The Mythmakers

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 9, 2008

Reviewed by Catherine Keenan

The Shadow Catcher

By Marianne Wiggins

Simon & Schuster, 323pp, $22.95

Illuminated by love and obsession, legends are not what they seem.

EDWARD S. CURTIS was an early American photographer whose greatest legacy is a mammoth catalogue of portraits of his country's native tribes. It became his obsession, taking him years, luring him to all corners of his land.

It sounds so noble: the white man who left the comforts of home to document Indian life, which he was certain would soon fade away forever. But if Marianne Wiggins's The Shadow Catcher shows us anything, it's that legends can be deceiving.

Wiggins is not as widely known as she should be. She's the author of nine novels, one of which, Evidence Of Things Unseen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and was nominated for a National Book Award. The Shadow Catcher is an austere, uncompromising work, yet because of that its occasional moments of beauty can still the heart.

Curtis's story, liberally re-imagined by Wiggins, forms only half the narrative. The other, set in modern-day Los Angeles, concerns a writer called Marianne Wiggins who is trying to sell a screenplay about Curtis. Her life is interrupted when she gets a phone call to say her father is gravely ill in hospital - a surprise, given he died many years earlier. But the writer in her can't resist a mystery and she heads out to Las Vegas to see who this man is.

While the Hollywood producer salivates over Curtis's story - "It's got the outdoors. It's got adventure. It's got the do-good element" - Wiggins takes us back to its flip-side. Every hero who lights out for the country leaves something behind and in Curtis's case it was his wife, Clara, and their four children.

Her description of how Clara falls in love with Edward is magnificent. Always icy and distant, lit up only by his single-minded obsessions, he is a man who exists mainly as myth, even to himself. Clara is clever, yet alone, and she yearns for the love that, until their dying day, was like an impenetrable halo around her parents. It is inevitable that she falls for dashing Edward. The scene that brings them together is as psychologically acute as it is moving.

Which makes it all the more heartbreaking when Edward's absences become not just emotional, but physical. First it's days, then weeks, then long months that he takes off on his project, often leaving Clara with nothing to support the family. She tries so hard to keep them together: to keep them fed and clothed and - just as importantly - to keep alive the myth of Edward the loving father.

This is what the book circles, in myriad ways and with unforgiving intelligence and insight. Fathers become absent for all sorts of reasons but these are nearly always unknowable, at least in their entirety, to those who care the most. And so children make up their own reasons, often at a terrible cost to the mother. This is what Curtis's children did (at least in Wiggins's version); it's also what Marianne Wiggins, the author in the story, does. When this myth crashes up against the reality, as happens to this Marianne later, it's even money which will win.

The narrative probes many other issues: photography, memory, the fate of Native Americans. It's very much a book of ideas, spiky and singular, and a highly original piece of work. Wiggins is not afraid to take the reader into small tangential essays on, say, crime shows after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, or long disquisitions on traffic routes in LA. She trusts her mesmerising and precise narrative voice and her meticulous structure to keep us with her.

The kernel of this book is as cold and clear as Curtis himself and just as hard to love. But one can admire it endlessly. It is sure to prompt thoughts for a long time after you've put it down.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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