The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan was an interesting story, I will admit, but of all the Colgan Christmas novels I have read so far–eight in all–this one has, aside from the teaser of the title, no Christmas content whatsoever. The action does take place over Christmas, but it is in a Scottish castle without a tree, ornaments or holiday decor. I like Colgan’s past Christmas novels, and while the story here was a good one, the only reason I read this author in the first place is for Christmas content, and I felt betrayed by the title. When I saw it, how could I have resisted a story about Christmas? And a library? And books of course? If this book was titled anything else, I would not have read it. The cover image is blatant false advertising.
Mirren Sutherland has been hired by a laird named Jamie McKinnon to find an extremely valuable book that is hidden somewhere in his castle in northern Scotland. As she leaves for the trip up north, while outside Euston station in London, a punk zooms by on a scooter and steals her cellphone. She is instantly transported to a state of utter helplessness without it:
“Then she remembered. Her Oyster card and all her contacts and her details and her life and her Uber and everything–everything was on her stupid bloody, bloody phone. She’d outsourced her entire brain in about 2009, and now she didn’t even know her brother’s mobile number, or anyone who could help her out.”
I liked how Colgan wrote about Mirren’s incapacity to do anything without her phone. She felt stark naked without it, and was practically having a mental breakdown in the station’s security office. Nevertheless she is still able to board her train without having so much as an E-ticket, and sets off for the Highlands. During her time on the train and while up there she notices herself repeatedly and reflexively reaching for her phone, only to discover time and time again that she doesn’t have it. How will she cope without it?
Whom does she meet on the train but a fellow antiquarian book hunter and a former crush (or is it current?) named Theo Palliser who has also been hired by Jamie to help find the valuable book. The two share an attraction that Mirren both acknowledges and repels, and the reader doesn’t know if the two will finally get together while on the train or in Scotland.
When the pair disembark at the end of the line they are met by Jamie and taken to his enormous castle. Colgan had a flair for describing its immensity, full of dark rooms, creaky corridors and secret caves. The castle had not been maintained and was strewn with cobwebs, dust and cracked walls and ceilings. But most striking were the books. Thousands of them, a bibliomaniac’s domain, all of them collected by Jamie’s grandfather. Upon the grandfather’s death Jamie found a mysterious poem left to him as his heir. It provided a series of clues in locating an extremely valuable book, so valuable that if sold could pay for the upkeep of the entire castle with plenty left over.
Colgan filled the castle with books: they were everywhere. Not just on bookshelves, but filling every cabinet and piled on the floor. If a room had any available space, it was filled with books. They weren’t arranged in any particular order, either, so even if Mirren and Theo were able to decipher the poem’s clues and discover the title of this mysterious book, they’d be no closer to finding out where it was.
I found their ability to decipher the clues, and their subsequent success in finding the objects those clues led to, to be expedient and not credible. A string of clues leads to bundles of letters and origami which offer more clues that lead to other objects, and the group is able to do all this–in a bibliomaniac’s hoarder castle–during a power outage? With no lights and no electricity to charge those who had working cellphones for their flashlight feature, everyone got around by candlelight and weak battery-operated flashlights.
Mirren is torn between the two men, as she feels ambivalent about Theo yet also drawn to Jamie. My current cull of Christmas reads this year has surprisingly given me more sex than I could ever (i.e., never) wish for, and unlike all the past Colgan novels I have read, this one has a steamy sex scene between Mirren and Jamie near the end of the book.
In the final chapters a fire in the outdoor maze destroys the castle yet conveniently does not touch the final object the mysterious poem leads to. A book sewn into a bedspread turns out to be an extremely rare copy of the Protoevangelium, a 1552 manuscript that is the Gospel of James. It serves as the proverbial golden egg and sets Mirren and Jamie up for their next stage in life, which is operating an antiquarian bookstore, no less.