I’ve always had
some of a mixed approach when it comes to novels that try to break the typical
framing device of books. When it comes to literary fiction I’ve never been able
to get it. James Joyce and James Gaddis are indecipherable; I’ve never been
able to make head nor tail of David Foster Wallace and I’m not much better
suited for the kind of work I’ve gotten from Salmon Rushdie or Umberto Eco.
I’ve had
somewhat better luck when genre fiction tries to break those same rules though
its been swing or miss. I could tolerate Harlan Ellison’s attempts mainly
because they were short fiction; Stephen King could do it well except when he
chose to write himself into the story and I’ve always found Jasper Fforde and
Chuck Palahniuk repulsive. Horror has a better habit of doing this well than
other genres; I’ve already written on how gifted Grady Hendrix was with Final
Girl Support Group and many of his other novels follow this same approach. That
said this is always a delicate balance to strike.
I remember when
I was still in college reading and then buying Mark Danielewski’s House of
Leaves, which was one of the most unsettlingly frame dual narratives I’ve
ever read. It was a riveting book to follow from start to finish but I ended up
leaving it strangely unsatisfied as to what I had actually read. I’m told there
was more to the story than that but I had little urge to follow it, nor have I
particularly wanted to read any of Danielewski’s books ever since. I grant him
credit for his ability to completely rewrite how narratives unfold but I wonder
if the heroes are his typesetters rather than his prose.
Catriona Ward’s Looking
Glass Sound has many aspects of this in its narrative from the start and
the deeper you go into it the harder it is for the reader to wonder what they
are reading and who’s telling the story. There’s a similar play on it when it
comes to the typesetting: the font keeps changing, we keep switching from
various unpublished memoirs, narratives from characters whose identities were
not sure of, and random sets of words that infiltrate the novel a page at a
time. The story keeps shifting from time and place and we’re never sure how
many points of view there are or what they have to do with the story. And forty
pages before the book ends we seem to know what we’ve been reading all this
time and then the narrative shifts yet again under our feet.
All of these are
the kind of narrative tricks that I can appreciate in a movie by Christopher
Nolan or David Lynch but frequently leave me cold when I encounter them on the
page. Yet that didn’t not happen once in Looking Glass Sound the most
recent and by all accounts radical horror novel that Ward has written. I’ve
read books like it before but this is one of the few I actually enjoyed from
beginning to end.
The first eighty
or so pages of Looking Glass Sound are told from an unpublished memoir
by a man named Wilder Harlow that’s written in June of 1989. Wilder is visiting
a small summer resort and he tells us he plans to fall in love for the first
time. He has spent his childhood being bullied and he wants to make friends.
Early in the
story he ends up meeting Harper and Nat Pelletier. Much of what we learn about
Harper comes second hand from Nat, who claims that she is rich, that she’s been
kicked out of multiple boarding schools and that she’s very secretive. Harper
is always volatile, refuses to make friends easily, and is not charmed so much
by Wilder as is willing to go along with what he wants.
The three get
together throughout the summer and the games they play are childish – and very
bizarre. A game of spin-the-bottle ends with them kissing rocks and sand.
Harper and Nat take Wilder out to a secluded cove and as a game nearly drown
him. Harper tells Wilder that she is a witch and starts games where they have ‘forfeits’.
If their
behavior is creepy, its downright chilling underneath. Nat supposedly goes into
houses late at night and takes pictures of sleeping children. There’s someone
known as The Dagger Man’ who seems to be an urban legend but Nat and Harper
believes he’s real. Near the end of the summer, Harper makes them take a vow
and uses hemlock as part of it.
Wilder should
know better but its clear these are the first and only two friends he’s had to
this point. He is struggling with his sexuality and can’t decide which one of
them he’s more attracted to. When he leaves for the summer, he can’t wait to come
back.
But when he does
come back the next year the mood has changed between Nat and Harper
dramatically and it affects Wilder just as much. Nat seems to have moved on to
a local girl and he acts coldly towards Wilder. Harper hasn’t changed at all
initially but she keeps finding excuses to get away from him. In the middle of
the summer, things get creepier when a mysterious photo appears in Wilder’s
room. They think it is the work of the Dagger Man.
Later that week Wilder
insists that the three of them go on a trip to that same cove, one of the
forfeits he asked for at the start of the summer. While on the trip Nat slips
and stabs himself with one of the dagger, an injury that is so severe that he
has to be hospitalized and eventually his hand is amputated. When they take Nat
to the hospital, someone recognizes the knife – and then they learn that there
is a far more horrid secret. Someone in town has been killing women for a very
long time and the police now realize it is Nat’s father.
As events unfold
Wilder realizes that Nat has his own secrets and that Harper has been covering
for it. When Wilder tries to reveal the truth something happens and by the end
of the summer Nat is dead.
The novels then
shifts forward another year under the heading ‘Wilder and Sky’. It tells how
Wilder meets a young man named Sky in college. By now the world knows about
everything that happened two years ago and Wilder’s role in it. Wilder is still
obsessed with it and is dealing with his own PTSD and obsession with what
happened. He suffers a panic attack in his first week and Sky is standing over
it when it ends. Sky wants to be his roommate and events seems to unfold so
that Sky ends up there.
