Crossways

A really good book, exciting, suspenseful and also thoughtful. The characters are extremely well-drawn. I recommend highly.

This was overall a very good read. The timeline jumps around a little too much for me, but I loved the South African setting and the story was engaging, almost hauntingly so.

Crossways: A novel, by Sheila Kohler, Ontario Review Press, 242 pages, $23. In her first novel, Cracks, and in much of her subsequent work, Kohler succeeds in carving out her own terrain, both literally, in the meticulously recreated South Africa of her childhood, and psychologically, in the dark haunts of her characters' minds. A versatile writer, she deviates from her geography of choice in Children of Pithiviers, the story of two little Jewish girls taking refuge with an untrustworthy French chatelaine during the Second World War. But in Crossways, her fifth novel, Kohler returns to her ancestral Johannesburg as the setting for this story of a South African family caught in the dark secrets of the past. Lovely, sophisticated sisters Kate and Marion dazzle young Boer doctor Louis Marais; he manages to win Marion's hand over the objections of her snobbish English mother, who looks down on Afrikaners. But the brilliant young doctor is scarred by childhood abuse, paternal neglect and maternal perversion, and Marion's marriage soon turns to a nightmare. Her husband is violently abusive towards her when he is not neglecting her for a secret homosexual relationship with his partner. Even John, the Zulu manservant around whom the two sisters grew up and who adored them as children, feels impotent, as a black man, to protect Marion from her vicious husband. When Marion dies in a mysterious car accident, expatriate sister Kate returns to their childhood home in Johannesburg and slowly begins to unravel the horrific spiral of events that led to her sister's death. Fans of Sheila Kohler's writing will recognize all the notes in the familiar symphony: the meticulous choice of words, the spare writing, the unfailing sense of place, the torturous relationships across the race and cultural divide, the particularly twisted form of perversion that is maternal sexual seduction, the violence waiting to erupt just under the surface.

Another disturbing, fascinating novel by Kohler. This one is set in apartheid South Africa with themes of loyalty, obsession, predatory sexuality and abuse as well as sister kinship. This is my second Kohler (the first one being Children of Pithiviers which also kept me in my reading chair) so it begins to emerge that the sister theme is important.

Dr. Louis Marais is in intensive care in the hospital in South Africa as this novel opens, recovering from an accident that claimed the life of his wife Marion. Louis, an Afrikaner of hard-scrabble background, has met and married Marion, an Englishwoman from a prominent family which regards Afrikaners as "not people, but brutes with hair on their backs." Recognizing from the outset that the hospital is the "safest place" for him, he knows that "he has to be careful if he wants to see [the three children] again." When Marion's sister and soulmate Kate arrives from Paris for Marion's funeral, she regards the accident as suspicious, as does the reader, since Louis has already made pointed comments to that effect (and because the book jacket summary gives away the main plot). As Kate investigates, aided by John, the elderly, almost blind Zulu house servant who sometimes sees Marion's ghost, Louis reminisces from his sickbed about his life before and during his marriage--his relationships, his goals, his loss of cultural identity as an Afrikaner, and his abusive temperament. The action builds up to its climax when Louis decides, on his own, to leave the hospital to visit the children and his wife's family. A novel of psychological horror, Crossways differs from the psychological horror stories of some other writers of this genre--Patrick McCabe, for example. From the outset the reader knows the direction of plot--only the details and characters' backgrounds need to be filled in. Unfortunately, too, the reader recognizes Louis as damaged and dangerous, but he has no qualities which inspire any empathy. The author suggests through Louis's comments that his loss of cultural identity has contributed to his derangement, and the memories and thoughts of John, the house servant, add to the suggestion that this is a main theme. John, the most sympathetic character in the novel, remarks that "without tradition and law, how can people live?" Yet the difference in scale between John's loss of his Zulu traditions and Louis's losses makes this cultural explanation for Louis's madness unrealistic. The author limits and controls what we know about the characters, telling us their inner thoughts, rather than showing these characters in action and allowing the reader to draw conclusions. The excitement and suspense develop through the withholding of key background information, rather than through the reader's observations of the characters' behavior. The intense psychological approach, the graphically described evidence of past violence, and the considerable suspense, as the reader awaits the characters' fateful destinies, however, will appeal to lovers of Gothic suspense and psychodrama. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple