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Conscience Point

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Conscience Point by Erica Abeel is one of those literary novels that's difficult to describe in just a few sentences. Madeleine Shaye thinks her life is just about perfect. She's a successful concert pianist who also works as a reporter for a national cultural arts TV show. Her daughterLaila is going throw normal college-age growing pains but is her best friend. And her long time lover Nick is still just as charming as when she met him thirty years ago. Together they live in hisHamptons mansion from the book title. But cracks begin to form in the foundation of her world, and Madeleine is shaken to the core as everything that matters is taken away until all that is left is self. Conscience Point serves as more than the name of Nick's family home, it's also an excellent description for the narration of this dreamlike novel.Abeel does a wonderful job of portraying just how caught up in our own narrative we can get not seeing the truth of situations are realizing how other people may view the same circumstances. The writing is almost stream of consciousness at times, with a fevered, dream-like quality. The reader is carried along with Maddy's intense emotions until she comes to find strength and purpose within herself. It's an astonishing narrative of one woman's life.

Madeleine "Maddy" Shaye, an accomplished concert pianist and television personality, lives a content life with her adopted daughter and her longtime boyfriend, Nick Ashcroft. As you might expect, Maddy's perfect life begins to slowly unravel bit by bit, first her career and then her family. Abeel maintains a high level of suspense as the story progresses, skipping from Maddy's past to the present and back again.

Abeel's prose is similarly nimble, though its studied flippancy takes some getting used to. This passage describing Maddy's culinary failure and Nick's save is typical of Abeel's style throughout:
He cooked--partly by necessity. She'd curdled the beef Stroganoff for a dinner party, but Nick just laughed it off; their unspoken compact was never blame the other; the word "Strogo" became their code for gastric alert. Sure, he was bossy as hell in the kitchen, and as for the cleanup ... But ta-da! he'd set out steaming bowls of zuppa di pesce, exuding essence of sea.

Abeel's upbeat, casual prose seems inconsistent with Conscience Point's overriding darkness. It's this darkness--a kind of pervasive Gothic atmosphere--that is this novel's most compelling feature. Other redeeming qualities include Abeel's graceful treatment of Maddy's musical career and the supporting character of Violet, Nick's sister. Although Violet rarely appears in the novel, her force is apparent throughout. Overall, Conscience Point is a suspenseful family drama written in somewhat distracting prose.

Erica Abeel's Conscience Point, published by Unbridled Books, started off rough for me, with shifts in tone and language for one of the main characters, Nick Ashcroft. After about 60 pages or so, I became absorbed in the dark secrets and the Gothic mystery surrounding the once lavish estate of Conscience Point. Madeleine Shaye is a concert pianist, an arts journalist, a mother, and a lover who allows passion to derail her career and lead her down a path that is wrought with disappointment and heartache. Nick Ashcroft and his sister Violet lead Shaye onto this path and become the center of her world, despite Maddie's obliviousness. The deep secret that tears her relationship with Nick apart is predictable at best, but Abeel weaves a setting that captivates the read and lulls them into the fantasy.

Shaye is a young pianist befriended by an eccentric artist from a wealthy New York family, Violet Ashcroft. She's easily dazzled by the estate, Conscience Point's ambiance, and the stormy eyes of Violet's brother Nick. Despite the separation between Nick and Maddie that lasts several years and through one marriage each, they connect as most artists will with exploding passion in a paradise far from their "real" worlds. Their love is a fantasy that sweeps up Maddie and leaves her blind to the reality of her self-constructed family. "Love cannot dwell with suspicion" is an apt theme running through the first portion of this novel, which stems from an ancient Roman myth featuring Cupid and Psyche. However, amidst the turmoil that her life becomes, Maddie is once again swept up by her true passion--music.

Through the initial pages of the novel, Nick uses terms like "thistle-y" and "joint," which seem incongruous, and the narrator interrupts herself to stop herself from digressing. These sections can be disruptive to the reader, but as they become less frequent and the pace of the drama picks up, the reader is absorbed.

While the plot of this novel is often cliche in many ways, the real gem is the poetic language and intricate weave of music and art throughout the novel. Maddie's magic fingers hit the keys and the reader is drawn into the world of an artist, and again conversations with her friend Anton about music and its composers easily draws readers into their highly dramatic world.

Imagine Brideshead Revisited meets Jane Eyre in the waning decades of
the 20th century. This page turner will keep you guessing (and gasping)!
-Otis Knoop

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Certainly, when young Madeleine Shaye is seduced into an impulsive friendship with Violet Ashcroft, she is driven, consumed with ambition as a gifted pianist, her sights set firmly on a successful career. Taking a detour with the fascinating, unpredictable Violet, Maddy learns a harsh lesson in the duplicity of the rich, Violet's grand gestures never as generous as they first appear. Accepting an invitation to the family estate at Conscience Point, Maddy is awed by an overblown, gothic mansion that might have been evoked from a decadent past: "There's a faux finish on everything. Like our family." The dark waters of the Ashcroft legacy are obscured by the eccentricities of wealth, Violet's grand gestures, her mother, Serena's obsession with winged creatures to the exclusion of her children, Violet's brother, Nick, who simmers with resentment, soon absorbed with Maddy's blooming talent.

Of course, this elaborate, dramatic world is irresistible to one such as Maddy, at first resisting the pull of the family's excesses, only to wonder later at her naiveté, desired by both sister and brother in that heady environment. What she realizes after considerable error is bought at great expense; "The rich, immured in their own desires, need never bump into reality." It is this painful landscape the author explores, Maddy's first brush with the Ashcroft's before she veers away from them to make her own mistakes, a stalled career, an impetuous marriage, an adopted daughter. Told in more recent time (1997-98) with flashbacks to those first days at Conscience Point, with Nick, with Violet, Maddy's life is a series of stops and starts, the promise and glamour of her talent eclipsed by daily demands. Years later, reunited with Nick, Maddy once more faces the folly of her romantic ideals, brought to earth by a betrayal that calls her entire life into question.

Abeel's prose is perfectly married to time and place, the New York intelligentsia, publishing, art, the music world and the gothic hideaway, Conscience Point, where Maddy and Nick exist in an environment without consequences or past until reality intrudes. The language is stunning, memorable, images that drift around Maddie like falling stars, even as her foundation crumbles, is patched together and continues, hampered by years and revelations: "She'd rubbed up against something furry and foul in a dark cave, she sensed a host of eyes, heard a chorus of insect screeches." Such meaning-laden language allows the reader ready passport into the lives of the idle rich, Maddy feasting on leftovers as she attempts to define herself again and again, comforted by the music that calms her spirit, demands her attention when beset with the banalities of human failings and a lesson hard-won: "We don't get what we want. We're shown it. But we can't have it." Luan Gaines/ 2008.