Recently I found myself in the dead centre of what used to be called West Germany teaching CanLit to a fourth-year university group of about a dozen highly articulate and well-motivated young women, students at the Institute of English and American Studies. Unlike our own people, these students approach Canadian fiction with no preconceptions about national distinctions; neither are their literary intelligences contaminated, at least so far, by that North American tenure-track obsession with critical theory. Their more off-the-cuff comments on the four novels I chose for them were therefore fresh and interesting to me. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing they found needlessly complex; Alice Munro's Friend of My Youth they thought technically adroit but, taken as a whole, depressingly obsessed with failure and life denial; they praised Robertson Davies's Fifth Business for its vision of the human lot as a joyous adventure, but attacked the novel for the author's clumsy central device (a letter to the narrator's headmaster). Most of their praise was reserved for Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion—they liked its sudden switches of focus, its evocations of physical labour, its elevated, mandarin language.

Hugh Hood's newest collection of short stories, The Isolation Booth, arrived too late for me to include on the reading list, so the opportunity to test Hood's work on minds familiar with Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Patrick Süsskind, and Peter Handke, as opposed to Sheila Watson, Morley Callaghan, Robert Kroetsch, and Margaret Laurence, passed me by. So here I am forced to rely on my own bare and unaccommodated intuitions.

I opened The Isolation Booth at random, and my eye landed upon “The Perfect Night.” This story concerns a wealthy man, Harley, who is keeping night watch on his six-ton yawl anchored securely in the mouth of a harbour channel. Two crew members sleep below: Harley's wife, Miranda, in the forward cabin and his friend Arthur in the cabin aft. Harley knows that if the two were alone, Arthur's bed would be empty, his wife's full, and the watch kept “only by the gulls and the riding-lights” (35). He doesn't blame them; he feels no sense of betrayal. Arthur's presence on board is justified, evidently, by his ability to read charts. Harley seems peaceful enough. He sits on deck smoking his pipe, gazing sometimes at its coal, and at other moments “he let[s] his eyes roam in the darkness without making any efforts to pierce the velvet night” (34).

Coast guards gently putter beside the yawl and warn Harley he should move up channel since the rising tide, under a full moon, may be dangerous. He takes their advice and starts the auxiliary engine, but, since he doesn't want to wake the others with its sound, he closes their hatches and “secure[s]” them “tightly” (37). He consults no charts, since that is Arthur's work, and chugs gently towards land. Suddenly the boat hits a jagged rock and breaks into halves, which promptly “s[i]nk like stones” (39). As Harley saves himself, he thinks of Arthur and his wife drowning and wonders if either one had reached a hatch only to find it tightly closed. “‘They'll think I did it! They'll think I meant it!’ he cried, bursting into tears” (40). And the story ends with him stumbling along a beach towards a nearby coast-guard station.

“The Perfect Night” raises key issues of narrative techniques. It is, for instance, reasonable that Harley should close the hatches against the noise of the engine—as an acquiescent, solicitous friend he wouldn't want to disturb his betrayers' sleep. But he needs to secure the hatches tightly only because of Hood; Hood doesn't want the separated lovers to escape when the water floods into their cabins. There is no excuse for this hatch business unless we are being asked to consider unconscious motivations. Harley makes no attempt to see deeply into the darkness around him when he's on watch; does this mean Hood wants us to believe that the drowning of Miranda and Arthur is the result of an unacknowledged desire? If that's the case, then the unlikely accident that ends their lives is too convenient. And you'd think Harley would, instead of bursting into tears, utter a howl of triumph—surely such a conclusion, so much more satisfying, must have occurred to Hood. I wonder why he rejected it. We know nothing of Miranda, except that she sleeps naked, nor of Arthur, other than his expertise with charts. Harley is rich, wears expensive shirts and ties at his office and old, dearly beloved sweaters and jeans on his boat—and that's it. If you could say anything about him at all you might be tempted to describe him as a complacent twit. At no point does the narrative allow him that reflective pause in which moral, character defining choices are made. These figures, in other words, don't exist as human beings. They might just as well be amoebas. The story annoys, disappoints, and frustrates me.

But this isn't by any means all there is to it. In the long, most interesting introduction to The Isolation Booth, which describes the provenance of the stories, Hood calls “The Perfect Night” a failure

because it violates a fundamental artistic law, one that Henry James … was keenly aware of. Never try to tell somebody else's story! I got the idea from a reading of [Isak Dinesen's] Seven Gothic Tales; in one of these strange pieces a pair of guilty lovers are surprised in each other's arms by terrifying death, the deliberate cruelty of an absolute ruler who buries them alive while they are sleeping, pleased to think that they will awake in the posture of love to discover their fate. What will happen to their sexual attachment as the realization hits them? This narrative suggestion terrified and fascinated me. I tried to do something with it in “The Perfect Night” but I just wasn't as tough-minded as Baroness Blixen [Dinesen]. I copped out, making the lovers' drowning accidental. That spoiled the story.

