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Why does the Bounty story fascinate us so? (Please don’t say it’s the sight of Mel Gibson in tight trousers and a pigtail.) From three movie versions to the celebrated Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, from contemporary 18th-century accounts to recent historiography, the tale of mutiny, survival and exile has been told and retold. In part I think it’s the age-old drama of rebellion against tyranny: heroic Fletcher Christian confronting evil Captain Bligh, setting his former commander afloat in an open boat to make his way back to England, then leading the crew to a refuge on the obscure shores of Pitcairn Island. Modern interpretations, however, have corrected the romantic might versus right version with an awareness of class difference and historical context --- portraying Bligh not as a sadist but as a brilliant navigator whose leadership style was no more authoritarian than any other captain in Her Majesty’s Navy at the time.
In THE GRAVE TATTOO we get yet another angle, albeit purely speculative, on the Bounty. Val McDermid, best known for her gritty, urban psychological thrillers, heads this time into historical/literary-mystery territory, playing with the hypothesis that Christian, who is understood to have been murdered a few years after reaching Pitcairn, didn’t die. Instead, he escaped back to England, where he contacted the poet William Wordsworth (with whom he had gone to school) and told him the true story of the mutiny and its aftermath --- which became the basis for a lost epic poem.
McDermid’s protagonist is young, pretty Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham. When a reasonably intact body with tattoos from the South Sea Islands is found in a bog in the Lake Country, Jane realizes that it could be Fletcher Christian. Soon she is hot on the trail of the missing manuscript, tracing it to descendants of Wordsworth’s housemaid, who attended his deathbed. When elderly members of that family start dying too frequently and conveniently, THE GRAVE TATTOO takes on some of the attributes of a more standard whodunit.
McDermid’s technique is to alternate the modern tale with excerpts from the story Fletcher Christian told Wordsworth (she doesn’t attempt a reconstruction of the lost poem) --- a double-barreled narrative device I’ve encountered quite a lot lately and of which I’m becoming a bit weary. She mixes in plenty of subplots and subsidiary characters, too: a broken romance for Jane; sibling rivalry between Jane and her petulant teacher brother; the trials of Jane’s protégé, Tenille, a 13-year-old mixed-race girl with a taste for Romantic poetry (the freshest voice in the book); the investigations of a forensic anthropologist named River Wilde (!) and her policeman boyfriend. There is also a good deal of rhapsodizing about the beauties of the Lake Country, where Jane spent her childhood, but the language often sounds like that of a travel brochure.
Unfortunately, that isn’t the only sense in which this novel is predictable. McDermid has a couple of interesting (psychosexual) twists on what “really” happened, but I don’t think THE GRAVE TATTOO succeeds either as a mystery (I guessed the villain way before the end) or a literary-historical puzzle. Background data about Wordsworth and the Bounty is introduced mechanically, via various handy stock characters, and clues turn up all too fortuitously; it’s like a sketch for a novel rather than the real thing.
This is very odd, since I have found all of McDermid’s work up until now absolutely riveting (notably her Carol Jordan/Tony Hill series, one of which I reviewed for this website a couple of years ago), with fiendishly clever plots and credible, complex characters. I’m all for authors reinventing themselves --- it’s a shame to get stuck in a formula, no matter how successful --- but for me this experiment just didn’t work.
I read THE GRAVE TATTOO while staying, appropriately, on an island, the sound of the sea crashing in the background and the smell of salt in the air. Probably we will never know which version of the mutiny --- because, Rashomon-like, there are several --- is true. When men and masters are trapped on a sailing ship, miles from anywhere, with tensions building and rage exploding, anything can happen and, evidently, did. It’s still a whale of a story.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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