The reissue of Charles de Lint’s 1994 novel MEMORY AND DREAM proves him to be an impeccable stylist. He can write thick and chewy sentences chock-full of appropriate metaphors, or he can write light and airy banter. His work is constructed so that slow and attentive reading provides a good payoff.
Take, for example, this passage concerning Isabelle, who is reminded of her dead friend Kathy as she rows across the water, and considers past memories: “They swept about her like a flock of noisy gulls, each clamoring for special attention, not one concerned with the pain their presence woke in her. They rose up from their secret places, pushing through the cobwebs, churning up a fine cloud that had lain undisturbed for years. Isabelle was choking on their dust.”
If you forgive the conceit of seagulls flying about in the neglected corners of her mind, you realize how interesting this description is for its water-based imagery and its apt portrayal of Isabelle’s flighty mind and her painful recall of her best friend. This dense writing isn’t an isolated incident.
Thankfully, the plot can withstand the weight of the style. The story spans 20 years and with the characters growing from college age to early middle age, it jumps back and forth between time periods. The current storyline has Katharine Mully dead for five years, Isabelle Copley living in isolation on an island, and Alan Grant hoping to publish a book of Mully’s stories, for which Copley would be the illustrator. All three were fast friends in college. But Mully’s death has weakened the bonds, and always in the shadows, there is the specter of Vincent Rushkin.
Rushkin was a world-famous artist in the ’70s, and for some reason, he decided that Isabelle would be his protégé. It is a strange relationship, and Rushkin is a strange and sometimes violent man. He has a gift – of bringing his paintings to life, literally. And he teaches this gift to Isabelle. The ethical implications of this power fuels the world of memory and dream that de Lint explores.
Contemporary fantasy is very difficult to do. It’s easier to have a reader believe in dwarves forging magical axes when the setting encourages this belief, but to have readers believe in magic in this rational age is much harder. You must show people’s disbelief and their eventual conversion realistically, and this takes time. It may be why the book seems bloated, clocking in at 400 pages. Even then, some characters seem too quick to accept Isabelle’s magic painting process, and others too slow to see the danger in the same process.
But even as one struggles with the book’s length and contradictions, with the overly sentimental and emotional tone, one is still drawn to the characters, to the people that are living within the characters that seem nothing more than letters on a page.
In a remarkable journal entry penned by Kathy found three-quarters of the way through the book, de Lint offers an explanation of what he is trying to do with fantasy set in a “cosmopolitan commonality.” Kathy writes a comparison of how Isabelle paints her fantastic beings into reality, and how Kathy herself writes stories that come to life, “In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on – a harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes – the way Izzy would pull her numena from hers – and then set out upon the stories’ various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well.”
He is successful in this. In fact, the night I finished the book, I dreamed about the characters and continue to carry memories of them within me. When I dream about them, I hope the good ones are safe and happy. I don’t think an author has the right to hope for more than that. Perhaps you should read this and see if you feel the same. Recommended. –Mark Rose
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• WIDDERSHINS by Charles de Lint
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }