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The Healer

by Greg Hollingshead

The last time Greg Hollingshead published a book it was The Roaring Girl, a collection of stories that went on to win the 1995 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. Excavating the review I wrote of that book, I’d called it “unsettling” and “funny.” I also said: “Hollingshead’s prose is full of oddments and surprises, and he deals in quietly momentous events: he meets his characters, you might say, at crucial (if unexpected) junctures in their lives, at moments of sexual self-revelation, at nervous breaking points…. Reading Hollingshead, you find yourself exerting and re-exerting the muscles you use to wince.”

Hollingshead was born and bred in Ontario, but now he lives in Edmonton, where he teaches English at the University of Alberta. By 1995 Hollingshead had actually already “announced” himself with two earlier collections of stories and a novel, Spin Dry, the latter well enough regarded to have been shortlisted for the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award.

The Healer, his new novel, exercises the muscles you use to shudder. Which is one way of saying it’s dark, intense, and there’s an electricity in the writing that can seem to affect you muscularly. It’s about healing, but it also plumbs other depths – savagery, how children survive childhood, marriage, and the land. It also powers along on good old-fashioned suspense – that’s the cause of the knotting you feel in your stomach. It doesn’t make you feel particularly good, but what are you going to do? It’s a powerful novel, but not a perfect one. It has its problems. Are they what fool reviewers like to call “forgivable?” Well, yes, sitting here in judgment, it has to be said that, yes, The Healer is bigger and better than its failings.

A writer from the big city, Tim Wakelin, arrives in the northern mining town of Grant to freelance a magazine piece about a young woman reputed to be healing the sick.Wakelin is undercover, posing as a guy from the city in search of country property, which is not so much a pose, because he really is from the city and really does want some property. Maybe only as a quiet place to curl himself up and die: as a recent widower, he’s also frail with grief, guilt, and self-blame; a man “already half turned to the past.” In short, he’s in need of absolution, of redemption, and of healing.

The healer: her name is Caroline Troyer, she’s 20, she helps her father with his real estate business. The healing thing isn’t simple, it’s no snake-oil sideshow, not a public matter of laying on hands, now you see the tumour, now you don’t. All Caroline knows is that she has some kind of power. Enough that she walks around scared, not so much that she can minister to her own fear, heal herself. Like most kinds of power, hers is one that’s paid for. She is, as she tells her father, “dry in my heart.”

The Healer is a novel filled with wreckage: car wrecks and marriage wrecks, and wrecked childhoods; emotional wrecks, psychological wrecks, bears who wreck cottages, and forests wrecked for lumber. Maybe it goes without saying that there’s blood everywhere.Which brings us to the last of the central characters, Caroline’s father, Ross. Of his business, selling rural real estate, it’s said at one point: “It’s a good life if you have no mercy.” Which would serve to sum him up, too. He’s an abusive husband and father. He wants Caroline to profit by her powers. What he wants he seems used to getting.

But Wakelin can’t follow through with his ruse, abandons his article, but not Grant nor Caroline. Then, while she’s driving him around to look at properties, she suffers a seizure at the wheel, crashes, ends up in hospital.

Wakelin’s okay. At the same time, Ross is arrested, and released, for a beating of his wife.
Caroline disappears.

Wakelin gets a new real estate agent, buys an isolated cabin from her, meets a bear, finds Caroline, meets Ross, who’s now on the run from arrest. Wakelin thinks Ross will kill him, so he runs. Gets himself lost in the woods. Which, of course, sets him up for rescue.

Which puts us, for much of the book, out in nature. Hollingshead’s nature isn’t merely set-dressing. It’s the beauty in the book, it’s symphonic with lilies of the valley, the quavering duets of loons, the “soughing of the wind … like the sibilance of whispering.” It also cues some of Hollingshead’s best writing. To wit: “Bullfrogs sagging iridescent among bonsai spinneys performed slow blinks.” But it’s furthermore a dangerous energy, purveyor of fire and flood, a first-class wrecker in its own right. Nature is also ugly in Hollingshead’s hands: The Healer features desiccated beaver tails, charred offal, fetid swampwater, and plenty of shit.

The Healer is a novel of darkness and light. Literally so – Hollingshead is a careful student of light, how it moves through air, how it falls on lakewater. And he’s just as interested in the darkness. It may be clear by now that there’s also a metaphorical opposition, a Biblical undertow of various Goods struggling against various Evils. Hollingshead is too good a writer to lard all the Evil into Ross. As he himself says: “There’s no Devil, you know, just people, and if that’s any consolation we need to have a talk.”

Hollingshead’s narrative is third-person, but there’s nothing conventional about it. Sometimes it’s delivered from a standard remove, a silent witness careful not to draw attention to itself. Often it turns terse and internal: we’re moving around inside Wakelin’s head, or seeing out Ross Troyer’s eyes. There’s also an all-seeing, stentorian tone – Biblical, if you like – that starts in now and again, as from on high. The overall effect of these changes of narrative speed is a little off-putting. But it grows on you. It’s like a strobe-lit scene. Or maybe better said, it’s a kind of cubism, with pieces of perspective chopped up and pasted back down where you didn’t expect them to be. There’s nothing random about it. The deftness with which Hollingshead orchestrates the pattern so it doesn’t seem to be a pattern, so that it’s honest and organic in its discovery of characters, human tendencies, the natural – that all speaks of his gifts as a storyteller.

Problems. The bulkiest is that while Wakelin and Caroline are both a strong presence in the novel, the bond between them takes some understanding and we just don’t seem to get enough information to go on. Is it simply her power that draws him? It’s clearer by the end of the book, but earlier on, it’s too much a matter of readerly faith. Otherwise there are some disposable characters, a slapstick hitchhiking episode that’s oddly out of place, and a pointless marriage to end the book. None of which really interfere – but they’re distractions.

Final words on The Healer? Best, maybe, to dwell on its duality and borrow again from the text, a line about Caroline being taken by an “intricate immensity of joy.” It doesn’t last – soon afterward, she’s commanded by an agony like a bodily migraine. The Healer pulls both ways. As another character says, maybe the point is just to survive.

 

Reviewer: Stephen Smith

Publisher: HarperFlamingo Canada

DETAILS

Price: $28

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-00-225516-2

Released: Sept.

Issue Date: 1998-8

Categories: Fiction: Novels