But I Go to Hospital: A Dialogue Review

Posted 11 December, 2007 in Book Reviews, Guest Blogger |

Orpheus Lost, by Janette Turner Hospital. Knopf Canada, $32.95 cloth, 358 pp, ISBN: 978-0-676-97942-8.

The second installment of TSR’s dialogue reviews features me in conversation with Kerry Clare, author and essayist, whose work has appeared in The New Quarterly, Hart House Review, The Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. She is a regular contributor to the Descant blog, and she is the author of the blog Pickle Me This.

Kerry Clare: I’d never read anything by Janette Turner Hospital before, and she definitely surprised me. I was aware that she is as American as she is Canadian, and that she is Australian first and foremost, but somehow I still expected her work to be representative of the sort of fiction Canada’s female writers seem to write best. The sort of fiction that I like best for that matter, of kitchens and caves, mothers, daughters, and divining.

The premise of Orpheus Lost would suggest otherwise though, wouldn’t it? This story of Leela, who studies the mathematics of music and falls in love with Mishka in the subway as he plays Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice” on his violin. Mishka, whose strange disappearances begin to coincide with terrorist attacks in Boston. Soon Leela is snatched off the street on her way home and taken to an interrogation centre where she is confronted by Cobb, a figure from her past, and questions of Mishka being a terrorist.

Thrills and chills, international crime and intrigue. What a treat, I discovered quickly. To read a plot-driven book for once, and have it be so good. To be unable to stop turning the pages until I’d reached the end. I was choking on my heart a number of times, and one day this book extended my lunch break by an extra half-hour. There was no other way.

I do love it when literary fiction manages to surmount the limits of “genre.” To borrow the best of other genres, using it to great advantage. And indeed Turner Hospital does sufficient borrowing here — with the Greek allusions, musical references, spy plots, and romance. Orpheus Lost is a veritable stew, but reads quite originally, all its ingredients measured.

I found the story throughout quite compelling, but Turner Hospital’s depiction of the Australian rainforest was striking in particular. Of course the rainforest is a place that lends itself to story, and Turner Hospital properly invests it with elements of the fantastic, but that somewhere so unknown to me could emerge so vividly is still a testament to her achievements. Conversely the story lagged just a bit for me with Leela’s backstory, which takes place in a small Southern town I felt I’d read about already.

Leela and Mishka’s relationship was hard to understand at first, though with two such eccentric characters, this is unsurprising. Some of the woodenness of their dialogue is easily attributed to the fact that they’re both so unconventional, and so too would be their romance. Words are neither of their fortes. Turner Hospital conveys their respective passions (math and music) well, and also marries them together. Though not so easily — nothing is easy here, and I respect that. The Orpheus story never exactly matches this modern version, piece for piece. Many characters do remain insoluble equations.

So I could continue here, picking the pieces of Orpheus Lost apart, but I will conclude now instead by stating this book is much more interesting as a whole than these pieces are in isolation. That Orpheus Lost is altogether riveting and well-orchestrated, and that it works. Or at least it worked for me.

How about you?

***

Steven W. Beattie: I’m going to be the dissenting voice here. Orpheus Lost was, for me, a major disappointment. In large part, this is because I have been exposed to Turner Hospital’s work before, and so much of it is just so much better: more alive, more potent, more riveting. The new novel, by contrast, was, for me, too mechanistic in its construction, too reliant on coincidence and forced parallels that are used to move the plot along, and without the complexity – both narrative and linguistic — that ignited Due Preparations for the Plague and – especially – Oyster.

I’m surprised that you found the descriptions of the Daintree rainforest compelling: for me they seemed like filler. Indeed, Mishka’s entire backstory positively dragged for me. I’m not sure why it was necessary to include it in such detail. The best sequence in the novel – the sequence that was the most compulsive, that most had me turning the pages in the frenzied manner that you described – was Cobb’s interrogation of Leela, in which he lays out the circumstantial evidence underpinning his suspicions about Mishka’s terrorist connections. The Mishka section that forms the lengthy central portion of the novel was slow, laboured, and unnecessary.

