[In the excerpt below, Martin offers a primarily negative review of Headhunter.]

"On a winter's day, while a blizzard raged through the streets of Toronto, Lilah Kemp inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness." That is how Timothy Findley begins his monumental new novel, Headhunter, the latest in a list of fictional works that includes half a dozen novels and two collections of short stories, and three plays. Lilah, an out-patient at the Queen Street Mental Health Hospital, is sitting amidst the hangings and the pools in the lobby of Raymond Moriyama's Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, "framed by the woven jungle of cotton trees and vines that passed for botanic atmosphere," when Kurtz makes his escape from the literary cage Joseph Conrad fashioned for him nearly 100 years ago.

An intriguing beginning, but there is nothing playful in Findley's intent. Headhunter is an expedition into the heart of evil as it festers in the male ego in the jungle of post-contemporary Toronto. Kurtz is the chief psychiatrist of an institution that is closely modelled on the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry. His nemesis, Marlow, is a practising psychiatrist in the same facility. Findley's portrait of Kurtz as a sinister, controlling demi-god is all the more devastating for the honour and prestige we lavish on psychiatrists in contemporary society.

Kurtz craves power, which in his case translates as research grants and donations. He gets it by violating his patients—clients as he calls them—using their intimate revelations to escalate their depravities, to blackmail them emotionally, and to subjugate their psyches. His clients, though, are not so much victims as instruments that Kurtz wields for his own nefarious purposes. The real victims in Timothy Findley's eyes are the children who are traumatized and tortured by their own fathers, most of whom are Kurtz's clients.

What a hell-hole Findley has created: the mad are sane, moral and sexual taboos have evaporated; AIDS is rampant, while another plague, called sturnusemia, is even more wanton. Nobody knows how it is transmitted, but because victims turn speckled in the terminal stages of the disease, public health officials, in the absence of a scientific explanation, have in desperation blamed birds, sending extermination squads around the city spraying trees, gardens, and ravines with deadly chemicals. The young, the environment and, by extension, life itself are in mortal danger while men abuse their own children and women douse themselves in alcohol and sex and fling themselves on metaphorical pyres.

This cautionary moral tale is driven by Findley's outrage at the depravity that he sees around him. There are echoes of Robertson Davies in the gossip and theatricality of this novel and in the skilful way Findley depicts old, monied Toronto as a small Ontario town. Ultimately, though, Findley lacks that old magician's bluster and sleight of hand. Headhunter dangles too many loose ends and, as in all of Findley's novels that I can think of except The Wars, there are too many obeisances to the literary monuments of earlier writers. There is no reason for Findley to invoke Conrad to reinforce his imaginary world. He can stand on his own prose and tell his own story without props or crutches. It is time for him to throw off these literary shrouds and come out as the unadorned and powerful novelist that he is more than capable of being.