[Marcus is a critic and translator. In the review below, he favorably assesses Headhunter.]

With eight books of fiction and a number of plays to his credit, including Famous Last Words and The Telling of Lies, an Edgar Award winner, the Canadian writer Timothy Findley is something of an institution north of the 49th parallel. In the United States he has achieved much critical attention but little popular success. Perhaps Headhunter will remedy the situation. This long, densely populated novel is already a best seller in Canada and its fusion of jeremiad with psychological thriller may win Mr. Findley the American audience he deserves.

Set in Toronto in the near future, Headhunter makes the tail end of the millennium look bleak indeed. Gangs of silver-suited skinheads, called Moonmen, rove the streets, pollution has given the sky a permanent yellow tint and a mysterious plague called sturnusemia—transmitted, we are told, by starlings—has begun to take its toll on the population. What's more, this physical decay seems to reflect an ethical and moral collapse. According to one character, the psychiatrist Charles Marlow, "Sturnusemia and AIDS were not the only plagues Civilization—sickened—had itself become a plague And its course … could be followed by tracing the patterns of mental breakdown…. Psychiatric case loads; everywhere, carried alarming numbers. Broken dreamers, their minds in ruin. This was the human race."

While Mr. Findley's dystopia signifies a shortage of happiness, there is no shortage of characters. The author's large cast constitutes a cross section of Toronto society, from kitchenmaids to painters to press barons, and the city itself is evoked so minutely and with such affection that it, too, becomes a kind of character.

At the center of the novel, however, is an unlikely trio. There is Lilah Kemp, former librarian, spiritualist and schizophrenic, "diagnosed according to her raising of the dead and her conversations with literary characters and famous persons from the past." And there are a pair of psychiatrists, Marlow and Rupert Kurtz, who act as standard bearers for the novel's conceptions of good and evil.

Marlow is no saint, of course, he merely possesses a conscience, which seems to have become a rare commodity in Toronto. But Kurtz is a black hat of memorable proportions. As the director of the city's most prestigious psychiatric institute (and confessor to many of its most powerful miscreants), this "harbinger of darkness," sets all sorts of ugly schemes in motion, involving blackmail, child pornography, torture, suicide and murder. Kurtz intends to "go against the current until he reaches that point where the river rises—the point of absolute power." At first only Lilah Kemp gauges the extent of Kurtz's wickedness, and in the end only Marlow is capable of confronting him with his crimes.

The attentive reader, noting the names and the talk of going upstream, will conclude that a prior work of literature is casting a long shadow over the present one. But Mr. Findley makes no secret of the fact that Headhunter is one long gloss on Heart of Darkness. Indeed, in the opening scene Lilah Kemp panics at the thought that she may have released Kurtz from the very pages of Joseph Conrad's novel. By updating this century-old parable of power and corruption. Mr. Findley demonstrates its relevance to an age in which both concepts have undergone a great many ghastly refinements. As one character points out, "Conrad was not the first to conjure Kurtz—and not the last. He was merely the first to give him that name."

But Mr. Findley has another purpose in mind, too. After all, Headhunter pilfers several other works for its characters, including The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary and Peter Rabbit. These borrowings suggest a kind of interpenetration of literature and life, a sense that the best books do not merely tell a good story but add, as R. P. Blackmur once wrote, to our stock of available reality. Fiction seems to enfold the very act of human intercourse, enabling Marlow to claim that "we write each other's lives—by means of fictions. Sustaining fictions. Uplifting fictions. Lies. This way, we lead one another toward survival."

Like many a loose and baggy saga, Headhunter has moments when the proliferation of characters and subplots begins to sap its narrative energy. In addition, Mr. Findley's spare prose occasionally lapses into pulpishness ("If his eyes had been lasers, his gaze would have burned a hole in the glass"). Still, it's rare to find an author in which the moralist and the entertainer cohabit so naturally. And if it is true, as Emerson insisted, that "every age, like every human body, has its own distemper," then Mr. Findley has diagnosed our own with eloquence and indignation.