A Comedy of Eros

Margaret McGrath was a research librarian at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto.

Virgil Burnett is both an author and an illustrator, and the perceptions of the visual artist are strongly evident in this short novel. The first half is the story of the love affair between an art teacher, Jaekin, and a mysterious young woman, Calypso, who appears one day in his otherwise discouraging life class. It is an unlikely union, withal a passionate one. The girl evades all questioning and the artist both passively accepts and ponders the mystery of her origins and history. Most of their time together is spent in her room, warmly and lovingly described as “a secret garden removed from external necessity.” Months later the affair is violently shattered with the appearance of the sinister Odile, in appearance a twin to the artist. She has been the girl’s lover and mentor and the two depart. The second half of the work describes the artist’s search for Calypso and his discovery of her in an exotic Italian palazzo. Now he is able to fill in the unknown, but the knowledge is destructive.

The author adopts a mystical style to achieve a suspension of reality, but the style’s success is jarred by passages where the language is mundane, with expressions such as “toothsome groceries” and “trim person.” The work carries more varieties of symbolism than its short length can hold. Calypso, Odysseus’s nymph, translates as she who conceals. Well and good, and the classical references continue, but must we have numerology and color symbolism as well? Omnipresent are interesting explorations of sexual psychology. “He longed... to become the androgyne that some fanciful god of creation might contrive if he had taken the two of them as raw material for his work.” The real success of the book is the author’s preoccupation with images, particularly reflected images. The reversal of Jaekin and Odile as male and female versions of the same identity, the destruction of the mirror image of Odile, and Jaekin’s final episode with the “slick cold” surface of window glass are examples.

Physically, the work is the usual well-designed and attractive product of The Porcupine’s Quill.