"This house is not a good one, I said it from the start... Smoke it out I said... but they didn't have the time to listen... everything seemed so secure with them... how could they foresee this... They seemed so on top of everything..."
The above statement sounds like a Halloween-ish, semi-metaphoric lament on America's current financial woes, doesn't it? It isn't of course, but the narrator's prescription to "smoke out" the past ills that haunt the family in Web of Secrets, may be something Governor Palin and pastor Muthee could identify with (snicker).
Web of Secrets is a family saga full of the drama and intrigue one can imagine possible in the lives of several generations of a family. It is the story of a family's struggle to keep up appearances after a financial fall (hence my lame American analogy), but as they struggle, cracks appear in the thin veneer of respectability that once separated them from others, and the family house in which they live becomes web-like: part protective, part imprisoning. To seal the cracks and avoid the ensnare of the web, three generations of women in the family confront and find inventive ways to deal with the past.
One of the narrators, Irma (who prescribes the "smoke out"), is convinced her sister Kathleen's madness and her niece's two failed marriages and illness are a result of their refusal to confront the history of sadness and cruelty that befell past generations who lived in the house in which they currently live.
Another narrator, Irma's niece's 14-year-old daughter (of course it's confusing. What? I didn't warn you? Come on, stay with me now)... The 14-year-old narrator, Margaret is convinced the things that go wrong in the house--her mother's second marriage, and illness--are the fault of the baku she (Margaret) kept for a while and then abandoned.
A third narrator, Kathleen (Irma's sister and Margaret's grandmother) sees cracks in the walls of the house and believes the secrets she kept from her dead husband (who shows up in her bedroom to mess with her conscience from time to time) are the reasons why things go wrong--why her daughters don't have happy lives, and why the son she adopted (who's the reason why she is no longer wealthy--he cleaned her out and left) and cared for more than her two daughters, turned his back on her.
So, the three main narrators in Web of Secrets whose fears of a haunted house, concerns about a vengeful baku, and whose secrets refuse to rest with the dead tell a tangled set of engaging stories about a once-well-to-do family, which span roughly the period shortly after Emancipation in the Caribbean to just before Guyana gains its independence from the British.
Their stories include rape, other kinds of physical abuse, bad marriages, fatal illness, mental illness, and incest. But they also include accounts of realistic mother/daughter, and sibling relationships, which survive the trauma of abuse and loss. The stories are woven together with a “web” device which first manifests as a cobweb over a woman’s bed that spreads and threatens to ensnare her, but she fights her way out somehow. That particular story’s themes are repeated in other stories, which are ultimately about resistance, confrontation, and survival.
The worst part of the novel is its attempt to tie family and country together at several points. Left alone, I believe a reader would be able to make some connections, but the effort to make one family's story the "soul" cry of a nation at the end of the novel felt strained and far-fetched. That "show-me-one-and-I'll-tell-you-all" strategy doesn’t work for presidential candidates, and it doesn’t quite work in Web of Secrets either.
But the novel ultimately succeeds as a family saga with all the elements of intrigue one can imagine present in generations of a family’s stories. The narrators speak conversationally to listeners (sometimes identified and sometimes not) they feel will know them, empathize with them, and learn from them. And, it's reasonable to expect Guyanese and other Caribbean readers, as well as some others will recognize and understand the role of the supernatural in the lives of the novel’s characters, and will find the characters and their stories an inspirational and enjoyable read.
[Web of Secrets is Denise Harris' first novel, which she describes as "fictional autobiography." It won the Guyana Prize in 1996. Harris, who is the daughter of Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris, has since written a second novel--In Remembrance of Her. Read reviews here at Peepal Tree Press.]
