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The Haunting of L., by Howard Norman
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The final book in Howard Norman's Canadian Trilogy: a novel about spirit-photographs, adultery, and greed
It is 1927. Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist, Vienna Linn, in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter's life is about to change in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Across Canada, Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur-theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence.
After a strenuous journey, Peter arrives in Churchill on the very night of his employer's wedding only to fall under the spell of Vienna's brilliant and beautiful wife, Kala Murie. Several months later, the uneasy menage a trois moves to Peter's native Halifax. Peter is drawn more and more deeply to Kala as he reluctantly comes to share her obsession with "spirit pictures," photographs in which the faces of the long-dead or forgotten mysteriously appear --and as he sees more and more terrifying scenes come to life in the darkroom.
Howard Norman's The Haunting of L. is a chilling fable of moral blindness and artistic ambition, from a writer of "complexly tragic vision" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times).
- Sales Rank: #566842 in Books
- Published on: 2002-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.08" h x 5.78" w x 8.30" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 336 pages
Amazon.com Review
The Haunting of L., Howard Norman's exploration of depravity and the influence of remorse, overcomes an underdeveloped plot with a consistently eerie sense of suspense. Following the tragic death of his mother, Peter Duvett leaves his Halifax home and travels to Churchill, Manitoba, where he has accepted a job as an assistant to a photographer he has never met. The photographer, Vienna Linn, works for a local Jesuit, for whom he takes pictures of recently baptized townspeople. Duvett soon meets Linn's "exquisite" new bride, Kala Murie, a devoted student of spirit photography, a phenomenon in which the images of the deceased appear in photographs alongside family and friends. Things turn especially bizarre when Murie fills Duvett in on the truth about her husband before seducing him on her wedding night: Linn is working for a deranged English spiritualist, Radin Heur, who pays him to arrange and photograph train wrecks. As his affair with Murie intensifies, Duvett chooses to remain with the pair, a witness to Linn's murderous attempts to appease Heur and the consuming guilt that follows.
Duvett states that a good book, in his opinion, makes him "feel some nervousness, excitement, agitation, even fear about what happened next." By this standard, The Haunting of L. is indeed a worthwhile novel; a classically styled mystery and the sort of strange-but-true tale Duvett favors. Norman (author of The Bird Artist) captures stark snapshots of setting and character, eliciting anticipation by focusing on the essentials and leaving detail in the shadows. The Haunting of L. ends up as an effective ghost story, creating alluring tension in its obscurity, making for an intriguing, if underexposed, portrait. --Ross Doll
From Publishers Weekly
The stark, unforgiving climate and landscape of Manitoba and Halifax, the symbiotic relationship of art and violence and the unlimited vagaries of human behavior are the idiosyncratic obsessions of this haunting novel, the final book in Norman's Canadian trilogy. Like its predecessors (The Bird Artist; The Museum Guard), it offers a potent mix of eccentric characters, mixed moral motives and love story. In 1926, Peter Duvett meets and sleeps with Kala Murie on her wedding day in Churchill, an isolated village on the shores of the Hudson Bay. Kala's husband is Vienna Linn, the photographer Peter has come to assist. He has traveled from Halifax, escaping painful memories of his mother's suicide or, as he is convinced, her murder. Soon Peter becomes the repository of the emotions and secrets of Kala and Vienna's hazardous partnership. Vienna takes money from an English millionaire, Radin Heur, to arrange and then photograph gory disasters. Unfortunately, the most recent job was botched, so the couple is on the run from the millionaire. Vienna, who eventually discovers Kala's adultery, combines revenge and business when he arranges for a plane with Kala aboard to crash. Kala, however, is merely injured, while the other passengers are killed. Vienna coolly draws on his wife's belief in "spirit photographs" to doctor the pictures of the victims so they seem to show the souls of the dead rising from the bodies, and Heur sends a British verification expert to Canada to authenticate the photos. The wary threesome of Kala, Vienna and Peter are to meet him in Halifax, where a sense of menace rises to a crescendo. The progressive intrusion of the alien and repressed into the familiar what Freud calls the "uncanny" provides the rich base of Norman's art, in which he is becoming a practitioner of uncommon subtlety. (Apr.) Forecast: Norman's steadily growing reputation should ensure a solid audience for this beautifully crafted novel.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Talk about trouble. In this wrap-up to Norman's Canadian trilogy, set in the 1920s, Peter works for a man who photographs accidents he has set up for a deranged client and whose beautiful wife believes in spirit pictures.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Disquieting love story
By Lynn Harnett
In the final volume of his Canadian trilogy ("The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard"), Norman again uses the isolated wilds of winter Canada as catalyst and character in this atmospheric story of love, art and violence in 1926-27 Manitoba and Halifax.
The novel opens in the middle, with the narrator, young Peter Duvett, waking beside his lover, Kala Murie, to recall the previous night's dinner with her seething, menacing husband, Peter's employer, the photographer Vienna Linn. During dinner Kala had prodded her husband to produce a letter just received from a photography expert, engaged by wealthy British collector Radin Heur to pronounce on the authenticity of a "spirit photograph" Linn has offered for sale. The photograph shows the souls rising from three "Esquimaux" killed in a small-plane crash. A crash that Kala, we learn, only just survived. And believes her husband caused by sabotaging the plane in order to kill her.
