Rview
CLAIRE’S HEAD
by Catherine Bush
McClelland & Stewart, 321 pp.
Many books have explored the experience of pain and the role it plays in our lives. David Morris’s The Culture of Pain, Marni Jackson’s Pain: The Science and Culture of Why We Hurt and Migraine: The Evolution of a Common Disorder by Oliver Sacks are three fine examples. With Claire’s Head, Catherine Bush seeks "the place of pain" in fiction, and why not? Novelists are always writing about pain of some sort, and well-rendered suffering is prized in the literary world.
The premise of Claire’s Head is certainly intriguing: Sisters Claire (a map-maker, living in Toronto) and Rachel (a writer, living in New York) both suffer from chronic migraines. When Rachel, whose headaches have steadily been worsening, fails to return from a freelance writing assignment in Montreal, Claire, alerted by Rachel’s massage-therapist ex-boyfriend, goes looking for her. What follows is Claire’s journey into pain’s dark heart: a journey driven by grief, fear, and rebellion, and marked by encounters with Quebec neurologists, a Chinese herbalist and New Age healers, including a guy named Ariel who talks to angels.
What follows is pretty implausible. Bush’s plot is overrun with weirdness, from its oddly named cast of minor characters to the death of Claire and Rachel’s parents, who were crushed by a falling luggage trolley on a Frankfurt Airport escalator.
Yes, Bush provides valuable insights into the role headaches play in her characters’ lives: the terrible impact on relationships, employment, eating, drinking, child-bearing, child-rearing, even deciding where to live. And it’s interesting, I suppose, that the word "spa" is a Roman acronym (salus per aquam) and that it’s possible to experience a 10-year headache.
Bush’s well-paced, efficient prose will compel you to keep reading even while the plot unravels with the inevitability of a blossoming migraine. Why doesn’t Claire hire the private detective who quickly found Rachel the last time she disappeared? And why does Claire keep hopping on planes to find information she could glean with a few simple phone calls? The thin insights revealed by "Rachel’s House of Pain" diary don’t explain why Rachel chose to have a baby, but Bush tells us, in no uncertain terms, that she intentionally became pregnant by boffing a stranger on a train.
Certainly, pain – particularly chronic pain – can make people behave irrationally. But if pain is what propels these characters and this novel’s bizarre trajectory, Bush fails to convince us.
|
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.