A Thriller Soap And A Man Wolf With Real Promise
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday May 27, 1994
FRESH from the racy delights of thrillers by women writers like Sara Paretsky and Susan Geason, I approached Remember Me in all innocence, only to encounter my first genuine thriller soap. I recognised the genre instantly when the first ineffably handsome, kind, tall husband, very protective of his beautiful but confused wife came on the scene, (and there are roughly four couples in that category, some alive, some dead, varying only in age and state of confusion).
Nearly every character in the book is physically gorgeous in a Stepford Wives kind of way, the only difference between them being that some are capable of limitless evil while the others know only what it is to be good. In true soap tradition any ambiguity that might have strayed into the relentless narrative has been flushed out with torrents of adjectives and exposition until you long for one thing to remain unsaid, one evil spirit to rampage without heavy hints and warnings beforehand.
I began to be obsessed with the mobility of the characters' facial features, the way mouths set in grim lines and lips were bitten, but in particular with their smile - the way they tugged and clicked and cleared frowns, the way even semblances of smiles could still cross faces. I already knew after the first few chapters that, once the tide of evil had washed over the little community, leaving the survivors to bravely rebuild their lives, the first sign of recovery would be the hopeful smiles tugging at their lips as they faced the dawn.
Alice Hoffman, on the other hand, writes about the physical minutiae of life in a way that is instantly recognisable. She knows about the ordinary small details of domestic life: cooking, gardening, the weather, the workings of a country community. Her book is full of sly soft vignettes of daily life:
The young people congregated in the rear of the yard, sitting cross-legged on Indian bedspreads, drinking lemonade and beer. The sunlight was honeycoloured and thick. Summer was close enough to make everything seem charged, the blades of grass, bare knees, the lazy sound of ice in a paper cup.
There is a nostalgic haze over the narrative which is never sentimental, a sensuousness in the prose which comes from her calm, affectionate attention to these details. She gives them their due weight, celebrating their beauty without hyperbole:
He knew what Connor was doing because once he had seen the girl waiting under the streetlight at the end of Mansfield Terrace. She had the same luminous look, weightless and ignited. Even when they disappeared together down the dark street, they left a pool of light behind them.
Second Nature is firmly in realist mode, but there is also a romantic, otherworld feeling about it which reminds me of the film Moonstruck. There is a sense that the extraordinary is always possible in day-to-day life, that reality has a way of turning itself inside out in unexpected ways. The heroine, Robin, her son, Connor, her soon-to-be-ex-husband (a cop whose colleagues keep booking her in an embarrassed but determined effort to persuade her to go back to him) are delightfully believable, partly because of the gentle humour with which they are presented.
Hoffman is good, too, at describing the grittiness of people - the teenage son who is drinking a lot and trying to make sense of his parents' break-up, the husband's wounded pride, Robin's dry humour. The novel is a celebration of ordinariness, a demonstration of how ordinary people are always capable of the extraordinary if you are patient enough to observe without judgment, as Hoffman does.
Robin's decision to invite home a stranger called Stephen and the fact that she falls in love with him might seem to be ordinary occurrences, but they are not because Stephen is a "Wolf Man", raised by wolves as a child and only recently "rescued". This takes the novel beyond the domestic context she so carefully constructs and, although the descriptions of Stephen's alien outlook and bizarre childhood are often vivid, he does not convince the same way the rest of the novel does.
He seems to be coming from another kind of novel altogether. The circumstances of his life are so fabulous that the reader has to go into another mental gear to encompass them; his depiction is both too humdrum and too fabulous to be credible. As a result, the novel's thriller aspect does not work for me, although the story and characters would, with more development, be the basis of a very fine novel indeed.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald