59 pages • 1 hour read
A Rule Against Murder
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Themes
Fathers and Sons
In A Rule Against Murder, Penny explores the complicated relationships between sons and fathers. She does so through Gamache’s relationship with his own father, Honoré, and son, Daniel, as well as Charles Morrow’s relationships with his sons, Thomas and Peter.
Charles Morrow is the enigmatic patriarch of the Morrow family. Although he died many years ago, his influence is still felt by all of his children. They remember him as a distant and harsh father; as Peter says, “I liked him about as much as he liked me. Isn’t that how it normally works? You get what you give? That’s what he always said. And he gave nothing” (63). Penny uses this question mark following Peters restatement of his father’s words to suggest a lack of conviction in this mimicry. Yet Peter still craves his father’s approval and treasures the fact that his father had kept a drawing of Peter’s throughout his life. Thomas also continues to seek a connection with his father, long after Charles’s death. He wears the frayed shirt that was his father’s, and his cufflinks, to be close to his father: “His father’s old shirt that Thomas had taken the day he’d died. The only thing he’d wanted. The shirt off his back. That still smelled of him” (305). The craved intimacy of the skin of his back and his smell resonates with the point that Irene withholds contact because of neuralgia. Their desire to remain close to him is despite the fact that they think Charles didn’t love them. However, their idea of their father as a distant unloving man shifts throughout the novel as they come to see that what Bert says was true: “[H]e never wanted anything except for you to be happy […] he loved you all” (306). At the end of the novel, Peter and Thomas are forced to reevaluate what they know about their father in light of Bert’s words, highlighting yet another story with incomplete information in the novel that bolsters the sense of mystery.
As a way to probe the issue from a different perspective, Penny offers the reader the parallel story of Gamache’s struggle to completely accept and forgive his own father, Honoré. As Gamache watches Thomas and Peter struggle to reconcile their complex relationships with their father, he is struggling with his own father-son issues. His son, Daniel, has asked for his blessing to name his child, if it is a boy, Honoré, after Gamache’s father. This act fulfills the meaning of the name. What might normally be an honor, however, is complicated by Honoré’s legacy and notoriety; as Gamache says, “[w]asn’t life difficult enough without having to walk through it with the name Honoré Gamache?” (19). The fact that Gamache describes walking with a “name” rather than a child reinforces the difficulty of paternal relationships for him. Although Gamache claims that “[i]t was a long time ago, and I know the truth” (193), his reluctance to pass the name to his grandson shows that he is maybe not as reconciled or comfortable with his father’s legacy as he purports to be.
In the end, however, after witnessing Charles’s, Peter’s, and Thomas’s relationships, and by talking to Bert, who actually knew his father and admired him, Gamache is able to truly put his father’s legacy to rest and give his approval to Daniel. By using both the Morrow and Gamache families to probe the relationship between fathers and sons, Penny illustrates the complex and conflicted nature of such relationships.
Prisoners of the Past
When Bert reflects on his own experience as a prisoner of war, he tells Gamache how he came out of the experience alive: he never considered himself a prisoner. To him, it is a state of mind: “The mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner” (318). In A Rule Against Murder, Penny explores this concept through the Morrow family members, who are prisoners to their father’s legacy and the family history.
The members of the Morrow family are all prisoners of their collective past. Their opinions of each other and their understanding of family history were fixed long ago and do not change, even as the people do. Gamache recognizes this during the course of the investigation, noting, “I knew then that this was a family at odds with reality, their perception skewed” (305). Now, the Morrow children are adults, but their identities and perceptions of each other are still fixed from when they were children. Gamache sums up the family perceptions of each child at the end of the novel:
Thomas was seen by the family as an accomplished pianist, linguist, businessman. And yet his playing is workmanlike, his career is mediocre and he can’t speak French. Marianna’s business is flourishing, you play the piano with passion and skill, you have an extraordinary child and yet you’re treated like the selfish little sister who can’t do anything right. Peter is a gifted and successful artist […] in a loving marriage with many friends. And yet you’re perceived as greedy and cruel […]. (304)
The anaphoric use of the phrase “and yet” epitomizes the conventions of a denouement speech: Gamache presents known information to listeners and then turns it on its head to enlighten listeners with his perceptions. In addition to these assumptions, Julia is treated as though she abandoned the family, even when she was forced to leave.
