Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have read all of Louise Penny's books and eagerly awaited the release of "The Beautiful Mystery." It combines the writing of a favorite author with a subject of deep fascination to me: monasticism. I was let down on both these levels. If I were going to write a book that delved deeply into, say, airline operations, I would spend a great amount of time beforehand talking to pilots, agents, flight attendants, anybody that was an insider to my subject. There is too much that isn't apparent, too much technical data and special language that needs to be learned. I don't see where Ms. Penny did this work. TBM, for the most part, is her imagination of what life in a monastery must be like. I understand that they are often cloistered and not open to many women, but this has been worked around by others. The whole atmosphere of this monastery rings untrue. Men don't join monasteries for "the chants," as she calls them, but for a deep religious motive. Believe or not, a postulant will not last long without this. Nobody joins such a rigorous life for the music. Certainly it is beautiful but no mystery: they've been doing it very well for hundreds of years and I don't recall where it has ever caught on in the popular market to the extent that big money is involved (the Singing Nun, notwithstanding.) Most monasteries barely get by with their commercial endeavors, including wine, whiskey, bread and music. And no monk would ever eat all the blueberries he just picked without confessing this to his brothers the next day in General Chapter! Any new monk like Luc, already a priest or not, would be segregated into a sort of school setting in which he would study, for years, theology, the rules of his order and everything else a monk needs to know. He would never be isolated to gate duty and left on his own. Pride is discouraged in a monastic setting: you don't show off what you can do well, you try to learn that at which you often fail. The book is full of errors any new monk would correct out of kindness. First, there is NO "vow of silence" in a monastery about which so much is written! Monks, like the Trappists with which I am most familiar, take five vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, stability and conversion of manners. Vows cannot be dismissed by an abbot. They are similar to the vow of marriage which includes, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder." Silence is a rule of the order, a simple discipline that has no morality attached to it. It is merely a way for the group to live more peacefully. This rule has much changed over the years to meet a monastery's needs. Abbots don't go from monastery to monastery seeking out potential players; it isn't the NFL! The vow of stability I mentioned above discourages this: a monk is supposed to remain with his monastery for life. This vow is tempered with the vow of obedience so that sometimes a monk is sent, for example, to help open a new foundation. But no monk has ever switched religious orders because the music was better! A monastery couldn't exist in secret, as this one seems to. They are under the care of the local bishop and Rome certainly knows where those folks are. A bishop is needed for ordination to the priesthood. How is the commercial aspect of a monastery carried out if nobody knows (including Rome!) that they are there? How do you make money on spoilable chocolate-covered blueberries in the heart of Quebec woods? And a word about "monks." Monks are mostly cloistered and live in monasteries. The Dominican is NOT a monk but a friar, a mendicant. They have different lifestyles entirely. It was said of the Dominican that he was "a monk, not a priest," as if that were a status symbol. Priests are ordained monks and every monastery has a number of them. The prior, for example, would be a priest-monk. The choir monks don't gather around the altar, they occupy choir stalls, long sideways pews with shelves to hold their psalters and other books. They are on either side of the main aisle and two groups of monks therefore face each other during mass and the chanting of the Divine Office. Mass isn't said normally at 11 o'clock for the simple reason that the monks fast until after mass. The main chapel is not called "The Blessed Chapel," but the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, as that is where the consecrated hosts dwell. No cleric would ever interrupt a mass as the Dominican did, never mind the result. This scene, so important in the conclusion, is just preposterous. And no abbot would leave choir, in the middle of service, to answer the door, nor would the others follow him! There just seems to be no actual monastic experience anywhere and the story wouldn't have suffered if it had been more accurate. There are some very good stories within cloisters written by people who have taken the time to understand the setting. Ms. Penny could also use some help with her Latin. She uses two of the most common phrases and gets them wrong. "Dies irae, dies illa" does NOT mean "day of wrath, day of mourning." This is a common English mistake. (Wikipedia this.) It really means, "Day of wrath, THAT day," of which the poem goes on to talk about. Any choir monk would know this. Also "Ecce homo," doesn't mean "he is a man," it means "Behold the man!" Pilate's answer to the question at Jesus' trial. This isn't Cicero! The book "mystery" isn't clear. How does the mark in the Book of Chants indicate "where to start"? Are monks born with perfect pitch? Another small question: do BlackBerry devices work without an Internet? Enough nit picking about reality! I've tried to make the point that this monastery is unlike anything seen in Catholicism in the history of monasticism. I'm well aware of suspension of belief in a novel but go too far and you have science fiction. What really disturbs me most is how little I was made to care for a single person in the story. Nobody is bigger than his petty self-interest. Beauvoir couldn't be much more dark and unlikeable, nor Gamache less a detective. The individual monks are one-dimensional and that dimension has nothing to do with being a good monk. In the end, I didn't care who did it; it could have been anybody with the inclusion of a simple explanation of "why him?" Everybody was set up to be the villain and we could just toss the dice. When you are convinced that a monastery is full of self-serving monks, at odds with their abbot and full of resentment up to the point of murder, you've really lost your target, I think. I was hoping to find a band of good people, like the villagers of Three Pines, where one of them went astray for reasons we might understand, and we would feel about as sorry for him as for the deceased. And please, enough of this police intrigue that has been going on way too long! Ms. Penny should get back to things she knows about, or at least cares to learn a little of. Let's revisit her murderous little world of Three Pines, off a road the map forgot. I'll be waiting there next time.