Books, Volume 14 #3

Review by Monty Williams

The compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable. It is the world's one hope.

--Bertolt Brecht

As we get older all that is most valuable is taken away. We despise what we are left with, but must make do with it. In time it too becomes too valuable not to be taken away; until then there is use, and after that, memory.

Both Patrick Roscoe's The Lost Oasis and Timothy Findley's The Piano Man's Daughter are about use, loss and memory. "For years I have lived inside memory," declares Richard, the narrator in Roscoe's tale. Charlie, the son of the piano man's daughter, lives in the same condition. Each narrator has a mad mother, and each searches through memory--with its clues and deceptions--for a lost father. Both, in the end, come to the uncertain gift of themselves and of their connections in the web of relationships that influence their lives and their actions. Through oppression, both learn the nature of community and compassion. For both that journey is one of loss and discovery and ends with the possibility of loss again. Both narrators, whatever the successes and failures of the novels in which their identities are transmitted, describe the risk and the pain, and the moments of joy, of being human.

THE LOST OASIS DESCRIBES Richard's journey through memory as he searches for his lost father. In that search his own life unravels to the point where he must come to terms with the power of the ghosts in his life and step purposefully ahead of them into the arms of his waiting lover.

The father, Mitch, lives in fantasy that is never realized and copes with the daily responsibilities of ordinary life by lying, by evasion and by running when each particular fantasy starts coming undone. In one such flight he disappears. His passport is found in the African desert, and Richard sets out to look for him. In this quest Richard discovers the deceptions of memory and his inability to read the signs that are presented to him because of the understanding of the world that he has been taught by his father. In effect he becomes his father--dislocated and on the run, in search of the lost oasis where he can finally find some solace and a sense of self.

There are artists who realize that stability and community--difficult as they are to create, coming only at the cost of enormous losses--can still be attained through the gift of belief as a narrative force that offers experience the form of a story.

He never does find that lost oasis or his father. Instead he is "freshly horrified by the speed and ease with which the structure of a life may be levelled." He loses his ability to find his way back, and ends up impoverished, starving and thirsty, without his passport. In that hallucinatory state of extreme dislocation he is captured, escapes and wanders off into the desert thinking, "You are only walking to the place your father's passport was found. You are only bringing this search, which you no longer expect to offer significant rewards, to an end." He collapses. When he regains consciousness he is being looked after by the Canadian embassy, which wants to deport him back to Canada. Instead he returns to Madrid and, on his way to his lover, he hears footsteps behind him and, turning, sees traces of sand. The novel ends ambiguously: "Go back. You've already found him. Before me the magic door opens in the sky."

In the ox-herding pictures of Zen Buddhism illustrating the spiritual path, one does not return to the world as it is until one has lost a sense of self. What returns is functional. What has been abandoned is a baggage of believing one can lose illusion. That takes time. The Lost Oasis takes that time; the narrator doubles back over and again on his emotional tracks. A reader might find this overwriting redundant but the novel conveys not just a plot but also the sensation of repetition that runs the sense of the narrator's self ragged. In that constant awareness of suffering lies the path of liberation, the transformation of desire.

FINDLEY'S NOVEL HAS SIMILAR themes and a similar ambiguous conclusion. The story opens onto an opaque world that slowly comes into focus as three generations of a family's madness are brought to bear on the narrator's situation, his mode of coping with the slow piecing together of family secrets, and his own search for his father. The piano man of the title fathers the mad and passionate Lily, mother of Charlie, the narrator, forced to be accomplice, confidante and finally guardian of that mother whose story he pieces together after her death by fire in an asylum. He says that she was "struck like a match," with "no option but to burn." What inflames her is the random cruelty of the world: a stepfather who locks her in the attic shatters her childhood. In her madness, she flees the world through passion--as a child for ants, as an adult for men. Even in the asylum where she spends the last days of her life, she knows that "we aren't safe anywhere...not in this world."

After her death the son resolves, "I will give her back her life." It is in this quest to find her life that he finds his own, and the name of his father. The novel is the record of that search and is "told in the way most family stories are told, some with prejudice, some objectively--always a mixture of myth and reality." It is a journey through memory and history in which the object of love, in each generation and in whatever form it takes, is taken away. Searching for his father through his mother's memories, pictures, and stories, Charlie notes, "It could be said he disappeared twice: once when Lily lost him in the fog of her illness, and again when he disappeared with her death."

The novel is structured around a series of these patterns that reverberate through the family history. There is the similar effect of parents on children; there is the epilepsy/madness from the mother's side, touching even the narrator whose wife "told me she thought I was mad"; there is the pattern of coping with reality through the telling of stories. Lily tells stories of the ant colonies she nurtured in her unhappy childhood; her son tells the stories that make up the book. Those stories cast the same light in the darkness of living as the striking of Lily's matches did in her stepfather's attic. They keep her sane and, at the same time, manifest her madness. The stories Charlie collects, records and narrates reveal a similar desire for illumination and a similar depiction of the darkness that possesses him. He searches for understanding only to find patterns of madness.

TO UNDERSTAND ONE'S WORLD, according to George Santayana, is the classic form of consolation. To flee from it was the Romantic form. To connect with it ("Only connect," as E.M. Forster insists in his epigraph to Howards End) was the aim of the first part of this century. To do so through the questioning of the very stories and myths that form us is contemporary. But even such ambiguous consolation, filled as it is with the horror and pain of being human, is hard-earned and tentative.

Both narrators come to the uncertain gift of themselves and of their connections in the web of relationships that influence their lives and their actions. Through oppression, both learn the nature of community and compassion.

Both The Lost Oasis and The Piano Man's Daughter move to that end. As Charlie, seeing his daughter continue his mad mother's interests in ants, observes at the end of Findley's novel, "We were not--and we will never be--alone." But within that unweaving and interweaving of family history there is a limited freedom to live a life. At the end of his journeying, Patrick Roscoe's Richard has not so much put aside his family as put it behind him on his way to his lover. He is aware that "the ancient web of threads--so fine as to be invisible, so strong as to be unbreakable...even across the greatest distance, has loosened around me. It is still there, the web, but now I can breathe more freely and easily within it."

There is a type of artist who--thinking no doubt that it is for our own good--removes belief from life, leaving us with a sickening sense of emptiness. (Betrayal does that too, as these two books show.) But these are not the only artists who have their eyes open to the horrors of this world. There are other artists who realize that stability and community--difficult as they are to create, fragile and tentative as they can be, coming only at the cost of enormous losses--can still be attained through the gift of belief as a narrative force that offers experience the form of a story.

Patrick Roscoe and Timothy Findley are artists of this latter type, and the main voices in The Lost Oasis and The Piano Man's Daughter are creatures of such belief and power. These books may suffer from overwriting, from the indulgences of surrealistic spectacle, from the contrivances of set pieces within the plots, but such weaknesses become insignificant against the power of belief that they portray. In an age like ours, with its deceptions and doubts, its horrors and the lack of commitment these horrors produce, The Lost Oasis and The Piano Man's Daughter look at these forms of displacement directly and affirm that there is something on the other side of despair--something that, with all one's brokenness, one must witness to. That is love. It is the world's one hope. These are hopeful books, and readable ones too.