Constant Reader (Grown-Up) Book Of The Month May 2024: Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
Words Can Not Describe Its Mystery — And Yet That’s Exactly What They Do
I’ve always had some of a mixed approach when it comes to novels that try to break the typical framing device of books. When it comes to literary fiction I’ve never been able to get it. James Joyce and James Gaddis are indecipherable; I’ve never been able to make head nor tail of David Foster Wallace and I’m not much better suited for the kind of work I’ve gotten from Salmon Rushdie or Umberto Eco.
I’ve had somewhat better luck when genre fiction tries to break those same rules though its been swing or miss. I could tolerate Harlan Ellison’s attempts mainly because they were short fiction; Stephen King could do it well except when he chose to write himself into the story and I’ve always found Jasper Fforde and Chuck Palahniuk repulsive. Horror has a better habit of doing this well than other genres; I’ve already written on how gifted Grady Hendrix was with Final Girl Support Group and many of his other novels follow this same approach. That said this is always a delicate balance to strike.
I remember when I was still in college first reading and then buying Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, which was one of the most unsettlingly framed dual narratives I’ve ever read. It was a riveting book to follow from start to finish but I ended up leaving it strangely unsatisfied as to what I had actually read. I’m told there was more to the story than that but I had little urge to follow it, nor have I particularly wanted to read any of Danielewski’s books ever since. I grant him credit for his ability to completely rewrite how narratives unfold but I wonder if the heroes are his typesetters rather than his prose.
Catriona Ward’s Looking Glass Sound has many aspects of this in its narrative from the start and the deeper you go into it the harder it is for the reader to wonder what they are reading and who’s telling the story. There’s a similar play on it when it comes to the typesetting: the font keeps changing, we keep switching from various unpublished memoirs, narratives from characters whose identities were not sure of, and random sets of words that infiltrate the novel a page at a time. The story keeps shifting from time and place and we’re never sure how many points of view there are or what they have to do with the story. And forty pages before the book ends we seem to know what we’ve been reading all this time and then the narrative shifts yet again under our feet.
All of these are the kind of narrative tricks that I can appreciate in a movie by Christopher Nolan or David Lynch but frequently leave me cold when I encounter them on the page. Yet that didn’t not happen once in Looking Glass Sound the most recent and by all accounts radical horror novel that Ward has written. I’ve read books like it before but this is one of the few I actually enjoyed from beginning to end.
The first eighty or so pages of Looking Glass Sound are told from an unpublished memoir by a man named Wilder Harlow that’s written in June of 1989. Wilder is visiting a small summer resort and he tells us he plans to fall in love for the first time. He has spent his childhood being bullied and he wants to make friends.
Early in the story he ends up meeting Harper and Nat Pelletier. Much of what we learn about Harper comes second hand from Nat, who claims that she is rich, that she’s been kicked out of multiple boarding schools and that she’s very secretive. Harper is always volatile, refuses to make friends easily, and is not charmed so much by Wilder as is willing to go along with what he wants.
The three get together throughout the summer and the games they play are childish — and very bizarre. A game of spin-the-bottle ends with them kissing rocks and sand. Harper and Nat take Wilder out to a secluded cove and as a game nearly drown him. Harper tells Wilder that she is a witch and starts games where they have ‘forfeits’.
If their behavior is creepy, its downright chilling underneath. Nat supposedly goes into houses late at night and takes pictures of sleeping children. There’s someone known as The Dagger Man’ who seems to be an urban legend but Nat and Harper believes he’s real. Near the end of the summer, Harper makes them take a vow and uses hemlock as part of it.
Wilder should know better but its clear these are the first and only two friends he’s had to this point. He is struggling with his sexuality and can’t decide which one of them he’s more attracted to. When he leaves for the summer, he can’t wait to come back.
But when he does come back the next year the mood has changed between Nat and Harper dramatically and it affects Wilder just as much. Nat seems to have moved on to a local girl and he acts coldly towards Wilder. Harper hasn’t changed at all initially but she keeps finding excuses to get away from him. In the middle of the summer, things get creepier when a mysterious photo appears in Wilder’s room. They think it is the work of the Dagger Man.
Later that week Wilder insists that the three of them go on a trip to that same cove, one of the forfeits he asked for at the start of the summer. While on the trip Nat slips and stabs himself with one of the dagger, an injury that is so severe that he has to be hospitalized and eventually his hand is amputated. When they take Nat to the hospital, someone recognizes the knife — and then they learn that there is a far more horrid secret. Someone in town has been killing women for a very long time and the police now realize it is Nat’s father.
As events unfold Wilder realizes that Nat has his own secrets and that Harper has been covering for it. When Wilder tries to reveal the truth something happens and by the end of the summer Nat is dead.
