Mortal Sins

Hugh Oliver is editor-in-chief at the OISE Press.

Presumably if Anna Porter’s own manuscript had crossed her publishing desk, she would have accepted it. And since it will no doubt sell a lot of copies (and quite likely provide the basis for a film script), she would probably have been night.

Mortal Sins is (as best I can gather) Porter’s second published novel. The place (apart from a few side trips) is Toronto — from Brandy’s near the Market, to Brunswick Avenue in the Annex, to the mansions of Forest Hill and the Bridle Path. The time is very pointedly the present (for example, there is mention of Michael Fox and Family Ties), although the origins of the plot date back — rather melodramatically — to Auschwitz. The action centres on the life, relationships, and death of a wealthy tycoon and on the earlier, and possibly connected, murder of a businessman from New York. The viewpoint is that of a journalist who is writing a story about the tycoon and of her boyfriend who rather fortuitously happens to be a detective inspector.

The writing style is cliche and the characters are cliche; but of course, that can be said about 90 per cent of the fiction that is presently published, and certainly the cliche of Mortal Sins is pitched at a fairly sophisticated level. To put it another way, the novel is about TV life rather than real life (again something that can be said of 90 per cent of recent fiction), and like, say, Dallas, exerts an irritating compulsion on the reader to discover what will happen next. However, unlike Dallas, which seems to survive from season to season, Mortal Sins must come to an end. Unfortunately it does so with a devastatingly dull and forgettable whimper.