Was it difficult to tread a middle ground between creating a sympathetic character in Ron and letting him off the hook?
My editor in New York asked me, “Do we have to like the guy?” and I said, “No, but he has to be real.” I couldn’t bear to have Rachel abducted by a monster. I wanted to make him someone who hadn’t yet fallen. I wanted him to have a moral dilemma. That’s more interesting to me. If a character has already fallen, there’s no dilemma.
“I wanted Ron to have a moral dilemma…If a character has already fallen, there’ no dilemma.”
What differences have you observed between the reactions ofmale reviewers and female reviewers?
Most of the reviews I’ve received from women have been great. They’ve said there is so much tension, and they were grateful that Ron is dimensional. A few male reviewers have said the same thing, but most men say, “This book has no tension because Ron’s a human being.” I think interest in young girls, a passing interest, a flash of interest, is so prevalent and so frightening to men that they want to hate Ron, they want him to be really bad, and they want me to take him out. I didn’t do that.
It’s fascinating to see how nine-year-old Rachel, the object of Ron’s obsession, deals with her captivity.
She doesn’t understand why she’s there, so she creates her own narrative to make sense of her situation. When you see footage of little kids in war-torn places, and they’re smiling and waving for the camera, you think, How can they be smiling? Their town has just been blown up, their parents maybe dead. But children are so remarkably resilient, and I think they invent narratives to bring sense to a senseless adult world.
You make much of Rachel’s beauty and how she accepts her effect on people.
“It’s Rachel’s reality to be beautiful; she knows that it gives her power.”
Rachel is a mixed child, Caucasian and black. She’s exactly like a stunningly beautiful girl I saw in a park in Toronto. She was playing Frisbee with her father, who was black. She had pale, mocha skin, chromium-yellow hair with tight little curls, blue eyes, black lashes…I felt the gratitude you feel when you see an exotic bird. People were staring at her, but she seemed completely indifferent, as I think at some point you would. There’s a line in the book where someone compliments Rachel, and she says, “Thank you,” and I have her mother think how she accepts compliments politely, but a little gravely, as another child might accept a gift she already has. It’s her reality to be beautiful; she knows that it gives her power.
In your novel, each of the characters experiences helplessness, including the abductor, but what sources of power come into play?
The power of beauty. The terrible power of too much desire. And how power shifts. In any normal relationship, the beloved holds power over the lover. Ron obviously holds the physical power. But the emotional power very quickly shifts to Rachel. She eventually senses the shift and exploits it.
What can fiction such as Helpless accomplish that other types of writing cannot?
Fiction can give order and meaning to chaos. It can impart a view of life that encourages readers to reflect upon their own views. It can be a moral guide in that way. Good fiction isn’t simply faked reality. Hemingway has something interesting to say about this. In an old Paris Review piece that I recently came across, he said, “From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing, truer than anything true and alive.”
“Good fiction isn’t simply faked reality.”
Selected edited excerpts are reprinted with the permission ofRamona Koval, from an interview broadcast on The Book Show, ABC Radio National, Australia (May 21,2007) and published in Brick literary journal (Winter 2007).
Read On
Works by Barbara Gowdy
Through the Green Valley (1988)
In eighteenth-century Ireland, the son of a peasant farmer struggles to find his place in the world.
Falling Angels (1989)
This black-humoured story features three sisters growing up during the 1950s in the shadow of their mother’s heartbreak.
We So Seldom Look on Love (1992)
Tender and empathetic, these short stories feature people whose interests, and sometimes their very anatomy, make them complete outsiders.
To receive updates on author events and new books by Barbara Gowdy, sign up today at www.authortracker.ca.
Mister Sandman (1995)
In this hilarious and disturbing novel, one family’s immoderate passions and potentially explosive secrets are exposed.
The White Bone (1998)
This engrossing fantasy plunges the reader into the world of African elephants as they fight to survive drought and slaughter.
The Romantic (2003)
When a mother disappears, her daughter develops a devotion to her neighbour’s precocious son.
Web Detective
www.prosecast.com
Listen to the HarperCollins Canada Prosecast interview with Barbara Gowdy. On the main page, scroll down to “Search this Site,” and key in “Gowdy”.
www.youtube.com
On the YouTube website, search for “Barbara Gowdy”. View “Barbara Gowdy Talks about Helpless,” an interview featuring Gowdy and senior editor of The Walrus, Marni Jackson.
www.torontolife.com/features/barbara-gowdy
Read Toronto Life’s interview with Barbara Gowdy.
www.eyeweekly.com/arts/features/article/804
Eye Weekly takes a look at the stage adaptation of The White Bone.
www.ourmissingchildren.gc.ca
This Government of Canada website provides a wealth of information, including a list of child-find organizations, a missingchildren database, an explanation of AMBER Alert and safety tips for parents.
www.weeklywire.com/ww/10-12-98/austin_arts_featurel.html
Weekly Wire’s article “The Man Who Loved Little Girls” (October 12,1998) provides background on author Lewis Carroll, whose obsession with little girls Barbara Gowdy has compared to that of Ron, the abductor in Helpless.
www.historicaltextarchive.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=769
For anyone interested in vintage vacuums, History Text Archive offers “Vacuum Cleaners Before Electricity—and a Little-Known Inventor,” which traces the history of vacuums, and includes a bibliography and list of websites with photos.
An Excerpt from The White Bone
It is the matriarchs who keep track of the days—how many since the last rainfall, how many until the black plums ripen, how many since a bull was in musth or a cow in oestrus, and so on. Their method is mysterious, even to them. Anyone can come up with the exact number eventually, by counting backwards or forwards day by day. For the matriarch, the calculation is immediate. It is not a skill she learns. She assumes the family’s leadership and several hours later if somebody mentions, for instance, the evening a certain calf died, she finds herself thinking, “Four years and fortyseven days ago.”
