45 pages • 1 hour read
Louise PennyA Fatal Grace
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Invalidation and Self-Worth
Many of the characters in A Fatal Grace rely on social or professional validation to reinforce a sense of self. Failure to win approval leads to lasting emotional damage for these characters, and, in two cases, to fatal violence.
A number of the villagers demonstrate insecurity. Clara suffers when she thinks an influential gallery owner finds her work amateur and banal. Even though El gives her the opposite opinion, Clara can’t feel satisfied that her art is good enough. Mother Bea is deeply disturbed by CC’s critique of her meditation center even though friends insist CC’s use of “Be Calm” as the name of her book is an homage and not an insult.
The detectives on the case aren’t immune to insecurity either. Lemieux constantly questions what Gamache thinks of him; he’s desperate for approval from his superior. Even though Beauvoir is older and more experienced than Lemieux, he suffers from the same insecurity. He worries about his appearance and how the local villagers perceive him. Nichol harbors a deep belief that she isn’t worth saving. Gamache offers her some validation by rescuing her from a fire, but she comes to doubt it was she he intended to save.
Even Gamache harbors self-doubt. Late in the book, he asks his wife if he made the right decision in the Arnot case. She needs to reassure him and validate his choice.
CC and Crie represent the most extreme examples of the damage invalidation can do. Although CC seeks public praise for her book and entrepreneurial endeavors, what she really craves is validation from her mother. When she realizes that her mother is a filthy beggar, and therefore unworthy to bestow validation on her, CC kills El.
Crie also wants validation from her mother. She performs in the school play, hoping that CC will see how beautiful she is. Of course, CC never arrives. Not only does CC withhold love and approval from her daughter, she criticizes her beautiful singing voice in front of the whole village. This pivotal moment of invalidation becomes a motive for murder.
The Quest for Calmness
Many characters in A Fatal Grace are also obsessed with achieving a sense of inner balance, of calm.
Clara first comes to Three Pines because she perceives the village as a pastoral utopia. Myrna has much the same reaction when she trades the bustle of Montreal for a quiet village bookshop. Mother Bea opens a meditation center named Be Calm in Three Pines to show the villagers how to attain a state of calmness. Even in her past, Mother Bea actively sought calm: She took El to India to learn meditation in the hopes of curing her friend’s mental distress.
Yet for all their seeking many characters fail to achieve calm, most especially those who claim to have found the path.
CC builds an entire career around her book, Be Calm, and the concept of Li Bien, a philosophy for achieving inner peace. Paradoxically, CC’s approach to finding calm is to suppress all emotional chaos; as a result, she is prone to volcanic eruptions that prove that she’s in no position to dispense advice on the topic. CC can be provoked into a rage by something as simple as a pillow that’s out of place—a character flaw that will eventually cause her death.
Similarly, Mother Bea, also a self-appointed expert on calmness, becomes furious when CC accuses her of not understanding the concept of serenity.
The only character who demonstrates serenity in the novel is Gamache. In the final page of the book, he quotes a poem encapsulating the principle that all the questors after calm have failed to realize:
Where there is love, there is courage
Where there is courage, there is peace
Where there is peace, there is God.
And when you have God, you have everything (406).
The Power of Belief
The power of conviction lies at the heart of A Fatal Grace and explains the motivation behind the book’s other themes. Belief shapes individual reality. Damaging beliefs create emotional distress that drives the quest for calmness. Similarly, destructive beliefs breed self-doubt that requires immediate validation from others.
Clara is afflicted with a false belief about the quality of her art. She bases her assumption on a fabricated conversation between CC and a man who isn’t even associated with the art world. Nichol believes a family history fabricated by her father to avoid admitting his own cowardice. Nichol, herself, has always been shoved aside by her army of relatives and forms the damaging belief that she isn’t worth anything.
Among these minor instances of distorted beliefs, two characters take fictions to the extreme.
Thanks to a mentally unstable mother, CC internalized a belief that emotions are dangerous. Because her own mother was incapable of doing so, CC preaches the need to suppress violent feelings. CC also takes on her mother’s false belief that she comes from royalty. CC assumes the surname of de Poitiers, appropriates the eagle emblem of Eleanor of Aquitaine as her logo, and marries a nondescript man named Richard Lyon simply because his name resembles that of the queen’s favorite son—Richard the Lionhearted. With the power of her beliefs, CC creates a reality she yearns for.
Crie also lives a fiction, one CC, with her verbal abuse, has made for her. Myrna tells Gamache how negative beliefs can wreck a life:
We become our beliefs, and Crie believes something horrible about herself. Has heard it all her life, and now it haunts her, in her own mother’s voice. It’s the voice most of us hear in the quiet moments, whispering kindnesses or accusations. Our mother (286-87).
Ultimately, Crie lashes out against the power her mother has over her, choosing to quiet that accusing inner voice by committing murder.
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