The Question

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Clarke’s ninth novel is large in concept—a man’s relationship with
a woman—but disappointingly poor in execution. It departs markedly
from this important author’s more familiar themes: the immigrant
experience, racial relations, and the West Indian expatriot community in
Canada. While Clarke’s concept here is universal, his plot is
decidedly singular. His protagonist, unnamed (as are all the characters,
save for the distasteful family friend “Auntie” Reens and the
Filippina he calls “Room”), switches his thoughts back and forth in
time from his Caribbean mother-dominated boyhood to his present life in
Toronto (he works as a refugee court judge and is newly married to a
neurotic woman who clearly prefers her incontinent dog to her husband).
Clarke’s hero spends most of his time in (unsuccessful) self-analysis.
The source of most of his complaints is his wife (“the woman I live
with,” he is fond of calling her). Most of his actions can be called
passive-aggressive. “My wife does not always show that she loves
me,” he says. “And when this happens, I spend my time taking baths,
with the door locked.”

Clarke’s language, usually precise and dynamic, in this novel is
uncharacteristically ponderous. His imagery is often clumsily
hyperbolic. “There are never any answers good enough to plug the hole
of insecurity and doubt,” he says from the security of his tub. “Nor
fit the hole in the bathtub to keep the bathwater in until the bath is
over.” There is a need for a tightening up of the story. At the
wedding chapel, Clarke has his narrator say: “The gold wedding ring
took up a little more than one centimetre of the skin of the third
finger on her left hand,” This image, like many others in the novel,
comes from nothing and goes nowhere.

Clarke’s writing has won awards. He was the 1999 recipient of the
W.O. Mitchell Prize. Let us hope that his future efforts return to
themes and styles with which he feels more comfortable.