Taken

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University.

Taken requires attention of the sort we expect to pay while reading
excellent poems. Who is “i” and who is “I”? First we are in
Australia during World War II; then in Java at the same time, or in
London, England; then in Vancouver Island during the Gulf (so-called)
War. “i” is the narrator, Suzanne. She wonders who her parents were
when she was a child. Taken is Suzanne’s effort to decipher “what
gets passed along in body tissue, without words. Not so much their
history even, but the ambiance of their lives, what they took for
granted, the smell, the feel of their time my own beginning
intercepted.” Ghosts materialize in Taken: from 50-year-old
photographs of her mother, they speak; from her father’s old letters
they appear.

Marlatt’s eloquence does take the reader beyond the words. Not, as in
some writing, by causing the reader to become self-reflective, with
words slipping in their referentiality, seeming applicable equally to
someone in the book or to someone in the reader’s life. Rather,
resonances in Taken occur, and stay, within the novel. Suzanne’s
reflections on censored televised images of U.S. firepower in Iraq
connect with her mother’s learning about the 1941–45 War in the
Pacific from censored letters, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. Her
mother sorely misses Suzanne’s father, Charles, while he is away at
war; Suzanne tries to articulate the painful gulf between herself and
her former lover. Sentences like the following are all too common: “If
the relationship of power between the individual in the nation state,
which underlies much current political philosophy, is shifting as
effective power is put in the hands of the multinationals to which
nations then become subject, then the strategies of individuals
responding to nation states become an important source of analogous
action for the nation state itself.”