54 pages • 1 hour read
Louise PennyThe Nature of the Beast
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
A young boy named Laurent Lepage runs through the woods outside a small Quebec village. He imagines that he is being chased and is protecting the village. Laurent is surprised to stumble across something unexpected in the woods, but the narrative does not yet reveal what he finds.
Chapter 2 Summary
On a beautiful September afternoon, the residents of the village of Three Pines gather together. Armand Gamache, formerly the head of the Sureté de Quebec police force, has recently retired and moved to Three Pines with his wife, Reine-Marie. Meanwhile, some villagers discuss their upcoming participation in an amateur theatrical production run by Antoinette Lemaitre and her partner, Brian Fitzpatrick. Titled She Sat Down and Wept, the play was written by someone named John Fleming. Gamache is taken aback when he learns the playwright’s name, but reasons that “it couldn’t be the same man […] it’s a common name. He was seeing ghosts where none existed” (15). Suddenly, young Laurent Lepage interrupts the gathering, claiming that he has found a huge gun in the woods. The adults gently dismiss this claim, especially since Laurent is known for making up wild stories.
Chapter 3 Summary
That evening, a smaller group of villagers gathers at the Gamache home for dinner. Among the guests are Ruth, an eccentric poet; Myrna, a former psychologist who now runs the village bookstore; and Gabri, who runs the bed and breakfast. Antoinette and Brian are also present. The group briefly discusses Laurent and his wild stories, but because he is the only child of eccentric and reclusive parents (Al and Evie Lepage), no one is too surprised by his unusual behavior.
Armand questions Antoinette about the play, and she explains that she found a copy of the script in some papers she inherited when her uncle passed away. Antoinette eventually admits that the author of the play is the notorious serial killer, John Fleming. Gamache is furious that she would stage the play, and the other villagers are uneasy about this new information. On her way home, Myrna visits her close friend Clara, who is a well-known painter, and explains her dilemma. Meanwhile, Ruth has slipped away with a copy of the script. At her home, she reads the script and then buries it outside her house. Ruth is troubled by an undisclosed secret.
Chapter 4 Summary
The next morning, Gabri, Myrna, and Clara debate whether to withdraw their participation from the play and question whether the play should even be staged. Gamache joins the discussion and remains adamant that the play should never be performed or read. He declares, “If John Fleming created it, it’s grotesque. It can’t help but be” (31). Fleming has been in a maximum security prison for more than 18 years. Some of the villagers do not understand why Gamache is so adamant in his perspective. Myrna eventually deduces that there must have been a secret trial to protect the public from the full horrors of Fleming’s crimes, and that Gamache was present. Gamache has been haunted ever since by what he heard during the secret trial.
Chapter 5 Summary
Gamache goes to speak with Antoinette and Brian; she staunchly refuses to abandon her production of the play even though a number of actors have dropped out. Antoinette also cannot explain why her late uncle, Guillaume Couture, even had the manuscript of Fleming’s play. Gamache goes to Ruth’s home and together they unearth the manuscript so that Gamache can read it. However, before he can begin, he hears from Reine-Marie that Laurent Lepage hasn’t come home, and his parents are growing anxious.
Chapter 6 Summary
Gamache and many other villagers search for Laurent throughout the night; early the next morning, his parents find his body in a gully near the village. Laurent’s bicycle is nearby. A few hours later, Gamache’s son-in-law, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, arrives in Three Pines. Jean-Guy is a police investigator who lives in Montreal with his wife and family. Jean-Guy explains that Laurent’s death has been ruled an accident. Investigators believe that he was thrown off his bike and hit his head. However, Gamache is suspicious and says that there should be a closer investigation.
Two days later, Laurent’s funeral takes place. Jean-Guy has been investigating but cannot find any evidence that Laurent’s death was suspicious. Gamache is left wondering if he is inventing suspicions because he misses police work, and he ponders what the next chapter of his life will look like.