(13–14)

It's always instructive to read authors' accounts of what it is they think they've done. Thus Conrad, in his preface to The Secret Agent, claims he wants to tell the story of a woman named Winnie Verloc. The briefest glance at the novel reveals that he's done nothing of the sort, that he's achieved both less and more. Hood is right in thinking Blixen's mind-set is a long way from his own. She comes not only out of Africa, but from a tradition of magical, yet mimetic, fantasy that culminated in the nineteenth century in such writers as E. T.A. Hoffmann. Like Hoffmann's, her stories are filled with passion, dementia, and sexual obsessions often presided over by dark, supernatural forces. There is nothing of this in “The Perfect Night”—what we find instead is a deliberate absence of passion, an evasion of narrative climax, a refusal to depict sexuality. The lovers, we notice, lie in separate cabins when the mundane and meaningless accident occurs. They might just as well, for all we know and for all Harley seems to care, have been Scrabble partners.

Yet if “The Perfect Night” is indeed a “failure,” it is hard to believe that Hood would have rescued the piece from his desk drawer and included it, unrevised, in this volume. I suspect that, bad though it is, Hood senses his story is not a total loss. And indeed what stays in the mind is the image of a man at peace on his boat contemplating the night without seeing very much. It is a strong image, or at least it is to me, and so “failure” is the wrong word. I would prefer to say, employing a useful Barthean distinction, that “The Perfect Night” is lisible, and the combination of story and introduction scriptible. I would also say, speaking very generally, that in such a combination of lack of feeling and the evocation of a powerful though static image, the comparatively feeble narrative and startling description, lies Hood's idiosyncracy as a writer. Though the story fails, in other words, to recall the baroness, it may instead recall Hood.

I want to theorize about this quality, but let's first look at some of the other material in the book. Harley, at peace on his boat, is memorable, and so is the picture—in “I'm Not Desperate!”—of two young literary men getting drunk in a tavern and talking brilliantly of morality. Some of the stories, such as the one I've just mentioned, are, Hood tells us, deliberate experiments. “The Isolation Booth,” for instance, is an attempt to capture and celebrate the idiom and jargon of a television personality. It is what Hood wants to call “a media folk-tale” (11), or a discourse shaped by the “pre-rational, instinctual” cohesiveness of people who work in a high-tech society (13). The narrator is a television announcer who runs one of those vile quiz shows in which people answer questions for money. The victim in this story is a young boy placed for the purpose of the show in an isolation booth wherein he quickly goes to pieces. In his introduction, Hood says:

Surely the society that invents a space called “the isolation booth” isn't far removed from the subliminal motivations of the torturers in prisons and camps of one kind or another. … The close parallels between media/high-tech culture and pre-rational, instinctual “blood consciousness” are obvious.

(13)

Perhaps, but the callousness the narrator reveals comes more out of insensitivity and stupidity than “blood consciousness,” and is in any case undermined (at least to my taste) by the relish the author has for the slang terminology of the trade. The manipulation of specialized language becomes the story's chief focus.

More successful, perhaps the best story in the book and the only one communicating powerful feeling, is “Suites and Single Rooms, with Bath,” an excellent recitation delivered by a young man just separated from his wife. It contains hate arias, and describes happy memories, angry marital fights, sexual deprivation, fears of the future, of growing old, of loneliness. These are reiterated with variations; the young man's obsessions wander about his head like those dogs in Psalm 59, prowling the streets of the city.

Hood's prose, with its light texture and unadventurous vocabulary, doesn't always avoid sinking into journalese, particularly in his introduction. Phrases such as “wow” (21), “chalk one up for the good guys” (17), “I really dig that moral” (14) cheapen it, somewhat, but lend it a kind of boyish charm that fits in well with a general attitude of innocent bluster: “Almost all my work,” he says, “is designed to be read silently by very intelligent and attentive readers, a large majority of them women, three or four times” (18). Maybe, but I would like to know what such a reader would make of “A Season of Calm Weather,” in which Hood tries “to get inside the head of a phenomenologist and metaphysician (if there can be such a being) and all I had to do it with were mere visible facts” (19). I tried to read the story more than the three or four times Hood recommends, but could not penetrate it beyond the second page where the passage “The postulates break down and away; one merely sees and need not discourse upon the vision afterwards unless the clamour of the aspirants around one call forth speech” ground me to a halt (100).

