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Product Description
Amazon.ca
It doesn't take long to discover the literary classic at the heart of Timothy Findley's dystopian novel Headhunter. Lilah Kemp, schizophrenic and one of a triumvirate of main characters, announces in the opening scene that she may have released the character of Kurtz from the pages of Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness. Add to this fantastic formula a couple of psychiatrists named Charles Marlow and Rupert Kurtz and a huge cast of secondary players set in a futuristic pollution- and plague-ravaged Toronto, and you are left with a bizarre reinterpretation of not just one of the classics of literature, but the age-old tale of power and corruption itself. Conrad did not invent this story, Findley shrewdly points out; he just gave it a name: Kurtz.
This is vintage Findley, who similarly re-imagined the Old Testament story of Noah and the Flood in Not Wanted on the Voyage. Headhunter is another example of Findley's ability to blend morality and entertainment. Findley's willingness to blend literature and pulp is Headhunter's greatest asset. You can get lost in the rollicking good fun of the sci-fi dystopia or you can dredge its depths for literary clues. Or you can do both. Either way, Headhunter lives up to both its best-seller and literary status. --Jonathan Dewar
From Publishers Weekly
Overlong and overwrought, yet compelling and powerful, Findley's ambitious chronicle of a society gone amok with greed, depravity and moral emptiness is sometimes maddeningly diffuse but always intriguing. The setting is a slightly futuristic Toronto, a city in the grip of an epidemic called sturnusemia, purportedly carried by starlings, who are being exterminated by death squads using a lethal spray. AIDS has run rampant; art, music and literature have become decadent. In this surreal landscape, Lilah Kemp, a former librarian suffering from schizophrenia, has "inadvertently set Kurtz free from page 92 of Heart of Darkness. " Rupert Kurtz, the latter-day incarnation of Conrad's epitome of evil, runs the city's leading psychiatric hospital. Brilliant but demented, Kurtz is secretly conducting drug experiments at his clinic, and he is also a member of the Club of Men, pornographers who do unspeakable things to children. Since his clients and co-conspirators all come from the wealthy and powerful segment of Toronto society (which Findley portrays with acidulous satire), Kurtz seems to be indestructible. But then, as he must, Marlow arrives: psychiatrist Charlie Marlow comes to the institute and finally vanquishes Kurtz once again. An hallucinatory, menacing tone permeates this complex tale. Some passages are brilliant, glittering with insights, while others bear the marks of haste and melodramatic excess. There are a stupefying number of characters and subplots. On the other hand, Findley ( Famous Last Words ) creates witty literary allusions: one character is a contemporary Emma Bovary; another is named Jay Gatz. His subtext is the power of literature: "We write each other's lives--by means of fictions . . . This way we point the way to darkness--saying: come with me into the light." Despite its many faults, the novel (a bestseller in Canada) is empowered by anger; it is a stirring indictment of the amorality that Findley sees as the plague that will usher out the 20th century.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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