Chapter 7 Summary
Shortly after the funeral, Gamache realizes that Laurent’s stick was not found with the body. Laurent’s stick was his most beloved possession, and he always used it in his various make-believe games. Gamache goes back to the location where the body and the bicycle were found and is surprised when he cannot find the stick anywhere. Gamache goes to the Lepage home and asks Al (Laurent’s father) if the stick has already been returned. Al realizes with surprise that he hasn’t seen the stick at all, and Gamache becomes increasingly convinced that the absence of the stick means Laurent was killed somewhere else and then discarded where the body was found. Gamache explains his theory to Jean-Guy, and they decide to try to find the stick, hoping to find more information. After two days of searching, a significant discovery is made.
Chapters 1-7 Analysis
The Nature of the Beast shares a setting with most of the novels in the Chief Inspector Gamache series: the small, isolated, and close-knit community of Three Pines, Quebec. Three Pines is often presented as an idyllic space that forms a sharp contrast to the more chaotic and threatening external world. It is important to note that the village often function as a haven for those who have encountered suffering, and this association is made clear when Gamache muses, “Three Pines couldn’t hide them from the woes of the world, but it could help heal the wounds” (6). Given that Three Pines is a rural village, the distinctive seasons also play an important role in the novel’s setting, and the author deliberately employs descriptions of the landscape to invoke symbolic life stages. The novel is set in the fall, and the settings of various scenes are often marked by imagery of falling leaves. This uneasy, transitional period of the waning year reflects the themes of aging and transitioning into new life stages: an appropriate association given that Gamache has recently retired after a long and prestigious career in the police force and is contemplating the next chapter of his life.
The first disruption to the seemingly tranquil setting occurs with Gamache’s suspicions about the authorship of the play; this suspicion is confirmed when he confronts Antoinette directly and gets her to admit that the play was written by a notorious murderer. Once this information is confirmed, tensions and debate quickly arise, foreshadowing the growing tensions in the close-knit community that will cause the town’s social structure to fray in the wake of Laurent’s murder. Significantly, the discussion about the play allows characters to engage in a rather metafictional debate, voicing different perspectives about The Moral Implications of Art. As the characters debate philosophical questions such as whether “the creation [should] be judged by its creator” (31), Louise Penny leans heavily upon the irony that the people debating this issue are “creations” in and of themselves, and even within the context of the story, the characters are creative individuals dedicated to the freedom of artistic expression. However, when the characters conclude that the play cannot be deemed morally neutral in light of the author’s many crimes, Penny makes a firm statement about The Moral Implications of Art that will resonate throughout the rest of the novel.
The discussion of John Fleming is particularly traumatic for Gamache because the protagonist has secret knowledge about the full extent of Fleming’s crimes. While the structure of the secret trial was designed to protect the general public, it did so at a huge psychic cost to Gamache, for he considers himself to be “one person sacrificed for the greater good” (34). The secret knowledge of atrocities that Gamache now carries is a deliberate manifestation of The Destructive Consequences of Deception, for rather than finding some form of illumination, he is instead haunted by this knowledge and is forced to conclude that “knowledge wasn’t always power. Sometimes it was crippling” (35). Ruth is likewise haunted by some past connection to Fleming; she has a visceral reaction to learning the truth about the play and responds by burying the manuscript in the ground. When Gamache later unearths it, he observes that “she’d dug, and dug. Deep. As deep as she could” (40). Ruth’s instinctual act of burying the play symbolically reflects her desire to repress and conceal everything associated with Fleming and the secret she is carrying. At the same time, Ruth’s desperate hope that, “maybe it would be all right. Maybe it would stay buried” (28) creates a sense of foreboding and heightens the suspense of the plot.
The idea that the play itself has the power to exert a malevolent influence increases when Gamache’s first attempt to read it is interrupted by the news that Laurent has gone missing. Now symbolically associated with the play, the discovery of Laurent’s body intensifies the looming sense of doom that is first introduced when Gamache confirms that Fleming is the author of the play. At the moment, however, these events seem to be completely unrelated, as Fleming has been confined to a maximum-security prison for years and cannot be directly responsible for the boy’s death, and it is not initially clear whether Laurent’s death is a homicide. Nonetheless, the initial chapters of the novel introduce two sinister events in rapid succession, thereby setting the stage for the mystery and implicitly charging Gamache with the responsibility of ascertaining the connection between them.
Related Titles
By Louise Penny
