Customer Reviews

The Haunting of L.

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In the final volume of his Canadian trilogy ("The Bird Artist," "The Museum Guard"), Norman again uses the isolated wilds of winter Canada as catalyst and character in this atmospheric story of love, art and violence in 1926-27 Manitoba and Halifax.

The novel opens in the middle, with the narrator, young Peter Duvett, waking beside his lover, Kala Murie, to recall the previous night's dinner with her seething, menacing husband, Peter's employer, the photographer Vienna Linn. During dinner Kala had prodded her husband to produce a letter just received from a photography expert, engaged by wealthy British collector Radin Heur to pronounce on the authenticity of a "spirit photograph" Linn has offered for sale. The photograph shows the souls rising from three "Esquimaux" killed in a small-plane crash. A crash that Kala, we learn, only just survived. And believes her husband caused by sabotaging the plane in order to kill her.

In this first chapter, Norman plunges the reader into a tantalizing story of intrigue and adultery, made powerful by the subtle, vicious manipulations of husband and wife and the passive wariness of the narrator. "It all but made my skin crawl, the civility."

Peter, though a photographer's assistant, is no photographer and has no ambition to be one. Instead, Peter makes up captions, obsessively. "So that, for instance, if I left my raincoat inside on a rainy day, I would immediately think, MAN WHO FORGOT RAINCOAT STANDING ON STREET."

Peter is also aware that his situation is precarious, fluid, temporary. "The foretaste of regret. I was convinced that I was building up such an archive of memories - all these various views of Kala sleeping - that I could never get them out of my mind. And where would that leave me, should it happen that we didn't stay together? I'd suffer one of Miss Houghton's hauntings, except without any photographs involved."

Miss Houghton is the author of Kala's favorite book, her professional Bible, "The Unclad Spirit," devoted to the investigation of spirit photography and quoted frequently in the course of Peter's narration. "A spirit photograph is one in which someone whom Miss Houghton called the 'uninvited guest' was present." Uninvited, often unwanted, always dead: an estranged spouse, a debauched uncle, a secret lover. Kala lectures on spirit photography and Miss Houghton and it was in this capacity Peter first encountered her on his arrival at a rustic, nearly deserted hotel in Churchill, Manitoba. Her audience consisted of three Eskimos and her husband - or husband-to-be, as it was their wedding day.

The pair have an extended history, though, and Peter begins to learn about it on his very first night, as Kala celebrates her new marriage by coming to his bed. It is not long before he discovers that Vienna Linn is in hiding from the collector Radin Heur, who pays in advance for grisly accident photographs. Heur had, it seems, paid for a photographic record of a train wreck, but Linn botched the wreck and spent the money.

The spirit photograph of the airplane crash is Linn's inspired ticket out of claustrophobic exile in Manitoba, where winter is one adversary who can never be bested. As his wife recuperates from her injuries with Peter by her side, Linn abandons all pretense of normal civility (the locals no longer worth the effort) and holes up in his dark room, preparing his masterpiece of spirit photography.

The understated tension builds as Linn establishes contact and the trio leave for Halifax to make the deal. Once in the city Linn re-exerts his social powers, charming the police and the landlady, while Peter sinks back into the grief and anger over his mother's tragic death which drove him to leave Halifax in the first place and events build to a discordant, crashing, crescendo.

Some readers may find Peter a too-passive narrator, intentional though it is. It is difficult to identify with a protagonist who makes you feel like shaking him from time to time. Yet Peter works his passivity like a weapon and Norman's unaffected simplicity, carefully crafted to heighten the chilled atmosphere, makes the whole thing work within the framework of the melodramatic plot.

While I certainly wouldn't want to read Howard Norman's books every day of the week, I do enjoy him as a change of pace. As anyone familiar with Norman knows, life in his world is bleak and fierce, men are meek and women are bold and mysterious happenings are simply the everyday stuff of life. Norman's novels are stories of love, murder, madness and, strangely enough, the redemptive power of art.

