T.M. Wright has written many strange books, including
THE ISLAND, THE
WAITING ROOM and COLD
HOUSE. BLUE CANOE makes those novels look downright
conventional, being a rare example of Wright at his most
unrestrained--in other words, the genre wraparounds of most of his
earlier books are absent here. Yet while there may be no ghosts, zombies
or alternate dimensions (at least not of the conventional sort), the
novel is very much a horror story, albeit of the most unexpected
variety.
Let’s see: there’s an odd man named Happy
Farmer. He resides in a large house by a lake, where he’s “locked up in
memory” despite the fact that he can’t seem to sort out the details of
his life. He’s obsessed with “the town named after the lake,” accessible
by a blue canoe whose existence Happy is for some reason deeply
insistent about convincing us of.
In the meantime he’s bothered by a constantly ringing
phone, the voices of the house’s (apparently) numerous other tenants, a
dog he dubs “the-dog-who-would-have-been-Bob-had-he-been-Bob,”
and a young woman who periodically brings Happy food on a tray. There’s
another woman named Epistobel who may be a). a ghost, b).
a delusional phantasm, c). the true identity of the woman who
brings Happy his meals, or d). none of the above.
Happy himself is nearly as incorporeal. He doesn’t ask
the pivotal question “Why am I here?” until near the book’s end,
at which point his already-tenuous hold on reality is becoming
dangerously weak. Then again, the precise realit(ies) being depicted are
constantly open to question, especially when, shortly past the halfway
mark, a new protagonist enters the story: Andrew Grimm, an eccentric,
death-obsessed young man attempting to track down Lily Hand, his
estranged lover, with the help of an equally eccentric Private Dick
named Fred Spoon. Andrew and/or Fred may be Happy in a previous
life, or perhaps not, just as Ms. Hand may be a former incarnation of
Epistobel…or not. For that matter, the tale overall could be the memoir
of an incarcerated madman or a ghost. Both interpretations are equally
valid.
If the novel sounds convoluted, inconclusive and
scatterbrained that’s because it is. Yet it’s also tight, cunningly
structured and streamlined. A contradiction? In most novels yes, but not
here. Only in T. M. Wright’s universe could all those adjectives
possibly coexist.
As in all his 31-plus books, what Wright is truly
after, in his own surreal, poetic fashion, are the emotions behind the
scenery: the love, fear and anxiety his characters--and by extension his
readers--experience. Sex (one of Happy’s mottos is “Always protect your
orgasm”) is an overriding theme. So is death, and our intimations of
what might come after. This makes for a creepy and unsettling piece of
work, but also a touching, funny, perplexing and endearing one.
