- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Harper Perennial Canada (July 25 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0006393071
- ISBN-13: 978-0006393078
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #106,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
In Spadework, Timothy Findley marries his passions for playwriting and prose in a novel about theatre people in a theatre town whose reliance on dialogue and visual clues make it read almost like a play. Jane Kincaid is a wealthy southern belle who abandons her life as a daughter of privilege in Louisiana in order to become a set designer. She moves to Stratford, Ontario, home of the Stratford Festival, with her son Will and husband Griffin, a stage actor on the cusp of fame. When the gardener accidentally severs their phone line with his spade, things begin to go awry in unexpected ways. A missed call to his director, Jonathan, leads ambitious and self-absorbed Griffin to become Jonathan's lover in order to win back his favour and some choice parts in next season's productions. A beautiful phone repairman comes to fix the line, and Jane falls in love with him.
Some aspects of the narrative seem unconvincing or irrelevant, such as a murderer on the loose whose existence only peripherally contributes to the mood and plot. A compelling tale that successfully draws the reader into the theatre world in general, and into idyllic Stratford in particular, Spadework lacks the substance and depth of character of Findley's other works, including Not Wanted on the Voyage and, more recently, Pilgrim. --Leah Eichler --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Bestselling Canadian writer Findley, whose stylish and complexly plotted novels have acquired an appreciative audience, here departs from his usual dark scenarios to produce an erotically powered narrative in which all's well that ends well. The setting is the town of Stratford, Ontario, home of the Shakespeare Festival. Findley (Pilgrim) knows this world well, and he conveys it with atmospheric detail. The inadequacy of mere ambition, even when one has talent, is the lesson learned by rising actor Griffin Kincaid, when he realizes that luck and fate can also play havoc with dreams of theatrical stardom. After Kincaid refuses a sexual proposition by his manipulative homosexual director, Jonathan Crawford, he is denied the roles he'd been promised. Griffin's wife, Jane, a Louisiana set designer for the theater, is bitter because Griffin refuses to let her use her substantial inherited income to buy a home in which to raise their seven-year-old son. When, by chance, her gardener cuts a buried phone line, dramatic events ensue. The telephone repairman is a young Polish immigrant, inarticulate but strangely beautiful, and Jane is aroused. Attracted to the repairman yet worried by Griffin's inattention, Jane suspects that her husband is having an affair with an actress. Then she realizes he has capitulated to Jonathan's demands. Despite being a sexual bully, Jonathan is acutely sensitive to Shakespeare, and his insights are enlightening. A hopeful ending provides uplift, but does not, unfortunately, compensate for shopworn characterization and the overdone Tennessee Williams atmosphere. For Findley, this is a curiously slapdash performance.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
One wonders why Findley wrote this book.,
By Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spadework: A Novel (Hardcover)
From a writer whose publicity bills him as "Canada's greatest living writer," this book is both a surprise and a disappointment. Telling the story of a group of participants in Ontario's Stratford Festival, the book includes many subplots, all dealing with some issue of love--love from the past, young love, new love, love of children, homosexual love, thwarted love, love of self, love of career--and the extent to which the characters are willing to sacrifice for it. While some of the dialogue, such as that in an early birthday party scene, pops and crackles, as one would expect in the writing of a playwright, other aspects of the book creak and groan, weighed down by irrelevant details and a shocking number of cliches. Ten pages into the book, Jane comments that she is the luckiest girl in the world. "I've got everything I wanted," she says. One is not surprised, then, when fate decides to teach her a lesson in the ensuing 400 pages. The personal conflicts which evolve are too shallow to allow for the illumination of great themes, and the characters are one-dimensional, prone to observations one has read many times in many other novels. Upon seeing the Bell telephone man, Jane decides, "He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. But his beauty was more than physical. There was something...indefinable." Her psychiatrist has a print of Paul Klee's "Scholar 1933" on the wall, "his inner eye, his daily reminder...that life was full of endless mystery and that nothing was known." An outdoor love scene takes place against a background with "not a single cloud. And yet...There was thunder." And it is difficult to take seriously a reference to "the voice of a man she barely knew, but a man she also knew she loved." For those who enjoy sentimental stories and can do not mind cliches, this novel provides a look at life in a theater company and a great many love stories, which end, literally, with "the sound of water flowing over the dam."
5.0 out of 5 stars
Canadian Goodness,
By Ez (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spadework (Hardcover)
Griffin Kincaid gets involved with another man, while his wife Jane becomes obsessed with the telephone repairman. Loved this book, especially the scenes with Milos Saworski. (A+)
4.0 out of 5 stars
Easy, readable novel from Findley,
By "cathst" (Toronto, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Spadework : A Novel (Paperback)
The Kincaid family lives a superficially contented, easy life revolving around the theatre in Stratford until one day their gardener slices their phone cable, some vital calls are missed, and their lives begin to unravel. A very readable, suspenseful novel, a bit different from what I'm used to from Findley. I'm a big Findley fan, but this is not my absolute favourite of his... and Findley himself called it his "slightest book," although I'm not sure I'd go that far. It still goes to say that this is a really great book with believable characters and a complicated plot with common but complex themes. It may even make you question your own character and what events it would take to make you break away from what you think is most important in your life. Note also that anyone who's ever been to Stratford, Ontario, will recognize a lot of landmarks and even people in this story!
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