Book Review: The Good Works of Ayela Linde by Charlotte Forbes - Page 2

She agrees to visit the doctor's office for a friendly consultation. While sitting in his office, she notes a picture on the wall — the church at Del Rio — and they begin to reminisce about a trip years ago, four couples in two cars for a day together in Del Rio. Then Ayela makes an unexpected disclosure about the way she used to treat Frederick, something abrupt, which is her manner, and the doctor flees from the disclosure by seeking refuge in his clinical professionalism. "It was the kind of admission that made me want to race back to the world of blood counts and creatinine levels and albumin and uric acid. An ordered world, where I felt at home and in control of putting a name on what had gone wrong."

Ayela skirts along the divide between chaos and reason. Ultimately, she is undiagnosable. In this story, we learn less about Ayela than we do about Doctor Teller. In particular, through his responses, we witness a different disclosure. The doctor unwittingly tells us about his own anxieties.

We observe the same method more pointedly in "That Old Lady." This story is told from the point of view of a paroled youth who is working at the botanical gardens. One evening as he is closing up, he finds an old woman sitting by a banyan tree. He tells her that it's time to leave, but she is disinclined to move. In fact, she has packed herself a chicken dinner, a bottle of wine, and fully intends to stay the night. As with Doctor Teller's story, we learn from the young man's observations less about Ayela than we learn about his own personal anxieties. We detect intimations of a brutal childhood that has played itself out through law–breaking and difficult behaviour. And yet, for all his rebellious posturing, the elderly Ayela's free–wheeling desires are threatening to him. Beneath it all, he is a conformist crying to get out.

Both these examples suggest an answer to my question: how is it possible to create a character so fully realized? The trick is not to heap one detail upon another. Quite the contrary: here, Forbes offers a prose which is beautiful and lean. How can one not smile in pleasure at a sentence like this? "We lay dreaming and dozing until the dark began to drop away in clumps." Instead, the trick is to sprinkle a book with gaps, places which the reader can fill up with personal experience.

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

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