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'Spadework' by Timothy Findley

Findley novel doesn't dig deep enough

Sunday, August 25, 2002

By Mark Kemp

	Spadework By Timothy Findley HarperCollins $24.95

Findley won many awards in Canada and France, yet he found little fame in the United States..

Like fellow Canadian Michael Ondaatje, Findley got his start in the late 1960s. He had acted in the early days of Canada’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival alongside such luminaries as Alec Guinness, Tyrone Guthrie and Ruth Gordon.

After writing his first short story in 1955, Gordon persuaded him to leave acting and concentrate on writing. Although the theater occasionally crops up in his books, and he has written a number of successful plays, his final novel is his first to take that world as its setting and subject matter.

Given Findley’s devotion to the Stratford Festival, and his long residence near that Ontario town, this book should have been his magnum opus. Instead, it will likely be remembered as a flawed swan song.

As the curtain rises, we see a quiet Canadian theater town, hopeful young thespians, a happy family: good jobs, good cars, good wine, good domestic help in the form of stoic retainer Mercy, child, dog, friends.

Life in Stratford seems perfect. But isn’t everyone drinking rather a lot? Isn’t their dinner conversation a little too humorless, superficial? And to quote Findley talking about recurrent themes in his writing, “why is it always so hot -- why can’t it RAIN?”

Of course, in a world that revolves around Shakespeare, the weather reflects the emotional lives of the characters. For ambitious young actor Griffin Kincaid and his prop-artist wife Jane, a heat wave outside parallels the illicit passions and repressed pasts about to erupt inside.

In the luxuriant grounds of their rented house, the obsessive digging of the gardener Luke, “wielding his spade,” hints at the sexual and psychological direction the story will take. Luke’s spade severs a buried phone line, preventing two important phone calls and precipitating the crises in the characters’ lives.

Missing one call draws Griffin into sexual blackmail. Although he has received enthusiastic notices for his first Stratford roles, he wants assurance of parts for the next season.

Reluctantly, then willingly, Griffin makes himself fair game for a predatory director who thinks of himself as a “sculptor of talent” who “molded his proteges as if from clay -- their limbs, their profiles, their vocal talents, their understanding, their emotional responses and, of course, their sexual submission.”

After the spade has done its damage, Jane encounters a hunky phone repairman she calls her “angel-man” and thinks she can mold through art (in her case, nude photography, not the stage).

Luke himself misses a call that might have averted tragedy in his own family.

The novel’s characters resemble actors working on creating their roles. Their dialogue, as if to call ironic attention to the Shakespeare plays being produced -- “Richard III” and “Much Ado About Nothing,” which emphasize the overweening ambition and sexual misunderstanding also afflicting the novel’s characters -- is decidedly un-Shakespearean in its repetitiveness and modern blandness.

The sometimes seamy drama of the theater world is, unfortunately, upstaged by the melodrama offstage. The novel contains intriguing glimpses at the inner workings of the Stratford theater.

Add to this insider’s look at the theater a serial killer mystery, a patina of mythology (Jane’s search for a St. George to serve as a human model for an elaborate stage prop she’s designing -- and to slay her dragons), a dissection of family dynamics and an obsession with Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress.

The novel’s setting is the summer of 1999, when the political tragicomedy was inescapable and available to anyone who wanted to turn it into cultural or personal symbolism.

Findley’s earlier books often mix fictional invention with legendary or historical figures. Most are set distant in time and place from Stratford: “The Wars” (1977) in World War I; “Famous Last Words,” narrated by Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (a persona from an Ezra Pound poem) and with Pound, Charles Lindbergh and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor as characters during World War II; “Not Wanted on the Voyage” (1984), on Noah’s Ark; and “Pilgrim” (1999), in Carl Jung’s Zurich clinic in 1912.

Many readers will enjoy visiting “Spadework’s” sweaty summer of discontent. But even to those who stay away, I highly recommend Findley’s time travels and imaginative geographies.

Mark Kemp teaches in the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.