Fairy Ring

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Spanning a three-month period in 1895, this ambitious first novel uses
diary entries, letters, and an Arctic explorer’s logbook to detail the
lives and obsessions of a handful of deeply eccentric Nova Scotians.

During a polar expedition, Captain Ian Ryder is stuck in the ice with
his ship and eventually abandoned by his crew. While fighting the
elements, he pines (inexplicably) over the “thorny and hostile”
Clara Weiss, who as a romantic conquest will prove to be as elusive as
the North Pole. A neurasthenic trapped in a corrosive marriage, Clara is
forced to undergo, at the hands of her mycologist husband, a sleep cure
involving ice-water baths, a diet of rare meat, and morphine injections.
She exchanges letters with her Aunt Hortense, who communicates with
trees, and with her not-so-Victorian sister Irene, who brings to mind
Sex and the City’s resident nymphomaniac. (Irene’s current amour,
Rackham, is a sculptor who incorporates “cadaver residues” in his
art.)

With the possible exception of Ryder, Desjardins’s characters are
thoroughly unlikable and one-dimensional, defined solely on the basis of
their respective quirks and peccadilloes. Their voices are
indistinguishable—pedantic and larded with Latin terms and phrases
that obscure whatever emotional truths the author is trying to express.
The encyclopedic knowledge these characters demonstrate is simply not
believable.

Movie director Ken Russell, that master of hallucinatory visuals, would
have a field day with the weird, grotesque images Desjardins never seems
to tire of serving up—from Clara’s “blood-curdling” nightmares,
to the harrowing operation performed on one of the characters, to
Irene’s kinky encounters with Rackham and Ryder’s cannibalistic
encounter with a mummified corpse. He’d also be right at home with the
novel’s highbrow trappings, and with the melodrama and cartoonish
emotions underlying the visual pyrotechnics.

Anachronisms like “bedroom gymnastics” and grammatical lapses like
“will keep you appraised” mar an otherwise fine translation.