Headhunter

M. Morgan Holmes teaches English at McGill University.

According to legend, “headhunters” are the fearsome inhabitants of
distant tropical islands. Playing on this imaginary construct, Timothy
Findley asks his readers to consider the possibility that less-fictive
“headhunters” of a more barbaric and stealthy variety live in the
midst of the apparently civilized centres of Western society. Set in a
loosely fictionalized Toronto of a not-too-distant future, Headhunters
locates its barbarians in the increasingly controversial domain of
psychiatric discipline and punishment.

Metaphors of infection and disease proliferate throughout the book.
Mental illness, however, is the principal malady through which Findley
challenges simplistic assumptions regarding what constitutes a
psychiatric “cure” and, more important, what person has the
authority to define someone else as ill. As it turns out, the sickest
soul in the novel is the revered psychiatrist, Dr. Kurtz, a descendent
of the megalomaniac from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Findley’s Kurtz is released from the pages of that novel into the
streets of Toronto by a mentally disturbed spinster/medium named Lilah
Kemp. It is she and Christopher Marlow (another echo from Conrad’s
story) who must return Kurtz to the pages of literature before he can
wreak his evil on society.

Findley’s intriguing association of late–19th-century imperialism
and late–20th-century psychiatry draws disturbing parallels between
the two practices of subjugation and control. A visiting Irish
lecturer’s commentary on North American society—a product of
imperialist expansion—resonates uncomfortably with regard to the
internal world of the mind: “there is nothing here of what anyone
proposed. There is little beauty left—but much ugliness. ... This that
was once a living place for humankind has become their killing
ground.” While this passage emblematizes much of the bleakness of
Headhunters, there is also a great deal of sophisticated wit and humor
to be found. Findley has ears and eyes for WASPs and their imitators,
their “vacuous gossip—none of it of any consequence, all of it
ribald and bitchy and true.” At times, the vast proliferation of
upscale Torontonians and their fetishes can turn from wryness into
cloying excess. Nevertheless, as a picture of a world in need of a
humanist overhaul, Headhunters performs its task with sensitivity and an
avoidance of prescriptive cures.