Spadework [Paperback]

Timothy Findley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 24, 2002

Lust. Infidelity. Betrayal. Murder.

On a summer evening in Stratford, Ontario, the errant thrust of agardener’s spade slices a telephone cable into instant silence. The resulting disconnection is devastating. With the failure of one call to reach a house, an ambitious young actor becomes the victim of sexual blackmail. The blocking of a second call leads tragically to murder. And when a Bell Canada repairman arrives to mend the broken line, his innocent yet irresistible male beauty has explosive consequences.

In Spadework, Timothy Findley, master storyteller and playwright, has created an electric wordplay of infidelity and morality set on the stage of Canada’s preeminent theater town. In this fictional portrait, intrigue, passion, and ambition are always waiting in the wings. Findley peoples the town with theater folk, artists, writers, and visitors (both welcome and unwelcome), and with lives that are immediately recognizable as "Findley-esque" -- the lonely, the dispossessed, and the sexually troubled.

A story that ripples with ever-widening repercussions, a sensual, witty, and completely absorbing novel, Spadework is another Timothy Findley winner.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bestselling Canadian writer Findley, whose stylish and complexly plotted novels have acquired an appreciative audience, here departs from his usual dark scenarios to produce an erotically powered narrative in which all's well that ends well. The setting is the town of Stratford, Ontario, home of the Shakespeare Festival. Findley (Pilgrim) knows this world well, and he conveys it with atmospheric detail. The inadequacy of mere ambition, even when one has talent, is the lesson learned by rising actor Griffin Kincaid, when he realizes that luck and fate can also play havoc with dreams of theatrical stardom. After Kincaid refuses a sexual proposition by his manipulative homosexual director, Jonathan Crawford, he is denied the roles he'd been promised. Griffin's wife, Jane, a Louisiana set designer for the theater, is bitter because Griffin refuses to let her use her substantial inherited income to buy a home in which to raise their seven-year-old son. When, by chance, her gardener cuts a buried phone line, dramatic events ensue. The telephone repairman is a young Polish immigrant, inarticulate but strangely beautiful, and Jane is aroused. Attracted to the repairman yet worried by Griffin's inattention, Jane suspects that her husband is having an affair with an actress. Then she realizes he has capitulated to Jonathan's demands. Despite being a sexual bully, Jonathan is acutely sensitive to Shakespeare, and his insights are enlightening. A hopeful ending provides uplift, but does not, unfortunately, compensate for shopworn characterization and the overdone Tennessee Williams atmosphere. For Findley, this is a curiously slapdash performance.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this tenth novel, best-selling Canadian author Findley (Pilgrim) depicts the disintegration of a family against the backdrop of the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespeare Festival. Griffin and Jane Kincaid live with their son, Will, in idyllic Stratford. Griffin, a repertory theater actor, discovers that his future success may depend on his response to homosexual overtures by the theater's director. Griffin is ambitious, but the security afforded by his wife's large inheritance suggests that something other than professional hunger motivates his fall onto the casting couch. Jane's simultaneous infatuation with Milos, the handsome Canada Bell repairman who arrives to mend a broken phone line, comes when she is most vulnerable. Yet this response rings false from a woman supposedly struggling to keep her marriage intact. Subtle character connections are interesting, but while diverting, subplots concerning the serial murders of women in neighboring towns and the domestic strife rampant in the family life of minor characters ultimately seem extraneous. For larger collections. Margee Smith, Grace A. Dow Memorial Lib., Midland, MI

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (December 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060932627
• ISBN-13: 978-0060932626
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,265,562 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Work Indeed, February 5, 2002

By 

Michael Younder - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spadework (Hardcover)

Not one of Timothy's strongest books. There's a lot of material in Spadework with several little stories being carried through. But I got the sense that some of the more interesting ones were left underdeveloped. As the book finished, plot lines were wound up too quickly is if to make way for the six o'clock news. A slight disappointment but an engrossing backstage peak at the theatre scene.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars One wonders why Findley wrote this book., March 7, 2002

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Spadework (Hardcover)

From a writer whose publicity bills him as "Canada's greatest living writer," this book is both a surprise and a disappointment. Telling the story of a group of participants in Ontario's Stratford Festival, the book includes many subplots, all dealing with some issue of love--love from the past, young love, new love, love of children, homosexual love, thwarted love, love of self, love of career--and the extent to which the characters are willing to sacrifice for it.

While some of the dialogue, such as that in an early birthday party scene, pops and crackles, as one would expect in the writing of a playwright, other aspects of the book creak and groan, weighed down by irrelevant details and a shocking number of cliches. Ten pages into the book, Jane comments that she is the luckiest girl in the world. "I've got everything I wanted," she says. One is not surprised, then, when fate decides to teach her a lesson in the ensuing 400 pages.

The personal conflicts which evolve are too shallow to allow for the illumination of great themes, and the characters are one-dimensional, prone to observations one has read many times in many other novels. Upon seeing the Bell telephone man, Jane decides, "He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. But his beauty was more than physical. There was something...indefinable." Her psychiatrist has a print of Paul Klee's "Scholar 1933" on the wall, "his inner eye, his daily reminder...that life was full of endless mystery and that nothing was known." An outdoor love scene takes place against a background with "not a single cloud. And yet...There was thunder." And it is difficult to take seriously a reference to "the voice of a man she barely knew, but a man she also knew she loved."

For those who enjoy sentimental stories and can do not mind cliches, this novel provides a look at life in a theater company and a great many love stories, which end, literally, with "the sound of water flowing over the dam." Mary Whipple

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Slapdash, April 8, 2002

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Spadework (Hardcover)

Timothy Findley's earlier novel, "Famous Last Words" is a very strange and disturbing book. The question is whether "Spadework" is a shift into a more traditional kind of storytelling for this Canadian author, or whether it is in fact stranger than anything else he's done. That's what's hard to decide.

As opposed to being set in Europe, where Findley always seems finds the smell of rot just below the surface, "Spadework" is set in Canada, in the fresh, bonnie territory of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. Jane designs props, and her husband Griffin is a promising actor. Findley knows theater well, and the setting is one of the novel's strengths. The art of theater is lovingly explored--the building of props, the use of lighting to create an environment- all the individual elements that make the artistic whole.

Ambitious Griffin suddenly leaves Jane and their son for an affair with the theatre's artistic director. Distraught, Jane is drawn to a Bell Canada lineman who disconnects her telephone, interrupting a phone call vital to the plot. Griffin gets the roles he wants for the next theatrical season and returns to Jane. She accepts him back. Does she really think anything will be the same again, or that his return can mend the destruction of their son's world? Why would she want this man back anyway when he has proven that his family is far, far down the list of his priorities? Is this an unbelievable ending, or is "Spadework" Findley's creepiest book of all?

It is my appreciation of Findley's earlier work that makes me want to give him the benefit of the doubt. The truth is that unless you put some work into coming up with alternative scenarios, this is a pretty haphazard book. It lacks the kind of quirk Findley excels at, and as a conventional novel of a family in crisis "Spadework" is a flop. It is a readable but mediocre outing by a writer from whom we are accustomed to getting only the best.