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Review If the saying ‘never judge a book by its cover’ rang true, it never did more loudly than with this novel. Coming from the small press, Kepler, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it has a decidedly amateurish photo-montage cover, despite being handsomely bound in hard-back. Don’t let that put you off! It is very professional and very satisfying read from the Boston based creative writing and English literature lecturer Kaplan-Maxfield. The book is obviously a labour of love and reveals his deep interest in the Celtic Druidic Tradition. Its surprising transposition to the New England coastal stone-cutting town of Gloucester sounds unlikely, but the novel is full of surprises. That a forty year old cynical manhunting ex-lawyer of Finnish-Irish descent, Nikki Helmik, could be descended from a female line of druids seems far-fetched on the face of it, but I have an American friend who claims just that, and the author carries it off convincingly through creating an air of verisimilitude via a gritty modern setting – a very post 9-11 America sundered by politics and conflict. From the opening line: ‘The soul of Gloucester is split as the souls of its sons and daughters are split…’ the theme of division is explored, chiefly through the legacy and line of Anne Cleves, Nikki’s druidic ancestor who sailed to America bearing her pagan ways, in stark contrast to the Puritan founding fathers: and so from the its genesis, the creation of a New World, Kaplan-Maxfield suggests a schism hard-wired into the American soul. The author bravely sets about if not healing, at least probing this deep old wound. Nikki Helmik is emblematic of a land disconnected from its past, and consequently making the same mistakes again and again. Nikki’s quest is to learn from this past, to accept her true nature and to acquiesce to ‘negative capability’, Keats’ notion of an ability to dwell in mystery, the Romantic riposte to Newton’s God of Reason. Her journey to self-actualisation is a painful one, coloured by a distinctly New England brand of American Gothic, invoking the ghosts of Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, even Miller’s The Crucible, with its Salem Witch Trails a metaphor of contemporary persecution. Perhaps the latter’s McCarthyism is meant to be allude to the new kind of paranoia prevalent in a America of Homeland Security, biometric firewalls at airports, the Patriot Act and heightened xenophobia. Yet this story is a very localised one, though never parochial, as it focuses in on the minutiae of one small coastal town as a microcosm for the sundered world, evoking along the way love of detail and texture of the small town life in The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx and the dreamtown of Thomas’ Under Milk Wood. Indeed, at times, the prose takes on a distinctly poetic quality, though never verging into the purple. The landscapes, townscapes and seascapes are particularly well evoked, creating a strong sense of place. The streets and bars of Gloucester, and the groves and caves of Dogtown are vividly rendered. Likewise, the characters are equally as quirky and memorable, although some do seem larger than life, as Nikki ventures further down the ‘rabbit hole’. Joe, an insane savant ex-Harvard professor seems at first a complete tone malfunction; played as something between T.H. White’s Merlyn, and Tolkien’s Tom Bombadil (and Robin William’s traumatised scholar from Gilliam’s The Fisher King). However, it seems to fit into the narrative as it transforms into a quest into the Celtic past. The most solid of characters seems to be Clarissa, an ex-lover of Ernest, Nikki’s father fixation, a genuine mountain woman, straight from the Thoreau school of common sense and earthy wisdom, as well as a fiery feminist Diana, a woman who literally runs with the wolves. The sequence where she takes Nikki through a much needed rites of passage is one of the strongest in the book. The catharsis she goes through as the ghost of her ex-lovers is powerful, and emotionally honest. And depicted from a woman’s point of view, convincingly realised. Kaplan-Maxfield excels at depicting the battleground between the sexes. But there is real insight and foulweather love to be found at the heart of the bitterness he describes both genders feeling and inflicting. There is much life wisdom gone into the book, something that only a writer with substantial life experience could achieve. This is not a book born of spring, but of autumn, and within it are contained the golden fruits of summer. Kaplan-Maxfield depicts the Celtic past and tumultuous transition to the New World as vividly as the Otherworld. In fact, this central section of the book: consisting of a letter from Nikki’s mother relating her denied pagan heritage, and then the translated journal of Anne Cleve’s outshines the contemporary setting, which becomes little more than a framing narrative, albeit a convincing one. At the heart of this novel seems to be an old-fashioned tale of heroes, heroines, villains, myth and magic that the author perhaps truly wanted to tell, but living in cynical, secular, post-Millennium times, he has had to frame it all within an ‘every day’ setting. Yet this provides the Normal World, that the Everywoman figure of Nikki leaves, to go on her quest for knowledge, for true identity, in the Special World of the past, the Oz to Gloucester’s Kansas. And, just as in The Wizard of Oz, the characters she meets seem larger than life versions of the people who populate her everyday life. She returns with a greater awareness of who she is and where she belongs – finding her heart at long last in her own home. Her experiences give her a greater awareness and appreciation of her surroundings, of her relationships. She has found her family, her community and her place in it. She has claimed her past, or rather, it has claimed her. In hunting for, discovering and translating the memoirs, Nikki herself is ‘translated’. She taps into and becomes part of her ancestral story, and in doing so, discovers the magic of language and the magic within herself. Kaplan-Maxfield epitomises this process through the advice of Nikki’s mother, read in a letter after her death: ‘By writing you write a story, becoming a character in that story. It alters you fundamentally, changing your nature – and this just may be the magic that we practice.’ Failings are perhaps inevitable in a book of this size, but they do not diminish Kaplan-Maxfield’s incredible achievement. Nevertheless, there are flaws, like the soul of Gloucester itself. Fault-lines that run through the book include the constant garbling of Druidry and Witchcraft – the two are often confused, the former being depicted as the latter, although the author wisely states: ‘the roots of Druid knowledge and this circle [wind] underground to the same Oak’. However, druids generally are supposed to meet in the ‘eye of the sun,’ not at night; wear white, not black; perform public ceremonies, not spells; hold gorseddau, not sabbats; and worship the sun, not the moon. The ‘druids’ in the book do all of these things. Of course, in the modern reinvention of druidry all of these things are permissible and are probably likely to happen, yet the point of the druidic circle in the book is that it is a supposed authentic continuation of an original tradition. Considering this tradition was all but lost in Ireland and British Isles and cannot claim an unbroken lineage in its native land, it seems highly unlikely to have survived the crossing to America, even though some folk traditions did migrate and were preserved (i.e. Scottish Border Ballads in the Appalachians). Shape-changing, use of Ogham and the Three Illuminations does occur, as well as Bardic and Vatic practises, which goes some way to redeeming the novel’s claim to be druidic, yet his secretive witch-druids are not the kind you would see performing grand public ceremonies at Avebury or Stonehenge, or MCing Eisteddfodau! The titles, both the chapters and the main one, are wooden and do not do the contents justice: they seem a little too prosaic, considering the magical subject and flashes of true poetry within. The book’s title could have been shortened to ‘Shape Shifter’ for instance, without losing anything. In fact it would make it sound less like an Anne Rice novel, which in runs the risk of emulating, especially The Witching Hour, as a multi-generational saga of women and magic crossing from Old to New World, and this world to the Other. The chapters are overlong and the pace slackens considerably at times. There is little narrative traction in the framing narrative, while as the Celtic flashback is gripping and thrilling. Only the quest to decode the journal gets the pulses racing, in a surprising way: perhaps there is a touch of the Dan Brown code-breaking here, yet in a more literary vein. The main love interest seems almost redundant, surprising considering how long is taken to set it up. The courtship between Philip and Nikki is protracted and mature in its depiction. However, Philip gets removed from the main narrative with an over-contrived cliff-hanger, and spends the rest of the book in a coma of uncertainty. We do not find out if he recovers and if they get back together again: the book has an open ending, which although indicative of Nikki’s new found ‘negative capability’, is a little unsatisfying. The denouement with the ‘villain of the piece’, Rose, the femme fatale, is almost arbitrary and embarrassing – like an uninvited guest turning up at a party. After all that has transpired, the Rose-Nikki feud has become an annoying subplot. The McGuffin of the Secret of Eternal Beauty fades away, leaving the reader wondering what was the point? Another ‘tone malfunction’ is the random appearance of Little People, who seem ludicrous when the rest of the otherworld denizens are depicted fully-sized and more seriously. And the ghosts that pop up now and again just seem like ‘walk on parts’, with no real chill factor. Nevertheless, this novel contains deep wisdom from a genuine tradition – enough to act as a primer for anyone interested in the Druidic Tradition – and it deserves to be acknowledged as an incredible achievement. If there had to be one great Celtic American Novel, I think this would have to be it. Kaplan-Maxfield has built a beautiful bridge between two worlds and two cultures, and any attempt at bridge-building on this fragmented planet has got to be admired. He should be proud of his effort, and if you take the effort the read this mighty tome, you will be rewarded with more than fairy gold. Kevan Manwaring January 2006 Paperback Buy this book from amazon.co.uk
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