A Precocious Childhood Romp

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie [by] Alan Bradley

[New York] Delacorte Press [2009]

978-0-385-34230-8; $23.00

Welcome to Buckshaw, the crumbling grand home of the de Luce family!  It is a halcyon summer in the fifth decade of the Twentieth Century.  Father is playing with his stamp collection in his study and 11-year-old Flavia, our heroine, is plotting revenge on her two older sisters from the inside of a closet, where they have locked her.

Flavia is quite a heroine, in the mold of great heroines of children’s books such as Jo March, Laura Ingalls, Sarah Carew, Roald Dahl’s Matilda, Nancy Drew, and all of the girls who empowered us as children.  Flavia is a self-taught chemist, with a passion for poisons, and a well-stocked chemistry lab on the Third Floor, courtesy of an ancestor of like mind.  I have heard there are those who cannot believe there could ever be such a child, but I know a woman who, if she could have been, would have been, such a child. I had no trouble accepting Flavia as heroine.  If others need to willingly suspend their disbelief, so be it.  Flavia is fun!

Especially when compared to her sisters, Ophelia and Daphne, whom she calls Feely and Daffy, thus poking holes in their inflated views of themselves.  Feely plays the piano beautifully, and spends much time gazing at herself in reflective surfaces.  Daffy reads Bulwer-Lytton and authors of that ilk for fun. Flavia doesn’t conform to the outmoded standards of girlish gentility to which her sisters aspire – her model is her adventuress-mother, who disappeared mountaineering in Tibet and is presumed dead.  She envies her sisters, who knew their mother much longer than she did, and she is almost destroyed when they tell her that she was adopted, and not really related to the sainted Harriet, whom the whole family has placed on a pedestal and behind locked doors in time-stopped rooms.

A dead bird is found on the kitchen doorstep at Buckshaw, with a stamp stuck on its beak.  Colonel de Luce, a dedicated philatelist, reacts violently, then takes the stamp, asking the cook to get rid of the bird.  This all happens in Flavia’s presence.  Later that night, she hears a man talking to her father in his study – they seem to be arguing.  The estate gardener, Dogger, who once saved the Colonel’s life during the war, and whom the Colonel cares for now as he suffers from post-traumatic stress from being a P.O.W., shoos Flavia back to bed.

The next morning, Flavia discovers the strange visitor dead in the garden.  Actually, he is in the act of dying, which Flavia watches with curiosity – a new life experience to be cataloged in her journal.  Then she calls Dogger, and then the Police. Inspector Hewitt comes with his assistants to see into the situation, and the Inspector learns that Flavia is quite a fund of information, both a help and an impediment.

The Police eventually arrest the Colonel.  The older sisters can do nothing but weep and wail at home, but Flavia goes to visit her father in jail.  There the unraveling of history begins, as the Colonel tells of his misspent youth in the Magic Circle at Greyminster, his boarding school nearby, which culminated in the death of a teacher, and the theft of a rare stamp.  It is up to Flavia to ferret out the killer.  She spends hours on her trusty old bicycle “Gladys,” visiting the public library, the school, and those beyond her father, who might have knowledge of the situation. She has an amazing vocabulary, as might be expected, and she has an uncanny read on human nature.  She is also naïve and sheltered, with the touching innocence of childhood. Perhaps because she’s never been in an institutional situation, such as school, she is utterly unfettered and fearless.  Her investigations place her in serious jeopardy on more than one occasion, but we never doubt that she’ll be the one to expose the culprit and reveal the whole story.

And so she does, putting her world back into the order that she understands as ordinary.  It is the world of classic children’s stories, where fathers are distant, mothers are dead, and little girls may show professional police how to do their work.  It is the world that the child in all of us adults needs to revisit once-in-a-while, and I, for one, enjoyed cycling the rural British countryside with Flavia, and look forward to doing it again soon.  Highly recommended. ~ lss-r

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This book is mine.