“The snow had begun to descend in thick icy flakes…” That’s how Peter Tremayne’s latest “Fidelma” book begins. Life obviously does follow art.
I had no more than begun to read The Chalice of Blood, another story of how this brilliant nun-lawyer solves crimes, when ice began to form on all the trees around our house. Our birches, too, were now bending, heavy with possibilities of breaking. Ice slipped from our metal roof in sheets like giant rectangles of crystal glass waiting to shatter.
Storm-watching and weather-predicting are state sports in Vermont. No one who has a radio could not help but know this one was coming. We’d stocked up. More sand. More salt. More groceries. And of course, another stop at our favorite library. I had no more than walked in when Librarian Amy handed me 1222 by Anne Holt. “I think you’ll like this, but I’m a bit embarrassed at giving you the latest in what’s a series and so far the only one in English. Why don’t publishers translate these things in sequence?” she muttered as she went on shelving books.
I wasn’t fussy. I’ll read them “out of order.” I’d never heard of this author, but she was Norwegian, after all. My people! How could I not like it?
I did. I finished it and then filled the bathtub with water (for toilet flushing in case the power goes out—we all do this in Vermont. I learned early on how many buckets of melted snow even one flush takes. We keep talking about getting a generator, but so far that’s in the category of a really good plan.)
Holt’s book is called “The Scandiavian Phenomenon.” Hyperbole? No. Her wheel-chair confined retired police woman is a compelling character. The kind of woman you’d like to get to know better. The title comes from the name of a resort hotel called Finse 1,222 because it’s 1,222 meters above sea level. Why is it that I always read about storms when we’re headed into a major storm? I suppose it’s for the same perverse reason I once read The Night of the Grizzly out loud to our young sons as we drove through Glacier Park.
Each of her twelve chapters is cleverly named after numbers 1-12 on the Beaufort Wind Scale which was developed by English Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort in 1805. The scale goes from calm to snowflakes falling vertically with a side-to-side motion a 1 m.p.h. to “The mountain is boiling. Lichen and branches from the trees are carried along by the wind. It is extremely difficult to ski,” at scale 8, 39-46 m.p.h. Oh, those hearty Norskes! And it progresses through 11 which Holt describes as “severe damage to forests” and finally to 12: Hurricane force with winds up to 83 m.p.h. Her story escalates along with the wind and with similar velocity.
As I turned the last page I got an email photo from a friend who is in another Beaufort—but this one is a coastal paradise in South Carolina. Her sunny relaxed face framed against palmettos and a sandy beach contrasted sharply with the one I saw looking back at me from the mirror…pale, red eyes, rather sleepy looking. Think bears hibernating.
Never mind. We like winter. So, on to Fidelma. She’ll perk me up with her brilliant, anti-establishment ways. It’s obvious I like my heroines, like Fidelma and Hanne Wilhelmsen, to be caring but callous when they have to be; smart, but not cocky; abrasive only when it’s definitely called for and empathetic to the downtrodden.
And I like my author’s characters to say something profound every now and then. Something important. Something like Magnus Streng, the height-challenged doctor says to Hanne when he is describing what his father was like. He was of the old school, a zoology professor. Every night he read to young Magnus from his textbooks about animals. Ants. Elephants. Lions. Hyenas. “The message was clear enough: we are all needed. We are necessary here on earth. Small and large, fat and thin, ugly and beautiful. I was good enough. I am good enough.”
We don’t need a Beaufort Wind Scale to measure how good we are. We just have to remember that we already are!
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