Philip Marchand on the welcome return of a very tall, tart-tongued St. John's heroineA mysterious provider lurks
The Custodian of Paradise
by Wayne Johnston
Knopf Canada,
510 pages, $34.95
Like Iceland, another rocky, windswept island in the North Atlantic, Newfoundland at times has an eerie, otherworldly feel, at least in the more remote parts of its landscape. Wayne Johnston ? who seems to have launched a prose epic of Newfoundland with his two most recent novels, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, about the rise of Joey Smallwood, and The Navigator of New York, about the rivalry between two American Arctic explorers ? makes use of that eerie feeling in his new novel, The Custodian of Paradise, his latest contribution to the epic.
One indication of the eeriness is the repetition of the word "ghost." The narrator of the new novel, a St. John's newspaper columnist named Sheilagh Fielding, imagines the entire Earth as a "ghost planet," a world as depopulated and empty as Newfoundland is always threatening to become. Much of the action takes place in a literal ghost town, an abandoned settlement on an uninhabited island, Loreburn, off the coast of Newfoundland. When not living in this ghost town, Fielding, as she is known, who describes herself as a "spectre" and a "ghost," resides in her father's house in St. John's, a gloomy place "in which the past persisted like a panoply of voiceless ghosts."
This motif fits right into a novel featuring strange, faceless stalkers, images of human habitations, cities deserted because of mysterious catastrophes and the sudden appearance and disappearance of wild animals once domesticated ? horses and dogs ? that have become harbingers of menace.
Yet Fielding ? readers of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams will recall her appearance in that 1998 novel, as the loyal friend and caustic critic of Smallwood ? is also very much a flesh and blood creature. It is almost an excess of physicality that undoes her ? she is beautiful, but she is embarrassingly tall, at 6 foot 3 inches, and she acquires a shrivelled leg after a long bout with tuberculosis. All this makes her seem a freak to her fellow residents of St. John's.
That's not her only problem. She is the daughter of a St. John's doctor and his wife, a Bostonian named Susan Hanrahan, who leaves her family when Sheilagh is 6 years old. The doctor remains obsessed with his departed wife, and morbidly suspicious that Fielding is not really his daughter. (Both he and Susan are short ? Fielding, he reasons, must have gotten her height from Hanrahan's unknown lover.) To revenge himself on both wife and daughter, he withholds love from Fielding. It's the first instance of self-destructive vengeance that will become a major theme of the novel.
In recompense, Fielding develops a devastating verbal wit. "All that matters is that you not be stuck for words," she bitterly accuses her mother when they meet in New York City, but the accusation might equally apply to her.
For one thing, Fielding discovers the devastating power of sarcasm. "Must you coat everything in irony?" her mother demands. "Why do you never say what you mean straight out?" Joey Smallwood similarly asks her. (Perhaps the answer is that people do not really want to hear "straight out" talk ? in which case irony and sarcasm are the only weapons left to a woman determined at least to be heard.)
For another thing, Fielding discovers the devastating power of nicknames. After coming up with a stinging name for a classmate who has offended her, Fielding realizes that this victim's future has "been altered by the mere application of a nickname, a four-letter name cast upon her like a curse by the girl whom she had thought could be slighted with impunity."
The novel is full of nicknames, not all of them created by Fielding. In fact nicknames, as the novel demonstrates, are a form of folk poetry, emerging almost spontaneously out of the collective unconscious, and more devastating often than simple curses. (How many bosses do we know who have been cut down to size by deadly epithets?)
Fielding's own nickname, self-created and embraced by her fellow Newfoundlanders, is The Forger. It is a name rich in layers of meaning ? from criminal duplicity to artistic creativity, as in Joyce's famous vow "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Fielding lets down her guard once, falling in love with a boy who scorns her after they have sex. Unknown to this boy, she conceives twins ? a plot development that briefly reintroduces Fielding to her mother in New York (Fielding gives up her babies to her mother) and also introduces a mysterious and ostensibly benevolent character who will shadow Fielding for the rest of the novel. His nickname is The Provider, arising from his various acts of assistance to the beleaguered heroine.
The existence of The Provider, and his almost preternatural success in hiding his presence and his identity, adds a key element of suspense to the novel, as well as posing various riddles to Fielding and to the reader.
These riddles multiply as Fielding carries on her career as columnist. In the latter capacity, Fielding earns a reputation as the crank that, in her own words, "criticized everything, mocked everything, rejected everything" ? especially "those sent out from England to oversee the running of the colony into the ground, the exploitative merchant class, the ersatz aristocrats, the fatuous and pompous, the Churches and their parochial, morally dictatorial leaders."
The word that echoes throughout this part of the narrative is not "ghost" but "pointless" or some form thereof. Fielding feels "pointlessly at odds with everything." Joey Smallwood displays "pointless persistence." Talk of love is "a pointless subject." An act of revenge is "terrible in its pointlessness."
What is not pointless in Fielding's life? Her wit continues to devastate. In fact, the narrative is stimulated by numerous, exhilarating verbal duels between Fielding and various obtuse, malicious characters. It's a great formula for narrative interest, especially given Fielding's underdog status ? the same status Johnston's Smallwood had to overcome in The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams.
How we want Johnston's latest protagonist to triumph over her enemies! (Johnston occasionally tries to get beyond black-and-white characterization ? the portrait of Fielding's father is a notable example ? but he also knows nothing gets the reader more interested than the evocation of an out-and-out creep.)
Alas, though Fielding may win these duels, and though her column may prick the pretensions of the mighty, nothing changes. It's all pointless. Neither Christianity nor Smallwood's socialism offers any hope. God is the hopeless "custodian" of a derelict "paradise," and meanwhile his lost creature, Sheilagh Fielding, expelled from that paradise, cannot even get a night's sleep without hitting the bottle.
But then there is the figure of The Provider, lurking as a sort of guardian angel for Fielding, overshadowing her sorrowful tale with hints of divine justice and retribution. His role in the story is a tissue of improbabilities ? which is unsettling to the reader of a novel supposedly operating strictly within the limits of realistic prose fiction. The same sense of jarring improbability accompanies Fielding's journey to the deserted island of Loreburn, a journey undertaken in order for her to sort things out in complete isolation.
Yet without this spooky element, this fairy tale aspect, the novel would be nothing but a sad saga of an unloved woman. If nothing else, the posing and eventual solving of the riddles associated with The Provider give the novel considerable narrative drive.
But The Provider is also one character in the novel that remains fairly enigmatic. Is he really a saviour, or just another burden for Sheilagh Fielding to bear? Is he really a guardian totally devoted to her well-being and to her "soul," or is he the true author of all her woes? Is he a flawed saint or just another dangerous obsessive?
The creation of such a character is an audacious ploy on Johnston's part, but it does give the book a more lasting interest to the reader, above and beyond the adventures of his memorable heroine.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Conten ... 0599119419
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