>>FEATURE
BARBARA GOWDY
Monday, March 12
John Dutton Theatre (W.R. Castell Library)
"This book is about love – someone helpless before love for another."
Necrophiliacs, two-headed men and a woman with two vaginas – author Barbara Gowdy (The White Bone, The Romantic) is no stranger to the bizarre. Her new novel Helpless, however, is the stuff of modern big-city nightmares – child abduction.
"I thought, ‘what’s the worst thing that could happen to someone?’" says Gowdy. "The loss of a child to the ether, not knowing…."
Helpless opens with Celia, a single mother living with her young nine-year-old daughter in a suburb of Toronto. They spend their evenings singing in a lounge, Celia struggling to maintain a household, Rachel wondering who her father is, an anonymous man, living somewhere – maybe – in New York.
Watching Rachel is Ron, a vacuum repairman whose attraction to the young girl is fraught with thoughts of her as underprivileged and in danger. With Ron is his girlfriend Nancy, who sees him as her saviour from a former life as an abused addict.
Late one evening, while Celia is at work, there’s a blackout across the city. Mika, the landlord of the home where Celia and Rachel live, comes to see if the young girl is safe. He stumbles down the stairs and in a moment, Rachel disappears.
Helpless appears to be a suspenseful tale of an abducted child and the ensuing investigation, far removed from Gowdy’s earlier strange tales. And while her new novel introduces more familiar fictional tropes of mystery, delving into the mind of a criminal, it’s still the author’s fascination with love in its various guises that drives the work.
Gowdy continues to remain honest when dealing with consuming love. "There’s a part when Ron sees Rachel’s pee in the toilet and fetishizes it. My publisher wanted to keep that part out – I argued to keep it in. When men fall in love they romanticize everything – her hair, her eyes, her voice.
"There are more men than we know of attracted to little girls," she says, adding, "never before have little girls in our culture been so sexualized."
Readers might be surprised to see Nancy go along with Ron’s plan to keep the young girl. "Not if you love somebody," says Gowdy. "She was a broken woman when she met Ron and allowed herself to believe his story. Many women stick with men who have abused them."
Celia encounters harsh criticism from a public who feels her love wasn’t enough to protect her daughter. "The mother comes under great unsympathetic scrutiny in these situations, not the father. I’ve always felt uncomfortable about that."
Confronted by a tale of a child abductor, one wonders what lurid details an author can conjure up, but horrific drudgery wasn’t what Gowdy wanted. "I didn’t want another book that was from the point of view of the bad guy. In the reviews so far, some women found the book to be suspenseful, while some men were disappointed that Ron wasn’t more of a monster – ‘where’s the horror, the degradation?’
"There might be people who object to his sympathy," she adds. "Every character I write has a heart, is a human being. It’s the artist’s job to speculate about anything. I didn’t want to make Ron despicable. I was interested in writing about a man from the inside who had fallen." |
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