BOOK REPORT: THE TELLING OF LIES BY TIMOTHY FINDLEY.

 

I THOUGHT I WOULD GIVE A SHORT REVIEW OF TIMOTHY FINDLEY'S MARVELOUS NOVEL, The Telling of Lies.  It is set at an exclusive enclave on the shores of Maine, New England in a small hotel that caters to the wealthy elites of early 1980’s America. Findley dedicates his book to the “Atlantic House” hotel, also of Maine, which presumably was the inspiration for the setting of his story. It is an evenly-paced and detailed examination of gentility, manners, mature lives and privilege, that surprisingly has as its central plot—a murder mystery!

Nessa Van Horne is sixty years old. She is wealthy, her father having made the family fortune in the oil business in the 1930s. She is a retired, award-winning landscape architect and an amateur photographer. It is during the course of taking photographs one morning that a mysterious death occurs, whereby Nessa is drawn into a web of conspiracy, criminality and political intrigue.

Which are things that simply don’t happen at the Aurora Sands Hotel, where she and a coterie of childhood friends have been patrons for decades, spending their summers in quiet, sedately-paced pursuits of the wealthy.

This is a story about Nessa and the mannered men and women she has known all her life, but it is primarily a tale of Nessa and her closest childhood friends, and what happens to them one summer in Maine. Findley tells the story about the women who reside at "The Ash" as the hotel is called by its regulars. It is about personal revelation, generational conflict, and coming to terms with the past while confronting a changing present. Through Nessa’s eyes, as she writes in her journal, we are given glimpses into the lives of aging dowagers, middle-aged socialites, young families and extended families in direct and succinct examinations of their lives and characters. 

Timothy Findley

We learn in the opening paragraph that the hotel will be sold in the fall, and that summer was the last season it would be operating. So this complex organism, this hive of privilege is ending, and yet there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about it, other than in the opening chapters. It is as if everyone, including Nessa, is trapped in amber, with all their conflicts, rivalries, loves and hates frozen in time.   
At The Ash, then, not much changes. Relationships, hierarchies, status, the snobbery of long-established cliques, their ways of communicating, their social mannerisms and layers of etiquette—all  seem ‘hardwired’ into the social functions of the hotel, and everything and everyone carries on, business as usual, until the unexpected death of the aging industrialist Calder Maddox and the appearance of an iceberg into the nearby bay, disrupt their lives. The iceberg, perhaps more so even than Calder’s death, is for Nessa emblematic of the sudden change that can occur in life, and how, like an iceberg, it comes with a vast and hidden history beneath the surface.

On the morning following the iceberg's arrival, while taking photos on the beach, Nessa inadvertently captures the moment of Calder’s death. Shortly thereafter, odd incidents start to happen around the hotel: her room is searched, mysterious cars and people are about, a well-connected doctor arrives on the scene, the adjacent inn is unexpected full, and significantly, the next day there is no mention of Calder’s death in the papers. Along with her nephew Lawrence, Nessa acts as “Watson” to Lawrence’s “Holmes”, as she humorously characterizes their sleuthing, and the two gradually uncover clues to how, and eventually why, Maddox died (though it is she who will carry their investigation to its shocking conclusion.) It is a mystery, and a dangerous one, for Lawrence, who is a doctor, has examined Maddox and concludes that he has been murdered!

But this is primarily a novel about women and their relationships with each other. Most of the male characters in Findley’s tale are unappealing: either they are boorish drunks, 'empty suits', pompous socialites or dullards with little imagination. They are peripheral, secondary, seen at a distance for the most part. Later on, we meet men who are corrupt, murderous and evil, and yet they, too, are virtually indistinguishable one from the other. They are creations made from the same mould, ’cookie-cutter' men, characterless and ubiquitous as ants. They are the grey men of corporate and political hierarchies. There is little in the way of character development with any of them because, for the most part, they have no character or substance to develop. One or two men are seen, briefly, to 'break from the mould', and interestingly, both are servants of the elites. (One is a bus boy at the hotel who confides in Nessa; the other is a bodyguard of the mysterious entourage staying at the neighbouring hotel whose flash of anger, Nessa observes, reveals dangerous, hidden depths.)  
The men in Findley's novel are mostly like the tip of the iceberg—cold and implacable, singularly-driven, ‘surface-dwelling’ creatures who wear their motivations and loyalties on their sleeves. The one male character that Findley most develops, Nessa's nephew Lawrence, is seen as sporadically insightful, but ultimately limited, with traits of selfishness, cruelty, and even brutishness that, in the end leave him unwilling and unable to confront the deeper truths that Calder's death will reveal. He will remain among the grey man.

