College’s wellbeing. One pawn has survived:
“My dear girl [counsels Wimsey], don’t cry about it. What the hell does it matter?”
“I loved them”, said Harriet, “and you gave them to me.”
He shook
his head.
“It’s a
pity it’s that way round. ‘You gave them to me, and I loved them’ is all right,
but ‘I loved them and you gave them to me’ is irreparable …”
A quotation, with grim inevitability, follows. At this
point, were I Miss Vane, the antiquity and belovedness of the chess-set
notwithstanding, I would have found a use for that surviving pawn that His
Lordship might have been surprised by.
Allied to the maddening quality of Peter Wimsey is the tendency
of this novel – as so many of the mid-twentieth century – to drew conclusions about its
characters from their physical appearance. Harriet notes that Lord Peter’s
nephew, a student at Christ Church who falls a bit in love with her, has
similar features to Peter’s but ‘with a certain weakness about the jaw’. Of
course the dashing aristocratic detective is a master at this dubious neo-phrenological analysis, but everyone in
the book whose inner thoughts we know does it, and it’s a feature you simply cannot
imagine emerging in fiction now. How did it come to an end?
This all adds up to a high price for a spot of Oxford
romanticism. But as the narrative builds towards the climactic unmasking of the
villain, there is a certain cathartic violence which culminates in the speech
that villain gives to the assembled members of the College, an attack on both
academic culture and first-wave feminism so daring, violent, and
all-encompassing, that it almost justifies the time you have spent reading so
far: regardless of whether you agree with the character in question, which
Sayers certainly does not. Whether I will in fact pass Gaudy Night on as
planned having experienced it, I am not decided!
[The picture shows 'the first cheap edition' of 1936, a copy of which I purchased at a very modest price. The presence of the original dust jacket would have raised it to £200 or more.]
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