Finding Helen

by Black Swan (Brand)

In his late 40s, in a career and a marriage that have each lost their lustre, Chris Gale is someone to whom life never quite kept its promise.

One morning, as he is leaving for work, he hears a song on the radio: a song that transports him back to an altogether better, happier time - the early 1970s, when youth, idealism and music, especially the music of singer-songwriter Helen Leonard, might have chnaged the world. Haunted by a raw sense of loss and a growing resentment at how life has turned out, Chris - goaded on by the mysterious, elusive apparition of the 'Beagle Man' - begins a physical, spiritual and emotional quest. Revisiting old haunts and old memories, he searches for an answer to a question that has haunted him, unanswered, for nearly 30 years: what did Fate hold in store for the woman he devoted himself to so entirely all those years ago - the maddening, mercurial, mischievous Helen Leonard...

Witty, elegiac, affecting and, as the narrative unrolls, increasingly disturbing, FINDING HELEN is a novel about the consequences of loss - of innocence, idealism and youth, a novel about memory and obsession, betrayal and forgiveness and what might lie beyond the veil...

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Misha Herwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second time of reading and I still can't work out exactly what this book is about. The search for self? The cruelty of women? Is the whole thing a drug trip for the narrator, who by the way is weak, flawed and far from pleasant. Is there any resolution. In spite of all this it is a an intriguing read.

[Michael Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

It felt like it was going to be an enchanting ride and it surely had its moments - the tale of a man, formerly adolescently obsessed with a singer and now journeying as an adult to find his obsession again. This is fertile ground for all sorts of themes - love, memory, nostalgia (everyone's synaesthesia), disappointment and even perhaps sadness. And to be fair, for much of the trip it's intriguing and promising. Helen, the lady on the pedestal in this piece, resides in the narrator's memory as all loved ones do, part clown, part alien and part angel, or so it seems. Yet when he finally finds her, she turns out to be no more than a mercurial and annoying ditz - but perhaps she always was, and he tinted his recollections with the obligatory rose. She was never perfect, but his infatuation made her seem much more likeable than she turned out to be. Still, perhaps that's what it was all about anyway, how we fool ourselves by aggrandising our obsessions. In which case, job well done here.

[Estelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is essentially a mainstream novel, but has a wonderfully surreal feel, and leaves you guessing at the end. A wonderful, engrossing read