In this first chapter, Norman plunges the reader into a tantalizing story of intrigue and adultery, made powerful by the subtle, vicious manipulations of husband and wife and the passive wariness of the narrator. "It all but made my skin crawl, the civility."
Peter, though a photographer's assistant, is no photographer and has no ambition to be one. Instead, Peter makes up captions, obsessively. "So that, for instance, if I left my raincoat inside on a rainy day, I would immediately think, MAN WHO FORGOT RAINCOAT STANDING ON STREET."
Peter is also aware that his situation is precarious, fluid, temporary. "The foretaste of regret. I was convinced that I was building up such an archive of memories - all these various views of Kala sleeping - that I could never get them out of my mind. And where would that leave me, should it happen that we didn't stay together? I'd suffer one of Miss Houghton's hauntings, except without any photographs involved."
Miss Houghton is the author of Kala's favorite book, her professional Bible, "The Unclad Spirit," devoted to the investigation of spirit photography and quoted frequently in the course of Peter's narration. "A spirit photograph is one in which someone whom Miss Houghton called the 'uninvited guest' was present." Uninvited, often unwanted, always dead: an estranged spouse, a debauched uncle, a secret lover. Kala lectures on spirit photography and Miss Houghton and it was in this capacity Peter first encountered her on his arrival at a rustic, nearly deserted hotel in Churchill, Manitoba. Her audience consisted of three Eskimos and her husband - or husband-to-be, as it was their wedding day.
The pair have an extended history, though, and Peter begins to learn about it on his very first night, as Kala celebrates her new marriage by coming to his bed. It is not long before he discovers that Vienna Linn is in hiding from the collector Radin Heur, who pays in advance for grisly accident photographs. Heur had, it seems, paid for a photographic record of a train wreck, but Linn botched the wreck and spent the money.
The spirit photograph of the airplane crash is Linn's inspired ticket out of claustrophobic exile in Manitoba, where winter is one adversary who can never be bested. As his wife recuperates from her injuries with Peter by her side, Linn abandons all pretense of normal civility (the locals no longer worth the effort) and holes up in his dark room, preparing his masterpiece of spirit photography.
The understated tension builds as Linn establishes contact and the trio leave for Halifax to make the deal. Once in the city Linn re-exerts his social powers, charming the police and the landlady, while Peter sinks back into the grief and anger over his mother's tragic death which drove him to leave Halifax in the first place and events build to a discordant, crashing, crescendo.
Some readers may find Peter a too-passive narrator, intentional though it is. It is difficult to identify with a protagonist who makes you feel like shaking him from time to time. Yet Peter works his passivity like a weapon and Norman's unaffected simplicity, carefully crafted to heighten the chilled atmosphere, makes the whole thing work within the framework of the melodramatic plot.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Spitit photos and adultery
By Frank J. Konopka
I look forward eagerly to every new release from Mr. Norman, for I know that I will be dazzled by his writing. His books about the Canadian Maritimes are excellent, and his writing style is just sparse enough to give the reader a heightened sense of interest in the plot. As usual with Mr. Norman, the plot itself is interesting and entangled at the same time. We have a young man caught up in adultery with the wife of his odd employer, and there are spirit photographs, mysterious and dangerous British millionaires, baptized Eskimos, and a crippling snowstorm, just to name some of what happens in this work. There is enough foreshadowing that you just feel the ominous sense of impending tragedy, though when it comes you realize that you weren't expecting it in just that way. I don't want to give away much of the plot, for it is integral to the enjoyment of the book as a whole. Just take my advice and read the book; you won't regret it!
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Like cold fog creeping under your coat collar
By Candace Siegle, Greedy Reader
If to haunt someone is to steal that person's peace of mind, the three characters of Howard Norman's novel are haunted indeed. Set in remote areas of Canada in the late 1920s, Peter Duvett, Kala Murie, and Vienna Linn form a strange trio hooked to each other by perverse forces revealed in a manner so understated that they become even creepier.
Photographer's assistant Peter Duvett leaves Halifax to take a job in the remote north of Manitoba. The settlement is accessible only by plane and so small that it is hard to imagine that there would be enough customers to support any business, let alone one which would require a photographer's assistant. When Peter checks in at the hotel, there is a woman giving a lecture on spirit photographs-the "uninvited guests" whose shadowy forms have mysteriously appeared in photo backgrounds. Why is this woman giving a lecture on such an arcane subject in a settlement so tiny that there are only three people in the audience? She is Kala Murie, fiancée of Vienna Linn, Peter's new employer. It is their wedding day, an event to which Peter is not invited and from which Kala comes to Peter's bed. With the bride as his lover and his boss as his enemy, Peter starts work. Vienna Linn, he learns, takes photos of Catholic converts for the town priest, but his real business is creating fatal accidents and taking pictures of the resulting mayhem for a wealthy British client. Train wrecks are a favorite, but planes, streetcars, and automobile accidents are acceptable as long as people die.
Yet watching photographic evidence of murder appear in the developing pan does not send Peter running from this strange couple. His passivity and attraction to Kala keep him in their orbit even when he knows too much.
The behavior of all three main characters is so strange that you cannot imagine how the story will end. Apparently, neither did Howard Norman. The climax is disappointing and there is now way this story could be resolved that simply. It negates the atmosphere that has been so carefully built up.
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