5. Touchstone by Laurie R. King (Historical Suspense) 548 p.

I’ve been a fan of Laurie R. King’s writing since the day my mother first put The Beekeeper’s Apprentice into my hands. In late 2002, when it felt like my life was falling apart and I needed something to take my out of myself, it was her newly-released Justice Hall I turned to—making it the first book I ever bought at full price while it was still in hardcover.

No surprise, then, that I’ve been eagerly awaiting her newest book, Touchstone. Unlike all but two of her seventeen previously published works, it’s a standalone novel. Set in April of 1926, almost on the eve of the British General Strike, it makes the most of King’s familiarity with the language and social customs of the time (the eight novels in the Mary Russell series are set in the 1910’s and 20’s, mostly in Britain.) And no one writes historical fiction like Laurie R. King. So it’s understandable that I had very high expectations for this book.

I started Touchstone on Friday, and I have to admit that at first I wasn’t too impressed. King’s books usually suck me in right from the first page, but this time I had trouble getting into the story, which begins with a prologue. I don’t know why, but I have an irrational hatred of prologues. I don’t like reading them, and I almost always feel the story would have been better without them.

Touchstone’s prologue I found especially off-putting, because it’s very emotional, almost melodramatic. Rather than being drawn into the story, I was left standing outside it. I couldn’t engage with the character. The prologue also seems to reveal information about the plot that I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. Even though it later becomes unclear whether that information means what it seems to mean, the passage raises questions, introduces ambiguities; without it, Touchstone would have been a very different experience.

The main narrative begins by introducing the protagonist, Harry Stuyvesant, an agent of the American Bureau of Investigation, who has come to London unofficially to gather evidence against a man he believes is responsible for three bombings in the United States. The city seems unable to think of anything but the upcoming Strike, hampering Stuyvesant’s investigation, but the chance mention of a name leads to a man who may be able to help him.

Major Aldous Carstairs takes Stuyvesant to Cornwall to have him enlist the help of Bennett Grey, who may be able to provide Stuyvesant with an entrée to his suspect’s world. Stuyvesant’s job is to convince Grey to help him—and to overlook the fact that working with Stuyvesant may bring Grey closer to the one man he hates more than any other: Carstairs. It helps that Stuyvesant himself dislikes everything he’s seen of the Major.

(As do I: at the end of the section, King succeeds brilliantly at making Carstairs repellent to me, by having him do something that disgusts me more than anything she could have written. Partly because I have a particular phobia about it, but I think most people would be suitably enraged at Carstairs.)

Stuyvesant may be interested in Grey for who he knows, but Carstairs wants the man for what he can do. Near the end of the war, Grey was blown up by an incendiary bomb that landed at his feet. He survived the experience physically intact, for the most part, but some essential muffling layer that protected him from the world was destroyed, leaving him unable to block out the smallest sounds, the lightest touches, the most subtle smells. And he knows things. He’s not a mind-reader, but he knows things about people he meets that no ordinary person could.

Touchstone is an interesting book for many reasons, one of them being the fact that it is not a story about Grey or his abilities. Harris Stuyvesant is the main character; the story is mainly told from his point of view. Grey is essential to the story, but on the periphery. As are a number of other complex, fully-fleshed characters. One of the things that puts King head and shoulders above so many mystery and suspense writers is the exquisite care she puts into characterization in what is, in the end, a plot-driven genre.

Once Stuyvesant’s investigation begins, the plot picks up for me, and I enjoyed the book immensely from that point on (not that I didn’t like it at all before that, but I wasn’t loving it, either.) The only shadow on my enjoyment came at the book’s climax; I’m still not sure what to do with the way the plot was resolved. Like the prologue, I just don’t know how to feel about it. That’s not a bad thing, though—Touchstone made me think, and I’ll be more than happy to re-read it sometime soon. Just to clarify my thoughts about it, you understand.

I have some other thoughts, about the way men, women, and sex are treated in the book, but I’m tired enough that I’ll leave those for tomorrow.

In the meantime, that’s one book down for the Chunkster Challenge!

Books read: 5
Pages read: 1,637

Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2008, Chunkster Challenge 2008, Laurie R. King