Clairvoyance or Memory Loss?

AboutBooks, Winter 2011

A REVIEW OF
The Diviner’s Tale
By Bradford Morrow

HoughtonMiffin Hacourt
January 2011, 320 pages, $26 hardcover, $14.04 Kindle eBook Edition

Bradford Morrow’s book, The Diviner’s Tale, is deceptively humble. Murrow himself, professor of literature at Bard College and founder of the literary magazine Conjunctions, is also, at first, unassuming. In his book reading at Oblong Bookstore late this winter, Morrow recounted his research for this book as an amusing, almost obsessive, journey into the world of the divine by which he meant, simply, the practice of dowsing.

On its surface, this book is a first person account of the perils of Cassandra Banks from a family of dowsers by trade, whose powers of earthly discernment suggests gifts of a more preternatural (divine) origin. Set along the banks of the Hudson River, the book opens as Cassandra recounts a vision while on a dowsing expedition in the middle of the woods, seen only by her, of a girl “hanged with a rope about her neck, not swaying in any breeze, but as dead still as a plumb stone.” The book’s meandering journey leads us in and out of these woods and to the coast of Maine and back, from the dark forests of Cassandra’s haunting childhood to July 4th barbecues redolent of fragrant summer evenings. Whether Cassandra’s fore-vision suggests genuine clairvoyance or crazy eccentricity becomes a central narrative question, and the remainder of the story is a combination of criminal investigation, fairy tale and psychological exploration.

But like the act of dowsing, the substance to this book lies underneath its tale. Set against an aqueous backdrop, investigating the quirky world of divination, Morrow’s book is about nothing less ambitious than the unpredictable, paradoxical ways we come to know ourselves and our world. Like her mythological namesake, Cassandra is a tragic figure with visions greater than those believed of her. But it is perhaps the price of her foresight, or insight, that she is also clueless as a giddy schoolgirl about a matter as significant as the true character of her children’s father.

And Cassandra’s father, the book’s Prospero, bearing a name no less evocative than Gabriel Neptune, is the book’s true visionary despite, or perhaps because of, his affiliation with Alzheimer’s. The personification of wisdom, Cassandra’s father, “Nep,” informs Cassandra that he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and answers his stricken and saddened daughter that he will tell her what becomes of memory and whether the good is erased along with the bad if he has any way of getting back to her on the topic one he’s “arrived there.”

Although Cassandra’s question to her father is never resolved, The Diviner’s Tale gives us a language for thinking about what we see and what is really there, how we can come to inhabit and to know ourselves and what in life is worth remembering. While the book’s surface, its plot, feels at times like an afterthought, the material underneath this story is fecund enough to make the business of telling it, and the business of reading it, completely worthwhile.

- Rachel Cavell