“It is the matriarchs who keep track of the days.”
Of all the gifts that aren’t Date Bed’s, this precise, instantaneous measuring of the passage of time is the one she used to envy the most. As a young calf she tried to train herself to count days at matriarchal speed and when she finally accepted that it couldn’t be done she devised a short-cut (“grouping,” she calls it) for arriving at a close approximation. Instead of tallying the days, grouping tallies the full moons, which occur every thirty days, give or take a day. Two full moons, or two groups of thirty days, add up to sixty days. Three groups are ninety days. You only have to do the addition once to know forever afterwards how many days or years are in five groups, or thirty-five, or in seventy-three and a half.
Every morning when she chisels another scratch into her left tusk she wonders if her life’s remaining days will add up to the three and a half groups that would bring her age to exactly t
hirteen years. She is not very hopeful. The wound above her right eye has scabbed over, but behind the scab is a buzzing sensation that is only slightly relieved by eating cycad bark. Coming to her feet she reels through a dizzy spell, and several times a day she falls into hallucinations—ravish ingly strange, and as sharply visible as if she were looking through Mud’s eyes, but disturbing. She is walking in an immense cavern where it is somehow as bright as midday, and on each side of her, in phenomenally straight rows, stacks of strange fruits—sweet-scented and vividly coloured (red, orange, yellow)—glide by; she is on a rise of land and, all around her, tiny white blossoms drift from a frigid sky and sting her skin and settle on the earth like sand.
“She prays, despite the fact that she has little faith in prayer and no comprehension of it.”
None of these complaints are necessarily deadly and they do not frighten her. What does is that her memory is leaking. Six mornings ago, a blue lizard scrambled past her face. She could not identify it, although she knew she had studied that breed and added it to her lizard inventory. Since then, half of her memories have been shadow memories: impeccable in parts, in other parts faded or gone altogether.
She prays, despite the fact that she has little faith in prayer and no comprehension of it. How can the circumstances of a preordained life be altered by begging? Her prayers, consequently, are modest. When she prays that the remnants of her family are safe, she is thinking especially of Mud and her mother but does not presume to single anybody out. For herself she asks that she suffer no more than she can bear and that if her fate is to survive she not thwart that fate through foolishness or inattentiveness. She may add that she hopes the leaking of her memory will spontaneously stop, as haemorrhaging sometimes does, or that she comes upon a family whose nurse cow knows a remedy. “I would love to see my own family again,” she throws in. Instead of pleading to find the white bone, she describes to herself, in prayerlike phrasing, various aspects of The Safe Place: “…for in that blessed realm are swamps, where grasses sweet and new…”
“She finds a sharp stone and chisels another scratch in her tusk. One scratch for every day since the slaughter.”
It is at dawn, just after she has come to her feet, that she prays. Such is her ambivalence that she can bring herself to petition the She only when she is reeling with dizziness and not quite herself and therefore the She may pardon her impertinence. When the dizziness stops she finds a sharp stone and chisels another scratch in her tusk. One scratch for every day since the slaughter. This is not yet a necessity, it is a precaution. She has no idea how quickly her memory is leaking, but she has met old cows who couldn’t tell whether it had been an hour or a year since they’d last spoken with her, and she must prepare herself for becoming that addled. She thinks of the scratches as a kind of net. The apprehension of time going by may fall from her body, but here it will be, caught on her tusk.
Acknowledgements
FOR THEIR COUNSEL and support I am grateful to Christopher Dewdney, Beth Kirkwood, Marni Jackson, Virginia de Vasconcelos, Jacqui Brady, Iris Tupholme, Sara Bershtel, Antje Kunstmann, Riva Hocherman, Richard Beswick, Christie Blatchford, and Police Constable Christopher Martin. I am particularly indebted to Superintendent Gary Ellis of the Toronto Police Service.
Praise
International Acclaim for Helpless
“With razor-sharp emotional acuity, stoic detachment and incisive prose, Gowdy, one of Canada’s boldest writers, looks beyond preconceptions in pursuit of underlying truths.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“Brilliant…Gowdy’s prose is, as usual, clean and precise. There is not a single word here that doesn’t further her story.”
—Edmonton Journal
“An assured, perceptive, deftly delivered story.”
—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
“Absorbing reading…[Gowdy’s] true feat is the sympathetic portrayal of Ron himself, a man who seems painfully unaware of his own dark impulses.”
—Booklist
“Gowdy consistently zeros in on strange minds, on propositions of difference in consciousness, and then resolves them through a kind of sympathetic intervention.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Through Gowdy’s fictional exploration we may exorcise our deepest fears.”
—The Independent
“Gowdy’s seventh novel, a nail-biting tale of suspense, spells extra work for manicurists everywhere. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal (Starred Review)
“Astonishing. We realize that it has been love, and nothing but love—Gowdy’s enduring subject—that has been driving this time bomb of a novel all along.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“Gowdy writes as if she’s on a sinking boat and needs to throw out all the dead weight.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“No one shades the darkness quite like Gowdy.”
—Eye Weekly
Also By Barbara Gowdy
The Romantic
The White Bone
Mister Sandman
We So Seldom Look on Love
Falling Angels
Through the Green Valley
Copyright
Helpless
© 2007 by Barbara Gowdy. P.S. section © 2008 by Barbara Gowdy.
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EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-1-443-40249-1
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Originally published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2007
This trade paperback edition: 2008
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“Yellow Bird,” lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Music by Norman Luboff.
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Gowdy, Barbara Helpless : a novel / Barbara Gowdy.
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PS8563.0883H44 2008 C813’.54 C2007-907028-0
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