But to return to the descriptive passages for a moment. What frustrated me was what I perceived as their general lackadaisical presentation:

In those days, before the fruit-cropping time, before sugar gave way to avocados and passionfruit and mangoes, the cane stood to attention in green and purple-plumed ranks each morning and saluted as Mishka arrived at school. The cane marched to the very boundaries of the buildings and yard, an invading force, every day gaining ground, every night sending out advance reconnaissance troops, so relentless that children playing cricket or soccer would stumble over spiky green shoots the next morning. This was the growing time. Once the cutting and crushing began, once the cane trains were trundling along the narrow steel tracks to the mill, the air was so heavy with a mist of molasses that the drowsy children would brush soot from their arms and lick sugared air from their lips.

There’s nothing technically wrong with this (although the accidental rhyme in “cane trains” is a bit off-putting), but neither does the prose leap off the page; it’s competent, but uninspired.

By contrast, the description of the outback at the beginning of Oyster is much more vibrant and bracing:

There was also, and still, the drought. More than that, perhaps the worst thing, was a sort of mephitic fog, moistureless and invisible, that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself. We gave it a name. We thought, I suppose, in some primitive way, that if we mocked it, it might decamp and leave us alone. Old Fuckatoo, we called it.

The Old Fuckatoo is roosting again, we would say, pressing handkerchiefs against nose and mouth.

The Old Fuckatoo could brood, close and suffocating, for days, then it might lift a little, depending on the sway and twist of convection in the desert air. Mostly, when it nested and tucked us under its fetid wing, the stink of dead cattle would predominate; or else that particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep. On certain days, when hot currents shimmered off Oyster’s Reef, we could detect the chalk-dust of the mullock heaps, acrid; or, from the opal mines themselves, the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts. Sometimes there was almost nothing, just the blackness of the outback heat, and this felt like a grace newly recognised. On other days – there was no escaping it – an altogether more disturbing trace prevailed, some terrible and indefinable emanation that suggested … but no one wished to think about what it suggested.

Some, in retrospect, claimed it was moral decay; though it was probably the simple stink of fear.

The latter passage is much more muscular, more invigorating, than anything in Orpheus Lost. The extended military metaphor describing the cane in the passage above pales, in my opinion, beside the “mephitic fog … that came and went like an exhalation of the arid earth itself,” or the “particular rank sweetness of rotting sheep,” or “the ghastly fug of the tunnels and shafts.” All of which is a shame, because, knowing what Turner Hospital is capable of, I had the impression that this time she was just phoning it in. (I thought the wooden dialogue was not a result of the unconventional nature of the characters, but was merely wooden dialogue.)

But I want to ask you about your reaction to the incorporation of the Orpheus myth as the overarching metaphor in the novel. As you mentioned, the first time Leela encounters Mishka (in the subway, which is not really all that subtle …) he is playing Gluck’s “Che farò senza Euridice.” The Orpheus myth is referred to again and again in the novel, and is turned on its head in the final stages, when Leela goes searching for the missing Mishka, essentially reversing the roles of the original protagonists. Did you accept this as a conceit for the novel, or did it seem overly forced to you?

***

KC: To be honest, I’m not sure it’s fair to critique a book for not being another book. Nor do I think that “leapage off page” is such a measurable attribute for prose that one could draw a line under it, or at least agree with another upon where to do so. I adored the descriptions of Mishka’s Hungarian grandparents’ strange European house in the rainforest, and the rain, the birds, the green. I can see it, though I’ve never seen such a thing in all my life and I’m not even sure if it could really exist.

But I do understand now that I was lucky to have found Turner Hospital with this particular effort, and look forward to Oyster and the impossibility of disappointment. Do you think that without Oyster as comparison, you would have still been so disappointed with Orpheus Lost? Do you think you would have bothered to read it at all based upon its premise?

