| Reviewed in
Infinity Plus by John Grant |
July
1, 2001 |
Jonathan Carroll is one of the best and most intelligent novelists
at work today, and yet, although they sell healthily, his books
have never achieved the sales figures his manifold virtues so richly
deserve. This has puzzled many -- the jacket of this new novel is
covered in quotes from the famous expressing exactly this puzzlement
-- yet the reason Carroll's work has never really conquered the
commercial market seems obvious enough, a feeling reinforced by
reading The Wooden Sea.
It is that his novels cannot easily be summarized in a sentence
or two ... precisely the reason that they're so very rewarding,
of course, but not helpful when you're trying to recommend them
to friends. If you were wanting to recommend a Stephen King or a
John Grisham novel, for example, you could say "it's about
vampires in a small American town" or "it's about this
guy on the jury of a cigarette-company lawsuit who's secretly an
anti-smoking campaigner" and you'd have adequately conveyed
the gist of the book. Each novel of Carroll's, by contrast, is "about"
a whole lot of things, so you're reduced to saying: "Just read
it. You'll love it." To repeat, this is why people who do read
them do love them, but of course it makes it hard to induce people
to do the reading bit in the first place.
So my apologies in advance -- and to Mr Carroll as well -- if the
following resumé seems a bit vaguer and more chaotic than
it could be.
Frannie McCabe is Chief of Police in the small town of Crane's View,
somewhere in the sleepier reaches of New York State. One day a dying
three-legged dog is brought into his office, and takes over his
heart. A few days later it dies, and he buries it. At about the
same time a couple of the rowdier townsfolk disappear, seemingly
into thin air. The dog refuses to stay buried, reappearing in his
car boot accompanied by a beautiful perfume -- not the stench of
decay one might expect. Other enigmatic symbols associated with
the dead dog recur in McCabe's life, notably a coloured feather
which only later will he realize is actually artificial. A teenager
dies, and it is discovered that the drawings in her schoolbook relate
to the dog, the feather and McCabe himself. An old artbook reveals
an 18th-century painting of what appears to be the three-legged
dog -- and called by the same name, Old Vertue.
These and other strange occurrences could almost lie within the
province of the real, and for a while McCabe desperately tries to
rationalize them as such. However, his attempts soon founder as
his life lurches into the outrageously surreal. Aided by allies
that include himself as a teenager (his junior self promptly gets
the hots for McCabe's own stepdaughter), he struggles to make sense
of all the weirdness, before realizing the counterproductiveness
of trying to make sense of something that has no straightforward
sense, no rationality.
An individual called Astopel, whom for some time both McCabe and
the reader assume to be a demon of a sort, tells McCabe that he
has only seven days of life to solve the enigma of what is going
on if he is to save the world. However, those days need not all
be spent in the same part of his life; cast into the future, for
example, he spends some hours as an old man and learns the dreadful
truth as to how his wife has died/will die young -- an event which
he obviously yearns to avert once back in an earlier portion of
his life...
Where this novel succeeds most brilliantly is in its portrayal of
constantly shifting realities. Let me enlarge upon this. The fantasy
concept of alternate realities is similar to but distinct from the
sf idea of alternate universes or parallel worlds; the two concepts
can be overlapped, of course, and often are, but they need not be.
Good alternate-realities stories are extremely difficult to write,
which is why there are so few of them: many writers either do not
take up the challenge or (which is really much the same thing) lapse
into the easier-to-handle sciencefictional mode of the alternate-universes
story. The Wooden Sea -- although it is in part actually an sf novel
-- is a paradigmatic example of what the fantasy alternate-realities
story can be made to do, while also, though it is eminently easy
to read, demonstrates the difficulty of handling the mode. McCabe's
(and hence the reader's) realities are in a constant state of flux,
always likely to be temporary and never to be trusted, but somehow
our perception of those realities remains fixed: because of this,
although the sequence of events, if related baldly as a list, might
seem to be random, there is at no point any sense while sharing
McCabe's adventures that they have just been arbitrarily thrown
together -- always it is the mind that they do have a purpose and
an order, although that purpose and that order may transcend our
understanding.
Even when finally an explanation is forthcoming, there is the delightful
feeling that this explanation itself may be as transient as the
realities through which McCabe has, and we have, journeyed. In that
sense, the plot's explanation almost doesn't matter.
All this is infernally difficult to achieve, as I've said: as readers
we usually want to have a book's rationale (or rationales) firmly
foregrounded, and become impatient otherwise. It requires great
skill for an author to shake us loose from this dependence on the
rational, this desire to duck the challenge that full-blooded fantasy
should be issuing to its readers. Michael Moorcock does it sometimes.
More specifically, Gene Wolfe succeeded brilliantly in There Are
Doors (1988) and, in a rather different way, Mark Helprin managed
it in the later parts of Winter's Tale (1983) -- while, of course,
Lewis Carroll managed it in his proto-surrealist Alice novels. There
are other examples, but they're few and far between. It was in particular
the Wolfe book that kept coming to mind while I was reading The
Wooden Sea. Although the two novels are very different, both succeed
in letting us -- or making us -- cut ourselves free from the logic
of the everyday world.
It would be perfectly possible to read The Wooden Sea with great
pleasure as just an entertainment, and doubtless many people will,
perhaps pondering from time to time about its seeming quirkiness.
But it would be a waste to do so when the book offers us so many
other rewards.
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