By this point
Wilder’s mother has been institutionalized and his father, who left them for
another woman that summer, is barely on speaking terms with his own son. Wilder
has decided that he needs to be alone and has no use for this rich boy. Sky,
like Wilder, wants to be a writer and he has an obsession with true crime.
Eventually Wilder tells his secrets to Sky and Sky convinces him that the best
thing for him is closure.
So on Christmas
Day, Wilder and Sky drive up to the prison to have a meeting with Alton. The meeting,
as you might expect, doesn’t go well: not only because Alton is blaming his son
for the murders but because it turns out the letter that allowed him to take
this meeting was in fact a forgery by Skye claiming to be Wilder – saying that
he too has the urges to kill. Wilder finds out about that that same night and
Sky manages to talk him out of it. Wilder, whose been fighting his attraction
to Sky the last few months agrees, and the two spend the night together. When
they drive to school the next day, Sky abandons Wilder.
The actual
betrayal comes the next day when Wilder finds that all of his notes have been
taken on the case. He learns the truth about Sky from his father and he learns
that Sky has wanted to write a book about the events in Wilder’s life and has
spent the last several months conning him. Wilder tries to write his own book
but suffers a case of writer’s block.
The following
September Wilder finds a letter from Sky and a draft of Sky’s novel. It is
called The Sound and The Dagger. Wilder is infuriated because he has
taken the kind of story that Wilder wanted to write and turned it into horror
and schlock fiction. He’s written it as a roman a clef so that its clear to
Wilder who the characters are but Wilder has told it from the perspective of
the hero Skandar. Wilder is so enraged by what he has read and the final pages of his narrative are: “I
understand, cool and clear, what I have to do. I’m going to find Sky. I’m going
back to Whistler Bay.”
Having told you
the entire first half of the novel, I’ve essentially told you nothing and I
have no intention of revealing any more. Throughout the chapters there are other
details we can’t make sense of: there’s a character named Pearl who keeps
having interludes and there are typed remarks that follow a word game we will
be introduced later in the novel but doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of
the story. We do go back to Whistler Bay and keep going back to it. We think we’re
reading a mystery, then a ghost story, then a horror story and by the time we’re
almost through not even Wilder is sure he can trust anything he sees anymore.
We also learn
truths about the real Sky throughout the novel and that seems to give us perspective
on what’s happening but in the bizarre sense that children think of things.
Even when we get to the end of the story, we learn that there are layers we
still may not be able to unfold.
I’ve read and
enjoyed novels where the narrator is unreliable but Looking Glass Sound is
brilliant not just because the narrator is unreliable but because we’re not
even sure who the narrator is or who the heroes and villains are. Wilder learns
from an early age that he can’t trust anyone or even his own memories, which is
a good source for the novel that unfolds. There are clearly bigger stories
unfolding that none of the characters are ever fully aware of and many people
end up dead before they learn the truth.
And its worth
noting that even by the end of the book we can’t even be sure that any part of
the story we’ve been told is real. The two characters left standing at the end
of the novel when the (climax? Denouement?) plays out have proven that they are
completely unreliable storytellers: one has been known for lying ever since we
met them and the other is clearly delusional and definitely a murderer. It’s possible
that what Wilder and Sky have believed their whole lives – that Alton was the
murderer that stalked the town – may never have been true in the first place. I
have a suspect in mind for who might have completed the killings but I don’t
know if I trust it to be the truth.
At the end of
the novel one of the characters is told that they are a ‘monstrous person, but
books are cages for monsters.” In a sense they are right: both Wilder and Sky
took the story of what happened at Whistler Bay and turned it into their own
story and one became enormously successful as a result. But that same character
also tells that person: “the story has been about me, the things I went
through.” And in that you see who the villain of the piece truly is. They
acknowledge they might very well have gone mad, but their actions are that of
someone so desperate that they have devoted their entire lives for something
that may be a feverish measure of insanity. They claim to have done it out of
love, but it’s a selfish love and, if we believe what we see, there’s something
truly sick and twisted about this obsession keeping in with the character since
the moment we met them.
I think that in
a sense, Looking Glass Sound is the literary equivalent of the films of Christopher
Nolan. By the time you finish reading it, you’ll be trying to unspool every
detail of it, the same way we’ve been trying to make sense of Memento twenty
years ago, Inception ten years afterwards and Tenet ten years
later. The blurbs on the back of the novel come from Ward’s peers and while I
don’t tend to buy most blurbs when they use phrases like “origami puzzle’, ‘nesting
doll of a novel’ and ‘a kaleidoscope’ its impossible to not come away in complete
agreement. You’ll probably want to reopen the book and start rereading again to
see the parts you’ve missed when you finish it – or perhaps see if new parts
have mysteriously appeared while the book was closed. Once you learn the
ultimate fate of some of the characters, that may actually seem plausible.
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