The Haunting of L.: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Disquieting love story
Review: In the final volume of his Canadian trilogy ("The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard"), Norman again uses the isolated wilds of winter Canada as catalyst and character in this atmospheric story of love, art and violence in 1926-27 Manitoba and Halifax.

The novel opens in the middle, with the narrator, young Peter Duvett, waking beside his lover, Kala Murie, to recall the previous night's dinner with her seething, menacing husband, Peter's employer, the photographer Vienna Linn. During dinner Kala had prodded her husband to produce a letter just received from a photography expert, engaged by wealthy British collector Radin Heur to pronounce on the authenticity of a "spirit photograph" Linn has offered for sale. The photograph shows the souls rising from three "Esquimaux" killed in a small-plane crash. A crash that Kala, we learn, only just survived. And believes her husband caused by sabotaging the plane in order to kill her.

In this first chapter, Norman plunges the reader into a tantalizing story of intrigue and adultery, made powerful by the subtle, vicious manipulations of husband and wife and the passive wariness of the narrator. "It all but made my skin crawl, the civility."

Peter, though a photographer's assistant, is no photographer and has no ambition to be one. Instead, Peter makes up captions, obsessively. "So that, for instance, if I left my raincoat inside on a rainy day, I would immediately think, MAN WHO FORGOT RAINCOAT STANDING ON STREET."

Peter is also aware that his situation is precarious, fluid, temporary. "The foretaste of regret. I was convinced that I was building up such an archive of memories - all these various views of Kala sleeping - that I could never get them out of my mind. And where would that leave me, should it happen that we didn't stay together? I'd suffer one of Miss Houghton's hauntings, except without any photographs involved."

Miss Houghton is the author of Kala's favorite book, her professional Bible, "The Unclad Spirit," devoted to the investigation of spirit photography and quoted frequently in the course of Peter's narration. "A spirit photograph is one in which someone whom Miss Houghton called the 'uninvited guest' was present." Uninvited, often unwanted, always dead: an estranged spouse, a debauched uncle, a secret lover. Kala lectures on spirit photography and Miss Houghton and it was in this capacity Peter first encountered her on his arrival at a rustic, nearly deserted hotel in Churchill, Manitoba. Her audience consisted of three Eskimos and her husband - or husband-to-be, as it was their wedding day.

The pair have an extended history, though, and Peter begins to learn about it on his very first night, as Kala celebrates her new marriage by coming to his bed. It is not long before he discovers that Vienna Linn is in hiding from the collector Radin Heur, who pays in advance for grisly accident photographs. Heur had, it seems, paid for a photographic record of a train wreck, but Linn botched the wreck and spent the money.

The spirit photograph of the airplane crash is Linn's inspired ticket out of claustrophobic exile in Manitoba, where winter is one adversary who can never be bested. As his wife recuperates from her injuries with Peter by her side, Linn abandons all pretense of normal civility (the locals no longer worth the effort) and holes up in his dark room, preparing his masterpiece of spirit photography.

The understated tension builds as Linn establishes contact and the trio leave for Halifax to make the deal. Once in the city Linn re-exerts his social powers, charming the police and the landlady, while Peter sinks back into the grief and anger over his mother's tragic death which drove him to leave Halifax in the first place and events build to a discordant, crashing, crescendo.

Some readers may find Peter a too-passive narrator, intentional though it is. It is difficult to identify with a protagonist who makes you feel like shaking him from time to time. Yet Peter works his passivity like a weapon and Norman's unaffected simplicity, carefully crafted to heighten the chilled atmosphere, makes the whole thing work within the framework of the melodramatic plot.

Rating:
Summary: The End Does Not Justify the Means
Review: While I certainly wouldn't want to read Howard Norman's books every day of the week, I do enjoy him as a change of pace. As anyone familiar with Norman knows, life in his world is bleak and fierce, men are meek and women are bold and mysterious happenings are simply the everyday stuff of life. Norman's novels are stories of love, murder, madness and, strangely enough, the redemptive power of art.

While the characters in Norman's books are usually quite low-key (the exception being some of the female characters), his plots border on the outlandish. No, they're not science fiction or fantasy, they're more plain illogical and downright strange. If you can't accept something like this, then Norman's books, good as they are, simply wouldn't be for you.

