Thunder and Light is the sequel to Marie-Claire Blais’ astonishing These Festive Nights (1997), a novel that won international praise – and a Governor General’s Award – in its original French version, Soifs. Another book is planned to complete the triad, but each is meant to stand alone, though characters and themes recur.
In the narcissism of photographers and dancers and poets; in communities’ resistance to immigrants and exiles and their origins; in the crazy hierarchies of criminals and their judges, Blais attempts to define innocence. Thunder and Light comprises the evidence to support one definition: innocence is the opposite of guilt and also, paradoxically, guilt’s core. Blais is a writer attuned – there should be a stronger word – to our times.
Blais, now in her early sixties, has been publishing for 40 years. Her first novel, so the legend goes, caught the imagination of esteemed writer and intellectual Edmund Wilson, who made her a literary princess. Most sources characterize Blais as “a writer’s writer,” a Canadian exile (she princessed off to New York for a time under Wilson’s intoxication) who resembles Virginia Woolf in style and temperament. Or Sophocles and Shakespeare. Or Dante. We should worry when phrases such as “poetic vision” and “originality of style” are flung fecklessly after writers who resist salesworthy conventions: linear plot, fixed narrative viewpoint, scenes. Such reductions are rarely helpful and often inaccurate, as they are in the case of Blais’ recent work.
Blais doesn’t flaunt a particularly original style, but it is not typically found in bestsellers or even manysellers. Thunder and Light is not written with what some critics (hold their noses and) call “poetic lyricism.” She uses few adjectives, includes only sparse details of place, and does not attempt to layer descriptions to suggest thematic texture. She doesn’t “play” much with rhetoric or connotations either.
What may appear new is the structure of her novel (These Festive Nights uses the same devices): one long paragraph and only a couple dozen sentences in almost 200 pages; myriad voices syncopating in myriad locations, slipping into and over each other mid-sentence. Anyone who has reveled in modernism’s canon – Ulysses, and much of Gertrude Stein especially – will float into the reading rhythm required for this long and tangling thread of a narrative. Maybe only fellow writers have the patience to forgo the easy pleasures of a predictable narrative arc, a single narrator to trust: let’s hope not.
Once the rhythm sets in, readers will be stunned and startled by Blais’ prose. Her characters, each an international mix of intellect, passion, and problems, are constructed with wisdom and compassion. Each is allowed contradictions and heresies. The narrative persona – whoever or whatever conducts this atonal symphony – does not judge Blais’ people. We are directed to only see what exists in a post-millennium, fallen world, not to decide who’s guilty of its atrocities.
The book abhors summary of any kind. These Festive Nights centres on a celebration; Thunder and Light turns to death, its previews and versions and aftermaths. Blais, like all true novelists, is also a soothsayer. While documenting cases familiar from media overkill – a girl flies a plane and crashes, a boy takes a gun to school and kills bullies – Blais predicts cultural hotspots. In Manhattan, a street girl released carelessly from a mental institution warns of apocalypse. Samuel the dancer asks, “and what if that lunatic’s predictions were dead-on, then the city of New York was going down in floods, buildings and skyscrapers crumbling.”
Critical of narcissism and its sidekick, acquisitiveness, Thunder and Light implicates those artists who deny their greed and its related blindness. As a photographer, “Caroline had preferred to look for beauty and harmony in a world where the beautiful and harmonious had been denatured and disfigured”; poets like Daniel prefer the exile and implied celebrity of the monastery and run from the exuberance and complexity of children, women, and family life.
Blais condemns all those who do not try hard enough to read history’s whole story. Monastic Rodrigo snarls about a “holier-than-thou bunch” of “writers spoiled by success.” “Once a year,” he says, “they get together here and talk about the financial impact of bad literature, why don’t they just call themselves the No-Can-Remember Club, because they’re so filthy rich from selling sappy novels that they’ve forgotten a whole century, probably the most savage since humanity began.”
Blais may be “a writer’s writer,” and Thunder and Light may be too dark and dense for the average (whatever that means) reader. But without the challenges of books like hers, readers, too, may become spoiled by success, too impatient and lazy to do the hard work some reading rewards.