SOURCE: "Gritty Terrain," in Books in Canada, Vol. XXI, No. 6, September, 1992, pp. 48-9.
[Hill is a Canadian nonfiction writer, fiction writer, poet, and critic. In the following excerpt, he presents a positive assessment of Amnesia.]
Douglas Cooper's Amnesia is a dark and troubling story … with an … important thematic centre. A series of narrative meditations on memory and forgetting, the novel finds its energy source in domestic disintegration; around the tale's specific events lurks the enormous memory-shadow of the Holocaust, modern history's most infamous example of family destruction. We forget what we can no longer bear to remember, Cooper suggests, personally and collectively. Either way is trauma; either way we suffer.
An excerpt from Amnesia
Katie sat despondently at the window that was his door and stared at the sky. The relentless cloud showed no sign of diminishing. Across the city she could hear a siren, the sound strangely muffled. She waited.
There was another sound down in the shadows of the ravine, as if bones were cracking, and then a loud tearing. For the first time, Katie noticed that his eyes were gold. Not brown, but gold: the color of a lion's skin. Of a lion's eyes. Only one dye was poured into the substance that made the lion, and it is a calm, fathomless gold; to stare into the eyes of a lion is to swim in the presence of a cool and impenetrable soul whose windows are gold.
Then again, she could never be sure that he was not in fact canine, or human.
For the first time, Katie was frightened.
He picked her up as if she were a piece of thread and carried her up against the wall, where he pressed himself against her so that their hearts beat together, and she understood then that his heart beat far too slowly.
Desire can take fear and bend it until it is an ornament. Katie no longer knew why she was breathing so quickly, merely that she was. She put out her arms for the first time to touch him.
Every time he breathed, her face would cloud over with mist. There was another tearing noise, less horrible than the sound in the ravine, and she realized that he was tearing her gown. In strips. Strip by strip. Until she was clothed only in thin tatters of cloth.
And then, for the first time, he kissed her.
If a moment could be expanded to articulate its parts—and for the next year of her life she would try to do this in her mind—the sequence of that moment would unfold slowly like this: she felt his lips against hers, and closed her eyes to be for a moment almost alone in her happiness; and her happiness swelled into a brief delirium.
And then she felt a hand between her legs, a cold, vicious hand, and then unspeakable agony as if something sharp had been driven through her, through her sex and up into her chest, and then the cold when her heart froze into white petals and then she screamed as the flower shattered under the hammer of his chest and she opened her eyes as wide as she could but they were still not wide enough to encompass those golden eyes. She realized, as she fell to the floor sobbing pitifully, that those eyes were mocking her. Laughing at her innocence, enjoying her pain. And then he was gone.
When she could at last lift herself from the tears and blood on the floor, she pulled herself still doubled over and crying to the night table, and as she stared at it she felt herself dying, and then dying again, and then dying again.
This time, he had left nothing.
Douglas Cooper, in his Amnesia, Hyperion, 1994.
The novel is set in Toronto, in the present and the recent past. It opens with the narrator, a municipal archivist sitting in his office just before he is to be married, confronted by a spellbinding stranger named Izzy Darlow. Izzy, like the Ancient Mariner, talks; the archivist, unlike the Wedding Guest, never gets to the wedding. What Izzy talks about is his city, his family, his friends, his love, his obsessions. Gradually Izzy's story takes over the archivist's; narrative consciousness begins to merge, memories overlap, events slide together, elements of the supernatural transform the temporal and local.
A reader may occasionally protest that the author is indulging in too much self-conscious mystification, too much self-conscious profundity. The novel seems to unfold rather slowly at the beginning, and shut the door rather quickly at the end. But on the whole Cooper controls his material successfully. His imagery is scary and erotic; his prose is low-keyed but suggestive. In the end, it's his imagination of the borders between the real and the magical, the sane and the psychotic, that gives the novel its considerable power to unsettle. If we still ask of fiction that it create a world whole, and wholly believable, on its own terms, then Amnesia does the job with convincing skill. The questions Cooper raises are serious, and the disturbing implications of the story will stay with a reader; one blackly funny scene—which gives new resonance to the phrase "broken home"—should win the Magic Realism Award for 1992.
