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White Apples
by Jonathan Carroll
(Tor Books. Hardcover, 304 pages, 1 September 2002; ISBN: 0765303884.
Paperback, 304 pages, 1 July 2003; ISBN: 0765304015.)
Vincent Ettrich comes back from the dead. Not only  does
he not remember dying, but no-one else remembers that he died -- except
for Coco, a mysterious woman who owns a lingerie shop, and Isabelle,
the on-and-off love of his life. Meanwhile, the unborn son of Vincent
and Isabelle is fighting against Chaos for the fate of the universe.
In the end, Vincent and Isabelle love each other, so everything turns
out alright.
I admit that I'm being facetious. But then again it's hard to admire
Jonathan Carroll's twelfth novel, White Apples.
All of Carroll's previous books are intensely beautiful, subtly menacing,
and bizarrely mysterious. White Apples, in contrast, is filled
with clumsy exposition, preposterous explanations, and cloying sentimentality.
Typically, Carroll creates scenarios where inexplicable -- or at least
unexplained -- supernatural events interfere in such a way into his
characters' lives as to explore with insight and profundity the web
of relationships and experiences that shapes their identity. In recent
books -- The Wooden Sea and The Marriage of Sticks, for
example -- he started to offer some explanations for his supernatural
shenanigans, but left enough mystery to stimulate readers' imaginations.
And he never sacrificed the integrity of the story he was telling.
In White Apples, the explanations are so heavy-handed that the
book acquires an off-putting preachy tone. White Apples is somewhat
reminiscent of such New Age feel-good pseudofictions as Jonathan
Livingston Seagull and The Celestine Prophecy. The forced,
gimmicky story seems like a transparent veil behind which lies an author
too earnestly trying to reveal to his readers whatever nonsense he believes
are the secrets of the universe.
As fiction, White Apples is a dismal failure.
Originally published in The Montreal Gazette,
Saturday, 28 December 2002.
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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