Agony Column Home Agony Column Review Archive Headhunter Timothy Findley Crown US Hardcover First ISBN 0-517-59827-2 440 pages; $23.00 Date Reviewed: 08-22-1994 REFERENCES COLUMNS Horror Mystery Fantasy General Fiction Horror novels typically portray the mentally ill as vicious, not visionary. Canadian writer Timothy Findley has a different take on the matter in his luscious, layered and literate novel "Headhunter". Following Francis Ford Coppola's lead, Findley takes the characters from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" and sets them loose in the modern world. In "Headhunter", however, the jungle is Toronto, Kurtz's citadel is the Parkin Psychiatric Institute, and both Kurtz and Marlowe are psychiatrists. As in Conrad's narrative, Kurtz is an enigmatic, powerful man, who has gone deep into the wilderness (of insanity) to achieve stunning commercial success, while Marlowe is the outsider journeying towards an understanding of the extent of Kurtz's power and magnetism. Findley shows a flair for the absurd in his opening pages, when Lilah Kemp, "a spiritualist of intense but undisciplined powers...inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of 'Heart of Darkness'." This mordant tone allows him to be unusually effective in treading the thin line between a novel of the supernatural and a novel of psychological delusions. When Lilah is told that the Kurtz she sees in the library is the head of the psychiatric institution that dispenses her anti-hallucinogen, she is alarmed, but her Marlowe will appear next door to her, in fact, employed by the very same Parkin Institute headed up by the venerable Kurtz. "Marlowe used literature as psychotherapy. He believed in its healing powers not because of its sentiments, but because of its complexities." | |
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