We have
lifelong connections with fictional characters.
Winnie the Pooh is hugely real for many of us, or Charlotte and Wilbur, or
Sherlock Holmes. I’m using examples from
childhood or adolescent reading, but I don’t think it’s that different with
characters we’ve met as grown-ups. And
we feel their loss as strongly, particularly when a series ends. Ace Atkins took over from Robert Parker,
after his death (and with Joan Parker’s blessing), so Spenser is still with us,
but there won’t be any more Kinsey Milhone stories, since Sue Grafton died, or Philip
Kerr’s Bernie Gunther, or Bruce Alexander’s Sir John Fielding. And most recently, we have Jackie Winspear’s
announcement that The Comfort of Ghosts, her 18th Maisie
Dobbs book, is their swan song.
I hasten to add that Jacqueline’s very much alive and well, and her decision to retire Maisie after twenty years is consciously the closing of a circle. She begins Maisie’s story with the years leading up to the First World War, and ends in the aftermath of the Second.
I came late to Maisie, and I’m well aware she had a solid fan base already, but the novels snuck up on me from behind, after I’d read Jackie’s extraordinary memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing. I’ve talked about that book before, and in this space, and I’m happy to talk it up again. But as an introduction to the Maisie books, This Time Next Year is evocative and sly – mischievous is perhaps a better word, in that there’s no intent to deceive the reader, only to conjure up a sense of anticipation. The memoir fills in some gaps, and echoes moments in the novels, which of course you only realize when you read the novels: if you’d read them first, you’d have the frisson of recognition, like the smell of harvested hops.
Speaking of, I don’t think it’s the best idea to pick up The Comfort of Ghosts as your first Maisie. Much of it depends on your familiarity with Maisie’s history, which in turn informs and enlarges your engagement with the story. It’s a kind of memory puzzle, in that Maisie herself is interleaved with her own past – as we all are – and she’s drawn back through the keyhole, the lock to an old doorway, into a place of shadows.
Maisie’s story arc, for those of you new to the series, is that she starts as a domestic, pre-WWI, but through luck and diligence, rises upward into the professional classes – she becomes a triage nurse at the Front – and although cruelly disappointed in love, during the War, eventually finds her feet. Part of her uniqueness is that she slips through the permeable membrane of the British class system, and shape-shifts. Her other memorable quality is her empathy, both her readiness to help and her ability to feel her way into another person’s sensibility.
(There is, in fact, a self-help book titled What Would Maisie Do? that came out in 2019, and culls commonplaces from the Maisie mysteries. You might find this terminally cutesy, but no. Maisie is eminently straightforward. Some of us might benefit from her counsel.)
The best advice I can give in this circumstance is to go back and read the books in order, from first to last, knowing they’re a story cycle. They weren’t intended that way, in the beginning, and Jackie says she was surprised when her editor assumed there was a planned sequel to the debut Maisie novel, but now we have a complete scheme, laid end to end, the learning curve, caught in the act.
And without further ado, reward yourself with a copy of This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing. I promise. It will both comfort you and cause reflection, in equal measure.