The novels then shifts forward another year under the heading ‘Wilder and Sky’. It tells how Wilder meets a young man named Sky in college. By now the world knows about everything that happened two years ago and Wilder’s role in it. Wilder is still obsessed with it and is dealing with his own PTSD and obsession with what happened. He suffers a panic attack in his first week and Sky is standing over it when it ends. Sky wants to be his roommate and events seems to unfold so that Sky ends up there.
By this point Wilder’s mother has been institutionalized and his father, who left them for another woman that summer, is barely on speaking terms with his own son. Wilder has decided that he needs to be alone and has no use for this rich boy. Sky, like Wilder, wants to be a writer and he has an obsession with true crime. Eventually Wilder tells his secrets to Sky and Sky convinces him that the best thing for him is closure.
So on Christmas Day, Wilder and Sky drive up to the prison to have a meeting with Alton. The meeting, as you might expect, doesn’t go well: not only because Alton is blaming his son for the murders but because it turns out the letter that allowed him to take this meeting was in fact a forgery by Skye claiming to be Wilder — saying that he too has the urges to kill. Wilder finds out about that that same night and Sky manages to talk him out of it. Wilder, whose been fighting his attraction to Sky the last few months agrees, and the two spend the night together. When they drive to school the next day, Sky abandons Wilder.
The actual betrayal comes the next day when Wilder finds that all of his notes have been taken on the case. He learns the truth about Sky from his father and he learns that Sky has wanted to write a book about the events in Wilder’s life and has spent the last several months conning him. Wilder tries to write his own book but suffers a case of writer’s block.
The following September Wilder finds a letter from Sky and a draft of Sky’s novel. It is called The Sound and The Dagger. Wilder is infuriated because he has taken the kind of story that Wilder wanted to write and turned it into horror and schlock fiction. He’s written it as a roman a clef so that its clear to Wilder who the characters are but Wilder has told it from the perspective of the hero Skandar. Wilder is so enraged by what he has read and the final pages of his narrative are: “I understand, cool and clear, what I have to do. I’m going to find Sky. I’m going back to Whistler Bay.”
Having told you the entire first half of the novel, I’ve essentially told you nothing and I have no intention of revealing any more. Throughout the chapters there are other details we can’t make sense of: there’s a character named Pearl who keeps having interludes and there are typed remarks that follow a word game we will be introduced later in the novel but doesn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the story. We do go back to Whistler Bay and keep going back to it. We think we’re reading a mystery, then a ghost story, then a horror story and by the time we’re almost through not even Wilder is sure he can trust anything he sees anymore.
We also learn truths about the real Sky throughout the novel and that seems to give us perspective on what’s happening but in the bizarre sense that children think of things. Even when we get to the end of the story, we learn that there are layers we still may not be able to unfold.
I’ve read and enjoyed novels where the narrator is unreliable but Looking Glass Sound is brilliant not just because the narrator is unreliable but because we’re not even sure who the narrator is or who the heroes and villains are. Wilder learns from an early age that he can’t trust anyone or even his own memories, which is a good source for the novel that unfolds. There are clearly bigger stories unfolding that none of the characters are ever fully aware of and many people end up dead before they learn the truth.
And its worth noting that even by the end of the book we can’t even be sure that any part of the story we’ve been told is real. The two characters left standing at the end of the novel when the (climax? Denouement?) plays out have proven that they are completely unreliable storytellers: one has been known for lying ever since we met them and the other is clearly delusional and definitely a murderer. It’s possible that what Wilder and Sky have believed their whole lives — that Alton was the murderer that stalked the town — may never have been true in the first place. I have a suspect in mind for who might have completed the killings but I don’t know if I trust it to be the truth.
At the end of the novel one of the characters is told that they are a ‘monstrous person, but books are cages for monsters.” In a sense they are right: both Wilder and Sky took the story of what happened at Whistler Bay and turned it into their own story and one became enormously successful as a result. But that same character also tells that person: “the story has been about me, the things I went through.” And in that you see who the villain of the piece truly is. They acknowledge they might very well have gone mad, but their actions are that of someone so desperate that they have devoted their entire lives for something that may be a feverish measure of insanity. They claim to have done it out of love, but it’s a selfish love and, if we believe what we see, there’s something truly sick and twisted about this obsession keeping in with the character since the moment we met them.
I think that in a sense, Looking Glass Sound is the literary equivalent of the films of Christopher Nolan. By the time you finish reading it, you’ll be trying to unspool every detail of it, the same way we’ve been trying to make sense of Memento twenty years ago, Inception ten years afterwards and Tenet ten years later. The blurbs on the back of the novel come from Ward’s peers and while I don’t tend to buy most blurbs when they use phrases like “origami puzzle’, ‘nesting doll of a novel’ and ‘a kaleidoscope’ its impossible to not come away in complete agreement. You’ll probably want to reopen the book and start rereading again to see the parts you’ve missed when you finish it — or perhaps see if new parts have mysteriously appeared while the book was closed. Once you learn the ultimate fate of some of the characters, that may actually seem plausible.