Graven Images

Dennis Denisoff teaches English at McGill University and is the author
of Dog Years.

This novel displays all of Audrey Thomas’s most popular writerly
qualities. The tone, style, and wit echo those found in her previous
works, as does the combination of the sardonically humorous and
violently bizarre. There are, of course, the everyday word games
(“Die-nasty,” “No Way, Ho-Say,” “Wry-ter”). Even the
narrator recalls the intelligent and wry heroines in Thomas’s past
publications. Thomas fans will get everything they expect from Graven
Images—which is not to say it is the same cake with different icing.

Thomas’s most popular works are probably Mrs. Blood, Latakia, and
Intertidal Life, all of which deal with the conflict between the
independence of the self and the pressures to adopt a traditional human
dependency on family or boyfriend. During the last 10 years, however,
Thomas has presented the notion of family as either less relevant or
more problematic than she previously had thought; the questions and
doubts that motivated her earlier works have become less likely to take
centre stage. Graven Images thus primarily analyzes relations that are
often lost behind conventional, heterosexual paradigms of love. The
change is refreshing, to say the least.

Early in the novel, the narrator tells us she has gone to England for
three reasons: money (she’s writing an account of the last
transatlantic voyage of a Polish ocean liner), to flesh out her family
tree, and to write a novel. Graven Images is that novel, just as it is
the fleshing out of the tree. Like most of Thomas’s novels, the story
is semi-autobiographical; she herself has worked on her family tree and
she did write an account of her trip on the last transatlantic voyage of
an ocean liner. While pushing the autobiographical elements of Graven
Images beyond this point is both dubious and probably unnecessary (the
novel is Thomas at her sustained best), it is interesting to note that
the changes in the author’s own views of human relations as she has
grown older have added immeasurably to the psychological diversity of
her oeuvre. With Graven Images, Thomas has shifted the focus away from
concerns regarding heterosexual bonding and the neurosis of women who
feel they are losing their looks and toward questioning what really
sustains relationships and the sacrifices one makes, not for love (or
even security), but simply for social convention.