The Beautiful Mystery

Predators of all kinds are a recurring motif in the novel.

The abbey is called “St. Gilbert between the Wolves,” in a reference to a parable about the dark and light forces within each person. Just as this story imagines both good and evil as wolves, the novel casts this animal as an evil image only.

Gamache and Beauvoir liken investigative work to hunting. Gamache knows he is out to catch a dangerous predator disguised as a holy man: “The abbot knew there was a wolf in the fold. […] Dom Philippe had called in hunters to find him” (44). Gamache repeats the metaphor later, as he describes the abbot not identifying the “wolf” in time to save the prior (269). Beauvoir’s internal metaphors are less figurative: He wonders if the abbot is best understood as a “jailer” (192) protecting the outside world from sexual predators. This association between good police work and hunting makes it all the most telling that Francoeur is never characterized as a hunter. Instead, Gamache sees him as “more cunning than clever [and] dangerous” (632). This word choice links Francoeur’s particular intellect to that of a wild animal, which relies on its instinct.

A different kind of detective, Frère Sebastien is a Dominican monk—“the hound of the lord” (286). This canine reference reminds Gamache of the monastery emblem: “Two wolves, intertwined. One wore black on white, the other, the abbot, wore white on black. Polar opposites. Sébastien, young and vital. Dom Philippe, older and aging by the moment. Entre les loups. Among the wolves” (292). Frère Sebastien’s job as an Inquisitor is to sniff out the location of the long-hidden Gilbertines, much to their consternation and fear; his personal goal is to track down the original Book of Chants to learn the starting pitch for the music.

In the end, hound and hunter work together to catch the wolf: Frère Sebastien assists Gamache in unmasking Frère Luc as the killer.

The image of the garden and fruit gathered from that garden carry deep biblical significance. In the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve exist in the paradisiacal Garden of Eden until they taste the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which causes God to cast them out forever.

In the novel, the prior is found dead in the abbot’s beautiful private garden, which becomes a tainted refuge and opens the monastic community to a new level of scrutiny—like Adam and Eve, they are exiled from idyllic isolation and forced to endure the encroachment of the outside world.

Fruit in the novel carries the same overtones of temptation that fruit has in the story of Genesis. When Beauvoir is uncomfortable and restless in the cloistered environment of the monastery, he retreats to the grounds and joins a search for the wild blueberries that the monks use to make candy. Each berry offers a profound aesthetic experience: “It tasted, not surprisingly, of blueberry. But it also tasted like autumn in Québec. Sweet and musky. […] It really was perfect” (178). Eating the berries suddenly expands Beauvoir’s perspective, much the same way the Edenic fruit gives Eve new knowledge about herself. Crucially, Beauvoir finds the blueberries so intoxicating that later, when like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Francoeur tempts Beauvoir away from Gamache with narcotics, Beauvoir notes that the pills are “the size of wild blueberries […] and the burst they brought, not of musky flavor, but of blessed oblivion” (186). We witness the young man’s fall from the grace of his loving relationships into addiction.