Pewsey's Divine Comedy

 

Divine Comedy / Elizabeth Pewsey
London: Trafalgar Square, c1995.
295 p.

This is the second book in Pewsey's Mountjoy series; I had to skip the first one as I can't find it anywhere online or in real life. So here is the second entry in the series. However, as I mentioned in my review of Unaccustomed Spirits, these really can be read as standalones so it's not too much of a problem.

In this volume, we focus on Quinta, a young teen who makes her way to Eyot while in some distress. She's taken in by a woman who comes across her as she is standing near the great Eyot Cathedral, and then we jump ahead nearly a decade for the rest of the story. 

Quinta is now working as a housekeeper for a composer (many of the characters in these books are musicians) and also working part time in a music store. She's coming into her own as an instrument builder (mostly violins/cellos and the like) but is still balancing her relationship with her composer as well as managing her young and feisty daughter.

As in all the books in the series, the social circles meld and overlap, and Quinta's friend Louisa and her messy breakup become part of the story, as do the stories of Louisa's ex, his strange twin sibling friends, various musicians, and the new Bishop. There are some difficult parts in this one, and reading from a perspective 20 years down the line, people don't seem to take the key plot point seriously enough. 

However, Quinta meets an chaos theorist who is the antimatter to her very ordered life, and things change for everyone. Finding out people's secrets, which aren't so bad once they're shared, is a repeated element of this book and it's very engaging.I really liked Quinta and her determination, and was glad to see that once again, the deserving characters find happiness and the nasty ones get a comeuppance. It makes a nice change ;) 

I enjoyed this book and it's always entertaining when you read a series like this to see other side characters and places pop up from the other books. Even though it's only the second one in the series that I read, there were already recognizable bits that enhanced the reading experience.

One thing to note about this series and this book in particular is that the originals were published under the name Elizabeth Pewsey, all by Sceptre books. When the series was republished in and around 2011, it was republished under her other name, Elizabeth Aston, and this book's title was changed to "The World, the Flesh, & the Bishop", which perhaps gives a better sense of the story! So if you can't find the Pewsey edition, look for the more recent Aston set, even if their covers are extremely unappealing, nothing like the charm of the originals.