"The Haunting of L" is no exception. Set in Halifax and on Hudson Bay, the cold described so lyrically in the book seems to literally permeate each page of the story.

"The Haunting of L" takes place in 1927 and basically revolves around three characters: the narrator, Peter Duvett, and an unhappily married couple, Kala Murie and
Vienna Linn.

Kala is the strange one of this trio right from the start. She is a disciple of a spiritualist who has a deep and abiding belief in "spirit photographs," a belief he passes on to Kala. Vienna, who is not so believing, still manages to find a way to profit from these strange and rather ghoulish "spirit photos."

While we know very well why Kala and Vienna are on the northern edge of Manitoba, we aren't so sure about Peter. He's sort of a ghost of a character himself, paling beside both Kala and Vienna. Complications arise when Vienna must deliver an assortment of "very special" photographs to his English benefactor, Radin Heur. Not to be beaten, Vienna "arranges" for the much needed photos. But does the end ever justify the means?

Without giving away the plot, I will just say that this book, while well-written and entertaining, simply asks far too much of the reader. There is a little too much authorial intrusion and it spoils what could have been so much better. While I enjoyed reading "The Haunting of L," I did come away from it less than satisfied and it will be awhile before I return to Howard Norman again. Though I will return.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Atmospheric, but...
Review: While there was much I liked about THE HAUNTING OF L., there were a few things I didn't like as well.

The story begins "in medias res," thank goodness. Finally, an author who doesn't feel he has to give us a long (and often boring) setup. I give Norman two stars for this alone. Of course, he then writes a flashback but I think it was quite beautifully done and really didn't slow the pace of the novel down too much. Of course, THE HAUNTING OF L. is not a fast-paced novel to begin with.

THE HAUNTING OF L. is an aptly titled novel because the atmosphere, from the opening sentence and throughout the book, is indeed haunting and filled with a sense of dread...just around the next corner.

The plot centers around Peter Duvett, who has resigned his job with a Halifax newspaper and travels to Churchill, Manitoba where he becomes an assistant to a strange photographer named Vienna Linn. Churchill is a bleak and desolate place but there is something that keeps Peter there, Vienna's wife, Kala Murie, whom Peter describes as the most "exquisite" woman he's ever seen.

Kala is just as strange as is Vienna. She's a spiritualist, or at least the disciple of spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose magnum opus she reads almost constantly. Kala is also very interested in something called "spirit photography." "Spirit photography" is just what it seems to be. It is a photograph in which someone who was not visible to the photographer at the time the photo was taken, an "uninvited guest," as this person (or spirit) is described in the book, is present when the photograph is developed. These "uninvited guests" often invade the very fabric of the lives of the people who see them in the photographs, in very negative ways, so you can see why they aren't entirely welcome.

"Spirit photography" has a profound effect on the life on Vienna Linn as well as on his wife, especially when he decides to photograph train wrecks and send the photos to a mysterious man in London named Radin Heur. It seems that Linn can't get his fill of "spirit photography" and it is then that Peter suspects him of being guilty of something almost beyond belief.

THE HAUNTING OF L. is a beautiful, atmospheric and "arty" book. While it has a definite plot line, for me, this was more of a character driven book and one that was darkly atmospheric as well, something I really liked. It was also quite claustrophobic, with most of the action taking place in hotels in either Halifax or Churchill. I loved this aspect of the book as well, since claustrophobic novels, as opposed to sagas, are favorites of mine.

The more one reads of THE HAUNTING OF L., the more one realizes that there is something fundamentally wrong with each of the three main characters. And I mean something "wrong" that goes far beyond their immoral actions. Something that is deeply ingrained, something that, in some strange way, binds them together.

There was something about THE HAUNTING OF L. that I just didn't like but can't quite decide what it is. The characters are very difficult to feel empathy with or sympathy for. Although this is a very intense and passionate story, the book, itself, has a cold, formal tone about it.

And then there's the ending. I don't mind endings that leave unanswered questions but I do want to feel some kind of closure with the characters and I just didn't feel that with THE HAUNTING OF L. I felt that after I had invested time and, to some degree, emotion, with these people I deserved more. Still, THE HAUNTING OF L. is a beautifully written book and one that is highly atmospheric.

I would recommend this book only to people who like a highly literary, character driven books with a very dense, moody atmosphere.