While the characters in Norman's books are usually quite low-key (the exception being some of the female characters), his plots border on the outlandish. No, they're not science fiction or fantasy, they're more plain illogical and downright strange. If you can't accept something like this, then Norman's books, good as they are, simply wouldn't be for you.

"The Haunting of L" is no exception. Set in Halifax and on Hudson Bay, the cold described so lyrically in the book seems to literally permeate each page of the story.

"The Haunting of L" takes place in 1927 and basically revolves around three characters: the narrator, Peter Duvett, and an unhappily married couple, Kala Murie and
Vienna Linn.

Kala is the strange one of this trio right from the start. She is a disciple of a spiritualist who has a deep and abiding belief in "spirit photographs," a belief he passes on to Kala. Vienna, who is not so believing, still manages to find a way to profit from these strange and rather ghoulish "spirit photos."

While we know very well why Kala and Vienna are on the northern edge of Manitoba, we aren't so sure about Peter. He's sort of a ghost of a character himself, paling beside both Kala and Vienna. Complications arise when Vienna must deliver an assortment of "very special" photographs to his English benefactor, Radin Heur. Not to be beaten, Vienna "arranges" for the much needed photos. But does the end ever justify the means?

Without giving away the plot, I will just say that this book, while well-written and entertaining, simply asks far too much of the reader. There is a little too much authorial intrusion and it spoils what could have been so much better. While I enjoyed reading "The Haunting of L," I did come away from it less than satisfied and it will be awhile before I return to Howard Norman again. Though I will return.

We picked this book for our Book Club and it has proved to be one of our all time favorites. Harold Norman is an excellent writer and the story will keep you on the edge of your seat. I am now looking forward to reading his other 2 novels. Do not pass this one up.

I look forward eagerly to every new release from Mr. Norman, for I know that I will be dazzled by his writing. His books about the Canadian Maritimes are excellent, and his writing style is just sparse enough to give the reader a heightened sense of interest in the plot. As usual with Mr. Norman, the plot itself is interesting and entangled at the same time. We have a young man caught up in adultery with the wife of his odd employer, and there are spirit photographs, mysterious and dangerous British millionaires, baptized Eskimos, and a crippling snowstorm, just to name some of what happens in this work. There is enough foreshadowing that you just feel the ominous sense of impending tragedy, though when it comes you realize that you weren't expecting it in just that way. I don't want to give away much of the plot, for it is integral to the enjoyment of the book as a whole. Just take my advice and read the book; you won't regret it!

If to haunt someone is to steal that person's peace of mind, the three characters of Howard Norman's novel are haunted indeed. Set in remote areas of Canada in the late 1920s, Peter Duvett, Kala Murie, and Vienna Linn form a strange trio hooked to each other by perverse forces revealed in a manner so understated that they become even creepier.

Photographer's assistant Peter Duvett leaves Halifax to take a job in the remote north of Manitoba. The settlement is accessible only by plane and so small that it is hard to imagine that there would be enough customers to support any business, let alone one which would require a photographer's assistant. When Peter checks in at the hotel, there is a woman giving a lecture on spirit photographs-the "uninvited guests" whose shadowy forms have mysteriously appeared in photo backgrounds. Why is this woman giving a lecture on such an arcane subject in a settlement so tiny that there are only three people in the audience? She is Kala Murie, fiancée of Vienna Linn, Peter's new employer. It is their wedding day, an event to which Peter is not invited and from which Kala comes to Peter's bed. With the bride as his lover and his boss as his enemy, Peter starts work. Vienna Linn, he learns, takes photos of Catholic converts for the town priest, but his real business is creating fatal accidents and taking pictures of the resulting mayhem for a wealthy British client. Train wrecks are a favorite, but planes, streetcars, and automobile accidents are acceptable as long as people die.

Yet watching photographic evidence of murder appear in the developing pan does not send Peter running from this strange couple. His passivity and attraction to Kala keep him in their orbit even when he knows too much.

The behavior of all three main characters is so strange that you cannot imagine how the story will end. Apparently, neither did Howard Norman. The climax is disappointing and there is now way this story could be resolved that simply. It negates the atmosphere that has been so carefully built up.

