Putting the pieces together

Tara Manuel’s new novel Walking Through Shadows: Stories from the Edge of the World reminds me of the movie Vantage Point, the celebrated mind-bending political thriller where the action is revealed from eight points of view.

Manuel’s quirky novel, with its morbidly surreal characters, takes a similar approach, but sets the action in a small town. It is in these confines that the Newfoundland writer explores the unseen and the unspoken connections people make.

The book is broken into 10 chapters, each one revealing a complete fragment of one person’s life. Each of the characters are somehow tied to each other, even if they’ve never spoken, and Manuel sets about peeling away their secrets, romantic yearnings, hatreds and perversions.

Each chapter explores one person’s psyche and is a complete short story. By the end, the completed circuit of psychologically probing tales comes full circle to the first story.

This is a town where the Everlasting Church of the Evangelical keeps its citizens’ morality in place. But underneath a patina of morality, the digressions of deviance continue unabated.

Some of those characters have been dragged from the darkest depths. There is Butterfly Girl, a young mute whose dreams surface whenever she sleeps with her lover, the town drunk. And then there’s the White Prince, an egotistical politician whose same-sex peccadilloes destroy his career.

We meet Spider Girl, a lonely terrified teen who develops a superhero persona to feed her fantasies, and then there’s Don Wand, a teacher who trolls the Internet searching for prepubescent girls in between digging up dead animal teeth from the dump.

These are stories of weird people that are guaranteed page-turners. None of the characters really aroused my maternal emotions. But they certainly provoked my curiosity in spades.

Manuel’s stories are disturbing in part because of content, and in part due to the writing technique she uses. Everything is written in the present tense with an active voice. But each chapter ends abruptly, almost as if the last paragraph had been chopped off. This technique both piques curiosity and leaves the reader with a strong sense of frustration — one that could lead to putting the book down permanently.

Despite my gripe, I acknowledge Manuel as a master of the bizarre who has a keen insight into human behaviour. Walking Through Shadows has an oddly perturbing beauty that definitely makes it a worthwhile read.