"Feet Of Clay": Character Issues In "Rose"

At the river, Blair washed his face.  The clouds were high and edged sideways by the sun, and although the cuts on his face burned, he felt strangely braced.


Leveret was distressed.  "You can't speak to people like Charlotte like that.  That was a terrible scene.  The language was unforgivable, Blair.  You goaded her."


"I goaded her? That's like accusing somebody of goading an asp."


"You were cruel. What were you getting at with insinuations about John's being human?"


Blair dried himself on his jacket and put a dab of arsenic in his palm. "What we are, Leveret, is a sum of our sins. That's what makes us human instead of saints. A perfectly flat surface has not character. Allow some cracks, some flaws and shortcomings, and then you have contrast. It's that contrast with impossible perfection that makes our character."


"You have character?" Leveret asked.


"Tons." Blair put his head back and threw the powder in. "It turns out that Maypole might have, too, in a demented, religious sort of way."


"Questions like that can ruin a man's reputation."


"I'm not interested in his reputation. I'm more of a geologist, I look for feet of clay. So I find it interesting that a penniless curate managed to connect to a girl with so much money."




--Martin Cruz Smith,
Rose, 
Ballantine Books: New York, 2000.


I am enjoying Martin Cruz Smith's Rose, a historical mystery set in the coal country of England in 1872. The protagonist Jonathan Blair will remind you of Smith's hero from Gorky Park and other novels--Arkady Renko (fish out of water/man with nothing to lose/underestimated man)--but that's actually quite fine.