Anne Perry: An Heir of Mystery

International best-selling author turns from mystery genre to fantasy to spin a story about a golden book containing life's answers.

Anne Perry

Her novel Tathea just won the Association of Mormon Letters award for excellence in LDS letters.

Who is this author who critics have called the best Victorian mystery writer of our time and has turned out a shelf full of novels about crimes and their solutions? She is a young women's leader in a 77 member branch, and her life is nothing like the scenes she paints--no hansom carriages, or fancy gowns, no hypocrisy in 19th century drawing rooms.

Instead, the stately, intellectual, dark-haired Anne Perry lives in a twelve-room, renovated, stone barn in the tiny, remote fishing village of Portmahomack in Scotland with her dog and four cats. It is a quiet, unhurried life. The room in which she writes her novels in long-hand has three windows that look to overwhelmingly beautiful views across the Dornoch Firth and her garden. She writes six days a week--most of each day--and for a change takes her dog for walks across the windswept fields, watches television, listens to opera and knits. She reads voraciusly--especially books whose ideas are big.

It sounds like a tame, reasonable life. Yet for a writer, so well-established and beloved in her genre, she has just taken a big risk and written a fantasy about an overtly spiritual idea. Will the critics and fans go screaming away? Will they wonder what has overcome their favorite mystery writer?

The risk was well-taken for critics have raved. One reviewer noted, "This ia particularly daring sort of novel, and that it's Perry's fantasy debut is nothing short of amazing. This is an innovative, well-written, intriguing novel, far removed from and far above the norm."

Readers of her Victorian mysteries could pick out her LDS worldview if they knew what they were looking for. "Even when you are writing a story, you must be loyal to the truth within you. I've been a member of the Church 30 odd years. If that doesn't change you, you've blown it somewhere."

Many of her novel's themes have as an undercurrent, the importance of agency and honesty, contrasted with the duplicity of late 19th century England. She likes to play upon the theme that we are responsible for ourselves, and it is not a good thing to become a victim of circumstance. A corrupt Inner Circle in her books which wields corrosive power sounds hauntingly like the Gadianton robbers.

Yet in Tathea, there is no need to look hard to see if she shares your spiritual outlook. For Latter-day Saints, this fantasy is like old wine in new bottles. Her story explores much of what we already know in language and situations so fresh, it as if you see many of them for the first time.

Tathea is a fantasy that takes place on another earth--one of those many that God created that we know nothing about. "If you put the story in this world, you are limited," she said. "If you put it in another world, you can do anything you want as long as it doesn't contradict itself."

In one horrible night Ta-Thea, Queen of Shinabar, the oldest and most powerful civilization in the world is awakened to find her husband and son murdered as treachery erupts in the land. Stripped of her home, title, and family, she must ride for her life and is suddenly faced with questions she might have never asked. "Everyone I loved is gone, everything I thought I knew. I want to know if there is any meaning in life. Why do I exist? Who am I"

This is the beginning of a ten-year journey of exile and truth seeking, and she is warned by her guide that the answer and the truth can be learned only at great costs. Fearful, but determined, she begins a brutal journey that is both physical and spiritual. She travels across maelstrom-tossed seas and distant lands in her search. She receives a glimpse of a premortal council in heaven with its powerful clash between good and evil, and she receives a golden book that contains the answers to her spiritual quest.

The book is "covered in beaten gold and set with chrysolite and pearls...its beauty was marvelous, its workmanship unlike any she had seen...As he hands touched it, an ineffable sweetness ran through her. She hesitated only a moment, certain that the words in it, once known, could never be denied..."

Having received the book, Ta-Thea begins the second stage of her quest. Knowing that there is truth and that the book contains it, she ventures forth to spread the word. Sometimes her efforts are successful, but, she learns bitterly that even those who embrace the book sometimes twist its meaning and use it for their own ends. Everyone does not embrace the book with the joy she has felt, and trying to teach its message in Shinabar only ends up making her an exile a second time.

The Great Enemy, Asmodeus, who she had seen battling against the light in her premortal view, continues his soul-pounding work on Ta-Thea's earth, and she learns that depth of courage and love required to fight the darkness.

In her quest, she finds a bitter-sweet love, she lives in different societies that represent different kinds of innocence and corruption, and she is transformed by her struggle. In the beginning lines of her golden book, she has been taught:

"By obedience you may overcome all things, even the darkness within, which is the Great Enemy. The heart may be softened by pain and by yearning until love turns towards all creatures and nothing is cast away, nothing defiled by cruelty or indifference. The mind may be enlightened by understanding gained little by little through trial and labor and much hunger to perform great works. Courage will lift the fallen, make bearable the ache of many rounds, and guide your feet on the path when your eyes no longer see the light.

"When your spirit is harrowed by despair and all else fails you, compassion will magnify your soul until no glory is impossible.

"By such a path did God ascend unto holiness."

Tathea a Type of Every Life
Anne Perry's book is an epic about kingdoms and worlds, light and dark as it battles around and inside of your soul. Sometimes the book seems too large, with more episodes and characters than can be easily aborbed or comprehended in a single reading, yet the ideas match the scope. The descriptive passages are exquisite pieces of writing, the spiritual philosophy profound. Though the events of Ta-Thea's life are painted on the huge backdrop of nations falling and people pushed to the limit of their endurance, still the story is everyone's story. Anne Perry said, "The choices she makes on her journey, her wanting the truth above all things and being prepared to pay for it, the enduring through difficulty, danger, and hardship is our existence. If we are going to walk with the Lord, we can't expect to do it for nothing."

The Sequel
Currently, Anne Perry is working on Tathea's sequel, a hefty book called Come Armageddon that takes place 500 years after the first novel ends. It is another ambitious and patient undertaking, but her life has prepared her for it.

Anne was born in Blackheath, London, and her childhood was dogged by ill health, particularly respiratory problems. At the age of six, she contracted pneumonia, and when she was eight, doctors warned her parents to prepare for the worst. When she recovered sufficiently to be able to travel, her parents took the advice of their physicians and arranged for her to stay with friends in the Bahamas and then in New Zealand. During these years of ill health, Anne's imagination flew while her body faltered. She loved to create stories along the lines of the ones she read. Her father, Henry Rainsford Hulme, who was a Rector at Canterbury University College, encouraged her to write her ideas down, and passed onto his daughter his own love of precise language.

Once when Anne was a teenager in New Zealand, "I remember going to my father with a problem and humming and hawing and just not being able to get across what I wanted to say. At which point I just said, 'Well, I can't explain it very well, but I know what I mean.' And he said to me, 'No. You don't know what you mean. If you did, you would have the words to explain it clearly.' And clearly he was right. Words, the precise words, are important and they can only come once an idea has been grasped, fully. He was very good at getting to the essence of a problem, and he was able to explain things in a way that was exact but vivid."

Anne wanted to be a writer, to give to others the expansion of mind and spirit she felt when reading. The spiritual journey and self-discovery of writing was a way to find new corners in her soul. As a fan, John Porter, observed of her, "She is extremely bright and quick, with a formidable intellect....Ms Perry has that extra, hard-to-define spark and fire in her eye."

Some of that fire comes from a discovery she made while living in California for a time during the late sixties. She worked as a nanny, but the household was not a happy one, and she felt adrift and alone. A neighbor who was a member of the Church seemed to have something special, and she started attending the local ward and studying the gospel. Since she had come from a very scientific family, her questions multiplied. Finally, her neighbor said, "Don't try to work it out in your brain. If it is true, the Lord will tell you. That's the best test of all, isn't it?"

That night Anne prayed about the truthfulness of the gospel, and the next morning when she awoke, the room was full of light. She quickly went next door and said, "I'm ready to be baptized."

"When?" her neighbor asked.

"Right now."

Anne says, "I've had some ups and downs, but I've never considered anywhere else to go. There is nowhere else to go."

Anne Perry hopes Tathea will plow new spiritual ground for those who, at this point, might never be willing to look at organized religion. She hopes the ideas might ring in some ancient part of their souls.

One fifteen-year-old girl wrote her own critique of the Tathea. "At the end of the novel is the text of the Book. It filled me with such awe, such love as I read it, and helped me better understand God's plan...Most people think that the definitely Christian, yet very different philosophy found in the book was created by Anne Perry. However, it actually reflects the doctrines of the Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints of which she is a member. I encourage, even plead with, everyone to read this awe-inspiring, spiritual novel. It will make you a better person; if everyone in the world read it and believed what it says, the world would be a better place."