Even their parents are imprisoned by past perceptions. Irene has never told her children that she suffers from neuralgia and so it is too painful for her to be touched, leaving them to believe that she doesn’t love them. The fact that the cause of neuralgia is often undetectable reflects this theme, since the source of dramatically painful results are skewed. Charles, their father, is also portrayed as cold and distant, even as his closest friend, Bert Finney, says differently. Not until this mythology is stripped away at the end of the novel can Peter and his siblings see their father for what he was. Irene, on the other hand, shows the dangers of being unable to free oneself from a prison. At the end of the novel, she insists on maintaining her secret, maintaining the mythology that she is cold and unloving. She is unable to break out of her old prison, and as a result, leaves her children still convinced that she doesn’t love them. Penny shows the reader that some aspects of this family mythology cannot be so easily dismantled; this lack of resolution also reflects the form of the series in which the story is not finished in one neat volume.
In the Morrow family, Penny offers the reader a portrait of a family so steeped in their alternate version of family history that they are unable to see each other for what they are—a dangerous quality in a whodunit genre that requires clear-eyed thinking. The family bases their conclusions about each other on long-ago events and refuses to let other family members grow and change. They are prisoners of the past because of their inability to free their minds, as Bert did, and leave their prison behind.
Family Armor
Every member of the Morrow family has some form of armor that they use to protect themselves during the reunion, the children especially, including Bean. As Peter tells Gamache, “[p]ower and protection was Clara’s theory. She says everyone has them, but none more obviously than the Morrows. Marianna wears her shawls, Thomas has his cufflinks, Clara repeats her mantras, Mother wears her make-up, her ‘mask’ as she calls it” (225). Penny explores the effects of the strained relationships and tension of the Morrow family through these bits of armor that each person possesses.
Peter is aware of this; in fact, he explains his own armor to Gamache, the paint spots on his hands: “When a family reunion comes along I stop scrubbing with turpentine and use normal soap. The oil paint stays on. After the reunion, when I’m back in Three Pines, I wash it off” (225). While the sculpture in the novel is unveiled, Peter’s art, in contrast, veils him, a point that lends itself to the mystery of what is known and what is covered up in the novel. Julia had a packet of letters she carried with her: “She kept a packet of notes with her always. They seem innocuous, mundane even, but to her they were her protection, her proof she was loved. She’d pull them out and read them when she felt unloved, which I imagine was often” (266). These letters connect her to the opening scene of the mailman who feels that Three Pines is “disconnected from the outside world” (5); there is therefore a sense that even letters cannot save a character from disconnection. Thomas obsessively wears his father’s cufflinks and shirts, and Marianna swaths herself with shawls and scarves. Even Bean has a talisman: the myth book that they are never without that highlights the importance of the past, and the way the past is narrativized, in the novel.
However, this armor is also a source of vulnerability. The other family members know exactly how to strip them of their protection, as the siblings do when they turn on each other near the end of the novel. Thomas and Marianna reveal to Peter that his nickname, Spot, which he had always thought was a reference to his paint-spotted hands, was a reference to “the way [he] used to follow Father around […] like a puppy” (218). In retaliation, Peter, devastated by the revelation, throws Thomas’s cufflinks in the lake. He follows his father as part of the thread of the desire for contact in the novel, and hence he abandons this desire through the very object that facilitates (posthumous) touch with his father. Although they have held tight to their armor as a source of protection, in the end, it proves to be their greatest vulnerability, as they are defenseless without it.
Despite the fact that they are at the center of a murder investigation and that the victim was their sister, the Morrows experience personal drama that goes beyond the murder. They are forced to confront the true nature of their relationships, as the protections they have always used as buffers, in the end, fail them. With the Morrow family, Penny probes the complex relationship dynamic of a family whose members cannot trust each other and yet know each other’s every weak point.
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