Halifax Men's Reading Group
Selection for September 2005
Spadework by Timothy Findley
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. |