FICTION: Belief and duplicity become almost interchangeable in US novelist, Howard Norman's latest excursion into the strange. Offbeat, peculiar and downright odd is his natural medium. Set in Canada in the 1920s, The Haunting of L. is less concerned with ghosts than the business of manufacturing the spiritual for an eccentric customer prepared to pay any price for ghoulish material.
The L. of the title is photographer Vienna Linn, an "intelligent intellectual" and deeply sinister character possessed of unnervingly good manners and an amoral approach to photography and just about everything else as well.
Well before the opening of the novel, Linn has been busy establishing a reputation based on producing studio-like photographs. But he does other work; commissioned portraits of staged disasters for which there is a buyer, providing the victims are fatally injured - no happy endings please. "Mr Heur, hires men to cause catastrophes" and then buys the photographs.
Linn has a consort, though not quite a business partner. The beautiful Kala Murie who lectures on the work of a 19th-century English specialist on the subject of spirit pictures, in which the images of the dead materialise in photographs of the living.
Yet again Norman, one of the most consistently interesting - and underrated - of writers, calls upon a deadpan, almost passive narrator as he did in his second novel, The Bird Artist (1994), and also in his third, The Museum Guard (1998).
In The Haunting of L, Peter Duvett having accepted a job offer as a photographer's assistant, travels to Churchill, Manitoba, far from his adopted home town of Halifax. His new employer is somewhat repellent but Linn's bride, Kala, more than makes up for this. Within moments of meeting her, Peter is besotted and quickly has his most carnal notions satisfied.
The action develops around the bizarre trio. Norman has a flair for matching the almost normal to the patently crazy. His quasi-surreal fiction is atmospheric and his art is that of very deliberately drawing the reader into a strange but apparently self-contained society. Linn, aware of the union forming between his wife and his assistant, tolerates everything as long as Duvett acknowledges his employer's power. Their days are acted out between the dining room, the dark-room and the bedroom.
While Linn plots his death-picture projects and is preoccupied with the dangers associated with not satisfying his rich client who wants photographs of death, Kala is preparing lectures. Her performances are based on the life and work of her heroine, Georgiana Houghton.
Meanwhile, the narrator watches everything and understands progressively more. The reader follows closely behind and much of the comedy evolves less from the situation than from the tension bubbling between the various characters. This friction is expressed through the snappy exchanges, that are often polite, yet no less vicious for all that.
Aside from proving as committed to their adultery as is his lover, Kala - no cowardly act considering the obvious menace Linn represents - Peter does not do much except think, walk, make love, eat and devise succinct captions for not only Linn's photographs but for most of the images that pass before his consciousness. That he has a dark past, or has at least suffered in the past, is made clear, as are his poetic tendencies.
Unlike the narrator of The Bird Artist, who begins his story, "My name is Fabian Vas. I live in Witless Bay, Newfoundland. You would not have heard of me. Obscurity is not necessarily failure, though: I am a bird artist, and have more or less made a living at it. Yet I murdered the lighthouse keeper, Botho August, and that is an equal part of how I think of myself", Peter does not seem to see himself in any context, aside from that of his new role as Kala's tireless lover, and of course, as a writer of picture captions.
As love stories go, and love story it is, it cannot be considered conventional. The lovers, Kala and Peter, are never as fascinating as the cast of crazies, including Mrs Sorrel the landlady, whom Norman skilfully steers through the story that unfolds in Churchill before moving back to where Peter actually begins it, in Halifax. It is partly the world of the boarding house, particularly that dining room which quickly becomes a stage, and Peter's bedroom which is more like a railway station in which privacy is an impossibility - as Kala exclaims "My God, why even have a door?"
Initially, the narrative appears set to be a battle of will between two men competing for the same woman, although Linn is not that interested in the loss of his wife's allegiance. Peter's own story and the tragic death of his mother, herself betrayed, begins to explain why he is as he is. However, a further energy enters with the arrival of the unhappy trio - all secrets exploded - in Halifax.
On moving into Mrs Sorrel's boarding house, that good woman and even more emphatically, her disturbing son Freddy, begin to take over. The sullen, nasty Freddy helps his mother to serve the guests. He is a masterpiece of characterisation from a writer who is very good at this. Freddy wants to be a criminal and confesses to any and all of the local crimes. He decides he needs his photograph taken to facilitate any future wanted poster he might adorn. Vienna asks: "All right, Freddy, how about a smile?" The young man has other ideas. "You ask me that again, I'll poison your food. Except I'll wait. I'll bide my time. You ask me to smile, you might as well not ever eat in this room again."
Linn is another impressive creation and Norman has provided him with a laconic, formal tone that brilliantly serves the prevailing absurdist comedy of this narrative of death, untruths, power shifts and low temperatures. "Well, fine then, Mrs Sorrel, you do have an interesting son in Freddy. But don't you agree, Mrs Sorrel, sometimes a person hears too much to take in all at once? Don't you think that's possible?" And thus he crushes the poor old lady's attempts to share her woes about her wayward child.
With the appearance of Mr Harp, a British Museum expert, who also moonlights for the crazed collector Mr Heur, the narrative takes yet another black turn. And Norman sustains this, ensuring that his narrator remains as horrified and as fascinated as the rest of us.
Calmly, quietly bizarre, this is a very funny book. And true to Norman's previous work, it is also elegant, at times beautiful and always original.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Haunting of L. By Howard Norman. Picador, 326pp, £15.99
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