{"id":37166,"date":"2017-08-30T08:05:05","date_gmt":"2017-08-30T13:05:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=37166"},"modified":"2017-08-30T08:05:56","modified_gmt":"2017-08-30T13:05:56","slug":"fiction-and-culture-mette-ivie-harrisons-the-bishops-wife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2017\/08\/fiction-and-culture-mette-ivie-harrisons-the-bishops-wife\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiction and Culture: Mette Ivie Harrison’s The Bishop’s Wife"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"A good Mormon mystery<\/b><\/div>\n
Novels — particularly good ones — convey a sense of place. This is absolutely true of mystery novels, from Kwei Quartey’s police detective in Ghana<\/a> to Alexander McCall Smith’s private detective in Botswana<\/a>. But how much do we really about a place or a culture from a work of fiction?<\/div>\n
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I recently listened to the audiobook of Mette Ivie Harrison’s first mystery novel, The Bishop’s Wife<\/a>. (There are currently three mysteries in the series<\/a>.) Here’s the quick: I couldn’t stop listening. Harrison has crafted a page-turner. Early one morning, a man turns up at the home of the bishop, reporting that his wife has gone missing. The bishop’s wife, Linda Wallheim, uses her neighborly kindness to get to the bottom of the case. Linda is a rich, complicated character, with faith and doubt and caring and curiosity all boiled into one. I look forward to reading of her further adventures. I had a few critiques — a few plot twists towards the end struck me as implausible and Harrison really doubles down on a theme — but the other virtues make up for them. If you enjoy mysteries, then I recommend this one.<\/div>\n

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Even more striking to me was how much I noticed that the protagonist was really speaking my language. She speaks…Mormon.* Now, I don’t read a lot of Mormon fiction — and I’m defining Mormon fiction here as fiction written by Mormons and taking place among Mormons. Besides Jack Weyland’s Charly<\/a> and the sequel Sam<\/a> (as a teenager), and then James Ferrell’s The Peacegiver<\/a> (which is more of a long parable rather than a novel), that’s it for me. Of course, there are many Mormon cultures. As Harrison puts it in the novel, “Sometimes it seemed like Mormons outside of Utah were part of an entirely different church.” But there was enough overlap between Linda’s worldview and mine to really feel at home.<\/div>\n
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What does it tell us about Mormon culture?\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
This book was well-reviewed in the broader media, gaining coverage in the New York Times, the L.A. Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and elsewhere. Note a common thread in the reviews<\/div>\n