Dying to Be Heard, by Paula Harmon. Margaret Demeray #4.
A mystery novel, and a bit of history lesson for me.
Margaret is a committed suffragist, a wife and recently a mother, a practicing physician, working in 1913 as a pathologist at a charity hospital, there to study diseases, but sometimes called in by the police to perform autopsies. Now in her late thirties, she has gradually been distancing herself from the more militant (and sometime violent) policies she once held in common with her friends in the suffragette movement, though not distancing herself from those friends or their long-term goals. When she begins to suspect her oldest friend of arson and of possible involvement in an explosion at a London post office, she faces an agonizing moral and ethical dilemma: Can she really betray a dear friend by reporting her suspicions—when suspicions are really all she has—especially when Maude has already been in prison twice and still suffers the mental and physical trauma of the abuses she suffered there? Yet, recruited to treat victims of the recent explosion she wonders, how can she keep silent, when others might be injured or killed as a result of that silence?
Complicating matters, someone seems to be murdering suffragettes and their allies—Margaret does the post-mortems, which, rather than clarifying how the victims died and why, only pose new questions—and the civil unrest stirred up around their activities may imperil an important peace treaty presently under negotiation, which is meant to prevent war in the Balkans from engulfing the rest of Europe as well. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but how do the various mysteries of the plot fit together? Where does the movement for Irish Home Rule enter the picture? Margaret doesn’t know, neither does her husband, Fox, a British intelligence officer involved in ensuring the peace talks go ahead, and it is only at the end of the story that the puzzle pieces begin to come together.
________
In reading this book, I learned things about the suffrage movement that I didn’t know before. I already knew women were imprisoned for holding protests, that they went on hunger strikes and were brutally force-fed as a result. I also knew that the procedure was painful and traumatizing. But what I didn't know was that it caused long-term physical and mental damage, as well as severe pain which lasted months after the prisoner was released. This is but one place where the main character being a doctor proves enlightening. I didn’t know that when the practice was declared illegal it continued to be used in some prisons.
In one horrifying scene, when she goes to visit Maude (who has been re-arrested for a previous crime) Margaret is pressured to assist as her friend is force-fed. Naturally, she refuses, on the grounds that the procedure is not supposed to be allowed, that it is cruel and dangerous, that the prisoner has been there for less than a day—so there would be no excuse in any case (she is hardly on the verge of starving to death)—but one of her male colleagues from the hospital insists on going ahead, botching the job so badly that he nearly kills Maude in the process.
A mystery novel, and a bit of history lesson for me.
Margaret is a committed suffragist, a wife and recently a mother, a practicing physician, working in 1913 as a pathologist at a charity hospital, there to study diseases, but sometimes called in by the police to perform autopsies. Now in her late thirties, she has gradually been distancing herself from the more militant (and sometime violent) policies she once held in common with her friends in the suffragette movement, though not distancing herself from those friends or their long-term goals. When she begins to suspect her oldest friend of arson and of possible involvement in an explosion at a London post office, she faces an agonizing moral and ethical dilemma: Can she really betray a dear friend by reporting her suspicions—when suspicions are really all she has—especially when Maude has already been in prison twice and still suffers the mental and physical trauma of the abuses she suffered there? Yet, recruited to treat victims of the recent explosion she wonders, how can she keep silent, when others might be injured or killed as a result of that silence?
Complicating matters, someone seems to be murdering suffragettes and their allies—Margaret does the post-mortems, which, rather than clarifying how the victims died and why, only pose new questions—and the civil unrest stirred up around their activities may imperil an important peace treaty presently under negotiation, which is meant to prevent war in the Balkans from engulfing the rest of Europe as well. The stakes couldn’t be higher, but how do the various mysteries of the plot fit together? Where does the movement for Irish Home Rule enter the picture? Margaret doesn’t know, neither does her husband, Fox, a British intelligence officer involved in ensuring the peace talks go ahead, and it is only at the end of the story that the puzzle pieces begin to come together.
________
In reading this book, I learned things about the suffrage movement that I didn’t know before. I already knew women were imprisoned for holding protests, that they went on hunger strikes and were brutally force-fed as a result. I also knew that the procedure was painful and traumatizing. But what I didn't know was that it caused long-term physical and mental damage, as well as severe pain which lasted months after the prisoner was released. This is but one place where the main character being a doctor proves enlightening. I didn’t know that when the practice was declared illegal it continued to be used in some prisons.
In one horrifying scene, when she goes to visit Maude (who has been re-arrested for a previous crime) Margaret is pressured to assist as her friend is force-fed. Naturally, she refuses, on the grounds that the procedure is not supposed to be allowed, that it is cruel and dangerous, that the prisoner has been there for less than a day—so there would be no excuse in any case (she is hardly on the verge of starving to death)—but one of her male colleagues from the hospital insists on going ahead, botching the job so badly that he nearly kills Maude in the process.
