Graven images

by Audrey Thomas

Book by Thomas, Audrey

317 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Audrey Grace Thomas, née Callahan, novelist and short story writer (b at Binghamton, NY 17 Nov 1935). Audrey Thomas was educated at Smith College, Mass, and St Andrews University, Scotland, and then taught in England for a year. In 1959 she moved to Canada and in 1963 earned an MA at the University of British Columbia. From 1964 to 1966 she lived in Ghana, but eventually settled on Galiano Island. She has published more than 15 novels and short story collections, more than 20 radio plays, several broadcast on CBC Radio, and numerous travel articles, some of which featured in Air Canada's in-flight magazine.

Thomas' writing has been described as feminine; her forte is the minutiae of women's lives, and she has claimed to strive "to demonstrate the terrible gap between men and women" and "to give women a sense of their bodies." Her style is characterized by word play; she emphasizes puns, etymologies, euphemisms, words within words, and pointing to the inherent possibilities, ironies and ambiguities of language. This close attention to language highlights the act of writing itself, and the possibilities and impossibilities of communication in human relationships. Her writing is also rich with literary allusion, from Shakespeare to Conrad, and from the Bible to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Audrey Thomas is a multi-award winning author. She has been recognized provincially, winning the Ethel Wilson Prize three times (for Intertidal Life, 1985, Wild Blue Yonder, 1991 and Coming Down from Wa, 1996). She has twice been nominated for the Governor General's Award (1984 and 1985), and has been internationally recognized with the Canada-Scotland Writer's Literary fellowship (1984-6) and the Canada-Australia Literary Prize (1989). In 1987 she won the Marian Engel Award, awarded annually to a female Canadian author for her contribution to Canadian literature. In 2003 Audrey Thomas won the Terasen Lifetime Achievement Award.

(from http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.co...)

Reviews

[C. (Don't blank click my reviews, comment please! · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reaction to my Audrey Thomas exposure I regret, is false advertising! We’re invited with a foreboding picture of a ship and enticing quote from the protagonist's mother: "I saw something as a child". Please know I'm a generous reviewer when I warn delivery fails. It's like Shyamalan trailers depicting cool scenes but the films drag. The effort Ms. Thomas went to, laying out a multi-generational history, is unusually extensive and can be appreciated. However it was too heavy against lack of action in the story and hampered progress. The spotlight was seldom on the boat ride to England that was to be the main thread! I did not retain if the protagonist found out what she wished to research there or not!

Heritage was not only excessive, it expanded in every chapter, from the angle of numerous family members. Flipping timelines for herself and even a best friend, did not let up. The overdose of detail might have worked if the story flowed in order but all of these stylistic aspects became too much.

The tantalizing quote was untouched until the end, cheating those who painstakingly stuck everything out! There was no expansion on the parts you wanted to hear about. What the mother at last revealed would be far more interesting to investigate and rewarding for the mother. This seems to be an author of great repute but the manuscript should have been edited and rearranged.

[Sheila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Graven Image tells the story of a woman (Charlotte - born in the US, but living much of her adult life in Canada) travelling to England to research her family tree - tracing it back to William the Conqueror - and unravelling her mother's place in this family in an effort, as one character says, to find a way to forgive her mother for being such a negative complaining and destructive person. It is, unfortunately, a tangled mess of a book.

Many parts are witty, amusing, and well-observed, but it's almost impossible to keep the characters straight, to figure out why they are there. There are several motifs - the ocean voyage, the water babies, the Norman invasion, the early settling of America's east, the ways in which women are/were locked up in mental asylums because of men's transgressions to name a few. Plus the main character's best friend is travelling on a similar journey to find her family.

It seems like autobiography - we feel very much like we're on a journey with Charlotte and Charlotte's life seems to mirror Audrey Thomas's. No problem there, necessarily, but she overwhelms us with details and even a memoir needs a narrative arc of some sort. It needed a good edit, and I'm sorry she didn't get it because there is much to admire in her writing.

I just found a good link that gives a critical review of Thomas's work: http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca...