Fiction 1

Letters in Canada 1994 Lettres canadiennes 1994 Fiction 1 / MARLENE GOLDMAN AND TERESA HEFFERNAN While circumstances such as time constraints, late requests, and the quantity of books have conspired so that one author could not fulfil the task of summing up the contributions of established authors in Canada, in some ways this task is better accomplished by at least two. With its diverse cultures and varied landscapes, Canada, even as it perseveres in an obsessive quest for a collective identity, has never lent itself to a single narrative. But perhaps it is this very lack of coherence that keeps the literary scene lively and dynamic. The books by established authors in 1994 have ranged from the execrable, important in their own way, to the poetic and profound. Endings, the breakup of the family, alienating encounters with the other - these are some of the recurring concerns in recent Canadian fiction. Perhaps it is only natural as we slouch towards the end of the millennium for texts to take on an apocalyptic tone. Instead of offering revelation, however, the most intriguing works interrogate the limits of story-telling, question the universality of canonical fictions, and jolt readers out of their role as passive voyeurs. Driven by a sense that the end is near, Timothy Findley's novel Headhunter (HarperCollins, 440, 1993 $24.95) springs to life with a horrifying vitality and plunges the reader into a dystopian universe. The drama begins when the schizophrenic ex-librarian Lilah Kemp accidentally conjures up the horror-meister Kurtz from the pages of Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness and sets him loose in Toronto's Metro Library. This is no paranoid delusion: Kurtz is as real as this page in front of you. In Findley's futuristic universe, AIDS has been replaced by another plague; rival gangs stalk the streets; and power-hungry members of society prey on the weak. Relying on hard-hitting language, Headhunter tracks an array of interconnected families and exposes the underbelly of the fashionable Rosedale set. Their stately homes are populated by alcohol-sodden adults, ogre-like fathers, and beautiful but distracted mothers. Far from a safe haven, home has become merely another forum UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 65, NUMBER 1, WINTER 1995 2 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 where power is won and lost. Amid the madness of the social and domestic war zones, the novel's moral compass relentlessly (perhaps too relentlessly) swerves to the children and other marginalized groups who are crushed and cannibalized in the brutal games played by adults. Following Kurtz's escape from Conrad's novel, a parade of characters, loosely based on familiar figures from canonical texts, stroll across the pages. Re-tooled for the times, Kurtz has become a modern-day headhunter , a 'shrink,' who wields seemingly limitless power as head of a psychiatric institute. Right from the start, the novel posits a mysterious link between Kurtz and a group of catatonic children at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre. The trauma suffered by these children constitutes the enigma at the heart of the text. The task of uncovering the root of the children's trauma falls to Charlie Marlow. By self-reflexively drawing on figures such as Kurtz and Marlow, and liberally sprinkling the novel with allusions to Madame Bovary, Frankenstein , and The Great Gatsby, to name a few, Findley does more than scribble himself into the portrait of past masters. Instead, the allusions to canonical works serve to highlight both the significance of literature and a mode of viewing the world as a web of texts. One of the most provocative aspects of Headhunter lies in its insistence on the authority and responsibility of readers for their interpretation of works of art - a gesture that puts the novel at odds with contemporary views that typically seek to censor images and hold artists responsible for the public's response. (The reaction to Eli Langer's drawings is a recent example of this mind-set.) Lilah Kemp's release of Kurtz from page 92 of Heart of Darkness provides the most obvious example of the reader's power as interpreter. The rest of the novel depicts her taking responsibility for this act...