Nessa, on the other hand, as she reflects on her life and on the lives of the women at the hotel, reveals the depth and complexity of her past, of the current times she lives in, and of the people she lives among. I won’t detail the ‘who-done-it’ plot*, other than to say the death of Calder Maxwell, like the appearance of the iceberg, signals a change for Nessa, ultimately invoking in her a clearer understanding of who she is and what she values most. Or perhaps it is better to say that she comes to a clearer understanding of who she is and what she must value most.

The ending is sobering. It reminds us of all the lies, falsehoods, mis-told truths and self-deceptions that lay beneath the solid-seeming surface of our lives, the iceberg's tip, and how they colour, obscure and shape everything else underneath, including the truth.

At the end, there is a second death, a suicide. A woman’s body is found floating near the iceberg. It is the woman who rents one of The Ash’s cottages on the beach. She is a minor character in the novel, who Nessa meets several times as she walks along the shoreline of the exclusive enclave of Larson’s Neck where the hotel is located. “Honey Girl”, as Nessa privately thinks of her, is young, beautiful and sexually provocative, yet she is seen by Nessa as a “loner”. Interestingly, writing in her journal about the young woman’s death, Nessa reflects that Honey Girl reminds her of Moira, a young woman she knew while in a Japanese internment camp for civilians, in Malaysia, during WWII:

     “I knew, of course, who it would be [the body discovered floating in the bay]—though why I write of course with so much confidence, I cannot really tell. It may just be that she was so like Moira, with her honey hair—and Moira had been so like her, with her desperate apartness and her appalling loneliness. And the way she eyed the distance out beyond the gate.

     Yes. It was the Honey Girl.

   They blamed it on the iceberg and they’ve called it an accidental drowning. The bastards. They don’t see anything that’s real.”(358)

Nessa notes that Honey Girl eyed the iceberg in the same desperate way that Moira had once looked out past the gates of their prison all those years ago. Moira had seen beyond the prison gates how things would fare for her after her release. She saw ahead a life of loneliness and ostracism. Even with the war’s end, when they were free to leave their prison after the guards fled ahead of the advancing Australian troops, Moira could see she would be alone, for she was pregnant with a Japanese soldier’s baby. She had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. She was an outcast. Thus, the peace fell on Moira (who would shortly be dead.) It fell like The Bomb fell on Nagasaki, the home town of the prison's commandant, who says of the attack ending the war: "It fell on Nagasaki. It fell on all of us."  Findley captures the personal and societal costs of war and its aftermath by juxtaposing Moira's plight with that of the commandant's. Similarly, he  captures how the sudden death of Calder has ramifications that affect Nessa and those around her, as well as society at large.

During their conversation one night, Honey Girl described to Nessa the colours of the iceberg at dusk. It was redolent, she says, with reds and pinks and the fiery hues of the setting sun. In the reader’s mind, this is a beautiful image, but for Honey Girl, I think we are given to understand it is symbolic of her life—all brilliant colours and shapes on the surface, but ultimately melting into the night’s black and the ocean’s waters. It is an image of despair, for her. Nessa, having come along the beach a bit later, sees the iceberg merely hued in green, as the sun set below the darkening horizon. For Honey Girl, it is a blaze of setting glory. For Nessa, the iceberg is the same colour as the window shade she pulls down at the start of night. But for both of them, the iceberg represents the sudden, undeniable arrival of change, and ultimately, like the revelations surrounding Calder's death that Nessa uncovers, it is something that impels them toward a greater awareness of the shadows and shapes, the lies and hidden truths that lay beneath the surface of their lives. 
Everyone at the Aurora Sands Hotel must live with the consequences of the lies they have told, the generations of lies that have been told in a place where few acknowledge the truth, and that when it is revealed, it is as rare as a flower growing from a stone.**

Thus, the hotel will close. The lies Nessa discovers will remain hidden, but at least they will be understood. And those at the hotel will live with the lives they have made; some of them will have a greater awareness of what lay beneath. And as is required of all tragedies, some, like Nessa, will live their lives with a greater awareness of what could lay beneath.

Cheers, Jake.

*For those who read this well-crafted tale, an interesting side-note: Without giving away details, the 'undercover operation' with its Canadian connection that is described in the ending chapters is based on a true story--as shameful and sordid as that is. It's one more example of man's inhumanity to man...

**At the end of the novel, Nessa sits with the reigning matriarch of the hotel, someone who has cowered her all her life. Unexpectedly, the grand lady acknowledges that Nessa has 'come of age', has joined the 'peerage' of the hotel, even as it will soon be closing. She makes it known that she, too, is aware of the true nature of Calder's death. Equally unexpected, she gives Nessa a gift--an embroidery of a camellia flower growing from a stone, suggesting both her true feelings toward Nessa and how rare the truth is, and how little soil there is for it to flourish. 



 

Timothy Findley, The Telling of Lies, Pebble Productions Inc., 1986. Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1996.