The Mysteries
by Lisa Tuttle
(Bantam, $21.00, 321 pages, hardcover; published in March 2005.)
 In
her novel The Mysteries, Lisa Tuttle mines the same folkloric
vein as did Susanna Clarke for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell:
the faerie legends of Great Britain. As in Clarke's novel, gone are
the Tolkienesque, Arthurian, and Disneyesque trappings of generic fantasy.
Tuttle delves into those terrifying primal regions where the mysteries
of the world infect the human imagination.
Ian Kennedy, Tuttle's protagonist, is a US expatriate living in London.
When Ian was nine, his father disappeared suddenly. Since then, he has
been obsessed with unexplained vanishings, an interest that eventually
led to a career as a private investigator specializing in missing persons.
Years ago, Ian's first case brought him to the UK, where he settled.
Now, he embarks on a new case that possesses disquieting echoes of that
first case -- both cases leading, impossibly, to the realms of myth
and faerie.
Tuttle's novel is drenched in the mysteries of the vanished, both
historical and personal. Ian's life is perforated by succession of disappearances;
his mind swims in a sea of loss and mystery, and the text reflects his
state of mind, gently pushing readers along the current of his thoughts,
emotions, and changes.
There are other mysteries to which the title subtly alludes. Tuttle
presents "others" as ultimately unknowable. No matter how deeply Ian
investigates, he will never truly understand anyone else. This deep
isolation is made perhaps even more emphasized when the novel shows
the perhaps unbridgeable gap between genders.
Many stories come together to compose the whole of The Mysteries,
and each of them is a mystery in its own right. Together, they create
a rich and evocative portrait of the impossible yet essential quest
to understand the other lives that confer meaning to our own existence.
Originally published, in slightly different form, in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 18 June 2005.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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