Summing Up Maisie Dobbs

Summing up a life is a challenge. How much detail? How much emotion? In The Comfort of Ghosts Winspear brilliantly sums up the life of Maisie Dobbs that unfolded in the 18 books of the series. Virtually every chapter takes a reader back in her life. Thus this commentary will also travel through her life. As with my review of The Comfort of Ghosts it is best not to read this post if you are planning to read the series.

For Maisie and the other characters ghosts are ever present with the losses from two world wars and the deaths that are inevitable through decades of family history. Yet those ghosts can bring an uncertain comfort.

It took Maisie years to move on from the lingering / slow death of her first love, Dr. Simon Lynch, years after the end of WW I. Simon and Maise had been wounded together at a forward hospital by an artillery shell.

Billy Beale’s family still mourns the death of little Lizzie taken by diptheria.

Her best friend Priscilla had been crushed by the death of her three brothers in the Great War and then her parents dying in the post-war influenza epidemic. Had Maisie not introduced her to Douglas Partridge she would have drunk herself to death. 

While Priscilla’s three sons survived World War II they are going separate ways and lonelieness has revived the dragon of despair.

There is a dragon within every character. I am dismayed that I did not remember the dragon lurking inside Maisie.

One of the strengths of the series is that readers feel an empathy, a connection to Maisie. Losses come to all of us. My parents were gone by the time I was 36 and my only sibling, my sister, died when I was 48.

In reading The Comfort of Ghosts, the ghosts I thought of were the hemophiliacs I represented starting in 1991. Each had AIDS and each was dying as there was no treatment at that time for AIDS. Of my original 11 clients, 8 had died by 1996. They were all about my age. For the only time in my life I spoke of the dead during a legal argument as feeling their presence in the courtroom.

Maisie has believed the dragon of despair can be held at bay but not slain.

Billy’s wife Doreen changes Maisie’s mind as Billy recounts how she talked about dragons:

‘I’ve had enough of this dragon lark,’ she said. ‘That dragon has to be knocked out once and for all, so he never wakes up again. And another thing,’ she says, ‘I reckon dragons get more dangerous and thrash around when they’re getting weaker - so tell that to your Mrs. P. If her dragon is off the leash, it means she’s getting better and he knows he’s losing his bottle, so don’t give him power by talking about him. When the dragon is going down, that’s when you have to be made of steel, not straw. Our boy will get back to his old self by looking ahead - by seeing how things could be for him, not down in the cellars of his mind where the dragon lives. And if we give everything we’ve got into helping him get stronger, he’ll be able to do a St. George and put a sword right through the blimmin’ thing.’

There is the comfort of ghosts in unexpected ways. Maisie meets a stonemason carving the names of the second war’s dead into a town memorial. He tells her of families coming to the memorial:

They usually wear their Sunday best when they visit. You see the mums shed a tear and the fathers comfort them. Young widows come with their parents and some bring the nippers along too. And the strangest thing - though, I dunno, perhaps it’s not so strange - they go up and touch the name. They run their fingers over every letter, as if they could feel the one they’ve lost.

I thought of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall with the names of 58,318 men and women etched in the black stone and how meaningful it has been for America veterans and families of the deceased to come to the memorial and find and feel the names of lost comrades and family

A comforting ghost is the memory of Maisie’s mentor, Maurice Blanche. He arranged a formal education for her and then educated her in the arts of investigation and how to feel a person’s soul from their physical actions.

The death of her husband, James Compton, and the resulting stillbirth of their child haunted me as a reader. For Maisie his memory is a comfort though always fraught with pain, 

Maisie’s final case is after solving the murder in The Comfort of Ghosts. Fittingly, it does not involve murder but does involve generations of ghosts.

I was drawn to read the initial book, Maisie Dobbs, by a blurb drawn from the New York Times. I normally avoid blurbs but this one caught my eye and I am glad it led me to the series. It said “be prepared to be astonished”. Maisie Dobbs topped my 2008 Bill’s Best of Fiction. Sixteen years later with 20 posts upon the series this will be my last post on Maisie. Astonished I have been.

I read the final pages with reluctance knowing they were the last I will read of Maisie’s remarkable life. Maisie felt a pang as she contemplated the 35 years covered in the series. I was heartened by her commitment to look forward to her future. Thinking of the reading joy Maisie brought me and her resolve to move ahead has inspired me to look forward to reading new series with wonderful characters.

****

Winspear, Jacqueline – (2008) - Maisie Dobbs; (Best fiction of 2008) (2008) - Birds of a Feather; (2009) - Pardonable Lies; (2011) - Messenger of Truth; (2012) - An Incomplete Revenge; (2012) - Among the Mad; (2013) - The Mapping of Love and Death; (2016) - A Lesson in Secrets; (2016) - Elegy for Eddie; (2018) Leaving Everything Most Loved; (2020) - A Dangerous Place - Part I on Maisie's life since the last book and Part II a review; (2020) - A Journey to Munich; (2021) - In This Grave Hour; (2021) - To Die But Once; (2022) - The American Agent; (2023) - The Consequences of Fear; (2023) - A Sunlit Weapon; (2024) - The Comfort of Ghosts