And speaking of Orpheus and his myth. No, you’re right that there’s nothing subtle about it. It’s right there in the title I suppose. But then subways are places people go and musicians are there and nothing about that in particular seemed forced to me. What I liked about the whole conceit was that nothing about the metaphor is ever easy after Leela encounters Mishka in the subway. The novel doesn’t run parallel to the myth, but rather pieces of the myth are scattered in shards throughout it, and no attempts at reconstruction could make for a whole that I could discover. But my attempts at discovery made for such an engaging process all the same, and my failure to solve the problem has led to the novel’s haunting quality, and a desire on my part to engage with both stories further.

Am I right to suspect that you did not come away feeling the same?

***

SWB: Yes, you’re right. I felt that the Orpheus myth was handled a bit too heavily to be satisfying. Of course it’s not inappropriate for a street musician to be found playing in the subway, but within the larger narrative context, the fact of Mishka’s first appearance there (i.e. in the underground), combined with the piece he is playing, seemed like Turner Hostpital was laying it on a bit thick. I had the same “Oh, come on!” reaction that I had when Al Pacino’s devil character is shown descending the stairs into the subway in The Devil’s Advocate.

There are other unsubtle moments as well. After her meeting with Cobb, Leela has “a fleeting image of Mishka with a ferryman in a boat, crossing to somewhere.” When Mishka is being “interrogated” following his rendition, he refers to himself as Orpheus and to his tormentor as Cerberus. The covert mission that Cobb initiates at the novel’s end is codenamed “Operation Underworld.” There were times while I was reading the novel when I felt as though I was being beaten over the head by the metaphoric resonance.

Similarly, I thought that much of the novel was too neat, too tidy to be satisfying. There is the forced parallelism of having Leela return to Promised Land to find both her father and Cobb’s father afflicted with cancer, for example. And I thought that the epilogue was really superfluous. It makes explicit things that would be better left ambiguous, such as Cobb’s ultimate fate.

As for the comparison with Oyster, you’re right in saying that “leaping off the page” is a vague critical standard; prose that leaps for one person might hobble for someone else. You’re also right that it’s unfair to fault Orpheus Lost for not being Oyster. The comparison I drew above was meant simply to illustrate comparable sections in the two novels in which I felt Turner Hospital was operating at a lower pitch in the new book. Had I not read – and loved – Oyster, I doubt that my reaction to Orpheus Lost would have been much different: I’d still find much of it heavy-handed and contrived. But, knowing how powerful Turner Hospital’s writing can be, my sense of disappointment was surely heightened.

Would I have picked the book up were it not for my previous exposure to the author’s work? Possibly, because the subject – the current climate of geopolitical paranoia (and the effects that has on interpersonal relationships) – is a touchstone of our shared historical moment. Indeed, it’s the subject that artists who engage with the world as it is seem unable to shy away from. Post-9/11 literature has become almost a subgenre of its own, with authors as diverse as Jay McInerney, John Updike, Ken Kalfus, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Don DeLillo having taken it up. There has been debate as to the efficacy of this; my own feeling is that artists are obligated to deal imaginatively with our most pressing emotional issues – love, fear, anger, confusion – and that, given this obligation, 9/11 and its fallout is the one subject that is all but inescapable at this point.

Having said that, the subject alone does not make for a compelling novel. It must be well handled, and my own feeling is that in this instance, Turner Hostpital fell short.

***

KC: There was a neatness to the novel, you’re right, though I suppose that’s to be expected from any book that begins with, “Afterwards, Leela realized, everything could have been predicted from the beginning.” Further, yes, perhaps it was too tidy, though I remain fascinated by how hard it is for us to accept coincidence in fiction sometimes.

Regarding the tidiness, though, what I liked about it was that tidiness could be created from such a mess. To create a tidy book out of myth, music, math, and intrigue (could not find a synonym beginning with “m,” unfortunately) is no mean feat. Orpheus Lost has served to broaden my literary horizons — toward Turner Hospital’s work itself, of course, but also to the myths, music, math, and intrigue I so often fail to consider, so ensconced am I in my usual bookish bliss. I enjoyed that I could be excited about such things at all, and how gripped I truly was.

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