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In LAKE OF SORROWS, the follow-up to Minneapolis-based writer Erin Hart's debut novel HAUNTED GROUND, American pathologist Nora Gavin continues to mourn her murdered sister, whose guilty husband was never convicted of the crime. This conflict isn't resolved -- leaving Hart the opportunity to resurrect it in another book -- but Gavin faces two new predicaments. Firstly, there's her lover, the Irish archaeologist Cormac Maguire, with whom she is sharing a house lent by his mentor's widow. The back cover advertisement claims that Nora and Cormac are "caught up in a tumultuous love affair," but this may be a bit of an idealised exaggeration. No longer attracted to Cormac, as he conspicuously recognises, Nora resorts to hiding in the bathroom from his advances. When she has these episodes, he is usually able to drag her back to bed, enabling Hart to escape from the gruesome details of archaeology and pathology with an infusion of Mills and Boon commonplaces. "As she rose dripping from the water he wrapped her in a white towel, then carried her in his arms the short distance to the bedroom," Hart narrates. "And this time nothing shattered; there was only triumphal yielding, sweet blending." Nora's partner isn't the only prehistoric man in her life. She and Cormac have come to the remote village of Loughnabrone ('Lake of Sorrows') to examine the body of an ancient man that has been found in a peat bog already famous for yielding up an invaluable stash of artifacts from pre-Christian civilisation. On Nora's first day in the bog, local workers discover a second corpse, of a man who clearly lived and died in the 20th century. When the police begin a murder investigation, secrets are dredged out of the muck and a serial murderer starts killing off the archaeological team. The secondary characters are thinly drawn. One is a vengeful femme fatale, a career archaeologist and incest survivor whose hatred of patriarchy works itself out in acts of sadism that contrast starkly with nice Nora's submissiveness. Another is a detective grieving, usually in terms taken from pop psychology, for his wife, who committed suicide after struggling with mental illness. Hart does better with one of the bog men, an individual we meet in person in the book's prologue. It must be admitted that the prologue could benefit from some editing for vagueness and cliché. Examples include "[h]e would never see them again, for he had entered a place from which there was no return", and "he abandoned all resistance and finally yielded to the bog's chill embrace." (His occupation, we are told, is tilling "virgin soil with his plow.") Hart's less-than-subtle personification of the bog as femme fatale, "whose deceitful purpose, he knew, was to draw him into its familiar, bosomy grasp and keep him here forever," sounds comic rather than horrific. Nevertheless, the prologue contains some haunting, lyrical piece prose poetry. Hart cleverly keeps it from divulging the era in which it takes place, though there are hints of the pre-industrial: "He gasped for air, the feeling the leather cord encircling his throat, all at once aware of a strange, spreading warmth upon his chest -- blood, his own blood, sticky and metallic." This shows promise, which, in Hart's next book, she may well fulfil.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, November 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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