This third and final novel in a trilogy about Canada is haunting, as the title implies. The story and the language linger in my mind. Norman's new novel is sensuous, romantic, mysterious. The author always writes about eccentric characters. His vision and voice are original, not at all ordinary, and we learn much about history and human nature from reading his books.I loved this novel, could not put it down and have recommended it to several people.

CONAN DOYLE WAS AMONG many of the famous who believed in Spirit Pictures in the 1920s and 1930s.These pictures consisted of regularly developed photographs onto which -abracadabra!- pictures of dear departed ones attached themselves supernaturally.They gained a Victorian following, and fooled many an intellectual.

Author Howard Norman, of Vermont, visits this strange belief in the last of his welcome Canadian trilogy.It oozes creativity, and lies outside usual mystery formulas.

Peter Duvell, a young Canadian, arrives in 1927 in Hudson's Bay to become assistant to a renowned photographer named Vienna. Vienna's new wife, Kala, seduces Peter (on her wedding night!)

Through her, Peter loses his innocence and falls under her spell. He joins her in a passionate interest in Spirit Pictures, and attends her lectures on the subject.

He finds out that Vienna is engaged in dubious activities that gradually become more evil. These eventually go beyond what either of the two adulterers can imagine, and involve a strange religious millionaire.

Norman creates a strong sense of menace hanging over his unusual characters. His fine novel explores themes of morality, responsibility, ethics, and of turning a blind eye --all within a suspenseful read.

Howard Norman is a terrific, contemporary American novelist and deserves to be read widely. His work is intense and cohesive, demanding that the reader not look away. The Bird Artist may be the strongest of his three most recent novels, but The Haunting of L. is a beautiful, disturbing study of characters and their motivations. The novel gets off to a relatively slow start, but there's nothing like adultury and a plane crash to get a plot moving. And the photographer of the dead introduces complications readers can't really expect.

Norman's strength is his ability to create quirky characters we don't think we know in real life but want to know, if only to make our own lives more intriguing and tangible than they are without these characters. These same characters in another author's hands would be too unbelievable, but Norman conveys them with such depth and assurrance that we cannot undo their seams. His characters taunt us, entice us to want to know the possibly odd and dangerous motivations that are potentially forming in all of us.

Don't be put off by the setting--it's no contemporary United States in Norman's novels. Don't stop reading in the early pages, when you might not know exactly what's going on or why you're starting to care about characters you know you shouldn't like as people. Read The Haunting of L., maybe read The Museum Guard, but definitely also read The Bird Artist, Norman's most inviting work.

Young Peter becomes an assistant to the portraitist Vienna Linn in a remote Canadian town, and discovers that a series of accidents have actually been arranged as settings for a private collection in The Haunting Of L., a story of intrigue and danger. Add an uneasy romance between three people and you have a moving story not of ghosts, but of questionable pursuits and ethics.

While I have enjoyed previous Howard Norman works, particularly The Museum Guard, I cannot say the same for THE HAUNTING OF L.
Though the premise of the book is promising: an exploration of the turn-of-the century phenomenon known as "spirit photography" which evidently enjoyed a short-lived vogue, by the time I got to the end, I felt no sympathy nor antipathy towards any of the three principal characters.

These three people all seem to have their own selfish motivations and desires in mind when tromping on each others' emotions. While I didn't come away hating any one in particular, I didn't feel they deserved any compassion either. They lived to pursue their heart's desires no matter the outcome. Maybe that is justly the moral of this story: reap what you sow.

Some of the critics' reviews I have read cite THE HAUNTING OF L as the third in Norman's trilogy that is preceded by THE BIRD ARTIST and THE MUSEUM GUARD. Though it might have been the author's intention to do just that, THE HAUNTING OF L is sadly a badly played "note" in what is otherwise a beautifully-written trio of stories.

If you're new to his work, you'll likely find the book readable. However, if you're familiar with the author's style, you'll more likely find this work lacking in resonance.