(novel, 1998)
Canadian
cover (hardcover and pb) |
|
Canadian
HarperPerennial cover |
A grieving
journalist arrives in a small mining town on the Canadian Shield
to write a magazine article about a reputed healer, shattering
a fragile state of tension between her and her parents.
My aim in The Healer was a realistic story about spiritual experience.
The idea came from noticing in accounts of mystics and ecstatics
a kind of tragicomic distance between their experience and the
understanding of their disciples.
What particularly
interests me is how spiritual experience can be realer than any
other in the life of the individual--realer than real--and yet
(or perhaps for this reason) fundamentally incommunicable. I am
interested in what happens to spiritual experience in an empirical
age, in which the assumption is that nothing undemonstrable exists.
I am also interested in how the spiritual experience of one person
will be used by others to achieve completely unrelated kinds of
power: religious, financial, personal, professional, even literary.
Since spiritual experience is private and ineffable, creating
a dramatic story has involved looking at its social effects rather
than at the experience itself. As I worked on the story, I was
not concerned to assert anything in particular about psychological
"causes" of spiritual experience, but The Healer does
suggest that trauma is one way in which the self is broken down,
"normal" expectations violated, and thereby the ground prepared
for something alien to ordinary human experience.
Reviews
"Hollingshead
challenges literary conventions with confidence and dignity .
. . [He] has the capacity--and this is his art--to cause us to
see ourselves, to recognize the 'darkness' that can exist not
only in the world around us, but in our own lives. Hollingshead's
vision is stunning . . " -- The Calgary Herald
"A powerful
novel . . . There's an electricity in the writing that can seem
to affect you muscularly. It's about healing, but it also plumbs
other depths--savagery, how children survive childhood, marriage,
and the land. It powers along on good old-fashioned suspense--that's
the cause of the knotting you feel in your stomach." -- Stephen
Smith, Quill & Quire
"The Healer fascinatingly explores issues of identity, will and the human
relationship to nature, in a style as complex and subtle as the
movement of water over rough ground." -- John Bemrose, Maclean's
"The book
combines an effectively suspenseful plot with a serious meditation
on the dark side of love. The Healer is an accomplished
novel which gives full reign to an imagination that moves freely
in the realms of the bizarre and the everyday, asserting the covert
connections between the two." -- Julian Ferraro, TLS
"Hollingshead
does not burden The Healer with solutions but allows
the unfathomable impulses of love and hurt to enmesh these fractured
and dislocated lives. He writes with a governing absence of philosophy
that vividly recalls the nihilisms of Cormac McCarthy. There are
resonances of E. Annie Proulx, too, in his poetically compressed
prose that imagines stark landscapes as richly unyielding as their
beleaguered inhabitants. This is a substantial book and a swift
read despite the gravity of its tale." -- James Urquhart, The
Guardian
"There are some wonderfully poetic and resonant images in this novel;
the descriptions of the Canadian landscape are incandescent and
some of the set-pieces both hilarious and disturbing." -- Francis
Gilbert, The Times
"In [the]
opening scene, Hollingshead's prose is clipped and staccato, oddly
detached. But this is only his way of teasing us before he does
a quick change, ditching his wry reserve and his terse, literary
demeanour for a wilder-eyed approach. And so The Healer is
rapidly transformed into a mad-tongued Gothic tale, a blend of
high drama and sly, dark marvels. It is a story heard through
'a confusion of smoke and opinion' in a place 'cozy as heaven,
old as hell,' a landscape seething with violence under its torn,
scarred surface. Even so, it takes Hollingshead's readers a while
to realize that an almost biblical rendering of accounts is in
store. By then, we have come to trust ourselves to his imagination,
and to its ultimate mercy." -- Abby Frucht, The New York Times
Book Review
