|
A Pure Weave
The Red Thread
Roderick Townley
Atheneum, 2007. 294 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
On his website, author Roderick Townley refers to his latest book, The Red Thread, as a “supernatural mystery.” Lest any readers find that description ambiguous or off-putting, allow me to clarify a bit: The Red Thread tells a story that covers a period of 500 or so years and in which the heroine, a present-day sixteen-year-old student and photographer Dana Landgrave, discovers through dreams and hypnosis that she has lived two earlier incarnations, and that events in those lives continue to have implications in her life in twenty-first-century New Hampshire. Dana’s story grabs you from the beginning and is hard to put down once you get started. It is not, however, a ghost story or fantasy that the adjective supernatural might imply.
Dana is a creative young woman, the older of two children in an offbeat New England family. Bothered by nightmares and conflicts with her peers, Dana is sent to Dr. Morton Sprague for counseling. Having tried hypnosis to get at repressed memories that might be at the root of Dana’s issues, Sprague suggests going even further with hypnosis by looking into Dana’s past lives—if such lives even exist. Dana agrees to give it a try, and thus her story—or stories—unfold.
Or perhaps it would be better to say, in keeping with the central metaphor indicated by the title, Dana’s stories begin to weave together, like a tapestry.
Townley has cleverly written a novel that is at once contemporary and historical. Dana’s present-day existence in Portsmouth, New Hampshire is pretty much run-of-the-mill: peer pressure, relationship issues, and family issues comprise the not-so-unusual aspects of her life. But she is set apart somewhat by her creativity and the tension that creativity can bring to life. Her brother Ben, recovering from a crippling accident, and the unusual but interesting perspectives of each of her parents, are other elements that add to Dana’s appeal as a character—and they are traits that provide clues and touchstones regarding the significance of Dana’s past lives.
The mystery of Dana’s problems unfolds as she witnesses scenes from her past lives during hypnosis, and through conjectures and flashes of deep memory upon visiting some of the actual sites of those occurrences. Dana’s past is tied up in the visual arts of previous eras, but is also touched by the harms done by religious persecution in Elizabethan England and by the actions of an unscrupulous portrait artist of the 1800s. Anyone who has ever stood in a museum and gazed up at a medieval tapestry, thinking, “How did they do that?” will not be surprised to find signs of the weaver’s art in Townley’s novel. Like a fine tapestry, there are no loose threads or tricks used to accomplish the feat. It’s a pure weave.
|