Though The Isolation Booth contains a fair amount of interesting and diverting material, it is, generally speaking, of low quality. The experiments in style and technique communicate little more than their author's attempt at cleverness, while the traditionally presented stories, such as “The Perfect Night,” sink the reader into banality. Nowhere within it is Hood at his best, or even his second best, but even his failures command a certain respect. It's clearer to me now what my students in Giessen might have made of him. They would, reading Hood in the company of strong narrative writers such as Davies, Atwood, and Munro, have found him either obvious or oversubtle. Three or four readings of “The Winner,” “The Changeling,” “The Fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper,” or “Friends and Relations” reveal to me no hidden profundities, though the odd episode, the occasional phrase, is mildly entertaining. On the evidence of this book, these students would not easily have understood why its author should be regarded as an important Canadian writer, or what distinguishes him from a B student in a creative-writing class. But they would also have missed the point. Hood's talent, as I have tried to show, lies in the creation of intensely realized meditative images, an art that aligns his work much more closely to the equally unconventional work of Michael Ondaatje, and that seems to me much more developed in terms of poetic vision than narrative structure.

I now need to digress a little. Many years ago I reviewed one of Hood's novels, praising it in general, but finding within it what I thought were minor flaws. The review led to a correspondence with the author that was at first acrimonious, later amicable, and finally published in Fiddlehead. The debate roamed over matters of concern to both of us: what constitutes a novel; how words such as narrative, drama, allegory, and so on, should be defined; and what we ought to be doing, as writers with a Christian take on the world, with whatever talents we possessed. We did not resolve any of these issues, nor even agree to differ. Maybe they aren't capable, this side of the great deconstructor in the sky, of any resolution, but, reading The Isolation Booth, I think I ought to let them reemerge.

In that review I drew attention to Hood as a Catholic writer, and was insolent enough to call him a Pelagian—one who believes that there is no such thing as Original Sin, that human beings can achieve salvation through their own efforts and consequently stand in no need of grace. I was clearly wrong in applying this label to Hood, though what my accusation points to is the fact that theological matters play a key role in his work and need to be taken seriously, even by people who would (understandably) run from a theologue as they would flee the pox.

Nowadays I would align him with the Christian mystical tradition, which puts him back in the ranks of orthodoxy (he'll no doubt be glad to hear), but within a framework that has been more or less ignored by the Church. People writing out of this tradition seem to hold that though sin is a reality and evil part of the condition of being alive, both are overwhelmed by God's blessing. The best known, and briefest, summary of this position is found in Juliana of Norwich's “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well” (Eliot 4). These lines are used by T. S. Eliot (who clearly wished he could believe them) as his peroration to Four Quartets.

A position that appears to be an overoptimistic refusal to face the facts of human existence is difficult (though to a mystic not impossible) to defend considering the Holocaust, the world wars of this century, the murderous thugs in Ulster and Yugoslavia (who, at the time of writing, are slicing live human victims with chain saws), but it is a position far removed from that of the bland and Pollyannaish optimism I imposed upon Hood so many years ago.

You would not expect work written from such a perspective to interest itself much in conflict (and therefore in narrative), violent passions, or the dark side of human affairs. Such aspects of human experience may be seen as constituting the via negativa (vide Meister Eckhart), a path to God, a temporary condition of the soul that segues gently into more positive states, all of which, including the via negativa, thrive under the aegis of blessing. What you would expect of such work is a general attitude of celebration, and this is usually best observed in the apt and startling images of lyric poetry. It comes to fruition in such writers as Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, and the Edmund Spenser of the sonnets and Epithalamion. It is perfectly expressed in Hood's early story “Flying a Red Kite,” but it seems to me a rarity in fiction. It is not so uncommon in cinema. It irradiates, for instance, and with Dinesen still in mind, a beautiful film called Babette's Feast, based on one of Dinesen's stories. Here there is a directly explored contrast between a blessing-centred view of human life and the sin-and-redemption theology better known to the general public. Such a contrast is rare in fiction because the latter, more so than film, is totally dependent on dramatic conflict or a series of agons wherein the writer opposes what he or she senses to be virtue against forces divined as evil. No reader of fiction need be oppressed by this—it isn't necessary to read every novel as though it were a morality play. I am only making what I think is an obvious point, that an awareness of evil is at the core of narrative, even within writing intended to be comic, or entertaining.

In Babette's Feast the inhabitants of a tiny Scandinavian village live under the oppression of a life-denying, puritanical religion. Among them comes a Frenchwoman on the run, Babette, to whom the villagers give shelter. Babette wins a lottery and, in return for the hospitality shown her, produces for her hosts a great feast, clearly representing a combination of the Eucharist and the eschatological banquet promised in Isaiah. The villagers are not evil people; they are, however, heretics who have spent their lives obsessed by sin. They have, in other words, misguidedly rejected God's gift of carnality. But at the end of the banquet they walk outside into the street and stand under the stars, thunderstruck at what they have been shown and at the transformations wrought in them.

Hood at his best has created visions as strong as this. Long after his stories and his characters have drained from my memory I can recall certain intensely realized mystical images—the ghost ship under the lake, the return to life of a human being frozen to the point of death in some horrible concentration-camp “medical” experiment, and above all that red kite of his, fluttering triumphantly over a fallen world.

Works Cited

Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. London: Faber, 1943.