Since his earliest novels, Timothy Findley has explored the many ways people betray their own better natures. Spadework continues this trend in showing how demons of anarchy and ambivalence conspire to destroy one man’s responsibility to others and to himself.

Set in Stratford, Ontario, home to one of the world’s great classical theatres, Spadework centres on characters – many drawn from the theatre world – who suffer enormous pressures to indulge their worst instincts. The central story of a handsome, young actor and the repercussions of his ambition is played out with intriguing resonances.

Between the fanfare of the opening – at a Shakespearean opening night at the Festival Theatre – and the celebratory parade at the closing is a centre of disturbance: “the three or four things/That happen to a man,” as Findley quotes in an epigraph from Auden. The man is Griffin Kincaid, a paragon of physical beauty, who is the father of seven-year-old Will and husband of Jane, a displaced American Southerner and a gifted maker of stage decor and props.

Griffin’s physical allure tempts both women and men, particularly his director, the authoritarian Englishman Jonathan Crawford. Though Crawford has certain traits in common with some well-known Stratford artistic directors, Spadework is no roman á clef. Findley is a moralist with a most humane agenda – though the story has its share of dark sensationalism and gilded romanticism.

The most obvious sensationalism is in Jonathan’s crafty sexual seduction of Griffin, which leads the actor to walk out on his wife and son and subject himself to the predatory director simply to further his own acting career. So the wife loses her husband to another man, but she herself is drawn to a handsome stranger – a telephone man of remarkable beauty, the “angel-man” Milos Saworski, who has deep domestic problems of his own with a mortally ill infant son and a wife who puts her nutty religious fundamentalism above medicine or secular love.

There is another subplot – that of Mercy (the Kincaid nanny) and Luke Quinlan. Luke is the gardener who begins the spadework in the Kincaid garden, and whose accidental severing of a telephone cable has serious consequences for two sets of characters. The physical disconnection is a metaphor, of course, for other psychosexual, emotional, and social disconnections in the story.

Three of Findley’s leading characters have emblematic names: Mercy, Luke, and Griffin. Mercy is kind to animals and humans, while Luke (like his biblical namesake) is a healer of her acute loneliness and hidden emotional pain. He also administers to his misbegotten Uncle Jess, a man appropriately nicknamed “Runner” because he tries to flee the terrible demons that pursue him to a tragic end. Griffin is the most intriguing emblem, his name coming from a mythological creature that symbolizes psychic energy and ambivalence. It is his sexual and emotional ambivalences that create some of the greatest ripples on the fiction’s surface.

But something goes awry in the novel, in spite of its share of impressive moments. Findley’s incisive knowledge of theatre results in passages of fascinating technical detail, but though he displays his talent for evoking locales (especially of well-known Stratford streets and restaurants) and for pithy dialogue, he stakes too much on a diction that is surprisingly plain and a mode of charting mental and emotional states that is rhetorically thin and rather obvious:

“Griffin had no qualms about homosexuals. They were all around him, given his profession. He simply did not want to be one – that is all. And thank God I’m not.

And yet…

And yet what?

Well…

‘I didn’t do it,’ he said out loud, as if explaining himself to the crows, the walnut tree and the stars. ‘I didn’t do it. I only let it be done. There’s a difference.’

Oh?

Yes.”

This inattention to language results in a story that never achieves a dramatic apocalypse or poetic intensity.

The intensity is further hampered by Findley’s tendency to let his good heart dominate his craft – in spite of its subplots of adultery and exploitation, the novel’s conclusion reads like a wish-fulfillment exercise. Everything moves to a placid finish. Jonathan is jolted back to decency after startling, traumatic disclosures from his personal life, and he releases Griffin from his thrall. Most of the other principal characters share similarly benevolent fates. Mercy and Luke look to a bed and breakfast business, and Griffin, Jane, and Will share wine and pizza at Pazzo, the restaurant whose very name is a benediction. Findley’s closure, with its promise of life, is a cloying surfeit of sweet love.